Congratulations to We Media alums Merrill Brown and Michael Tippet, who now get to figure out how to spend $10.6 million of funding for NowPublic, a "crowd powered" news service that has partnered with The Associated Press and that does not want to follow in the footsteps of failed citizen journalism predecessors Bayosphere and Backfence. CEO Len Brody tells Gigaom: "If you go to NowPublic, you will never ever see the term citizen journalism mentioned." He also likes hyperpersonal (like Facebook) over hyperlocal (like Backfence). PaidContent says: "Count the red flags."

See: paidContent and Gigaom.

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Like the Wall Street Journal’s Bancroft family, private equity firm PCM has been in a selling mood of late. Selling: a huge chunk of its holdings in US newspaper companies. Then again, those companies are on track for a $2 billion decline in revenue, year-over-year. See: Reflections of a Newsosaur: PCM dumps publishers

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If you read the iFOCOS blog THIS carefully, you deserve something for paying such close attention. So here’s something: a sneak peak at our newest research project, Random Acts of Media.

RAM is both research and a collaborative gallery and art project about how people around the world experience media. Our first formal report for RAM is about how the spring 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech university in the US signaled a permanent shift in the way journalism is practiced and distributed in the connected society. You’ll also find a curated gallery of images we’ve selected for exhibit, and a collaboration gallery we hope you’ll use to add more images, videos and insights. Hope you like it.

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Here’s the first installment of our new iSIGHTINGS notes on trends and “things” we’ve spotted.

iPhone. We all worked the scenarios for news, entertainment and info on cell phones more than a decade ago. Apple’s device is worthy of the thinking. Finally a business for mobile content?

First look: Nokia forges ahead with online media labs and  ideas from mobile users. Join the experiment at Nokia Trends Lab, currently in Beta.

Brian Storm’s MediaStorm sets a standard for well-designed, multi-media storytelling.  Quality journalism isn’t dead; it now comes from unexpected places.

Backfence bows out with a whimper, not a bang. We love user-generated
content, but  no one wants another bad Metro section. Learn, innovate. Founder Mark Potts  shared  some of his lessons learned - but not all. We want to know about the ugly stuff  - err, lousy execution - that he and the investors don’t want to discuss in public. We have no interest in any of the Backfence-inspired obituaries for hyperlocal business models. They are wrong and tedious.

Let’s bury the derivative myth once and for all: 75% of users 18 to 25 are reading or writing user-generated content. Few are passive participants. Active users of UGC haven’t abandoned off-line media for online, but they are learning to balance the two. There’s something to this We Mediathing.

HanaZuki is a boutique, a creative studio, and a collaboration without boundaries. Is it work? Or play? Yes.

VCs are all atwitter over Fred Wilson’s alway-on blog and the Jason Calacanis takedown of Jeremy Liew over the VC rules of discretion.
 
Online video is such a huge trend that’s it’s hard to keep track. Video Toolboxaggregates more than 150 video sharing sites to manage video
mixers, mashups, converters and more.

Reuters CEO Tom Glocer blogs the annual Allen & Co. media moguls meeting in Sun Valley, where he writes that he can’t tell us anything because the meetings are off the record. Thanks, Tom.

Young, connected activists will rock the vote and have an unpreceented
impact on the U.S. presidential campagin and election. Look for our report this fall.

Can your daddy Facebook? Big bloggers like Jeff Jarvis, corporate captains and a leading foundation have launched pages. Reminds us of the Ana Marie Cox line about MSM trying to blog:  it’s like watching your parents try to dance - awkward and off time. Not kewl. Time for the Facebook faithful to Xanga outta there. Meanwhile, Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield recently used LinkedIn to announce he’s looking for someone to take over as CEO. Ross, that’s sooo 2006 …

Assume the Postion, Robert Wuhl’s history lesson on HBO, makes a comedic connection between pop culture, fact-and-myth, and learning that entertains. Learn from this major mashup. HBO’s Flight of the Conchords also gets it right with cultural insights, music and laugher.

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Here’s an interesting collaboration that nicely illustrates how seemingly different agendas can intersect: The Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog organization that focuses on expanding online access to information about the U.S. Congress, is collaborating with NewsTrust, a kind of non-profit Digg designed as a platform to evaluate the trustworthiness of online journalism.
Read more

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Noted: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was a major supporter of this year’s We Media conference, and they’ve featured it in their 2006 annual report. Check out the online experience, and the accompanying video. To produce the multimedia experience, the foundation hired tumultimedia, a small firm from Chicago run by photographer Alex Fledderjohn and producer Sarahmaria Gomez. They are both former journalists now applying their traditional photo, video and audio engineering skills to create highly polished multimedia stories for foundations and other clients.

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Bloomberg asked for comments on the Dow Jones-Rupert Murdoch saga, and I explained that I had no special insight into the situation. Rupert Murdoch offered a lot of money for Dow Jones, and so far no one else has offered more or come up with a business case for doing so. See: Burkle, Greenspan eye group bid for Dow Jones - Newsday.com

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Come to THE festival for innovators and creators of the connected society. Plan on it: Feb. 26-28, 2008, Miami. Registration coming in October. Speaker, sponsor or program ideas? Drop us a note (andrew AT ifocos DOT org).

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