Journalists write stories. Most stories are intended to convey information. The strategic thinking that should be the next step — who needs this information, how might they act on it, how will they find it, how will they share it, how is it useful to them? — gets little attention in most newsrooms. This piece [...]
This is a mirror post of an editorial I wrote for The Exception Magazine (here for post). I enjoyed writing this because it was written for readers instead of for other journalists. Journalists suddenly noticed their industry looks like all the other ones they write about on Wall Street. Newspapers, such as the Rocky Mountain [...]
In the past week a lot has been written about Jon Stewart’s skewering of CNBC and the faux-populist Rick Santelli. In the midst of all the praise for what was truly a deserving comedic spanking of arguably the most-watched group of financial journalists on television, others are concluding that Stewart’s eight-minute jab-fest was an example of good journalism. Something tells me Stewart – a comedian – would disagree.
While the Daily Show’s bit on CNBC was hilarious (video below), it should have prompted every working journalist to engage in some serious self reflection. The piece, instead, held up a mirror to a system that is obviously in need of a fix: journalists with all-access passes to the rich and powerful lobbing softballs at the crooks who got us into this economic mess in the first place. Sure CNBC does not represent every working reporter out there, and there are plenty of good examples of financial journalism that warned of the looming meltdown years before it happened (even though it was tragically and largely ignored by the public – but that’s another debate). The problem is we are losing credibility and fast no thanks to the massive cut in resources newspapers are enduring.
Our group identified two major problems: the disappearance of local journalism institutions and a public disconnected from journalists. So we wondered, “how might nomadic journalists work and how would community life continue to be successful?”
This idea builds on Group 2 (inadvertently), mixes Spot.Us, Innocentive.com, OhMyNews.com, uWeb/iTunes/iNews and other journalism movements: public journalism, citizen journalism, etc.
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This group wanted to develop a point system on a news website. For every activity users do, they receive points. People receive more or less points depending on their level of engagement. For example, commenting on a story nets maybe 2 points, but writing your own story is worth 10.
The site basically becomes a customized delivery system with an incentive to participate in democracy. [...]
Absolutely right. The argument that people will go elsewhere doesn’t jive in one-newspaper towns such as Reno or even San Francisco. If the Reno Gazette-Journal or San Francisco Chronicle started charging for content readers would have absolutely nowhere else to go for local information involving courts, schools, people and business. The New York Times certainly does not cover Reno or San Francisco like readers need it to be covered. And neither do any of the alt publications in town. [...]
So instead, news needs to find a way to create something that doesn’t only help the journalist, but helps thousands of other unpaid creative people.
uNews must be for more than news. It must be for all creative endeavours. It must be for InnoCentive.com, it must be for people who want to make money off of their own videos, images news, games, information and other content. uNews can’t actually be called “uNews.”
uNews needs to be for everyone AND news. And it has to be as fun and interesting to be a part of as all of your awesome Apple products. uNews must be a paradigm shift on how we operate on the Web. It must serve as a focusing point for all communications. Otherwise, it will fail like the other micropayment systems did.
Other systems segregated content away from the Web instead of integrating people into each other. That is the key. uNews must CENTALIZE the web instead of further DECENTRALIZING it.
But wouldn’t it be great of a news company made it? [...]
As most of you know there’s an interesting debate about using an iNews/iTunes model of journalism to in fact save journalism. A lot of the main ideaists are talking about it as a business model while Shirky is the leader in why it’s a bad idea. I posit that iNews (or uNews as I’m calling [...]
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but what you can do for SND