NewsJunk, Dave Winer’s slightly more than errant weekend project, has been shuttered. I wrote up NewsJunk here at Mashable shortly after it’s launch back in June. From his blog:
Now that the election was almost two weeks ago, we’re winding down newsjunk.com. It was an interesting experiment, but it didn’t achieve the biggest goal I had for it, not very many people used it. Not enough to justify continuing to do it.
He also mentioned that the tech.NewsJunk variant had ceased operation, mainly because his “heart wasn’t in it,” and he just doesn’t “care much these days about tech news.”
I felt there was a vacuum in the flow of political news, one site whose mission was to be a “briefing book” on a single topic for people who wanted to be more or less completely informed. I feel we accomplished that much for the election, and as one of the editors of the site (there were three others) — just reading all the news also had tremendous value for me. On this one topic, I was pretty close to fully informed, or as fully informed as you could be through news and blogging.
As I noted in that write-up, the launch was probably a bit stilted for a number of reasons relating to partisan politics. Chiefly, the project was architected and executed by Dave himself, and Dave has never made any secret of his partisanship. That combined with the fact that in the early first few days the site was making the rounds, all the articles were very liberally slanted may have turned off a lot of folks who were looking for an aggregator or news-at-a-glance, rather than yet another biased view of the news.
For that matter, while the bias situation certainly improved, the spartan design of the site never seemed to. The site seemed to bill itself as something more than an aggregator, but never rose to that occasion. Disscussion capabilities (powered by Disqus, at one point) were stripped from the site, and it wound up looking like a slightly less flashy version of the Drudge report.
All this begs the question, then: is there a market for a linkblog anymore? I recently launched a public-facing linkblog of my own, and recent news from Matt Drudge suggests that the activity is as popular now as it has ever been, with 30 million unique visitors on election day alone. For that matter, what is Boing-Boing (one of the most popular blogs on the Internet) but a very pretty linkblog?
I suspect that a linkblog has the potential to still do quite well, even in the face of tools like FriendFeed and Twitter rising in popularity. The key is representing it as such. Most of us, when we were pitched on NewsJunk, expected an alternative to Memeorandum, not Dave Winer’s linkblog. In fact, I imagine that something pitched as “Dave Winer’s Linkblog” would have been a lot more successful than NewsJunk ended up.
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I’ve said it twice before already, but I’ll reiterate: This is the YouTube election. Yes, Twitter has played some part. Reputable bloggers on all sides of the fence, too. But YouTube has been the glue that’s bound this big beautiful mess of a social media space together.
The class of political watchdogs that inhabit the space have given the presidential candidates, as well as the mainstream media, a real qualitative sense of what viral video is all about. That goes as much for the ups as it does the downs. It’s all part of the puzzle, and plenty of us can delight in the fact that the people have influenced things more than they ever have before, either through sheer vigilance or vocal responsiveness to events on the campaign trail. Still, it’s not over. There’s November 4 to consider - and the many minutes of citizen journalism that will presumably be recorded that day.
Indeed, if there’s anything that can bring more noisemakers to the fore in the land where user-generated content remains supreme - quantitatively, at least - it is the method of granting a single day of voting in order to elect a new leader of a nation of 300,000,000-plus people. (Not counting the many preceding days for so-called absentee ballots that one-quarter to one-third of the voting public has chosen to deliver to Uncle Sam, of course.)
It’s bound to get ugly. Somewhat, anyway. From touchscreen mishaps to entirely dysfunctional or broken machines to challenges over valid and invalid registrations, the battle for a majority result one way or another is never clean-cut and never above-board 100% of the way through.
In light of this expectation, the reality of the ever-present “citizencam” makes for one such national situation that gives the public at large a teensy bit more powerful a role than it had on its person for elections past. Okay, not a teensy bit. A major leg up, you might say.
I’ll certainly leave it up to others to determine the who-what-when-where-and-how of the events which are to occur on Election Day, but suffice it to say that them handicams Mr. and Ms. America will inevitably have on their possession outside the voting booth and station will go far in exposing that which may not have received just attention 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, or 20 years ago.
Now, putting aside the political leanings of the man for a moment, the actor and and director Tim Robbins made it a point to mention on a recent edition of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” to urge citizens to keep the cameras rolling, as it were, throughout the day, as often as possible. Good advice, for sure, but whether that advice reached the right ears that evening last month is hardly of much pertinence here, of course, since it is undoubtedly going to happen anyway. I dare say people would have a harder time doing their due diligence in gathering the appropriate identification than they would their digital recorders.
So the only thing left to question is: Will you be ready on Election Day?
Imagery provided by iStockPhoto/3dbrained
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The Christian Science Monitor is being faced with the same choice that the New York Times is facing: change or adapt. They’re wisely choosing adaptation, as word filters down through the blogosphere that the last print edition of the 100 year old national newspaper will soon come out.
The question remains as to whether they’ll be able to sustain their current staff and editorial output under the new format. The Christian Science Monitor’s website is sharply growing, and has substantial readership, but by no means is one of the leading outfits for online news.
The Monitor has always been a news outfit I’ve respected for their bias and aherance to their ethos to “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” Very few news organizations in any genre have remained steadfast to any guiding ethos, though the cynic might say that has been part of the downfall of the organization. There is no doubt that their aversion to scandal might cost them pageviews, but in a day where much of the much more visible news organization online and offline are becoming more known for pandering to the viewers than providing actual news, they might see a measure of success in staying the course.
How Do Their Numbers Look?
For some time, their online viewership has outstripped their hard-copy circulation. The Wikipedia reports that their circulation was only 56,083 for the daily print edition, where Quantcast puts their monthly pageviews at at two million, and unique visitors at over one million.
In terms of a general content strategy, it seems that they’re more or less on the right track, though if the focus is going to be for online only content, they may need to step up their efforts a bit in the social media department. They currently offer a variety of RSS feeds, including daily audio podcasts feeds as well.
Looking to promote themselves on social news services like Digg, Twitter and FriendFeed would serve them well, but we’ll give them a minute on that since they’re just now getting the hang of being an online only orgainzation.
Headcount and Other Costs
What’s likely to be of more importance is the headcount at the organization. Just as important for a New Media organization (which is what the Monitor should now be considered one of) as the the format is the organizational structure. In general, Heritage Media organizations and newspapers in specificity have a very top-heavy editorial board.
The structure and staff of the Monitor isn’t published in fine detail, but based on what little they do let out about the structure, it appears that the staff of the organization is fairly lightweight as compared to most New Media organizations of similar size, though their writer compensation levels indicate that they’re definitely over-paying compared to your typical “A-List” blog.
According to ReadWriteWeb, the average top-tier blogger is paid between $10 and $200 per post, but according to the Monitor’s guidelines, they pay between $150 and $225. As they settle into the online space as a recognized name, they may see these rates decline a little, but they aren’t too far out of whack for an organization of their size.
They’re Gonna Make It After All
Given what they’re doing and their willingness to continue to push the edges of what’s possible for an online publication, it’s my opinion that we’ll be seeing quite a bit more of this news organization, and that they’ll be around for quite a while in their new format. It’s a little to early to say that they’re going to be the model of what a newspaper should look like as it makes it’s transition to New Media organization, but for those interested in this arena, this is definitely an organization to keep an eye on.
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While dozens of technology and media firms are cutting back on expenses and staff, GettyImages is doing just the opposite. This afternoon, they announced the committment to purchase of JupiterMedia’s photo and image division, Jupiterimages, one of Getty’s largest competitors in the stock, event and archive photography business.
The purchase was made for $96 million, and gives JupiterMedia a much needed cash infusion, as their stock has lost more than 95% of it’s value over the last eight years, and not insignificant percentages of their remaining value over the last several weeks.
We’ve covered the exploits of Getty extensively over the years here at Mashable, because in addition to being the largest player in the world of providing content to producers both New Media and Old, they’ve also been a consistently quiet but persistent player in the Web 2.0 world, in both starting up Web 2.0 divisions of their own as well as being a purchaser for other startups looking for an exit.
Getty is no stranger to buying out Web 2.0 companies, themselves, having purchased Pump Audio last summer, and bought Scoopt about a year ago. They’re solidly in the music and citizen journalism business with both acquisitions, as well as being a solid friend to the independent and freelance journalist with
their wire service (try hitting up any red carpet event without running into a Getty photographer).
This appears to be a role that they will continue to play given moves like the one today combined with the fact that they’re not exactly short on cash or resources following their acquisition by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman for $2.4 billion in cash.
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A rumor purporting that Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack, published on CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport, briefly sent shares of Apple in a freefall this morning. While Apple quickly moved to quell the rumor, telling Silicon Alley Insider that the news was simply “not true,” in light of the recent concerns over Steve Jobs’ health, the news was enough to spark a rapid sell-off of the company’s stock.
While it will remain to be seen whether or not this was a deliberate attempt to manipulate Apple stock and make money on the part of the citizen journalist who posted the news, it should be noted that Internet rumors concerning the stock market have existed long before we started calling anonymous Web posters “citizen journalists.” During the dotcom boom in the late 90s, stocks routinely made aggressive moves based on comments made in chat rooms and on online message boards, known as “pump and dump” scams.
In any event, today’s case is a bit different because iReport carries the branding of CNN, a respected mainstream media organization. As such, the rumor seemed more credible, and investors obviously made the decision to sell Apple stock based on it. Nonetheless, I think this is mainly a special circumstance – concerns about Jobs’ health have been in the news for months, and any indication that it is moving in one direction or the other has had implications for Apple’s shares.
Further, the premise of iReport is that the best news makes it on-air to CNN (presumably after being verified by professional journalists) – that didn’t seem to happen here. News about public companies is obviously a delicate subject, but I would hardly call this blunder the beginning of the end for citizen journalism. Media companies are learning as they go – citizen journalism for the moment is simply a compliment to the traditional tenants of reporting – and so long as the credibility of the parent organization isn’t compromised, there really isn’t much to worry about.
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The buzz has more or less died down, at least in the pages of Gawker, MediaShift, TechDirt and Romenesko. But our very own Alana Taylor did a feature for PBS blog MediaShift, a commentary really, on the lack of New Media savvy amongst the students and faculty at NYU in a class called “Reporting Gen Y.”
She did so by mainly remarking on the irony that in a class full of journalism students, she was the only one to have ever posted to a blog before, let alone heard of Twitter, FriendFeed, or any other microblogging utility. After she posted her observations on this, the Professor for the class banned any unauthorized blogging of the class.
Romenesko, in his trademark succinct manner, summarizes the hubbub the best:
“Every single journalism class at NYU has required me to bring the bulky newspaper,” writes AlanaTaylor. “I don’t understand why they don’t let us access the online version, get our current events news from other outlets, or even use our NYTimes app on the iPhone. Bringing the New York Times pains me because I refuse to believe that it’s the only source for credible news or Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism and it’s a big waste of trees.”
Alana Taylor says after writing about her “Reporting Gen Y” class at NYU, instructor Mary Quigley told her not to blog, Twitter or write about the class again. (Quigley tells Mark Glaser: “I would certainly require a student to ask permission to use direct quotes from the class on a blog written after class.”) Glaser writes: “As a private school, NYU might be able to restrict a student’s reporting on what went on in a classroom — but that would go against everything that journalism schools are teaching students about the First Amendment and freedom of the press.”
Michael Getler has “serious problems” with the “undercover” piece by journalism student Alana Taylor (left), which was published on PBS’s website. Journalism is going to evolve, the ombud writes, but “it seems to me that certain fundamentals must remain bedrock. Among them is the notion that journalists must always, except in the most rare circumstances, announce themselves, go through the front door, say who you are, what you are doing and who you are working for.”
As often happens in these sort of defining process story events, they can very easily turn into fodder for not just commentary but learning. Alana has told me that a number of professors around the country have said that they’re making Alana’s original piece and the controversy it stirred a part of their curriculum for journalism ethics and New Media-related courses.
Given that, I took a few minutes over the weekend to talk to Alana and get her side of the story. I know from personal experience when a seemingly innocuous article spins far outside the context in which it was 
originally written. Last August, I wrote a short little piece regarding confirmations I received for the existence of the gPhone, and the five or six sentences of analysis and information I wrote were duplicated, cited, and spun eight ways to Sunday for the following two or three months until Google made an official announcement.
Similarly, a lot of critical words were written with regard to what Alana wrote, including the words of MediaShift Ombudsman Michael Getler, and according to Alana none of those who wrote highly critical words contacted her a full accounting. We’ll set aside the irony of Heritage Media vangaurds railing against the lack of best practices in New Media while ignoring the most basic of rules they claim to espouse.
Instead, I wanted to focus on some of the more interesting things Alana and I talked about. I commented to her how silly I thought it to create a policy in today’s society that said “you can’t blog about this class.” To me, that’s tantamount to censorship, something that the professor has no right to do. It would be similar to the manager at the local corner-store telling me I can shop there, but not tweet to anyone about my experiences at the store. It’s senseless and outside their jurisdiction.
She concurred, despite the fact it was her intention to simply show the power of New Media.
“A lot of the points I made in my article that were actually re-enforced through all the blogosphere buzz,” she said. “My point was precisely that blogging is powerful and social media should be used for what it is - the newest platform of communication. It should be taught to the kids who will have to use it in the next ten years.”
And despite all the heritage media posturing and smug self-importance, she indeed proved her point. By simply putting her story out there, through the rapid conduits of New Media, her article got attention and further established her name in the world of journalism, landing her letters of congratulations and job offers from editors, publications, and news anchors.
That of course didn’t stop many of her detractors from writing furious letters to the editors as to how insignificant and trivial blogging and New Media journalism was. This lead both of us to the question: if nobody takes blogging seriously, then why are they so furious? It’s a good one, and its answer is probably rooted in the same place that irrational and desparate actions from pop stars of ten years ago are when they sue toddlers for dancing to their music on the Internet.
Beyond that, I was awestruck that NYU, an educational institution renowned for it’s journalism school, was 
barely ahead of the community college where I started my journalism education ten years ago. Back then, social media wasn’t a powerful thing (or even a term), but my journalism classes for the first two semesters consisted of being taught the intricacies of the Mac Color Classic as a “twentieth century publishing tool.”
If this is the cutting edge of media education, then our educational system is in trouble. When you look around at the nature of the professional blogosphere, is it any wonder that a minority of them come from classically trained journalism backgrounds?
There are a wide variety of conclusions to draw from the whole debacle, but the one which sticks out most to me, I think, is that our approach to social media in the mainstream in general and education in specificity needs to become a lot more advanced. This technology isn’t going away, and if we continue to let academia pretend like it doesn’t exist, then we’ll end up robbing our society as a whole of what has been the historical basis for much of our country’s innovation and advancement.
In short, institutions for higher learning will simply become obsolete.
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Were you pleased with the online coverage of the debates? I’m not talking about the punditry, the live streams and the drunkblogs. I’m specifically talking about the much-vaunted live coverage on Twitter and FriendFeed. You know, the stuff that was overlayed on Current’s channel, talked about on CSPAN and probably used in at least a dozen other bits of news coverage.
The usage was certainly there, and Biz shows us some interesting usage graphs, showing not-insigificant spikes during some key phrases in the debate. Definitely, when looked at in terms of aggregate use, there are some interesting patterns that emerge. For those that are looking for a civilized general debate though, well, it definitely left me feeling a bit empty at the end of the night.
A couple of weeks ago, I penned a piece called “Wisdom of Crowds isn’t the Answer for Everything,” and it’s in the context of those points that Sean and I talked today about the suitability of most social media platforms for political discourse.
Check in on the discussion below (or download the MP4).
Oddly, I think we both agree that there are ways out of this problem, but there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight currently for the lack of elevated discussion. The question becomes, then, what useful purpose during this election can FriendFeed and Twitter serve? It certainly isn’t substantive discussion or a place for distilled truth (like the blogosphere was four years ago). Is it simply statistics on when people are intrigued or moved by widely heard statements?
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Continuing the trend of mainstream media integrating user-generated content into its programming, CBS has launched EyeMobile for iPhone, allowing its users to submit photos and videos to the company’s citizen journalism site: CBSEyeMobile.com. While several cable networks have launched similar efforts – CNN with iReport and FoxNews with uReport – CBS is the first of the “big three” broadcast networks to get into the game.
In addition to being able to upload content to EyeMobile, the app includes options for viewing content uploaded by others and leaving comments. As for the EyeMobile website, it is very YouTube-esque, allowing you to browse photos and videos by most recent, most viewed, and most commented. The site also allows you to copy and paste code to embed photos and videos elsewhere.
What’s not clear about EyeMobile is how it might integrate with the company’s on-air reporting. Both CNN and Fox News routinely show user-submitted video, while CNN is taking things a step further by utilizing Twitter in its on-air reporting. Of course, CBS has a lot less news coverage than the 24×7 cable networks – 30 minutes every night in addition to The Early Show every morning.
On the other hand, those shows have a much larger audience than most cable programming, so if CBS is serious about pushing citizen journalism, they certainly will have ample opportunity to promote EyeMobile and its new iPhone application. Additionally, with CNET now under the CBS umbrella, they can also reach out to the tech savvy community to encourage users to submit content. In short, all the pieces seem to be there for CBS to execute a big citizen journalism initiative – it’s just a matter of how serious they are about pushing it.
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YouTube has announced a contest for aspiring documentarians and journalists to take home $10,000 for creating a series of journalistic pieces to go towards beefing up their “reporter” content selection. This isn’t the first thing they’ve done to emphasize their efforts to grow this sector of the service. A quick catalog of the recent posts to the YouTube company blog shows that almost exactly half of the last 20 posts concern something to do with citizen journalism on YouTube.
They’re definitely making a valiant effort to appear pro-journalism and pro-citizen reporting. Everyone knows this is something that’s desperately needed for the site. The above chart is from an incredibly even-handed article from PCMech entitled “Its Official, YouTube Sucks,” and shows the general distribution of content types by category on the sharing site. The question remains, though: are their journalism programs and contests good first steps or are they completely misguided window dressing?
I’ve got a feeling it’s the latter, and I sat down to analyze this, one of the more serious moves to encourage journalism on the site, to gain some insight as to what they’re thinking. They announced it earlier Tuesday on the YouTube blog:
Today, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center, YouTube presents Project: Report(www.youtube.com/projectreport), a journalism contest (made possible by Sony VAIO and Intel) for non-professional, aspiring journalists to tell stories that might not otherwise be covered by traditional media.
Winners of each round will receive technology prizes from Sony VAIO and Intel, and the grand prize winner will be granted a $10,000 journalism fellowship with the Pulitzer Center to report on a story outside of their home country.
So, it’s time to pick up that video camera, take on this assignment, and start reporting your stories to the world.
Yours,
Olivia M.
YouTube News & Politics
Aside from what can charitably be described as YouTube’s shaky history with journalist types who try to use the system, there is one other important factor that indicates to me that this is a half-hearted effort (or at least one that’s doomed before it starts).
It occurs to me that of all the players on the field in the world of Internet video, if any single company is in a position to encourage and make a success of anything journalistic (let alone citizen reporting), it’s YouTube. There’s a wide variety of endeavors out there, many of which we’ve covered here at Mashable, that are doing everything from compensating reporters by encouraging donations targeted towards certain types of reporting to folks making a full-on commercial endeavor out of bringing you the news like Revision3.
The one thing all these companies have in common is that they’re completely venture capital-backed. Each one of them is taking extremely risky gambles, all betting that their business model is going to win out in the end.
Google is the one player in the field that has the backing to really make a serious effort in this regard. A contest where the prizes are some Sony schwag and one grand prize of $10k earmarked for another documentary isn’t exactly the carrot needed to get the creative juices flowing by those that would be regular producers of quality content. At the end of the contest you’re going to have one moderately excited winner and a whole bunch of disenfranchised losers.
Why doesn’t Google add another 0 to the grand prize money pot, and announce reward quality serial news producers with smaller payments capable of sustaining the very draining lifestyle of news content production? It isn’t as if Google doesn’t have a machine in their basement that almost literally prints cash - they’re hands down the largest and most watched company on the Internet that has a hand in video distribution.
The problem of a lack of monetizable content keeps rearing it’s ugly head when it comes to actually recouping some of that monstrous investment Google made in YouTube. These sorts of contests are designed to encourage quality producers to stay around the site, but may indeed have quite the opposite effect.
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For as long as there has been reporters or journalists, there have been those anonymous sources who have helped them break more than a few stories. In most cases, these fountains of information have preferred to remain anonymous and out of the spotlight, but it is safe to say that without those sources a journalist’s job would be a lot harder.
This was of course long before social media came along and provided everyone an opportunity to be the journalist instead of just the source. Tied in with that was the total paranoia on the side of the mainstream media newspapers that this Twitter things was just too flaky and bloggers were trying to destroy their business.
As with all things though, given enough time and proof attitudes can change and such is the case as more and more regional newspapers appear to be willing to take a second look at this whole social media thing. Not out of fear that they will find themselves relegated to the ancient past, but rather out of realizing that it can be a great way for them to maximize their already limited resources.
A good example of this meeting on a common ground can be seen in a post today at Poynter Online where Daniel B. Honigman talks about a recent evacuation at the Cook County circuit clerk’s office after a bomb threat and how the
Chicago Tribune included local Twitter users in tracking down the story. Beyond that, the Tribune used the service to further spread the story that the Tribune had posted to their online site.
It turns out that the bomb scare was all over Twitter within minutes of people being evacuated from the building. This Twitter activity on the ongoing events was picked up by the Chicago Tribune’s online persona on Twitter who passed the story onto the newspaper’s City Desk. Within 20 minutes the story about the bomb scare and the evacuation was on the front page of the Tribune’s web site.
At the same time the story link was posted to Twitter via the Tribune’s Twitter persona – ColonelTribune – who also took time to thank those on 
Twitter who had helped with the leads on the story.
While I would have like to have seen that type of attribution in the story as well I fine this kind of willingness to embrace and use new technology like Twitter very encouraging. Rather than the typical bickering that seems to go on about the value of services like this there are organizations that are finding ways to make them work. In the end we all benefit and that is a good thing.
[Twitter screen captures courtesy of Poynter Online]
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