At the Web 2.0 Summit last week, the most timely panel may have been “The Web and Politics.” Moderated by John Heilemann of New York Magazine, the panel discussion included Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post; Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco; and Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean and John Edwards.
The discussion covered the role that social networks and the Web played in the victory by Barack Obama and whether that’s permanently changed how elections will be run. The group also discussed how this election signaled a change in the way the press covers campaigns, how voters get their information, and what that means going forward. Read the rest of this entry »
The panel didn’t disappoint. I’ve embedded the full video above. But let me highlight a few of the important points that struck me during the session. Read the rest of this entry »
In the search for new business models for journalism, one of the most intriguing experiments underway is Spot.Us. Founded by David Cohn, Spot.Us creates a marketplace between reporters and communities to try a new paradigm for funding journalism. Cohn was among the most recent recipients of the Knight Foundation News Challenge Grants last spring for this project.
After several months in quiet beta, Spot.Us officially launched today.
The concept works like this: A reporter posts an idea for a story along with an amount they need to produce the work. Members of the community can then donate money through the Web site to fund that work. The checks aren’t cashed, so to speak, unless enough money is raised. Spot.Us has already funded a few stories while the site was still being built. The stories are then available for any publication to run for free. A news organization can have exclusive rights if it contributes enough money to fund the story. As Cohn explains, this can be a great way to stretch the freelance budget.
At the moment, Spot.Us focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area. So if you have an interest in supporting quality journalism, then think about making a donation. The concept really works around micro-finance, so the donation doesn’t need to be huge. Lots of little donations can really leverage the network effect and make things happen.
Will this work? I hope so. It’s off to a strong start. Is it the answer to all of journalism’s problems? No, and Cohn doesn’t claim it is. But it represents the right kind of thinking for this era: Something that harnesses the network power available through the Internet while also thinking progressively about what the underlying business model looks like.
When Google reported its earnings a couple of weeks ago, a lot of people who didn’t pay close attention hailed the results as a sign that the company had truly created a transcendent business model. I even heard people invoke the term “New Economy.” Funny, because when I start hearing that term, I figure trouble lies ahead.
In fact, if you parsed what Google said in its results, a lot of its profit increase came from cost savings and paring back its torrid hiring pace. Hardly the stuff of a “new economy.”
But I’m wondering now if there’s even more trouble brewing based on an email I received today about AdSense.
“The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy is a 15-member commission of luminaries assembled to recommend both public and private measures that would help American communities better meet their information needs.”
The forum is being held on the Google campus in Mountain View starting at 9 a.m. local time. I’m speaking on a panel in the afternoon on “technology and innovation.” I’ll post a link to a copy of my remarks after the event.
I think this is critical work, given the changing landscape for news and information. If you have time, you can follow the live Web cast here.
The struggle continues. On Wednesday, I checked back and there were new restrictions on editing the profile:
This page is currently protected from editing until September 8, 2008 or until disputes have been resolved. This protection is not an endorsement of the current version. See the protection policy and protection log for more details. Please discuss any changes on the talk page; you may use the {{editprotected}} template to ask an administrator to make the edit if it is supported by consensus. You may also request that this page be unprotected.
In my blog posts, I wrote that I admired how the Wikipedia community is handling all of this. But check out the discussion here around edits. This is really going to put Wikipedia’s ideals to the test.
(The page where the “babygate” posts originally appeared before being scrubbed.)
Over the weekend, I watched in fascination as an anonymous blogger at Daily Kos traced the potentially explosive allegations that McCain’s vice presidential pick Sarah Palin may have faked her most recent pregnancy to cover up for the fact that it was daughter who was pregnant. It looks like that’s not true, and as everyone knows now, the McCain campaign announced on Monday that her daughter, Bristol, 17, is five months pregnant.
Still, this all left me wondering how the folks behind Daily Kos handled these postings. If Daily Kos is one model for the newsroom of the future, how do they balance the freewheeling nature of a group blog with the need to maintain their reputation? What are the ethics behind this?
When Markos Moulitsas saw that one of the contributors to his liberal blog was accusing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin of lying about her 4-month-old baby, he was a bit skeptical.
“I feel a little weird about the questions being asked,” he says. “But I also feel a little weird about saying, ‘Shut up, people.’ It takes a lot for me to step in and squash what’s on Daily Kos.”
In less than 48 hours, the allegations by a Kos diarist known as ArcXIX ricocheted into the mainstream media, when John McCain’s designated running mate announced Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant and plans to have the baby and marry the father.
But it appears by Tuesday, Moulitsas and the Daily Kos community had a change of heart. All entries related to “babygate” had been taken down.
I’ve sent a note to Moulitsas in the hopes he’ll chat about all this. We’ll see. But Steve Outing had an interesting post related to the tricky ethics for traditional news outlets faced in deciding whether to cover it:
What should mainstream news organizations do with this? I think they have a responsibility to investigate it and discover the truth, and report it, whichever way this turns out. (If Palin were lying about this, it should disqualify her from holding the VP’s office, at least to my mind.)
But it turns out there may be even more to this tale. On Saturday, I noticed a post on J.D. Lasica’s blog: Did Sarah Palin scrub her own Wikipedia entry? J.D. notes a brewing controversy:
“Well, now it appears that one of the citizen editors on the entry was … a member of Sarah Palin’s family.”
National Public Radio had reported that either a member of Palin’s family or the McCain campaign had rewritten portions of her entry in the hours before she was officially announced as McCain’s running mate. Apparently, the offending editor created an account called “Young Trigg.” Read the rest of this entry »
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