Undercurrent

Even impressive, this demo of what Time Inc is working on, apparently for the coming Apple tablet.

ProPublica editor Paul Steiger is fairly optimistic on behalf of investigative journalism in the web era:

Last year, a 20-something, self-taught Internet genius named Amanda Michel mobilized hundreds of politically active citizens to supply info for her “Off the Bus” report on the Huffington Post Web site. When Candidate Obama voiced the notion that some folks who were losing out in the global economy were clinging to such things as religion and guns to compensate, Michel’s network captured it and we soon all heard about it. Without that network, we might never have known, because reporters weren’t invited into the area where Mr. Obama spoke. Michel now works for ProPublica and has put together a team of more than 2,200 volunteers who will do similar reporting for us. This army permits us, for instance, to track progress on 500 representative federal stimulus projects in real time, even though our own news staff numbers just 32.

We will still need journalists’ special skills:

The process of finding and communicating what we used to call news may no longer require newspapers-at least not as we have known them, as seven-day-a-week, ink-on-paper compendiums of new information on a broad range of subjects. But the process will still require journalism and journalists, to smoke out the most difficult-to-report situations, to test glib assertions against the facts, to probe for the carefully contrived hoax. These are reporting activities that take a great deal of time, money, and skill.

The photo says almost all, but make sure to read Nieman Journalism Lab’s text about The Ann Arbor Chronicle as well:

There’s no fixed publication schedule for full-length stories, said Morgan, a former business and opinion editor for the defunct News. Rushing to get the story first is outdated and doesn’t really matter to readers, she said. “The assumption is, well, we’re going to get it done as soon as we can given everything else we’ve got going,” she said. (my emph.

(Nieman Lab is published with a CC by-nc license, like this blog).

Andrew DeVigal (photo: Gaute Singstad, Nordiske Mediedager).

Before it gets way too old, the rest of my notes from last week’s Bergen media conference (note to self: stop taking paper notes, buy that mini laptop you’ve been thinking about for a long time). About multimedia at the NYT, a journalist using blogging as a tool in a Danish business scandal, and Adrian Holovaty on EveryBlock.

(more…)

The people at Publish2.com are on to something with the notion of “link journalism”:

Link journalism is linking to reporting or sources on the web to enhance, complement, or add more context to original reporting. Link journalism can also be a topical news aggregation, with links to interesting and important stories from any source on the web.

More important, they have created a tool for sharing and exchanging links which it will be interesting to test.

(tip: spot.us blog).

New BBC blog Journalism Labs makes its debut with an analysis of an experiment with embedded external links in news articles:

Over 90% of those that responded said that they found Apture useful. This was an unexpected result, even considering that the opt-in nature of the trial favoured early adopters.(…) We’ve decided to do go back to basics and look again at the fundamentals of linking in news stories. When the BBC News website started in 1997 we placed background links to the side of the article instead of inline, for technical and user experience reasons. We haven’t revisited that decision in any significant way until now. In 2009, we’re going to be refreshing how we markup our stories.

Spiegel Online has a simple, but effective flash-based news graphic on the Mumbai terror attack. (You need to allow the page to open in a pop-up window.)

What Jarvis asks for here must surely be achievable soon?

I want a page, a site, a something that is created, curated, edited and discussed. It will include articles. But it’s also a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides curated and annotated links to experts, coverage from elsewhere, a mix of opinion and source material. Finally, it’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but tries to add value. It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organised. Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter. Everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room – and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information.

Spot.us is launched. Leonard Witt thinks it just might succeed.

The BBC has bought its own container and is sending it around the world for a year as basis for reporting on globalisation and the world economy. It’s now full of whisky… So far it hasn’t left Britain/Ireland, though! Wish I could embed the map of the journey. (tip: Passport blog).

Tim Berners-Lee and Martin Moore have won a grant for their project to create tools for transparent journalism and better navigation on the web (the project will be open source). This is something to watch:

The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data – the “story behind the story” – to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.

There were other notable winners of the Knight News Challenge also:

• Using the Web to solicit funding from the public to pay for investigative journalism projects
• Creating software that allows a computer to become a digital radio transmitter, significantly reducing the cost of setting up community news stations in India
• Blogging to discuss the idea of interactive games where students measure and track their personal demand on natural resources.