Hack with Technical.ly at media business hackathon Church&State

Today, Technical.ly is announcing Church&State, a hackathon dedicated to the business of local media, taking place Sept. 27-28.

We want to bring together media business teams, programmers, journalists, marketers and readers that care about the transparent and sustainable production of news.

Why “Church&State”? It has been a common refrain in the newsrooms of the last half-century that the editorial and business departments — which respectively, report hard-hitting news and generate revenue for that very operation — act much like the storied separation of church and state. The allegory suggests an important divide between each that still demands a deep respect for the other.

Since our launch, Technical.ly has stood by a strong ethics policy, to promise readers that generating revenue to create a sustainable organization will not interfere with the unbiased production of news. Looking across the fledgling online media landscape, the publications that respect that traditional ethos are ones that we admire most.

But new technologies have also created opportunities for business and editorial teams in media to collaborate toward a better end — whether that’s making sponsored content more transparent for readers, de-siloing data so that publications can better serve their audiences, or producing content with advertisers that want to strengthen reporting on important topics.

We’re not new to the exploration of changing media needs: it’s what we do each day as we build a company to help cover and connect technology communities in four cities (and one state). It’s what we do each April, when we bring together more than 200 industry leaders to talk about news innovation. It’s why we’re excited to be working on this project with the Local Media Association (which is gathering media members for its Innovation Conference, Sept. 30-Oct. 2) and our host, WHYY.

Join us at Church&State for an important next step: developing solutions to some of the industry’s most challenging problems, like:

• Making native advertising more transparent
• Tools for editorial data input that respects editorial relationships
• Data collection that bridges editorial and sales
• Customizing key performance metrics like Cost of Reader Acquisition, Cost of Lead Acquisition and Cost of Customer Acquisition
• Turning editorial content into structured data
• Generating revenue with mobile news

We hope to see you there.