 OK, let me try that again. I'm used to sanitizer equipment. It's one of those things you do in automatic, and you got the wrong button. So I'm Joey Coleman. I'm a journalist here in Hamilton, Ontario. I run a website called The Public Record. The Public Record covers Hamilton's civic affairs in great depth and great detail. The Public Record is a member of the National News Media Council. I'm also a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists. I'm going to go through my bio in the presentation. What my goal today to do is to discuss how WordPress has democratized information and communication and enabled me with my background to be a journalist. And that's actually quite something else when you learn my background that I'm a journalist. And the fact that I can be a journalist is because of the fact that the internet has opened the lines of communication. And because of platforms, WordPress being one of the predominant ones that have opened up the internet for people to use who are pro-amateurs. So I'm not a coder. I can play with code, but I can't build code. I can play on the back end of a server, but I can't actually build a stack from start. I can use WordPress, and I can modify the PHP, but I couldn't write it all myself. And that is amazing when you think that 20 years ago, I couldn't exist. I couldn't have a voice. And today, not only do I have a voice, but it is very powerful. So I've already done that. So this here, this picture here, most of you probably don't even know where this is. This is a building. This is Congress Crescent. It's social housing. So I always enjoy this, because the city has tried numerous times to rebrand this survey with various nice names. So officially, the city calls it Pine Grove Place. And they've been calling it Pine Grove Place in every document for 15 years. They don't even put the address down anymore because they want people to stop calling this Congress. But people who live there and who are from there, we call it Congress. It's one of my favorite things is to have arguments with senior city staff about the fact that I call it Congress. I'm like, I grew up there. I get to call it what I want. You bureaucrats downtown can call it Pine Grove Place. That's fine. This is a social housing development. It's an interesting survey. It's one of the more, so city housing in East Hamilton, when these were built in the 60s and 70s, a lot of these surveys, the city housing surveys, were built on isolated plots of land where the land was on the Red Hill Creek, which gave it a geographical constraint. So this apartment complex here, there's about 1,000 to 1,200 people that live in this survey. Sorry, correction. I actually have mixed up my numbers. There's about five to 600. I was counting Oriole in there as well as doing the subsection. So there's about five to 600 people that live in this survey and it only has two entrances in and out. And it's a very constrained place. And I put that up there to give you a sense of where I come from. And the fact that, you know, out of all the people that I knew as a kid in this complex, three that were closest to me, one's in jail, one's living there now with her children and her grandchildren, the third person we don't know whatever became of them. It's a place where poverty is really generationalized. And I go in there often and I can tell you who's grandchildren of who are even great grandchildren. You know, so that's where I start. A little bit about me. Journalist, blogger, amateur coder, activist. And I use that term quite openly and quite proudly. I don't, so in journalism, we like to use the term activist as a pejorative. You know, so for example, the citizens who were calling for the end of minority voter dilution in Hamilton. So in Hamilton, our current wards dilute minority voters more so than any other municipality in Canada. We're the worst for suppressing minority vote power because what we've done is we've created wards where mostly white Anglo-Saxon communities. And this was the term that the city used at the hearing. They explained these are predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, homogenous communities of interest. We've created a system where minority voters are concentrated in three wards with high population and non-minority voters are in wards with lower populations. And so the spectator, they covered the ward boundary hearing. They called the people that were pushing for voter equity activists. And when the Ontario Municipal Board came down and said, no, this is not proper. You have to consider minority voter dilution. You cannot give disproportionate power to white Anglo-Saxon homogenous community of Dundas, Flamborough, and rural Flamborough. There were citizens that started a petition to go to the divisional court and the spectator referred to them as concerned citizens. So, their activism was to keep the wards as it is. And let's be clear that we're not referring to these people as being motivated by race. They were motivated because they wanted to keep the status quo of their neighborhood, their unique character, their former municipal communities. The unfortunate side effect of that was dilution. And so I wanted to explain why I use that term because I actually think that we've created a discourse where activist is a negative and it should not be. We should be looking at the type of activism. Engaged citizen, I'm a Crown Ward. So Crown Ward is I was in foster care. So after Congress, a lot of housing, a lot of instability in the family situation until I ended up in foster care. And that's an important part of my background. It's not something I generally have talked about till about the last three years. Because most people when you leave foster care and you're fighting to make your way in the world, you're trying to shed that. But it's important to how I've got to where I am. I volunteer, I'm in the Neighborhood Association. My hobby is I'm a pinball player. And if you go back to my old blog, like long, long time ago when I was in university and universities had arcades, I had a daily blog post of my pinball scores. Bit of a time, and people loved it. Bit of a timeline, so my first website was in 1996. My school had two computers with dial-up internet. And I wish I had a copy of that first 1996 site only because it's hilarious. It's got the scrolling text, the flashing text, the star background, the spitting bear. How many of you do branding for a living? Branding, marketing. Okay, so 1996, I'm 14. 1998, I'm 16. I'm running my school network. I'm on school board committees and the new school board, the Hamiltonian District School Board, released their new logo. And they had only put it up on their website for five minutes. And what do I do? I grab the logo. I change the color of the logo at the proportions of the logo to better fit my high school website and put it up. And that was the first time I understood that branding people really care about color. You know, teenager, I'm like, our colors are orange. Who cares if the board's blue? We're gonna make this logo orange on our website. 1999, at 17, I moved out on my own. I ran for school board trustee in 2000. I was the first candidate to have a website in Hamilton. You know, because as soon as I registered, it was like the website thing. And it was quite interesting because there were a lot of candidates that never had websites in 2000. And that's really hard to believe today. In 2001, I joined the Canadian Forces. So for three years, I was off the internet. Like, I was still using the internet, but no website, no posting on social forums, nothing interactive. 2004, I left the military. The night I left, I went home, cracked open a really nice bottle of wine that I bought, you know, and just said, okay, so what's next? And I looked at where the internet was and that's how joeycollman.ca started. I wrote a lot about student politics, student affairs, just as a blogger, purely as a blogger. I had no intention of being a journalist. And on March 11th, 2007, McLean's magazine calls me up, offers me a job. Only four days before I had turned down writing a column for the eye opener at Ryerson because I wasn't gonna be a journalist. But when McLean's called and offered me a job, I was like, hmm, I think I'll do this. So I spent two and a half years at McLean's, then I went to the Globe and Mail on a contract. So at McLean's, I was a full-time contract. At the Globe and Mail, I was once a week writing. I left McLean's in, my contract had come to an end. They were going in a different editorial direction than what I was going. So when they said they were going in that direction, I said, I'm not planning to renew my contract. They bought out the remaining four weeks I had. And I was planning to leave journalism. The Globe and Mail called me up, said, hey, you know, why don't you write for us once a week? We can't pay you much. I actually worked it out per word. They were paying me pretty well, but mostly because I was only doing one column a week. Whereas at McLean's, I was the guy that just blogged all day, all night. Paul Wells and I used to compete with each other to write the most each day. 2010, I switched to local news. 2012, my personal website, Joey Coleman. So I was writing a lot about local news. I crowdfunded it, 2014. I rebrand and relaunched the public record. And that extra bit there, I'm actually not sure how that ended up in as I was reformatting the timeline. I knew there was gonna be an air somewhere in the slides. So, to give you a bit of an idea, blogger or journalist, I really enjoy this debate, not actually because I enjoy the debate itself. I think it's rather frivolous, but I enjoy mocking the debate. And when I got hired by McLean's, my official title was something associate, or I think it was associate or assistant, or no, assistant editor, universities. Journalists love titles. I actually had put on my business card, reporter slash blogger, universities. And that always raised eyebrows and it heckles from other journalists. I'm like, it's what I do, I report on my blog. I don't need a fancy title. And it's also because I think blogging is a very noble pursuit when done properly. Much as journalism is a noble pursuit, but when not done properly, we've seen the consequences of that. So, up in the top left is how the blog looked before I was writing about anything that interested people. Literally, for the first six months, my blog was writing so that I now regret and picture each day. And the people that I was writing for were basically my friends. I was basically doing that at the end of the day, so I had content to play around with the CMS, reformat, redesign. The writing was not the primary. I get elected to student union council in January, 2005. And that's when the blog really changed into a blog that people read. On student affairs and student politics, so that's in the middle. There's McLean's. There I am like this. This photo here, I showed you the first photo of Congress Crescent. Not my pretty bland building, very institutional, very boring, very... This is me in Doha, Qatar. And it's amazing how many buildings. I went there twice, six months apart, and the skyline had changed in six months. Like they just building buildings. And I remember I was on a tour with the interior ministry and I asked the guy what they were putting in one of these like 80 story buildings. He says, oh, we haven't figured that out yet. I'm like, so why are you building? He says, because Dubai has a similar building, but there's this two-story shorter. But that was me on assignment in the Persian Gulf. Completely crazy assignment. Yeah, I mean it was amazing to go from Congress to sitting in first class on a Middle Eastern airline where the longest I had to wait for food was 12 minutes while they made it. McLean's website, my picture there. Let me tell you it is an ego boost to open up McLean's magazine to... What would it be now? 11 years ago and have a full page ad with your big picture on it. It's quite the ego boost. Actually, my ego got the better of me a little bit at that time. And then over at the Globe and Mail and you can somewhat clearly see the headline here in the style of writing. Like I'm talking about labor relations at Lake Head University about forelogging and labor relations boards, like really nerdy stuff. But the Globe and Mail let me do that. And that was the thing, right? Because one of the things with the democratization of information is that even in the media that imprint, that would have never been a print column. It's way too niche. But online, that's fine. You know, the pre-blog age. So, you know, a brief history of the internet because you know, I'm one of those guys like I remember when BBS has existed. I loved BBS as the fact that you could go in these forums and maybe 12 of the people locally. So BBS, how many people are familiar with that term? Okay, so bulletin board system, basically pre-internet. Before the World Wide Web, you could call somebody's computer and people would have like 12 phone lines into their house and a computer server, less powerful than your smartphone, of course. And you'd have basic text. And in grade four, my teacher did not know what to do with me in terms of the fact that I was in a class school where 90% of the students English was their second language. And myself, I was 2%ile below the gifted program when I tested in grade three. The areas of the tests that I had done, I got perfect, but a quarter of the test, I had never been taught the concepts. And nowadays that would result in a person in that type of school situation going into the gifted program because they have now started to weigh other factors. So my teacher literally put me in the computer room with a manual and a modem and said, have fun. And so I really enjoyed that exchange of ideas. And so when the first, when the internet first came out, there was this idea that the internet was going to give us an exchange of ideas. It was gonna be, the world was gonna be smaller. You were gonna talk with people across the world. It was gonna be a utopia. Instead, it delivered cheesy graphics, bad medleys and in sync fan sites. You know, and so I loved the XKCD tribute to GeoCities when it went down. I was like, even though this isn't a real GeoCities site, it really captures how GeoCities was. I mean, I had a GeoCities site and I wish that the World Wide Web Archive had captured it better. But in a way, you know, this sort of was a democratization of information and communication because people weren't talking about what they loved. GeoCities was horribly organized. It wasn't that complex to use, but it had no structure. And that was a problem. People just dragged stuff all over. It was messy and you could see the promise of people putting content on the internet, but it wasn't yet organized. It wasn't yet structured. And this is the best that I could do. There was a picture of me. There was like a bunch of pictures, but you see the sign guest book and it's like, yeah, I'm eventually gonna update this website and I never actually did because I was running my school website. That was my fun. But even there, you got like the little widgets that you could drop and drag and it's just ugly. The blogosphere starts and you know, this is where we're seeing the start of what we called Web 2.0. This is the start of that promise is coming together. And the early blogs were developers like Dave Wiener who were just trying to organize their own websites. And it was the start of open source culture. So they were sharing the programs they were building for their own websites. And two came to really dominate the early internet, blogger and movable type. Blogger is still around and still used. I don't, I've got like a couple of blogspot websites that I still follow, but those are sort of remnants, university professors or people that started in the height of the blogosphere and rarely blog now. Moveable type is basically a few corporate sites that are custom built by six apart. Moveable type is effectively dead, which is quite amazing when you think about how dominant both those platforms were before WordPress even existed as a concept. So you've got the early blogs and it's one of those things where, so blogger arrives in 1999, movable type arrives in 2001, but they're very niche products. There's maybe a couple thousand sites worldwide that are doing this. And then we have President George W. Bush and we've got the Iraq War. And the Iraq War gets people talking. It gets people fired up. And now the blogosphere becomes where people debate these ideas because people have opinions and ideas about this major topic. And that's what began the American political blogosphere which really lit blogging on fire. It's when it got attention. There is a capture of Glenn Greenwald's blog. And I, how many of you are familiar with Edward Snowden? Okay, so you're familiar with Glenn Greenwald, journalist who broke that story. Glenn Greenwald started as a blogger against the Iraq War. He had amazing writing. It was very well documented. He linked out, he shared information. He was one of the nodes of the blogosphere. He started on blogspot and then got hired by Saloon to write for Saloon. Got hired by The Guardian, broke the Edward Snowden story and now is one of the managers of The Intercept and probably the world's most famous journalist of the internet age. Without the internet, there's no Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald's writing against the Iraq War would never have appeared in mainstream media. He would have never had a voice if it weren't for the fact that he started blogging. WordPress itself comes in to play. It forks off of another project called B2 Cafe Log in May 2003. So the blogosphere is not yet at its crescendo but it's a force in early 2003 and WordPress just starts. It's just another, at this time, there were dozens of blogging platforms. There were dozens of attempts to build something that people felt corrected the flaws of movable type or corrected the flaws of blogger. None of these projects were meaning to replace. There was no feeling from people that they had to move. Then, some of the early flaws that WordPress would end up correcting is blogger was not self-hosted. So you could redirect your URL to blogger and have your own domain, but very few people did because once you've redirected your domain, well, you can't use your web domain for much of anything else without creating a huge amount of name records. There was a limited ability to customize them initially and blogger was both the host and the platform. So they controlled, if something happened to blogger, you lost your content. You weren't in full control of your content. That was the flaw of it. And in terms of the ability to design and customize, has anybody ever seen a really nice looking blogger powered blog? The other challenge was they had a barrier to entry. So this here is from my original hosting provider. One of the pictures of how you had to install movable type. And for a lot of people, the idea of changing permissions on certain files and not other files, that was intimidating. And if you change the permission on one file incorrectly, you could have your site easily hacked. You had a vulnerability. So there was a barrier to entry. The other thing, so movable type basically controlled. Moveable type was the WordPress of 2003, four, five. Most websites use it. The Huffington Post launched on movable type. The Washington Post used movable type. The New York Times used movable type for their first blogs. Moveable type was the platform. But it's most fatal flaw. Because all of the difficulty to install WordPress had the same problem at the time. That could have been solved. It's ultimate flaw was it was not open source and it alienated its community. Is there anybody here that was using movable type back then? Okay, so you probably remember when movable type out of nowhere announced that you could no longer just use it for personal use free. You had to pay them a license if you have more than one author and one blog. And they quickly retreated from that, but that was it. People went, wait a second. You can do that to us. Suddenly just shut down my blog, make it hard for me to blog. Okay, and at that point, the community of bloggers went elsewhere. And while movable type core was not open source, movable type had plugins. So there was a huge ecosystem of developers who were developing plugins for movable type. And they dispersed all over the place, but one of the projects that grabbed some of the key developers was this thing called WordPress. And myself, I stayed with movable type. I wasn't prepared to move after I customized my template, I customized my site, all that. But that was ultimately the fatal flaw was the second that they decided not to be open and to be arbitrary, people fled. And that's where WordPress really had its key moment was when it got those developers. I can't see how well you guys are seeing this. So it hasn't really worked out well in this format on the screen, but basically if you could see this well, you have really nice topography and it's basically a blog where there's a link, list of links on this side, there's the content in the center, and then this was very much a thing in 2005, these little badges of everything and anything. I do sort of miss that sort of wild west element of nobody cared how you designed your site because people were too busy writing about politics to criticize your layout. So a couple of the things that, here's BBC, BBC's blogs were powered by movable type. We still live in the legacy of movable type. Moveable type invented the track back. Moveable type had some of the first capture comments. Yes, I remember when track back happened, when they invented, I thought it was the greatest thing ever because it was one of those things was there were all these sites that would try to index the internet and tell you what sites were linking to you. And this at the height of the internet, you really had a lot of people linking all over the place. And for a person like me, whose website was bringing in tens of thousands of viewers per month, and I was just getting traffic all over the place, it was really hard to organize looking at my analytics of where people were coming from because analytics were a monthly count. I was interested, you know, who in the last week or sorry, analytics were daily but the referrals was a monthly dashboard. Who was linking to me was something that when track back came, I was like, oh, but the other reason that that was important was because you wanted to go over and comment in that conversation. If that person was linking to you, you wanted to read what they were saying, but you also wanted to join the dialogue in the comment section at the bottom of their blog. So I talked about the fiasco of the licensing issue. Trust is important. So this is really one of the key themes that I wanna hammer home is that trust is important. So this is one of my favorite headlines. It's like, I just love this headline because of how absurd it is. The headline states, Canadians trust doctors less, journalists more, pull. You wanna talk about journalistic bias. So what happened was doctors in one year, people the trust went down 22 points in doctors. And so 63% of people said they trusted doctors. 32% said they trusted journalists, which was up one point from the year before at 31. So the headlines technically correct. People trust the journalists more than they did the year before and doctors less. But when you read that headline, you're thinking, why do people trust journalists more than doctors? It's one of the challenges in the age that we're in is trust. Cause, you know, the public doesn't know journalists. And this is actually one of the great challenges facing journalism is that most people have no, they don't know a journalist. Journalism has become a very class stratified trade. A guy like me, you know, I'm out not in mainstream journalism for two reasons. One, coming from the blogosphere originally, nobody's gonna tell me that I can't write something. Nobody's gonna tell me to go chase clicks cause I didn't start chasing clicks. I have no interest in chasing clicks. But two, I, you know, I'm a crown ward. I'm a guy who grew up in social housing. I have gone to journalism interviews where they've said, you haven't paid your dues because I haven't worked for two to three years in Toronto on paid. And you know, when you explain to them, yeah, I, you know, can't afford to, don't have somebody to pay for me to work. And they're like, well, you know, you gotta do some months paid internships. But, you know, so that's one of the challenges with facing journalism. And it's also the collapse of local news because you don't have journalists in your community anymore. So when you read articles that are written by journalists, they're an other. And we are naturally, we don't trust the other. Unless we know people, unless we have some sort of relationship, if they're the other, we're untrustful of it. But then we've also got the problem of politicians that lie and politicians loving to lie about journalists right now. Like we created, as a trade, we created the factors that have enabled us to be used as a wedge issue by politicians. But that does not get the journal, that does not get the politicians off the hook for lying. They're still lying. But the problem is that they do it so much that now, you know, you go on the internet and I get it every once in a while where people are just attacking me for being a journalist. And that's it. And the other challenge is that journalists, we tend not to know people outside of our circles, but we're like most human beings. You like to stick with what's familiar. I can tell you, you know, when I go and interview professors, I know. I know what to prepare for. I'm pretty relaxed. I'm comfortable. But when I, and I do this as much as I can, and I do look at who I'm sourcing my stories with and I try to change up my sources. So tomorrow I'm going to be sitting and reading a bunch of graduate student papers to try to find new sources, to try to find new knowledgeable people. But when you first interview that person, it's an uncomfortable experience because you're not in a familiar setting. So we tend to end up not going outside of our circles. I've talked about the fact that, you know, people don't know local. This guy here, I really, I like this photo and I've read his collection of his writings. This is a man named Al Macintosh. How many of you have watched Ken Bird's documentary, The War? Okay, so you'd be familiar with Al Macintosh's writings. So this is a guy who worked for, oh geez, I think it's the Rock County Gazette. It's a small newspaper in rural Illinois. He had the chance to work in Chicago, New York for the big name newspapers of his day. But he stayed as the editor of this relatively small community paper and he wrote eloquently of how the war was impacting his community. And when Ken Burns went into his documentary on the Second World War, he found the writings of Al Macintosh and he said repeatedly, talk after talk, that that was the greatest discovery out of all the archives he went through. Thousands, tens of thousands of hours of research. This guy's writing was there. And I put him up there because people in his community trusted him. If he wrote an editorial, people read it, believed that they trusted him because he lived in his community. He liked being part of his community. And the internet is a form of community. It's not a geographical community. It's a community of people nonetheless. And that's one of the reasons why blogging is so important. A little bit of comic relief here. Right now we tend to use social media instead of blogging. And this would have been a blog post 10 years ago. I would have done this as a blog post. Again, it's not as clear. So how many of you are from Hamilton and familiar with Hamilton politics? Know who Brad Clark is? Okay, so Brad Clark is a red Tory. So a bit right of center, really nice guy. Not opposed to Bikeshare, but it wasn't, Bikeshare wasn't his biggest priority. So I had a little fun with one day. The only choice I had for bike was one named Brad Clark. So I did, if it was Capital Bicycles and not Social Bicycles, the free market would reign and I'd have more choice. Right, Brad Clark? Implying that I didn't want to take a bike named after Brad Clark. I didn't actually mind. Blogging will research. We're at a moment right now in our civic discourse where there's a lot of tension. There's a lot of division. But there's a real hunger for good, high quality information. There's a real hunger for a return to the fact that what was great about the early blogs was you could read somebody's 1,200, 1,800 word essay on a topic and then click all the links and dive further. And I think we're at a moment much like the tensions that surrounds at the Iraq war in America where there's a division, but there's a, people are seeking clarity. They're seeking a deeper dive. They're seeking something that actually challenges them. And blogging peaked between 2006 and 2010. There are many reasons why it declined. Twitter, Facebook, mostly Twitter. Twitter was, if you were a blogger before, if you had an idea, you had to write a blog post. Now you could do a tweet and I'm one of the worst for it. But as you know, I go back in my tweets and I'm like, ah, that I should have done as a blog post, because now I can't find it and I have to go download my archive, search the archive on my local then click through. It's annoying. One of the biggest problems that the blogosphere faced was how the heck do you make money doing this? And so you had, yeah, three streams of where people ended up out of the blogosphere. You had the people that professionalized like myself, Glenn Greenwald. There's a whole host of people that ended up getting hired by publications. The Atlantic was a great example. They hired a lot of great bloggers. As far as the reason why the Atlantic is such a great site today is because they pulled some of the best talent and the best talent went there because they could get paid. There were people that just, once they had another platform, social media, they were happy to leave blogging. They didn't really, that wasn't really their format. And then there's the third. The people that are still blogging to this day, but it was never their primary source of income or their primary thing. They did it as a side hobby. It never consumed them. Well, today we have crowdfunding. We have Patreon. So you can see there, there's the graph for Canada Land. Jesse Brown, Canada Land Show, one of the most popular podcasts in the country, 10 years ago, he could not exist because there was no easy way for payments to be processed. And this is why people want good quality content and now they have the ability to pay for it. And I expect that we're gonna start seeing sites powered on WordPress resurging. So myself, I'm an example of this in that I have a site called the Public Record. I cover Hamilton City Hall in ridiculous steps. I cover the most boring subcommittees straight through to the most entertaining of council meetings. And it's entirely reader funded. It's entirely open. How many of you subscribed to my RSS feed? And okay, so how many of you use RSS? Okay, this is something that thanks Google for destroying Google Reader and destroying RSS. So you could read my entire site purely in your RSS app. You don't have to come to my website. Everything's open. All of the content I produce, a lot of high value in the sense of a lot of resource intensive, very niche, it's completely open. And there are people that voluntarily subscribe for a monthly payment to my service to enable me to provide it for everyone. And so the site's powered on WordPress. The template is something called Largo. The theme is, you would call it a theme. Traditionally, if you got it in the WordPress theme site, but it's actually not in the WordPress theme site because it requires some customization, not much. And it's an open source project run by a network of independent news sites in the United States. You can sort of see a bit of the layout of those sites. My site itself is a fork of a theme done by the Chicago Reporter. And so I'm able to focus on journalism. So I set up the website, I managed the backend, but I don't have to code the theme. I don't have to worry about updating the parent theme when WordPress updates because the community takes care of that, enabling me to do my journalism. Without an open source project like WordPress, I don't exist. Some of the things that power my website. So you can see here, I'm not sure how clear it is. The next thing is that if you go to the publicrecord.ca, scroll down to the footer, there's a section that says our equipment, gear and software, and you can actually see everything that I use to do everything that I do. So in terms of patron payment processing, so I actually process the payments through Stripe. That setup is done through INN. So INN laid out, here's how you use gravity forms and Stripe to create a secure payment system. I followed that guide. So I didn't have to try to invent that. And I'll tell you, I sometimes get asked, what is your information security plan? My information security plan is not to have information that needs to be secured. Flat out and simple, I'm a journalist. I'm not an information security expert and I'm not gonna try to play one. I don't want your personal information because then I have to worry about, not if I get hacked, but when I get hacked anymore. I mean, the reality is, is that a guy like me trying to secure information, it isn't my primary thing. That's just stupid. And every once in a while I see some of these lists that have I been hacked or whichever one, Tony, can't remember his last name, the, do you remember the guy, Microsoft VP? Tony Hunt, or Troy Hunt, is it Troy Hunt? It's Troy Hunt. Troy Hunt, like I, when he does show some of this stuff, I'm like, why the hell did you even have that information? Like I look at some of these things, I'm like, why the hell did you have that information that got hacked? She even had it in the first place. I use Let's Encrypt for my certificate. My web hosting is Web Faction. And I'm not giving, I love Web Faction, they're really great, but I'm not necessarily doing a referral here because there's lots of great services out there and you need to find the service that works for you and I'm not an expert on that, so I'm not gonna give you recommendations. Talking about my themes, there's all the plugins. I did remove the anti-spam plugin earlier this week, mostly because I'm obsessed with no third party, transfer of information, like I've got no embeds of share buttons. I do embed YouTube videos, but even there it's, you click to get the embed loaded, it doesn't load automatically. I'm obsessed with no third party calls at all. And so I removed the anti-spam, which is a bit annoying to deal with the spam, but right now I'm just in the phase. I'll probably put it back on once I get tired of dealing with spam. So live blog is, this is one of the things, people live tweet and live tweeting was a sort of cool thing, but I can tell you that I've gone back to live blogging because you can do more than 280 characters. You don't have to read things. You don't have to worry about somebody retweeting a 280 character block that in context makes sense, but outside of that context makes you look like a fool. I do a good enough job making myself look like a fool. I don't need to have the platforms do it for me. Okay, I won't quit my day job. But I actually did a live blog of a Ontario Municipal Board hearing into the War Boundaries, and that live blog at the end of it, of, geez, I, okay, I'm glad he put the five minutes. So mission statement of the public record, you can go to the website, basically it's to inform people that they can be good citizens. So watch your own blog. You should control your content. You really need to control your content. That's the big thing. Go out, even if you use WordPress.com, because WordPress.com, actually you can export it, and WordPress.com has a business model. I love mediums layout. I love the idea of the ecosystem that mediums created, but they haven't figured out their bloody business model and they screwed a whole bunch of journalists sites earlier this year when they decided suddenly, you know that partner thing we were doing? We just canceled it. And then people were scrambling to get their content off of medium, try to build their own site, control it, just write, don't be severely stupid. Feel free to be stupid. Just don't be severely stupid. Don't be needlessly mean. That's my key tip. Don't check your statistics, don't worry about them. It doesn't need to be WordPress, but WordPress is easily. Open up, credit, link to others, be open, use Creative Commons licensing. This here is the text of a blog post I wrote in 2006. This is my most read article ever. This article had 30,000 reads, 30,000 unique readers on the day it was published, as it was being updated. 30,000 in 2006. 30,000 today, I'd be like, whoo, 2006. But look at the text. You can see there was lots of linking up. Basically what I was doing was aggregating. This was a student union impeachment in BC. I was sitting in the basement of the Student Center at McMaster in Hamilton covering it. But you can see here, and these are all blogs. These are all people that were writing at this university. And it's amazing. And those people were coming back to me and we were exchanging information. Like it's not a pretty post, but it's got utility. Like that is the perfect blog post. 30,000 reads in the day that it happened. Creative Commons licensing. Go study your license that you want to use, be aware of what they mean. I don't have time to go into it, but I use the Creative Commons by attribution share alike. It's an open license. It allows people to use the content without reaching out to me. It allows them to modify it. The only thing it requires is that they also use an open license if they significantly derive from my work. This is one of my favorite fan mail. You get lots of good fan mail. This is my personal favorite. Coleman, your writing sucks more ass than a liposuction hose. You know, I no longer put the person's name. I haven't actually taken down their name from the original post, but they were a journalist who was pissed off that I had called them out for something. Questions, so I'll take questions in a moment. We'll leave the contact connect up. So I actually, I am gonna be around all afternoon, so please feel free to come and ask me questions then. I'll take one or two questions now and I thank you all for listening. Okay, sorry? What's next, what's the next big thing? Well, it's getting the public record sustainable. So right now I'm about to launch a campaign to get enough monthly patrons to be sustainable just for me, but then to start hiring local journalists and start fixing local news. People really want local news, but they want local news that's not chasing clicks. They want local news that's actually boring, but insightful and boring in the sense of people, there's not much I can do to make subcommittees interesting. There's not much I can do to make technical reports interesting, but I can give people insight and people really want that. People do click and share the crime weather traffic stories. Like that's what the media does is a lot of, I call it journalism, but they're not willing to pay for that. They really do want the in-depth content. The problem is it's chicken or the egg. The in-depth content requires somebody to be able to have the time and the resources to do it or be willing in my case to make the sacrifice of the startup and then people will pay for it and it's getting there. It's not yet sustainable, but somebody has to do it and ironically, part of the reason I can do it is because I come from the background I do, I have no desire to be part of the club. Don't get me wrong, traveling to the Middle East was a lot of, or the Persian Gulf was a lot of fun, but I didn't actually enjoy the state dinner and the second state dinner I got invited to, I went to Applebee's that night and read a book. I mean, I'm not the guy that likes the student tie. I do like the opera though, no ads whatsoever. So the question was, do you cover anything outside of Hamilton and do you ever take ads? I don't take ads at all because firstly, when you're doing ads, now you're doing third-party tracking of your readers. Secondly, ads do not, you can't put an ad beside a live blog of a quasi-judicial hearing. It's too damn boring to generate clicks. And then also, your readers are going well, if you're getting advertising money, people think advertising makes money. It doesn't make money, but if they see it, they're not gonna find you because they're like, well, okay, you're double-dipping at best. In terms of outside of Hamilton, no, for two reasons. One, I don't have the time. Like I literally work 80, 90 hours a week read every agenda at City Hall, but two, it's also brand dilution. People need to know exactly what I represent. So I barely touched on the provincial election. That's the big hot issue right now. But I haven't touched it at all because then I'm all over the place. I got to focus on fixing municipal affairs. And in four years, hopefully I have a staff working for the public record where we can provide great coverage of the provincial election. As a leader, how do you trust more people like, you know, how do you combat Fort Chan, for example? You don't combat Fort Chan, you know? How do people have Fort Chan? Yeah, so the question was this, how do you build trust, how do you deal with, basically the dark parts of the internet and build trust? Well, building trust as a reader, look at the site. Look at, are they linking out? Are they making a logical argument? Is there a depth to it? And I can tell you, there's times where I do rants and I get people are like, what the hell are you ranting for? It's like, and I've actually separated my personal website and I run a different platform and different design completely on my personal website to try to differentiate between when I'm just a random guy ranting and when I'm being a journalist. But even when I'm ranting, I have to be very, like I can't be malicious, I can't be, I'm still a journalist. But, you know, when you go and look at where are they linking, what depth of research is there? In terms of battling Fort Chan, the reason that Fort Chan has success is because they figured out how to game the system. They figured out that journalists love chasing clicks. So if the story is too good to be true, journalists are like, oh, I'll generate a bunch of clicks and, you know, I've worked in media sites where there's a reward. There's an instant gratification of you got likes and shares. And so Fort Chan's figured that out. The reality is, is that we all just need to pause and I'm as guilty as anybody else of it. I've got a lot better, but I've also been burned in the process. Like, you know, I thankfully learned that once you burn your nose on the stove, don't put your nose to the stove again. But I've put my nose to the proverbial stove a few times. And I think you're right. I'm very interested in more in-depth articles, you know, or a platform like the Long Leeds. And I find that, you know, modern journalism, they're forced to be shallow, so I'm fascinating. Yeah, like, I mean, so the question was trust. And, you know, one of the reasons that you're losing trust is that articles are shallow. It's a challenge of, if you're running an advertising-based model, you've got to generate clicks. You know, when I was working for McLean's, I was covering a really in-depth issue of policy that I felt was important for its nation's education funding. But nobody cared to read it. Like, it wasn't an issue that got people fired up. But a student politician at Carlton University said, cystic fibrosis is a white man's disease. Therefore, we're not going to fundraise for it. And boom, through like the McLean's analytics on that story was through the roof. And my editor's going, you know, why am I paying you to go to Belleville to cover this story that's getting a couple hundred reads when the intern is writing the story that's generating the clicks? And, you know, it's a system, the system is broken until we fix it. You know, it's not going to fix itself. And it's going to require that readers pay for the news that they want. They see that news, you got to pay for it. And for example, I'd go back to the Ontario Municipal Board where I live, blogged it. That was a real risk for me. That was a 10-day hearing where for 10 days, all I was doing was that hearing. The hearing started at 9 a.m. every morning, went till 6 p.m. and then I would have to read case law that was cited throughout the day or at it. But in the end, it turned out well for me because everybody went, wow, Joey did a great job. Like that really helped my crowdfunding in December. But the risk was that if something more interesting had happened and I had committed my resources to that hearing and nothing happened at that hearing. And so it's why people need to start funding the news and they will. But it's the chicken or egg. What's optimistic about that? So what's optimistic is, and it's basically accepting how the internet works, the internet has a 991 tier which is 90% of your visitors just visit. They never interact. 9% will sometimes interact, could be incited to leave a comment or click like. Like you think about when you put something up on Facebook, how many people are clicking like and how many are putting in a comment? Like is probably 9%. 1% are commenting, 90% are viewing it and not engaging. And it's much the same with journalism. So I'm building a model where I'm accepting that 1% I'm gonna be able to get to pay fairly easily. They're gonna go, this is great. I really like this. I like what you're doing. I like the concept I'm in. 9% I'm gonna have to work to get them to pay. And when I say to get them to pay is they're willing to, how do I figure out the incentive for them? 90% will never pay. But journalism has to be a public service. If I'm not a public service, then why does the public give me access, media officers access to public documents, that type of thing. So it's just bringing the cost structure down. We can see out this window with the trees while the trees are now blocking. There's a gigantic building with a huge printing press that costs tens of millions of dollars. Well, now you can go to wordpress.com and start for free. So it's both accepting that we're gonna lose revenue, but also bringing the cost structure to meet where that revenue is at. One last question. So I've considered that. And so there's two reasons why it won't work. One is the people who are funding at very large amounts. There's one patron who's giving $50 a month. And they're actually not using the content as much as most other patrons, but it's that they like the fact that their $50 a month is providing information for everyone. So the concept, the open, people like the open, the brand consistency of everything's open, creative commons license. Two, I have very limited resources. I'm literally myself. Every feature I add requires me to drop something else because I no longer have time to add anything. So now I'm creating more work for myself that's taking away from producing the actual content. And lastly on that, I said to originally, but lastly, what I'm doing is so niche that almost in effect, it's an exclusive product. Okay, thank you everyone for today.