Andy Rooney was among the greatest news writers of his generation. But during the latter stages of his life, he complained about how awful life had become, about how things had ceased to be familiar any more, about how disruption had left his world a blur. Rooney's complaints had become emblematic of what has been perceived as the decline of the role of television as an information medium. So when M.G. Siegler spends a few minutes with us in the same vein, complaining about how the object of his career up until recently has been "bulls---," one wonders whether this should be emblematic of the end of something else.

Siegler, by any measure, is one of the more noteworthy bloggers of his generation, still contributing to TechCrunch while working now as an investor in the CrunchFund partnership. Yesterday, Siegler posted a critique of an online article by New York Times reporter Nick Bilton. His subject was a rundown of the unauthorized sharing of iPhone users' address books by Path, and the subsequent apology from Path CEO Dave Morin, which RWW's Jon Mitchell praised as "full of refreshing self-consciousness."

NYT's Bilton was disturbed by the sudden reversal of apparent public sentiment toward Morin, from indignation to outright support, which he credited to savvy public relations, especially toward the "technorati." But along the way, his original story had some inaccuracies which NYT corrected, with its usual addendum.

Writing in his personal Paris Lemon blog, Siegler chastised Bilton for not doing the requisite legwork. Had Bilton taken the time to do more research, Siegler pointed out, he would have discovered that Path is not the only app uploading address books to Apple's servers. "Apps that have been doing it for a long time. That actually would have made his point much stronger," Siegler wrote. "But that would have been more work. And work is hard. Path was served up on a platter, the homework already done."

Had Siegler stopped there, we might have considered this a valuable and important lesson. It has become commonplace for Web journalists and bloggers to acquire a story in its mostly, if not entirely, completed state, add one layer of informativeness or newsiness to it, and pass it along the pike. From there, someone may copy it in part or whole, perhaps adding another layer of commentary. Yes, that's not a particularly ethical way to run a news business.

But Siegler was having a bad day. He had come to the deep, personal revelation that the world of investing into which he had entered, and the world of writing about investors which he has not entirely exited, were - in his words - "not aligned. At all."

"More Bulls--- Than Information"

(Do forgive me for not repeating Siegler's words here verbatim, including several of the Seven Words You Can't Say as compiled by the late genius George Carlin. I know writing in street language is oh-so-Hunter S. Thompson these days, but as both my longtime readers will know, as an editor, I tend to lean more towards Fulton J. Sheen.)

"Most of what is written about the tech world - both in blog form and old school media form - is bulls---," remarks Siegler. "I won't try to put some arbitrary label on it like 80%, but it's a lot. There's more bulls--- than there is 100% pure, legitimate information."

The reason, he reports (in exhaustive detail), is the relentless drive by advertisers for publishers to produce greater page views, which in turn means bloggers devote less time per story, thus reducing the amount of research they're allowed to do to near- or absolute zero. It gets worse. Most tech bloggers don't think, Siegler goes on. He himself pleads guilty as charged, adding that it was impossible to know the full extent of what tech bloggers do not know, until he could step outside the shell and observe them from the outside.

Now he realizes just how many different topics a blogger is expected to be an expert in, simultaneously. "You cannot be an authority on 20 different topics. You just can't," Siegler writes, in what should have been a concluding paragraph but wasn't. "But people are trying to convey that they are. And there's often a perception that they are. And this horribly broken system works from the perspective of the pageview machine."

So here's the problem: Some of us appear to have spent a great deal of our careers disrupting the monster that is mainstream media. In Andy Rooney's day, these were the oracles from which all information flowed in regularly scheduled intervals and in properly proportioned nuggets. Why do people attribute that much authority to a single institution, folks asked?

But now that we have the floor and the spotlight is shining on us - all the myriad individuals who tore down the walls separating the people from open and transparent access to the information they need to live and work - all of a sudden, no one person can be an authority on twenty different things. Now the burden is too hard to bear. We redefined the news business from something about institutions into something about ourselves. We've deconstructed the three or four big silos and built a thousand smaller ones. And we've come to the realization not only of how under-informed we are, but how uninteresting we are to boot.

We Interrupt This Diatribe...

A news service can be an authority on twenty different things, or a hundred, or five hundred. It's already happened, just deep in our past. An institution of reporters working together under established, trusted editorial leadership, sharing their knowledge and collaborating with one another, can and has earned a rightful place of authority in millions of people's lives. Great news broadcasts, newspapers, and newsmagazines about the world and about technology were typically produced by a few dozen people.

It is perhaps the narcissistic nature of this generation that has led people to believe they work better in closets, collaborating to the extent that one can by way of the occasional tweet or IM. Fewer people indeed do generate more content per publication than ever before in history. But as Siegler himself correctly points out, the truth - if and when it ever does become known - is produced through a complex and often random exchange of data from one blogger to the next to the next. When you connect all the various blogs together into one steel-wool-shaped mass, and perceive the product rather than its individual threads as the modern engine of journalism, you realize that far more people are involved today in the production of a complete story than ever before. Each blog publication may act as a subatomic component in the creation of facts, and whatever else accompanies them; the greater molecule of news production is bigger, bulkier, and less efficient than ever before in history. Tens of thousands of people, all ping-ponging hyperlinks in M.G. Siegler's pageview machine.

"I offer no solutions because my honest opinion is that nothing will change where we're headed," the TechCrunch writer closes. Well, okay then. We've had our tantrum, and now we're exhausted and a little embarrassed. Thank you for your input.

My turn now. Journalism is not about being an expert in twenty different things. It's about being interested in all of them, knowing how to ask questions, and how to elicit information from the answers. You do not have to be an expert in anything at all to be a journalist. In fact, your need to know must be more potent than your need to profess what you know. Your methodologies will improve, your insight will be sharpened, your ability to separate fact from filth will be well-honed.

But you can't ask questions and expect answers in a vacuum. First, you have to open the f---tarded closet door and step outside. Breathe some clean air. Then start finding the right people to ask questions of. I strongly suspect it's something M.G. Siegler is yearning to do anyway.

Scott M. Fulton, III is the author of this document, and is fully responsible for his content.

Byte Magazine cover, February 1983, from VintageComputers.net

Rawporter, an iPhone app that will soon be rolled out for Android, turns almost anyone into a local news cameraman or camerawoman. Instead of dispatching a camera crew to a fire during rush hour and risk they won't get there until after the flame is out, a television news reporter can create an assignment from Rawporter's Web interface and send it to anyone with the app who may be in the area of the fire.

Speaking at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York on Saturday, Rawporter co-founder Rob Gaige said the assignment feature allows producers to tell photographers how much they'll be paid. Photo and video journalists retain rights to the work they create using the app and can share it with their followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

"Our job is to make your job easier," Gaige told conference attendees, most of whom were journalists, and many of whom were not buying assertions that Rawporter would not threaten their already tenuous job security.

Even an instructional video on Rawporter's Web site notes that traditional news crews are "too costly and too slow for today's news market" and that viewers don't want to see "a reporter talking about the aftermath" when they can watch an event as it unfolds.

The app itself is relatively straightforward to use.It feels a lot like Instagram, except it also offers push notifications from news outlets looking for content. I've been using it since Saturday and, so far, no assignments have been tossed my way but, then again, as far as I know I have not been in the vicinity of any newsworthy events.

For producers looking to fill a sudden news hole, there's not a lot of user-generated content to choose from just yet (aside from videos shot at the conference where Gaige was speakinbg, the most recent video is from a Jan. 23 vigil following the death of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno).

Rawporter just launched in November, so it may take awhile for accidental journalists to discover the site, and for producers to figure out if they're breaking union contracts by outsourcing camera work for $10 or $25 a clip.

Myers points to WNYC's coverage as a superb example of the advantages gained by incorporating Google tools into original coverage. There's no question that Google has built a useful platform for news organizations on top of its existing core services. Myers wonders whether Google could even compete directly with the AP for the lucrative business of reporting election returns, and his sources believe it could, if its leaders wanted to. But I think there's even more going on with these Google election initiatives. It looks to me like Google is searching for ways to disrupt the whole election news business.

While major news outlets, including the NY Times, MSNBC and Huffington Post were relying on AP results, Google's data came in faster and went straight to a dynamic map. Google proved it has a formidable technical advantage over news-focused organizations when it comes to this kind of coverage. Even if a news outlet does build its own in-house mapping platform, it's a tall order to build one as scalable, reliable, responsive and extensible as Google's is.

Google's tools are therefore pretty hard to resist. WNYC combined them with in-house work and software, and it did a bang-up job. The organizations that used AP data sound a little jealous in talking to Myers. "Google was ahead, definitely ahead," Aron Pilhofer of the NY Times news applications team - which uses AP - told Myers. The Guardian's U.S. newsroom, still getting its sea legs and watching U.S.-based organizations closely, thought that WYNC's John Keefe's fine tuning of the Google map was even more accurate.

The Tools Are Free, But The Methods Are Secret

To me, the most intriguing part of Myers' inquiry is that Google was cagey with him about its exact methods. The Google Elections portals are built on top of ordinary, free Google services, which anyone can use. If you wanted to set up your own Google Map tracking election results in real time, pulling in data to Google Docs and visualizing using Fusion Tables, you theoretically could. Even so, Google wouldn't tell Myers exactly how they did it in order to beat the AP's coverage.

The Iowa GOP worked with Google to create the system for tabulating the results. Staff and volunteers collected the data from the 1,774 precincts using Google Apps, and the verified data went out to services tracking in real time, including Google and the AP. Google wouldn't tell Myers exactly what they did with the data, and the AP relayed a statement to him that sounds like a bit of an excuse. Basically, they used the same Google Apps-powered tables, but they double- and triple-checked everything.

"Scrupulous verification" is great, but it's also slow. The fact is, Google's team wasn't hasty; it was just faster. It had a competitive edge. As Myers reports, the AP is heavily invested in being the best at this, and Google was just doing it in Iowa as an experiment. It's not even providing the same service in New Hampshire or South Carolina. And yet Google wants to maintain its competitive advantage over the AP by not revealing the specifics of its methods.

Google's Secret Sauce

Myers raises great points about trust. The AP is a nonprofit journalism outfit, and Google is a for-profit ad company built on good data science. The AP is dedicated and scrupulous, but Google's tools are extensible and free. "Once all those votes are counted," Myers asks, "to whom does that information belong?" That's a crucial question. But as a clue, consider how transparent Google is with the public data it collects. Google's secret sauce is not in the data itself. It's in the methods of analysis.

When Google launches free consumer election portals in Egypt or the U.S., it's doing more than just providing live maps of the returns. It's aggregating news stories, and it's providing background research and search tools on candidates and issues. But it's also doing what Google is always doing: gathering data on users and their preferences.

The Google.com/elections pages might not be major traffic destinations, but Google's giving away its embeddable tools to news organizations, so it will gather data from their sites. Google is going to learn what online consumers really want out of political news, and since it's guarding its methods, it will be in a privileged position to give it to them.

Where do you turn for election news?

CNN, meanwhile, has dedicated a single evening news segment to the issue. All of the companies covered in the report have either publicly supported SOPA or have parent companies that have done so.

Comcast/NBCUniversal (which owns MSNBC and NBC News), Viacom (CBS), News Corporation (Fox News), Time Warner (CNN) and Disney (ABC) are all listed as supporters of the bill. ABC and CBS are also listed as separate supporters of the bill.

SOPA would block access to sites accused of violating U.S. copyright laws. The measure has been called Draconian by opponents who say it would fundamentally change the free-flow of information across the Internet. Proponents, ranging from the NBA to Universal, say the measure is needed to block sites which flagrantly flaunt copyright laws and make content available for free without paying copyright owners.

Traditional media companies have been key players in lobbying for SOPA's passage, with more than half of that funding coming from cable television providers, commercial TV and radio stations, and the entertainment industry. Opponents of the legislation have been developing apps to help voters track how their legislators stand on SOPA and how much they have received in campaign donations from SOPA-supporting entities.

Launched in January 2009 by Ernie Smith from Washington D.C., the site publishes about 30 news soundbites a day. ShortFormBlog is still a part-time project for Smith, who also works as a graphic designer at The Washington Post. He's hoping to turn the site into a full-time business. And I think he's onto something, certainly in terms of using a tool like Tumblr to change the way news is delivered and consumed. I interviewed Smith to find out more about his Tumblr-powered news service.

The site publishes over 200 posts per week, an average of about 30 per day (higher on weekdays). There are currently four other contributors, other than Smith. The site can be consumed by following on Tumblr, or by RSS, Twitter and Facebook.

The audience reaction and feedback - mostly via Tumblr, but also other social media such as Twitter - is a key part of the site. Catching the eyes of readers with visual design and enticing them to engage with the content is what ShortFormBlog is all about. "I like to think of what we do as sort of a soft approach to more serious news," remarked Smith. "It's one that uses commentary as a tool, along with straight storytelling. A lot of what we do involves numbers, quotes, various types of blurbs, different sizes of photos and so on, anything to keep things interesting."

The Tumblr community is especially important. "One thing that's really helped us grow," remarked Smith, "is that there's a strong community around news on Tumblr. There are a number of great Tumblrs -- Pantsless Progressive, SoupSoup, BrooklynMutt, inothernews, kateoplis, The Political Notebook and NewsFlick, to name a few -- that really take the concept of news curation to heart."

How Tumblr is Being Used

ShortFormBlog uses a mix of Tumblr and Wordpress as its publishing platform. In particular, a plugin called Tumblrize. As Smith explained, Tumblrize "allowed me to take the WordPress backend (which I had invested a lot of work into customizing) and use it as a Tumblr backend."

So why still use Wordpress, if Tumblr appears to offer a great publishing platform for short-form content already? According to Ernie Smith, it's because the design tools they use are reliant on having a custom editing interface. "Through a bit of melding TinyMCE and some super-specialized CSS," he said, "we can pretty much do our number-based and burby posts without having to touch any HTML. I've also hacked the Tumblrize plugin to do a bunch of extra things -- effectively doubling Tumblr's seven base styles."

This is what their posting interface looks like:

The site currently gets between 40,000 and 50,000 unique visitors a month, although Smith said that "with over 12,000 [Tumblr] followers and Tumblr's viral nature, the true reach of our content is probably much further than that."

Is There a Future in Curated News?

ShortFormBlog is an excellent example of innovation in journalism. And it uses a consumer blogging service that wasn't designed to be a professional media tool.

Sure the bulk of its content is sourced from external media outlets, which is not dissimilar to the heavily criticized Huffington Post "aggregation" model. But let's look at the bigger picture: the media ecosystem nowadays relies as much on good curation than on original writing. The curation needs to done selectively though, with a solid filter, in order to attract a regular readership. That is the opportunity for sites like ShortFormBlog.

Let us know what you think of Ernie's site and approach in the comments.

From the press release:

"The program is targeted to individual students creating innovative projects that further the ideals of digital journalism. A key goal is to promote geographic, gender and ethnic diversity, with an emphasis on rural and urban areas."

Applications are now open. Only U.S. citizens are eligible (see eligibility requirements). The deadline is January 27, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

This is a strong partnership in the online news space. The AP is one of the largest and most influential news organizations in the world, with a clear need to prepare the next generation of journalists. The Online News Association is the largest membership organization of digital journalists. Google, the seeming outlier in this group, seeks to organize the world's information. Without new, high-quality information, there would be nothing for them to organize.

For years, AP and Google struggled over content licensing issues, but the parties eventually reached an agreement. The announcement of this joint scholarship indicates that the two organizations see cooperation as the best option for the future of news content on the Web.

Google has ramped up development of its news offerings this year, introducing a new Google News interface, badges to add a game element to news reading, and location-based local news on mobile devices.

Carvin used Twitter to build a network that now keeps him on top of the news that comes out of the Middle East and in doing so has shown the media industry a new way to be a reporter. The question becomes: is the future of the news industry tied to the technology or is technology an enabler to creating human networks that spread information?

"It is a collaborative news gathering network," Carvin said on stage at the ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit at Columbia University in New York City.

Carvin considers himself a bit of a pseudo-reporter. He has been a content creator since 1994 and his official job title at NPR is "senior media strategist who runs the social media team." Yet, he has no background as an actual journalist outside of some advocacy journalism he did in the early 2000s. His growth into a "Twitter news anchor," as he calls himself, was very organic.

Carvin went on a trip to Tunisia and ended up learning the country by backpacking through it. He met and talked to bloggers in the country and when he came back to the states he kept in touch with them. When turmoil started in Tunisia in December 2010, he contacted his sources and started tweeting about it. His connections have grown as the uprisings have spread in Egypt, Yemen and Syria.

"I went from tweeting about Tunisia casually to being on Twitter for 17 to 18 hours a day for the last six months trying to keep up," Carvin said.

Carvin does not create packages for NPR.org. His Twitter stream, at his request, is not hosted on the NPR page due to the sometimes gruesome nature of pictures and videos that he links to. The primary "package" he creates is through his Storify account. Carvin uses Storify as an archival tool to construct the stories that he follows on a daily basis.

Carvin uses Twitter to build a network of people and tell an ongoing story. However, he has found that there are some tools the service does not have that would make his job easier. One of the reasons that Carvin uses Storify is to keep track of storylines he has reported before. If Twitter had a better archival service it would enable Carvin to more easily track topics he is researching. PostPo.st is a Twitter history search service that could help with that. He would also like to see social media monitoring that is not built around tracking brands but about networks and people and how those networks interact with each other.

The Changing Journalist

As a social media strategist, Carvin looks to ways that journalists can leverage new technologies to tell a better story.

"The tools are important for the human network they create," Carvin said.

He thinks that the next round of journalists being trained will be able to do what he does easier and better because they will be digital natives.

"They are going to need to be prepared to not only take really good journalistic practices and make sense of them and apply them online but also understand the strengths of social media," Carvin said.

Like many journalists, Carvin considers his work to be a public service. He is not a "one-man newswire" but rather a hub of intelligence that he filters and sorts and chases stories in the digital realm. His particular topic is news of strife in the Middle East but he envisions reporters creating networks in whatever niche they cover.

Encyclo is a curated collection of noteworthy news organizations and what each has done for the future of news. Encyclo "takes a step back from the daily updates and focuses on background and context." What has ReadWriteWeb been doing to enhance the future of news? Encyclo has the answer.

"Reasonable people can make their own judgments about the value of these various outlets -- but they've all got something to teach us about how the business of news is changing," Nieman writes in its introduction of Encyclo.

In addition to media companies, Encyclo also includes technology companies that are having a profound effect on the news industry including Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Craigslist.

Each entry is broken into five sections: 1) about the publication and its contribution to the future of news; 2) important new articles and commentaries about the subject; 3) partners, allies and competitors; 4) all posts on the subject by the Nieman Lab; 5) all posts by news industry aggregator MediaGazer.

Encyclo provides an embeddable widget on every entry that can be placed on a site or blog for easy reference. Check out the entry for ReadWriteWeb to the right. Encyclo is working to update the database with the newest and most pertinent information and asks users for ways to improve, update and fix entries; "While Encyclo is a Nieman Journalism Lab project, it'll only achieve its full potential if others get involved."

For those of us who write about feature creep on beer apps from our bathtubs, journalism holds only the dual dangers of trolls and sponge-based injuries. For those who are out in the field, especially in dicey places, it holds the dangers of imprisonment, beatings and death. With the flare up of wars and now mass protests, 2011 has already seen 16 fatalities.

(Iran and China lead the list for imprisonment of journalists, with 34 each. Unsurprisingly, they lead the race in imprisonment and harassment of bloggers and other social media participants as well. Tyrants don't draw a thick line between amateur and professional.)

The Journalists Memorial is casting a wider net, however, and is asking the public to help identify videos about and by killed journalists, according to a post by Steve Grove on the Official Google Blog

"This channel will become a digital version of the Newseum's Journalists Memorial, which is re-dedicated annually to honor journalists worldwide who have died during the preceding year. This year, 77 names are being added to the list of the more than 2,000 journalists who have been recognized for their sacrifices since 1837."

Here's just one video about just one journalist.

"Newspapers, for the first time, will be able to request that feeds of nonprofit materials be delivered directly into their content management systems through AP's Webfeeds software. The project will begin testing with nonprofit organizations in California and will use Internet delivery feeds that have been put in place at newspapers over the past year."

Partners on that undertaking included ProPublica, the Investigative Reporting Workshop, the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Joining these established partners will be the Maynard Institute.

This project is for organizations that provide journalism free of charge. AP already has the APT system in place for the distribution of non-profit journalism content that for which its providers charge.

According to the Nieman Journalism Lab, the pilot project was not all that successful, as AP partners did not pick up a lot of the content. A lot of this problem may have been technical. AP has transitioned from its traditional satellite "wire" to its Web-based AP Exchange. But to find stories there, editors needed to search for them, not likely to be a common event for anyone who's spent time in a newsroom.

This iteration, however, will be using the AP Webfeeds tool, which will bring streams of stories to the user based on keywords and other criteria. This should make the process of reviewing stories for possible inclusion a lot easier and overcome what was essentially a technical-traffic obstacle.

Printing press photo by Carol Guillaume

• Zombie Cyborg Beetles! Implanted with electrodes at birth! Flown via radio signals! [Video] http://bit.ly/fZjB0H via @scienceblogs
• Unexpected hazards of e-book lending: http://bit.ly/dQbenZ via @maudnewton
• A Tale of Two Googles: Race, Labor, and Hierarchy in the Digital Age: http://bit.ly/eUPg93 via @ThoughtCatalog
• How blogs have changed journalism: http://reut.rs/fuugUl via @FelixSalmon
• "Putting Eric Schmidt in charge of policing online privacy is like appointing Bernie Madoff to direct the SEC" http://bit.ly/fjDLn5 via @HilliconValley

Online advertising jumped 11% for newspapers in 2010. But overall the news is still bad: http://bit.ly/gqCNC9 via @joleisky

Follow ReadWriteWeb and the ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter.

What links did we miss? Let us know in the comments.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_smart_links_you_missed_on_twitter_on_today_031711.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_smart_links_you_missed_on_twitter_on_today_031711.php Blogging Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:00:00 -0800 Abraham Hyatt I spent much of my fourth consecutive year at the South by Southwest Interactive festival capturing tweets, photos and other moments from the thousands of people in attendance. To accomplish this, I used curation platform Storify, which incidentally won this year's SXSWi Startup Accelerator competition for news technologies. Although still in private beta, Storify is getting a lot of well-deserved notice.

]]> Additionally, Storify launched a custom site that features many other curated stories from SXSWi keynotes, panels and parties.

Without further ado, here's the scrapbook I created over my three day adventure. Admittedly my curatorial stamina began to wane a bit towards the end, but I pulled through! I'll continue to fine-tune this story over the next few weeks. If you have something you'd like me to add, please drop me a line on Twitter.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/south_by_southwest_interactive_the_ultimate_scrapb.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/south_by_southwest_interactive_the_ultimate_scrapb.php Community Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:00:00 -0800 Seamus Condron

If you're a TV actor, you have the Emmy Awards. If you're a journalist, you have the Pulitzer Prize. But if you're a citizen reporter, what do you have? Nothing, until now.

CNN announced today that it was launching the CNN iReport Awards "to honor the best examples of participatory journalism in 2010."

]]> CNN first launched the user-generated iReport feature nearly five years ago and last year alone users contributed more than 150,000 "iReports". The project surpassed more than 740,000 "iReporters" in 2010. How does it work? Users submit reports to CNN directly on the Web or from the iPhone app, which are posted to the iReport section of CNN.com.

"The collaborative relationship that we have with our iReporters is one of the unique strengths of CNN, and in many ways represents the future of storytelling," said Meredith Artley, managing editor and vice president of CNN.com, in a press release. "These awards are designed to celebrate those outstanding efforts."

According to the release, awards will be broken up into six categories: Breaking News, Original Reporting, Compelling Imagery (photos or video), Commentary, Personal Story, and Interview. In each category, five users have been nominated and will be judged by a panel of "innovators and trailblazers in participatory storytelling."

Nominees run the gamut, from iReporter Johnny Colt, who "took a boat out to the coast of Grand Island in Louisiana to expose BP for its slow effort in cleaning up the oil spill", to Sam Bolton, who "investigated the lack of progress made to clean up unexploded bomblets from the Vietnam War." While all of these iReporters may have varying levels of training and experience, they have something in common - the desire to relate their experiences and stories to the world, and CNN offers that platform. Of course, anyone could simply upload videos or relate these accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Blogger or any other "Web 2.0" medium, but CNN might lend a bit of credibility. When CNN independently confirms details on a report, it stamps it with a "vetted" badge.

Awards will close on March 7, but until then you can see all 30 nominees on the iReport Awards site.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cnn_announces_ireport_awards_for_participatory_jou.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cnn_announces_ireport_awards_for_participatory_jou.php Crowdsourcing Tue, 15 Feb 2011 18:18:01 -0800 Mike Melanson Although the mission of WikiLeaks is to "open governments," it's done quite a lot to make us think about how to open journalism as well. We've seen a number of new whistleblower sites crop up - OpenLeaks and Rospil, for example - as well as major news organizations - Al Jazeera, and perhaps even The New York Times - investigate ways to facilitate more whistle-blowing and leaking.

But why wait for local newspapers to roll out their own anonymous tips pipeline when a project from CUNY Graduate School's Entrepreneurial Journalism program has designed just that thing.

Using Localeaks, you can send an anonymous tip, including a file, to over 1400 newspapers in the U.S. through one online form. Choose your state. Choose the newspaper. Enter your information and submit your anonymous tip.

]]> Each drop-box consists of a secure web connection and a form that encrypts both files and the text submitted (then destroys the originals) as well as removes identifying metadata from documents. The system also makes every effort to leave no traceable remnants from the transaction, such as identifiable session cookies on the client side or logging of any IP addresses on the server side.

Once a file is submitted, the newspaper will receive an email, alerting them to the tip. The newspaper then needs to reply that it's interested. Then a temporary secure file transfer is established. This last step isn't automated yet, according to Matthew Terenzio, Web Development Director at The Hour Publishing Co and one of the members of this project. The best way to do so, he says, would be to have the encryption software - the open source GnuPG in this case - set up on the newspaper's end. "It is unlikely that most would have it yet," says Terenzio, who says he's working on helping some newspapers set up their own drop-boxes to avoid this step.

But an increasing familiarity with encryption might just be in more newsroom's future, particularly if the number of "local leaks" continue. After all, as Terenzio notes, "the people formerly called the audience and the sources, are setting the pace of change, not the news organizations."

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/localeaks_a_drop-box_for_anonymous_tips_to_1400_us.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/localeaks_a_drop-box_for_anonymous_tips_to_1400_us.php News Wed, 26 Jan 2011 10:30:32 -0800 Audrey Watters

Tech news aggregator site Techmeme got its start in 2005 as an automated, algorithmic collection of blog posts organized according to inbound links and blogosphere conversations. When we first reviewed the site, we noted that "the beauty of it is, only posts with a decent amount of writing in them make the memeorandum page. A simple link and a sentence won't do." Today, that's all changed.

Techmeme editor and founder Gabe Rivera announced this morning, appropriately by Tweet, that the site would now be including Tweets among the up-to-the-moment headlines.

]]> The first Tweet to hit Techmeme, of course, is Gabe Rivera's announcement, which reads "We're now including tweets on Techmeme and this will be the first one. @-reply with something clever to join the Discussion!" Beneath that is a list of tweets discussing the idea of Twitter landing on the front page of the site where only blog posts and articles used to reside. A number of Tweets exalt the move, others ominously predict the end of both blogs and journalism alike, while others still offer some interesting insight on what this means for the state of tech news today.

"@Techmeme now helps #tech #PR subvert the media," tweets Jonathon Gardner.

"@gaberivera techmeme has a cleverness algorithm now? Or is that @megan [RWW alum]@madlid and @ScepticGeek?" asks Kevin Marks.

"I suppose only insiders will get credit for tips, still? Techmeme is acting just like digg before the fall," notes Ed Shahzade.

Of course, you don't have to take my word for it, because this entire Twitter conversation is laid out for all to view on the top of Techmeme.

Rivera explained a bit more behind the new feature in a blog post, saying that by not including Tweets, Techmeme had been missing out:

For as long as newsmakers have used Twitter, tweets have broken news stories. And yet for Techmeme, linking directly to tweets was never imperative - after all most newsworthy tweets are blogged within minutes, moreover with helpful context. But still it seemed as if something was missing in passing over tweets: we'd miss the first few minutes of certain developing stories as well as opportunities for including good commentary. We also missed the chance to let certain sources simply speak under their own byline. And so, at last, we've begun incorporating tweets on Techmeme.

Rivera explained that Tweets included on Techmeme would come in two forms: breaking news and commentary.

In some ways, the addition of Tweets completes the transformation of Techmeme from everything it once wasn't to what it is today. It started off as a completely automated, algorithmic aggregator of tech news. Over time, a number of editors were hired on and it became a bit of a cyborg in nature. Most recently, the site began posting links directly to vendor blogs and announcements, not to contextual stories by other news outlets. Now, it does the one thing it wouldn't do when it first started out. Now, a simple link and a sentence will do.

There's just one question - at what point does Techmeme become not a link to news, but a breaking source on its own? And when does it change from a source of traffic for blogs to a source of competition?

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/techmemes_evolution_from_automated_headlines_to_tw.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/techmemes_evolution_from_automated_headlines_to_tw.php News Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:46:30 -0800 Mike Melanson