Better than whining about Google: Experiment with new models for funding journalism. In the UK, an impressive line-up of people now launch The Investigations Fund. Roy Greenslade reports:
Its aim is to foster independent public interest journalistic inquiry while encouraging a new generation of reporters.
Related posts:
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.
Clay Shirky on media technology revolutions, especially the current one:
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case. Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead. When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
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).
Foreign Policy magazine is out with a relaunched website with a selection of new blogs, one of them by Dan Drezner (see Undercurrent interview). According to the Passport blog, the objective is to create “a vibrant, daily online magazine of global politics, economics, and ideas.” What’s interesting here is where Foreign Policy is coming from. A very slow bi-monthly print magazine now has a website that is updated many times a day with instant analysis. The web has made such expansion possible for serious print magazines (The Atlantic is another example). Maybe the print versions of these long-form, analytical magazines aren’t as exposed to web migration as daily newspapers. Their “content” lasts longer. Could this print-web combination be a winning media format?
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).
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