Yesterday I had a chance to visit Current TV’s office in San Francisco and chat with Robin Sloan, one of the first employees at Current brains behind the EPIC 2015 video (If you’ve never seen EPIC 2015, do so now, after your initial panic, come back to learn more about how Current TV and Robin approach reader participation to create news). More info on Robin in this NewAssignment.net interview and this interview for a conference.

In terms of video YouTube might be the site for user-generated content, but Current TV is setting the pace for community powered journalism. With almost 400 employees total, they aren’t a measily citizen journalism network to skoff at. They are an operation that is scalable and in my opinion, they engage in beat (video)blogging.

Upon visiting Current TV Robin showed me two exceptional parts of the building, one technical, the other people powered. Let’s skip the technical (and I’ll remind everyone – if you want to become more tech-savvy, join the Wired Journalist Ning group) and go right to the people.

About 25 percent of the content on Current TV is user-generated. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t professionals who are working hard to make sure the content comes in smooth and up to par. In the main room at Current there were about 12 people working full time, all ensuring that viewer created content makes it to television. Some of those people go out and find new contributors, they are network wranglers. The other group deals with contributors who are in the process of creating a video and need advice, help or just cheering. At any one point these video producers are working with several contributors.

These individuals weren’t the only signs of "community" at Current either. There was also the Web team who also track down new contributors, but mainly work to keep the website clean, safe and generally conversation inducing. It harbored back to David Crumm’s conversation about safe space.

The first lesson from Current TV: Community doesn’t just mean sticking a forum on a website. There are different acts of creating community – wrangling new members, working with current members and gardening a website. You have to do a little but of everything.

Then Sloan and I began to talk about Current TV’s website in more depth, as it went through a redesign/rethink back in October of 2007. The goal, according to Sloan was to make it easier for more people to contribute in more ways. The old website was all about video contributions of high caliber such that they might make it on air. But when you put the factors together of (a who might be interested (b. who is tech savvy-enough to do good videos and (c. who has time for such a project, the number of realistic participants dropped, said Sloan. The new site allows people more room in how they can get involved, including text, photos or social networking. Even if they weren’t using the site for straight-up citizen journalism video – Sloan is glad that Current has a website that people come to in order to interact.

The lesson: Make contributing as easy and open as possible. Remove any technical barriers and let the content fly in. Or else, expect a serious lull in contributions.

Finally we talked about the future of newsrooms. His vision is less bleak than what was painted in 2015. In fact, it’s very similar to what I imagine – Newsrooms need to become open spaces where people can stop in and find out what is going on. This is why I started CopyCamp and why I urge every beat blogger to think about having meetups, or any kind of face-to-face meeting. Just because you organize networks on the web doesn’t mean you can’t organize in-person meetings (this goes double if your beat is local).

The Lesson: Be accessible to people. If you start a local or VERY large network – find a way for people to solidify their relationships in person.

Also of interest: While visiting I also chatted with Andrew Fitzgerald (’the real brains behind Current’s citizen journalism strategy’ according to Sloan). According to Fitzgerald, the future of Current’s effort will be in "collective journalism." Where groups of people work together to tackle the same story from different angles. That is NewAssignment.net’s bread and butter.