In the past, whistleblowers like Mark Klein have had to act on their own to call out an injustice. By offering users an easy method for submission, Wikileaks improves the system of disclosure.

Wikileaks currently offers users a chance to submit documents via secure upload, email or mail. The organization has already published more than 1.2 million documents. Publisher-based partnerships, such as the ones that the embeddable submission form is for, are likely to improve the quality of investigative journalism, decrease instances of government corruption and re-establish a culture of ethical business. For more information on Wikileaks, visit the website at wikileaks.org, or if you've got questions, check out the Wikileaks Live Chat Room.

Photo Credit: hughelectronic

Kiva initially allowed users to lend to entrepreneurs in developing countries. However, due to the American financial crisis, the company recently extended its mandate to help US entrepreneurs gain access to micropayment loans. As millions struggle to execute on their dream projects, a number of crowd-based funding options have emerged. Below are a few of these tools.

2. Spot.Us: Spot.Us harnesses "community-powered reporting" by allowing the public to commission news stories. Filmmakers and reporters pitch the public on stories, and public donors commission their favorite story ideas. In this way, environmental organizations and under-funded advocacy groups pool their resources to collectively fund issues-based investigations. If a group wants exclusive rights to a story, they must fund at least 50% of that story's production costs.

3. SellABand: SellABand helps musicians crowdsource funding for their next albums. While Bandcamp, Amie Street and MixMatchMusic allow fans to donate after tracks have been laid down, SellABand specializes in the pre-recording phase. The service offsets the high costs of studio time and sound engineering. A number of SellABand artist albums are available on Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon US and Dutch-based Bol.com.

4. Contenture: Contenture is a micropayment service that allows content creators to monetize their sites. Users pay a monthly fee and their money is distributed to the sites they visit the most. Groups like Silicon Florist and Hashtags.org use Contenture simply by adding a line of code to their sites. In this way the most popular service members earn cash for their traffic. TipJoy also offered a micropayment tipping service to content producers; however, the company unfortunately announced plans to close a few days ago.

In addition to our 4 examples, we know there are a number of professionals who are crowdsourcing their funding efforts. From TwitPay to Tipit, let us know your favorite tools and what you're working on in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Lead image courtesy of Bradley Gordon

While this is perhaps one of the first major news organizations to codify and automate the tracking of copyright violations on the web, several large organizations employ automated tracking to protect their content from misappropriation. In particular, photo organizations such as Getty and Corbis have worked with PicScout's Image Tracker for a number of years to seek out and confront copyright infringers. However, where Getty and Corbis can make clear claims to their licensed stock photography, the AP's claims to news-related content is blurry. Still, the blogosphere will have to tread lightly when it comes to using AP-related sources.

While the Knight Foundation's endowment has been hurt by the current economic climate, the Foundation is still committed to granting a total of $24 million to local media projects over the next five years.

Another good example for an organization that was awarded a grant by the the Knight Foundation is the Coral Gables Community Foundation in Coral Gables, Florida. This group, together with the University of Miami, will use its grant to train seniors to report, write, and blog about local affairs.

A complete list of sponsored projects can be found here. A second round of grants will be awarded later this year.

Rumors Gone Wild

Specifically, Noughton cites a rumor that Michelle Obama, wife of US presidential candidate Barack Obama, was caught on video tape hurling a racial epithet about white people. The rumor started on Larry Johnson's No Quarter blog. His source? "Someone in touch with a senior Republican" who knows that a "major McCain backer has a copy of the tape." Later, Johnson says he's learned more about the tape via "five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

Despite the clear lack of a credible source, the rumor had serious legs. From friend of a friend of a friend hearsay, to a mention on Fox News as "credible buzz," to Obama being asked about it by a reporter from the well-respectd McClatchy News Service. "So the story whirls around the echo-chamber of the paranoid, right-wing blogosphere, with the odd whisk from Fox News reporters, until it reaches hysteria," says Noughton. And though no tape has surfaced, damage has potentially been done.

Therein, perhaps, lies a danger in putting too much credence in the blogosphere and citizen journalism. At times having untrained eyes on the ground can be invaluable at getting the story reported, and sometimes citizen journos can beat the mainstream press to a breaking story. But when your sources are relying on rumors heard from friends, lending credence to those rumors by mentioning them in the mainstream press is toxic.

We've seen rumors run wild on the tech end have real-world consequences as well. Last May when Engadget erroneously reported that Apple was planning to delay Leopard and the iPhone, the company lost $4 billion in market cap in an afternoon. Even though Engadget quickly updated its headline and story when Apple denied the rumors and said their source (a memo) was a fake, the story was frozen in time on Techmeme and in people's RSS readers with the wrong information.

The Solution

With the rise of Twitter, mobile video blogging, and other tools of citizen journalism, the news cycle is now seconds. With news rolling in non-stop 24 hours per day, the continuous, Twitterized cycle doesn't leave much time for fact checking -- speed matters. But that's not the future that Noughton hopes for.

When rumors published and repeated without checking the facts can have far-reaching consequences -- like influencing voters in a US presidential election, or knocking $4 billion off a company's market cap -- accuracy should count for something. Noughton provides a moral for the tale of the phantom Michelle Obama tape: "If confronted with online rumours, investigate first, report later."

In February, CNN launched user-gen citizen news site i-Report, which was originally just a feature of the CNN web site. They also held two CNN-YouTube presidential debates over the summer. The new site, which looks and feels a lot like YouTube, offers many similar features like the ability to rate and discuss videos and embed them elsewhere.

But CNN is far from being the only large media outfit to launch citizen journalism ventures. For example, Yahoo and Reuters teamed up on You Witness News, BBC has Your News,and MSNBC has a section of their site that features citizen journalism, as well. MSNBC also owns citizen journalism site Newsvine, too.

Apparently, YouTube now wants to bring some of the focus on citizen journalism back to their site, where so many of today's citizen journalists post and share their work.

About Citizen News

On the introductory post, Olivia writes (and posts a video of course - see below):

"Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there's an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe. You're conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold." 

Even if you're not a citizen journalist yourself, but you just happen to stumble across some excellent citizen journalism on YouTube, she wants to know. She's also interested in knowing how YouTube can serve citizen journalists even better and she asked for all thoughts, questions, and other feedback to be sent to citizennews@youtube.com.

In the video below, Olivia introduces Citizen News and gives examples of the types of reporting they're looking for, which can include everything from university newscasts to citizen journalism straight out of Sudan:

What better way to pull together the bits of a story has has been "reported over the years" than by using links to the actual reporting, asked Karp. The traditional media method would be to summarize the previous reporting, said Karp, "but on the web, with its infinite space and connectedness, the Times could have added an important supplement to their own perspective" by linking.

Unfortunately, a quick search through Google News archives reveals that much of the important historical content is stuck behind pay walls -- the rationale being that old news doesn't get enough page views to monetize with advertising and is only of value to people researching a story, who are likely willing to pay for access. But as the New York Times' public editor pointed out, sometimes historical context is helpful. But is framing significant historical reporting around current events and using links to the actual reporting to build a readable trail really journalism?

The Drudge Report, seen here in 2006, has been doing 'link journalism' for over a decade.

This sort of reporting is something that bloggers and others on the web have been doing for years. One of the best known examples is The Drudge Report, which has been putting out link-based reporting since the mid-90s. By organizing links to other original reporting, Matt Drudge has really pioneered a type of online news that is something like the web-based equivalent of a paper that carries only wire stories, and does no original reporting.

The Drudge Report and other so-called link blogs, are really a subset of edited news aggregation, which has a great signal to noise ratio. Because the content is being vetted by an editor, readers can assume that they're being directed only to relevant, non-redundant reporting (assuming they trust the editor). Link journalism is also something citizen journalists do a lot of, as when we share links via Google Reader like Robert Scoble, or via del.icio.us like Jemima Kiss. Bloggers and citizen journalists have long recognized the value of the link as a way to add context for readers and reinforce the points we make in our posts.

According to Wikipedia, "Journalism is the discipline of gathering, writing and reporting news, and broadly it includes the process of editing and presenting the news articles." Karp's link journalism falls at least into the "gathering" and "editing" pieces of that. It's certainly not on the same level as original reporting -- which link journalism relies on completely -- but it does have an important place, and I hope newspapers are listening to Karp's call to tear down pay walls and start recycling relevant historical content by utilizing links. And not just to their own reporting, but to any reporting that could add value for the reader.

There is, of course, one major hurdle in the way of convincing newspapers that this is a smart thing to do: the mainstream press doesn't like to send people away from their web sites. To that, Karp responds, "Just remember Google’s law of links on the web -- the better job you do at sending people away, the more they come back."

The new site, according to Mediaweek who got an advanced look at the site, will be completely open in terms of what users can upload. Users will be in charge of deciding what constitutes news, and which submissions should be removed from the site. "The community will decide what the news is," CNN News EVP Susan Grant told Mediaweek. "We are not going to discourage or encourage anything -- iReport will be completely unvetted." (Though CNN will monitor the site for inappropriate content.)

Mediaweek says that the new site will look and feel a lot like YouTube and will also feature the usual community features, such as the ability to rate and discuss videos, and embed them on other pages.

CNN recently paid $750,000 for the domain names "ireport.com" and "i-report.com," so this is clearly something they are serious about. And they should be. As we've noted in the past, citizen journalism is fast growing in importance. The only way to keep up with a shrinking news cycle, is to have distributed reporting capable of capturing breaking news as it happens. Often times, the people best suited to report breaking news are amateurs. CNN saw that happen with last year's California wild fires, when much of their most compelling footage came in via i-Report.

"The real contribution of citizen journalists in a story like this, where whole areas of land are closed off and the fields of greatest danger keep shifting, is in having more eyes on the ground," Thomas Hollihan, a professor of media at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, told the Baltimore Sun. "Citizen journalists are swapping information back and forth - reporting where the flames are now headed or showing images on their cell phones of the fire. And with so much happening so quickly, that kind of information can be really powerful - if it is accurate."

Accuracy is a potential concern for CNN, who have had editors vetting users submissions before allowing them on the web. CNN's Susan Grant said the network will be clear about labeling the new iReport site as a "post-moderated site" (i.e., moderated after posting, rather than before) and that the views put forth in videos uploaded to the site don't necessarily reflect those of CNN.

But accuracy concerns aside, not embracing citizen journalists, or at the very least their tools and methods, seems to be something that the mainstream media can't afford to do. As Scott Karp says, "The news business -- and the journalism it supports -- can no longer afford to wait for innovation to happen in due time. It needs to happen NOW."

CNN Election Center 2008

In our opinion, CNN has by far the slickest and easiest to navigate election site out of all the major mainstream news media sources. They have a well designed, easy to navigate, and clearly laid out page that puts a wealth of information at your fingertips, including live election results, delegate counts, entrance and exit polls, candidate overviews, money charts, and general election info. If you're looking for just the straight state-by-state results, USA Today does a great job.

Politweets

Politweets is our favorite Twitter politics mashup. Last month we said that, "For political junkies, Politweet will be a must monitor web-site on every primary date this season until we know who the candidates for the general election are." Assuming Twitter can keep the lights on, Politweets will again be a must watch site throughout the day. Also check out the SuperTuesday Twitter stream from the Virtual Vantage Points blog.

Google Super Tuesday Map

In an effort to make sure Twitter goes down, Google has also teamed up with the service to create a maps mashup that shows Twitter updates about the primaries as they come in from across the country. It will display election results down to the county level after the returns are in, as well. The Google News team also slapped together an election gadget so you can embed state-by-state results on your web page.

YouTube YouChoose Super Tuesday

YouTube has a Google Maps mashup of their own that will aggregate and post geolocated videos throughout the day from candidates, news organizations, and YouTubers. The coverage isn't really restricted to Super Tuesday states, but it is still worth checking out -- many times the citizen journalist view is clearer than the one you get via mainstream sources.

MTV Choose or Lose Street Team

Speaking of citizen journalism, MTV's Street Team has citizen journalists dispatched to 23 Super Tuesday states to upload live and recorded mobile videos and blog posts throughout the day (absent is a representative from West Virginia, whose primary is actually May 13 -- the Republican party is awarding some delegates today via a statewide convention, however). Last week we called MTV's online election coverage a coup for citizen journalism.

Newsweek Live Webcast: Inside Super Tuesday

If mainstream journalism is more your thing, then Newsweek has you covered on the web. The magazine, along with owner the Wasington Post, is trotting out the heavy hitters for six continuous hours of live streaming web video coverage. Bob Woodward, Ben Bradlee, Sally Quinn, Howard Kurtz, and Leonard Downie will participate, with Newsweek editor Jon Meacham anchoring from Washingtonpost.com's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. WaPo and Newsweek reporters Michael Isikoff, Howard Fineman, Jonathan Alter, and others, including those from online magazine Slate, will contribute reports throughout the evening. Newsweek's operation is aiming to bring the name appeal and polish of broadcast news to the web. We'll see if it works.

Memeorandum

From the maker of Techmeme, Gabe Rivera's political memetracker keeps a pulse on the political blogosphere. It's a safe bet everyone will be buzzing about Super Tuesday today, but what are the individual storylines that will no doubt permeate the coverage? Following the related and discussion links on Memeorandum will let you find out. For a broader view of what people are talking about on the blogosphere, check out PoliticalTrends.info.

The N95, as readers of this blog will recall, is also being used by Reuters as part of a "Mobile Journalism Toolkit," which some Reuters field reporters are testing to help them file stories from the field and use the cell phone's camera to take photos and videos of news events. This is all part of a growing trend toward legitimizing citizen journalism and the embrace by mainstream media of amateur journalism's tools and techniques.

"'Citizen journalism' is beginning to embrace a wide range of public engagement with the media," said Timo Koskinen, project manager with Nokia Research Center when the mobile toolkit was announced, "from groups of contributors organized around subject or geographic areas to the casual participation of observers who are lucky - or unlucky - enough to be at the scene of a newsworthy event."

Yesterday we wrote about Twitter's growing influence in the reporting of news and its use by mainstream news reporters as an information distribution tool. It is interesting that while MTV is building technology to instantly stream live mobile video reports from amateur reporters in 23 states, they're apparently not planning to use Twitter. Those reporters will have cell phones, afterall, making them more than capable of Twittering.

MTV has actually used Twitter before. About 4 months ago during the Video Music Awards, MTV set up a handful of Twitter accounts to stream live updates from the awards show floor. Though it featured mostly inane updates from artists and hosts, like Lil' Wayne saying, "Yo we just left the awards It was crazzzzy," it at least shows that MTV is open to trying out new tools to push information to users. Though their Twitter experiment at the VMAs resulted in sub-par content (in my opinion), it was a modest success, attracting almost 1500 followers on their main account.

Twitter or not, though, MTV's emphasis on streaming mobile video next Tuesday, and their continued use of amateur journalists during the 2008 election cycle is part of a growing trend that is pushing citizen journalism into the mainstream and increasing its impact on how we report and consume news.