Thanks for the link from Scott Heiferman, who got it from ZeFrank, and thanks most of all to the editor, filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr.

On April 19 he’s ripping a page from the tech world and organizing an “unconference” to help the San Jose Mercury News talk with and learn from, well, anyone. He’s calling the effort CopyCamp, an homage to BarCamp and FooCamp, events for software developers and techies without a fixed agenda. They set an agenda, then try to come up with brilliant ideas, new code or at least new friends.

What brilliant ideas, new code or new friends might CopyCampers come up with?

Should the owners of the big newspaper in Silicon Valley give up and shut it down now? Or stay the current course – and painfully plunge from relevance, ever hopeful that there’s a bottom down there somewhere? Or does the San Jose Mercury News, in any form, have a future, a place in the heartland of U.S. technology innovation and investment – and a place in the cultural fabric of community life there? Might Silicon Valley’s best and brightest have anything to contribute to the conversation?

How about the newspaper where you live? Or newsANYTHING – TV, radio, web, mobile, whatever. Who’s producing the journalism you need to inform and influence life in your community?

Even if you don’t care about the future of the San Jose Mercury News you can consider these broad and generic questions about the future of news from a variety of angles. Here’s a new set of essays on the subject from Britannica.com (now a blog!), with contributions from Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky and others. Here’s a new report from the World Association of Newspapers that reviews the many ways newspaper companies can “maximize the Content Value Chain for efficiencies and revenue-making.”

In the U.S., at least, the business outlook for newspapers is grim. Earnings are down, share prices are down, and investment analysts are bleak on what comes next. Eric Alterman wrote last month in The New Yorker:

Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.

Actually, it was imagined. And anticipated.

The trends are similar in the UK – and we’re even seeing signs of declines in traditional media usage in China, which now has the world’s biggest Internet audience.

Perhaps less obvious, or less interesting to those interested only in maximizing revenue, is the corresponding social urgency revealed by the decline of newspapers. Our research finds Americans deeply dissatisfied with their traditional sources of news, but also deeply mindful of the importance of journalism in their communities.

So there’s a gap to be filled – an opportunity to provide better journalism for people who believe it’s important. This is the We Media News Gap.

But what, exactly, does that mean? What does better journalism look like in the culture of We Media – the mediascape of free, networked, digital everything, news unbundled from advertising, ubiquitous, always-on creation, distribution, recommendation, sharing and information overload?

From the CopyCamp web site:

CopyCamp is a one day un-conference that brings community members into the newsroom to meet and discuss important issues with local journalists. After an initial meet and greet, reporters from the San Jose Mercury News and active members of the San Jose community will suggest topics they believe will benefit through an open dialogue in the hopes of improving the quality of journalism in the Bay Area and figuring out how the SJMN can better cover under represented communities.

Several editors and reporters from the newspaper have signed up to attend, including the newspaper’s influential designer/business development director, Matt Mansfield – but he’s also on his way out the door via the newspaper’s most recent round of layoffs/voluntary “departures.” Here’s the CopyCamp participant list.

Analysis: If chatting with members of the community you purport to serve is a novel idea for a newspaper company then CopyCamp is too little and too late to help. But making such conversations a priority, and re-imagining the relationship between a news organization and its community, is a big idea – and taking it more seriously would be a smart step for anyone who wants to meet the We Media News Gap.

You can find more details about CopyCamp and register to attend here.

Here’s one response: A pleasant photo-video montage, set to a Natalie Merchant song, Carnival.

Analysis: If she’s going to be taken seriously, and have any impact, the beautiful queen, sans burka, is going to need to respond directly, rather than dismiss, the more challenging questions she fields about violence and rage in the Arab world – directed against women, the West, Jews and anyone who insults Islam, as seen here:
(WARNING: This has some disturbing images that are inappropriate for children)

Technorati Tags: softpower

Nothing new here, right? We all know about online auctions. The only innovation is applying a well-tested online transaction model to a different niche -  in this case a potentially high-value niche that may provide real utility – and new buying power – for a global audience. It’s worth comparing this service to another crowd-sourced approach to aggregating event information: Yahoo’s Upcoming, which is full of Yahoo’s social media goodness – and lots of free events, too. You can add comments, people, maps, etc.. But at the end of the day (and more than two years after Yahoo! purchased Upcoming), it’s a big list to promote events – but not to directly sell or determine pricing for seats.

Insight: Innovation happens everywhere.

I should also note: the We Media/connected/story-telling culture helped me find Conference Bay. Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman’s blog mentioned Solana Larson and the Global Voices crew that came to We Media Miami, and this popped up in our Technorati tracker for the wemedia tag. Someone named Anne from the Phillipines who knew or knew of Ethan commented in his blog – and I followed the link to Anne’s blog, then read down not only to see some familiar names and interests, but, reading down to the next post, a link to Conference Bay.

Maybe that’s because I did know-her-when: Watching all of American Idol Season Six, I saw Sparks rise from her first audition to her win over beat-box-boy Blake Lewis in Hollywood last spring. In other words, I felt involved in her stardom. And even though I never pick up the phone to vote for Idol contestants (it’s not a civic duty, is it?), I liked Sparks and felt she earned her stardom: America literally did vote her into “office.”

This morning, Britney Spears crossed my mind (I was contemplating working mothers who have breakdowns,) and my first thought was: “Who elected her to be a star?” Then I laughed, remembering that, in fact, entertainment superstars are not elected. All of a sudden that seemed wrong: If you put “unelected” in front of anything — judges, superdelegates — they start to sound a little nefarious.

When I think of Britney Spears prancing around in her sexy school-girl outfit in Baby One More Time I do think she’s somewhat nefarious — especially when compared to the restrained teen-aged beauty of Jordin Sparks.

That’s when I started thinking about We Media: Could it be that when Americans get to vote on their pop stars guided by expert advice,(read: pro-am collaboration,) they choose talented, often-beautiful people but avoid super-sexed icons? Of course there are have various minor scandals about Idol contestants with their breasts bared (poor Antonella Barba discovered the dark side of the connected society,) but when I think about the American Idol winners and runners-up as a group, they are a notably wholesome bunch.

So is there a moral here? That the way to clean up entertainment is to make it participatory? All I know is, when it comes to teen-aged stars, I’d vote for Sparks over Spears any day.

In the new Intelligence Report we’ll consider trends in media and their implications from a variety of perspectives (enterprise, social, creative, investment, culture, technology). As usual, the analysis reflects our broad definition of We Media – the world in which everyone and every institution is media.

The report will be made available first to members of the We Media Community – so if you still haven’t joined, now there’s additional reason to make the modest investment as an individual or corporate member. You can learn more about membership here.

The report joins our iSIGHTINGS blog, which includes faster “realtime” analysis and findings. The Intelligence Report is a longer-form PDF, with more reflective synthesis of what we see and what it means – and it’s also more visual than our blog. We hope you’ll find value in both and appreciate the difference between the two.

The first edition of the Intelligence Report includes a recap of the Media Matrix Dale and I have have developed for our consulting and strategy projects, and thoughts on the Amazon Kindle, cell phone novels, the design dividend at CES, endowed social journalism – and more.

You can access and download the January 2008 issue here.

Where does good will end and greed take over? That depends on whether you’re a giver or taker. Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media is bothered by the free labor scheme he sees in a corporate blog post about new features just announced at Reddit, a commercial recommendation service and competitor to Digg owned by the Newhouse family’s Conde Nast magazine group, which, along with Vogue, Glamour and Bon Appetite magazines, publishes Wired (which publishes various blogs, among which we find a recent report on a crowdsourced Shins video shot by fans).

Reddit is looking for programmers to hire – and volunteer translators. Dan is bothered by that explicit distinction of value – cash for coders, air kisses for translators.

The finger-wagging at Reddit raises this question: Is there a qualitative, ethical or rational distinction between Reddit’s overt and explicit request for help with its product, the result of which could be a more valuable service for whoever uses it, and the implied request for help from the multitude of platforms and conversation-fueled media – like Facebook, MySpace, Kos, PerezHilton – or from the non-profit competitor to Digg and Reddit – NewsTrust? (Disclosure – I advise NewsTrust). They all depend on user-supplied content, comments, tags and filtering to create any semblance of a business model. Is asking for free translations going too far? But asking for recommendations, evaluations, comments, photos or trackbacks is ok?

Comment: A backlash against uncompensated contributions to commercial media would be fun sport to watch. Imagine if millions of people decided to dump Facebook next week, just for spite.

Analysis: The hype around crowdsourcing leads, at times, to visions of an open-source digital utopia in which everything online is produced for free by righteous individuals who donate their writing, editing, video, photo, coding, translation or whatever skills to virtuous, free, universally accessible, multi-lingual projects that are made better through the collective intelligence and will of said crowd. Professionals, meaning pay is involved, not necessarily skill, fade to black in this world. Though fantastical, the vision draws on the ancient sense of human connectedness. When people put their minds to it, anything is possible. Even Wikipedia. Indeed, the principle of shared, linked intelligence – through hyperlinks – is the bedrock of the web itself.

The ideal of digital collaboration – all for one and one for all – degrades to a more distopian tragedy when for-profit companies try to persuade unpaid contributors to expand, enhance and add value to their services. AOL built its chat-driven empire on the backs of volunteer chat moderators. But recruiting volunteers to work hard and well for your benefit isn’t easy. Commercial failures in volunteer-dependent hyper-local journalism come to mind – Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, for one, followed by Backfence. But so do commercial survivors, like delicious, MySpace and YouTube.

Forecast: The crowd will continue to create AND contribute – on its own terms, when and where it feels like it makes sense. Asking for help may at times appear selfish. The willingness to offer it reflects our yearning to link with and help each other.

See: Sex Charges and a Facebook Frenzy in Newsweek.com

Analysis: News companies remain painfully focused on their internal woes and remarkably disengaged from investments in innovative new opportunities. The New York Times Co., which purchased About.com several years ago, can’t compete against News Corp. or other giants for high profile mega-deals. It may wind up being acquired in such a deal. But like other newspaper companies it can use its cashflow and capital for shrewd strategic investments focused on the distributed, networked information and creation culture (as opposed to the closed one-way monopoly markets of old).

Source: NYTimes.

Gore replies from the audience: “That’s the way the world used to work. The world doesn’t work that way anymore." Gore implies a theme he outlined in much greater detail at our very first We Media conference – that the nature of public discourse is strangely disconnected from the challenges society should be confronting. At the time the context was the bizarre disconnect between what news reports told the world about weapons of mass destruction and the rationale for the invasion of Iraq – and the truth (oops, no WMDs, sorry). The provocative question Gore is obviously still thinking about: What should media companies with enormous influence on public opinion and policy – including Google – do to make sure we have access not simply to lots of information, but to the most important information – and that we don’t simple access it but do something about it?

Meanwhile, back on earth … you could and probably should also check out what’s really been on people’s minds (more than 25 million views on YouTube): Soulja Boy Tellem – How to Crank That – INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO!

But the profound impact of the FCC decision is that it catches a world looking the wrong way. We ought to cast our scrutiny instead on a ruling by the agency that regulates trade. Last week the FTC — that’s the Federal Trade Commission — allowed Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of Double Click. The ruling, which also requires approval by he European Union, will make it harder for media owners, and perhaps anyone, to compete in the place where the real money is flowing.

The Google acquisition will affect the future of American media by dominating, if not controlling, the way advertising is served on the Internet. By acquiring DoubleClick, Google takes an insurmountable leap by applying technology and knowledge to advertising and marketing. It has the potential to become the only place marketers will go to reach just about anybody.

Google deserves credit, and it has been handsomely rewarded, for a prescient vision about how media and marketing are changing. Its algorithms changed the way people search for information. Now it is changing the way advertising works. It’s secret weapon: the knowledge of us.

Google is currently amassing an enormous capacity for knowing who we are and what we do. It understands that consumers use all forms of media all the time, everywhere. With its unrivaled database, it intends to serve marketers by targeting consumers based on demographics, lifestyle and consumer behavior. With its leading-edge database technology, its lucrative search-ad business, and the possible acquisition of a company that serves 40 percent of the banner advertising on the Internet, Google can dominate the advertising marketplace in the U.S. in ways most media and marketers can’t even fathom.

Moreover, Google assumes a power to enter the private spaces of our lives – our homes, our offices, our vehicles, our shops, and our devices – with news, entertainment and commercial messages aimed specifically at us. What may be good for advertising sounds troubling for the rest of society.

The FTC concluded that Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick will not substantially lessen competition. Few competitors would agree, including media managers from around the world who converged on the Harvard Business School to learn how Google intends to sell targeted advertising in every medium everywhere. “The biggest enemy of everyone in this room is Google,” said Koos Bekker, managing director of Naspers Ltd., a multimedia conglomerate based in South Africa.

Google’s stated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Which is to say that Google sees a business model in all information and intends to monetize it, even at the expense of privacy.

Google’s founders started with message that was somewhat less imperial: “Do no evil.”
The FTC apparently believes them. The question is: do the rest of us?

Today, a Chicago businessman named Sam Zell took over leadership of Tribune through a complicated transaction involving massive debt and employee ownership. Zell sent this note to investors:

We’ve got a long way to go to shed all the things that tied us down in the past, and to realize the enormous potential we can create. You’ll see a lot of changes in the coming months.

* We will take intelligent risks and reward innovation.

* We will tear down bureaucracy and reward entrepreneurial spirit.

* We will compete fiercely but with integrity.

* We will work hard and have fun.

First thing shed: Dennis FitzSimons, the CEO who led the company to and through the deal with Zell. But shed no tears: FitzSimons took home a severance package said to be worth as much as $40 million, accord to Tribune’s Los Angeles Times.

See: Content Bridges and Editor & Pubisher and LA Times

Made possible by a $700,000 grant through Knight’s News Challenge, MTV has recruited and is equipping 51 young, citizen journalists to cover the 2008 elections through the lenses of their culture. MTV will run the reports as part of its “Choose or Lose” campaign and AP will run select reports on its global, online video network of 1800 media sites.

The project serves as a real-time lab that promises to reveal insights into media usage, youth culture, civic engagement, the prospects for pro-am journalism, and opportunities from non-traditional partnerships. We admire the project and look to learn from it.

Today’s press release:

December 20, 2007 – New York, NY – MTV, as part of its Emmy-winning “Choose or Lose” campaign, today unveiled “Street Team ’08”: a specially recruited group of 51 citizen journalists – one from every state and Washington, D.C. – who will cover the 2008 elections from a youth perspective and tailor their reports for mobile devices. The members will contribute weekly, multi-media reports (short form videos, blogs, animation, photos, podcasts) that will be distributed via a soon-to-launch WAP site, MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and to the more than 1,800 sites in the Associated Press Online Video Network. Carefully selected by MTV after an extensive nationwide search, the one-of-a-kind press corps will be armed with mobile media like laptops, video cameras and cell phones, and charged with uncovering the untold political stories that matter most to young people in their respective states.

“Street Team ‘08” members represent every aspect of today’s youth audience – from seasoned student newspaper journalists to documentary filmmakers, the children of once-illegal immigrants to community organizers. They are conservative, liberal, from big cities and small towns. The tie that binds them all is a passion for politics and a yearning to amplify the youth voice during this pivotal election. All of the “Street Team ’08” correspondents will begin reporting early next month, after an intensive MTV News orientation in New York City.

“Recent MTV research shows young people believe their generation will be a major force in determining who is elected in the upcoming local and national elections,” said Ian Rowe, VP of Public Affairs and Strategic Partnership, MTV, “and Street Team ’08 will be a key way for our audience to connect with peers, as well as get informed and engaged on the local and political issues that matter to them most. We’re proud to join with the Knight Foundation on this innovative experiment – which will also explore how coverage of youth-centric election issues can be an effective pathway to increased youth voter turnout and greater political and civic engagement.”

The “Street Team ’08” program is made possible by a $700,000 Knight News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight News Challenge is an annual worldwide competition awarding $5 million for innovative ideas that use digital media to inform and inspire communities. The Knight Foundation plans to invest at least $25 million over five years in the search for bold community news experiments.

“We hope to find out whether or not our most important political event – the election of a president – matters to young people, and whether or not if matters more when it comes to them through the lens of their issues and the screen of their cell phone,” said Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation. “We also hope to find out what important youth issues are being overlooked by traditional media as the Street Team coverage goes beyond the presidential horse race.”

In addition to laptops and video cameras, each “Street Team” member will be equipped with best-in-breed tools that will aid in their reporting. Adobe Systems Incorporated is the exclusive software partner for the program, and as part of its Adobe Youth Voices global philanthropy program fostering youth self-expression, the company is outfitting each “Street Team” member with a copy of the Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 Production Premium package – a complete post-production solution, integrating Adobe’s all-new video, audio and design tools. PNY Technologies, a leading supplier of memory modules, flash media, USB drives, graphic cards and other peripherals, and the official flash memory provider of MTV’s Street Team ’08, is donating high-end SD cards and USB flash drives for all of the correspondents.

A collaboration with the Associated Press will bring select “Street Team ‘08” reports to AP’s Online Video Network, which encompasses more than 1,800 media sites with an aggregate reach of 61 million unique visitors. “AP is constantly adding to its already comprehensive coverage of the 2008 political campaign and this collaborative project fits in with our goal of providing an even wider range of multimedia content,” said Executive Producer for Online Video Kevin Roach.

All 51 of the “Street Team” members have active profiles on Think.MTV.com – MTV’s online community where young people, their friends and some of the biggest names in pop culture come together to bring about positive social change. The Think community, a dedicated WAP site, video services from the industry-leading carriers in the MTV Mobile family and the Associated Press’ Online Video Network will be the primary platforms for the correspondents’ reports. Select stories will also be showcased on other MTV platforms, including MTV, broadcast to 88 million subscribers domestically, MTV2, mtvU and MTV Tr3_s.

The Think Community (Think.MTV.com) is dynamic, multimedia-driven and enables youth to easily learn more about the issues that matter to them most, share their opinions – via uploaded online videos, podcasts and blogs – and connect with others to make a difference. The site is one of the only to reward members for positive actions taken online or off, serving up chances to hang out with socially conscious celebs, access to exclusive MTV events, exposure on MTV and other national media outlets, as well as grants, scholarships and more. Think.MTV.com was built with the help of financial support and expertise from founding partners the Case Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Goldhirsh Foundation and MCJ Amelior Foundation. For more information or to build a profile and become involved, visit Think.MTV.com.

A consortium of publishers now plans to launch a long-delayed assault – a kind of D-Day for the Allies. The plan, a search standard called Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), would give them more say in what search engines are permitted to do with the content published on news sites. Associated Press CEO Tom Curley said the standard could block sites from distributing content without permission. “If you want our content, we expect to be paid for it,” Curley told paidcontent’s Rafat Ali. “This nonsense that you can just take the first paragraph or use the picture small doesn’t really fly with us. People die trying to take those pictures.” Sounds like war.

News companies could suffer costly casualties in such a war. By attempting to drive news consumers to their sites by blocking search engines from linking to content, they put at risk the largest conduits of traffic to their sites: the search engines and networks that steer people to news and information online. Those users are likely to exercise brand promiscuity – their reliance on multiple brands and supplemental sourcing – as they discover additional alternatives to content. The publishers would also face a formidable backlash from a marketplace that expects open access, as well as from advertisers who require it.

Publishers already have the ability to tag stories so search engines can’t index them. So why change the standard? A smarter tactic would be to beat the enemy at its own game by creating a superior value proposition – an engine that returns results based on context and relevance, rather than popularity.

See: The Crunchies

Retirees Tom and Bill were at their usual table talking leisurely over cheese Danish. Each wore their Redskins baseball caps, maroon faded by years of sunlight and memories. Young men trickled in wearing Redskins football jerseys, the number 21 and name “Taylor” emblazoned on their backs, waiting for the neighborhood barber-shop-and-discussion-forum next door to open. A group of mothers gathered in the cramped seating room for their pre-school coffee klatch, wheeling their children in cushy strollers, one bearing a young passenger bundled for the chill morning with Redskins stocking hat and matching booties.

The talk was of the life and death of Sean Taylor. Everyone in our small corner of Reston knew the story at 8:15 a.m. on Tuesday, November 27, 2007.

Entering the coffee shop I spotted the stack of newspapers by the front entrance. One story dominated the front page of The Washington Post under this headline: “Redskins’ Taylor Critically Hurt In Shooting at His Home in Fla.”

My reaction was that of an old friend who had to deliver bad news to the uninformed.

Everyone in the coffee shop — well, maybe not the pre-schoolers — knew the sad truth, which partially explains why so many newspapers were still on the rack. They had learned about Taylor’s death, which occurred about 5:30 a.m., from television and radio reports, from Internet sites on which they were following developments, and word-of-mouth from friends, family, colleagues and contacts during the early-morning round of their daily lives.

The Post, which went to press the night before, was hopelessly dated.

What’s a newspaper to do? It takes time for reporters to report, editors to edit, designers to design, presses to print, trucks to transport, and carriers to deliver to households throughout metropolitan Washington. The process, formerly known as “the daily miracle,” takes at least a day. To get newspapers on doorsteps by 7 a.m. deadlines start at least a half-day before delivery. So the news in the morning papers occurs a day or more before you get a chance to read about it. Or to put it another way, yesterday’s news tomorrow.

That’s a big problem for newspapers like The Post. The times demand immediacy. Consumers want news from a variety of trusted sources and platforms across media and society.

Steve Klein, journalism professor at George Mason University and a former sports editor, learned about Taylor’s death at 5:55 a.m. by watching the local NBC affiliate WRC News4. About ten minutes later he received an email update on his computer from washingtonpost.com. Klein remained glued to the screens and a variety of sources throughout the day for the latest developments, communicating with his network of friends and colleagues as he learned and shared information.

Meantime, Post beat reporter Jason La Canfora started reporting Taylor’s death at 6:02 a.m. on his Redskins Insider blog, which he updated throughout the day. Hundreds of networked journalists did the same, stirred by affinity with the Redskins, media coverage, networking with other fans, and sheer emotion.

La Canfora was arguably the best of the bunch. In frequent updates he referred to Taylor, a player known to distrust reporters, as “Sean.” La Canfora also expressed personal feelings in his blog, a reporting practice that is generally discouraged in newspapers. He even took time to do something that most reporters avoid: he communicated with readers as the story unfolded, responding to hundreds of emails.

All of which begs the question: What were The Post’s newspaper editors thinking?

One answer comes from newsroom culture, a cultish ecosystem of knowledge processing of which I was part for about thirty years. Most of the news that goes around between reporters and editors is based on the assumption that they know more about the news than the audience.

The assumption is almost always wrong. Audiences in today’s connected society are incredibly informed, sometimes incorrectly, through dozens of sources including the original ones that were once exclusive to journalists. News tumbles through the mediascape, changing as it goes. What is not known at a publishing deadline will certainly be exposed through additional information and sourcing later.

On Tuesday, The Post had a web site with immediate, impressive reach and continuous updates. It had a dedicated, tireless reporter wired into sources and developments. It had an entire community connected emotionally to a story of enormous local interest. But on the day Sean Taylor died, readers of the local newspaper got this: “Redskins’ Taylor Critically Hurt In Shooting at His Home in Fla.”

Jason La Canfora’s byline appeared on the story, but the immediacy and emotional connection he brought to it through his blog were edited out.

The Post has one of the most comprehensive Internet operations in news media. Yet the newspaper marginalized it with a throwback approach on newsprint. The day’s newspaper barely referenced exceptional, developing coverage online. It made the crucial mistake of looking back at a story that events were certain to overtake. And it deleted a vital connection it desperately needs to enhance: the emotional connection between stories and storytellers. There are ways to do that, even in print.

It could be that newspapers will one day cover breaking news on digital screens but not on printed pages. It could be that a new kind of journalism will emerge to inform society, set a civil agenda for civic discourse, and handsomely reward its best practitioners. It could be that news companies will flourish on the Internet. But for now I am certain of only one thing: on Tuesday, a newspaper became less relevant in yet another part of daily life.

Dale Peskin is a former editor and news executive who currently serves as managing director of iFOCOS.

Technorati Tags: wikis, wemedia

That’s the promise of crowd-powered information aggregators like Wikipedia, which is thoroughly entrenched in the digital-info-culture as the second-best place to find information about anything (after Google, of course). But Wikipedia has a built-in “attitude” called neutral point of view that may not be ideal for helping us resolve life’s toughest questions. Some issues, ideas and arguments are difficult to express without a point of view, or a call to action. Or they beg for it.

A new crowd-powered wiki called Debatepedia aims to be more useful than Wikipedia because it’s modeled on the research, methods and logic trees used by formal debaters, with succinct propositions, evidence and data organized around arguments for and against each proposition.

I chatted yesterday on the phone with Debatepedia co-founder Brooks Lindsay, and he explained that the structure of arguments themselves is an important departure from Wikipedia’s neutral point of view. Debatepedia is the exact oppositie – infused with and structured around point of view. Here, for instance, are the sections built around arguments for and against the death penalty, carbon cap-and-trade policies and partial-birth abortion.

Debatepedia is owned and operated by the non-profit International Debate Education Association. Lindsay, a 2006 Georgetown University graduate, says he has created and organized a lot of the content so far – but he’s hoping debaters and debate societies around the world will pitch in and use Debatepedia as a hub to organize their notes on various topics.

"I envisioned a spirited discussion, with readers reacting strongly, pro and con, one side accusing the paper of abdicating its "responsibility"; the other, declaring "It’s about time!" Guess what? It didn’t happen. I didn’t get a single phone call about the announcement. Nary an e-mail.

Ouch.

In fairness, the public editor, who does attach his name to his words, was a tad tough on the public. There were 31 comments on the original editorial. Which leads to yet another icky question: could it be that the public editor is even more ignored than the editorialists? Double ouch.

Go here for details on how to apply: www.newschallenge.org.

Technorati Tags: journalism, philanthropy, investment, socialentrepreneurs

The early-bird registration expires Sept. 20. To register, go here.

Confirmed participants include: Tom Bosco, VP and head of sales, MySpaceTV; Merrill Brown, Chairman, NowPublic; Katherine von Jan, CEO, Node US; Martin Luther King III, CEO, King Center for Social Change and Realizing the Dream Inc.; Solana Larsen, Co-Managing Editor, Global Voices; Michael Madnick, SVP, United Nations Foundation; Ellen S. Miller, Executive Director, The Sunlight Foundation; Ashfaq Ishaq, Executive Director, International Child Art Foundation; Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst, The Enderle Group; Scott Rafer, CEO, Lookery.com; Chris Versace, SVP, Agile Equity; John Walcott, Washington Bureau Chief, McClatchy Newspapers; Alan Webber, Founder, Fast Company; Kinsey Wilson, Executive Editor, USA Today.com; John Zogby, CEO, Zogby International. There’s a bigger list updated here.

And here’s this week’s prize for reading carefully: use this special code to save $150 on registration. It’s this: IFO-150. To use it now, go here.

Wait! I didn’t mean go away for good. Go back to Jeff if you’ve got the energy. He does, that’s for sure. He’s one of the smartest media thinkers out there, a genuine A-list blogger talkaholic media pundit, and surely he must be the most prolific. If anyone else writes more than Jeff, with even a fraction of the insight or inspiration, please, just stop. It’s too much, ok? Too. Much. Jeff always has something to say, about something, or someone,  and what’s more incredible than the word count itself is that, more often than not, he’s sharp, thought-provoking and worth the read. Damn it. And thank you. You see in Jeff’s blog, BuzzMachine, the secret sauce that’s missing from most daily journalism, or most media of any sort – unrelenting passion. It’s lovely – lovely to experience, and lovely simply to know it exists.

Here’s Jeff on the Yahoo-Huffington-Slate debate mashup fiasco, in which Yahoo! was supposed to provide tools to allow users to mix and match video soundbites from presidential candiates, but instead, as Wired explained, Yahoo! offered nothing more than a glorified video player:

The much vaunted Yahoo/Huffington Post/Slate presidential debate “mash-up” is a pathetic insult to the voters that is years behind in internet culture.

Go Jeff.

Stop the presses.

The report from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government purports to peer into the future of news in America. But “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet” neither advances the theory of creative destruction introduced by the economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 40s (and later appropriated by enterprising Harvard Business School professors-consultants Richard Nolan and David Croson in 1995, then Clayton Christensen in 2001), nor illuminates the migration of news and information consumers to the Internet.

Rather, the report by JFK Government School professor Thomas E. Patterson applies a thin methodology – web traffic estimates of “unique users” – to support old chestnuts about what is happening to traditional organizations that produce print, broadcast and Internet news for what was formerly known as the mass media audience, local and national. Patterson all but apologizes in the second sentence of the report: “ … our assessments are necessarily speculative.” Veritas.

The shaky methodology and flawed premise validate conclusions that have been obvious for some time. Sure creative destruction is and has been occurring in news as well as every other sector. Almost everyone understands that. But we should be wary about conclusions based on unreliable, comparative metrics on how someone’s computer is hitting someone else’s servers on a monthly basis, then spreading that data over a time when computer and media usage have increased exponentially. As media usage changes and expands, it is reasonable to expect that “monthly users” are increasing or being redistributed throughout media.

The Harvard report assigns commercial statistics to apples-to-oranges comparisons about content and services — only some of which have to with the distribution of news and advertising — that different platforms provide in the eroding, controlling environment of mass-media distribution.

The conclusion that local web sites are losing audience to big, online competitors is largely unsupported, counter-intuitive to the Internet’s organizing principle of community. There’s more of everything, a proliferation of sources, and an endless array of choice in open markets, physical and virtual, for news and information.

Our research suggests that audiences are using multiple brands — as many as 12 to 15 day — for information, including news, and for interacting. That should change tired, self-serving notions about monopolizing or dominating markets to those who are the best at facilitating and serving markets.

At a time when all producers of online content and services crave fresh insight on the shift in media usage and behavior, Harvard has given us a hollow report that is so old school.

This month’s debate: Who screws up the most?

The debate begins with the claim “you can’t trust anything on the Internet.” The new twist is that my friends are convinced that Google, Wikipedia and a gazillion bloggers are not only spreading bad information but instilling bad habits in good reporters.

Reporters have become poor spellers who don’t check things, they contend, because they rely so much on that insidious web of misinformation and opinion. The editors worry that professional reporters are beginning to perform like the unskilled and distrusted amateurs of the Internet.

My friends are also upset with the error surcharge. They complain that newspapers and broadcasters pay a far higher price for making errors or expressing opinion than do Internet sites.

I wanted to tell them that the public expects more – perhaps too much – from professional news organizations and their promise of rigor, objectivity, and truth to power.

I also wanted to explain how the Internet itself acts an editing mechanism where editorial judgment is applied at the edges, sometimes after the fact, not in advance.

Instead, I yielded to the wine, the time and a respect for dedicated friends doing the hard work of a good profession

Then came the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Near the end of the broadcast, Williams paused to announce a correction. The previous week, NBC reported that Russia had planted a flag on the seabed directly under the North Pole in a move seen as a symbolic claim on the resource rich region. NBC ran video footage from Reuters called “Russia plants flag under N Pole.” Reuters posted the story and video on its news site on August 2.

The problem was that a 13-year-old boy who saw the footage on NBC thought the Russian MIR submersible in the video looked a lot like the submersible used in the search for the Titanic more than a decade ago. Which it was.

Blaming Reuters, Williams acknowledged the error. Poof. It was gone.

Reuters merely posted this clarification above the story on its site: “This story contains file shots of Russia’s MIR submersible. The story also contains video of a submersible which was shot during the search for the Titanic in the Atlantic.” Poof.

The bad video tumbled without correction from one medium to the next. CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other stations ran it for days. Dozens of newspaper sites linked to it.

On the Internet, an error gets around like a lobbyist in Washington. Reputations are shaped by how quickly peers, critics, friends, experts and, yes, editors correct it. Participation in the process of setting the story straight is part of the currency, as well as the sport, of the Net.

It used to be that journalists were expected to be an expert on something. Today some 13-year-old probably knows more about the thermal tiles on the space shuttle than a reporter covering NASA. Chances are the 13-year-old is communicating with a larger network of readers on My Space. So why not use their knowledge network, even if the kid (or the reporter) may misspell “Endeavour.”

That’s the promise of We Media – the media environment where shared or connected knowledge is an opportunity, not a threat. As great as the promise of “truth to power,” interactivity and communications technology enable citizens to spread knowledge,

“Who screws up the most?” is not the question we ought to be asking at dinner parties, in newsrooms or on the Internet. We ought to be asking how skilled journalists can collaborate with connected, informed citizens to better make sense of a complex world.

Editors might help everyone with their spelling. Or they could blame an algorithm.

Trust us. Or trust me.
Trust systems are one of the cornerstones of iFOCOS work. We’ve posited that trust is in flux: diverse communities in a society shaped by global access to news and information are assuming influence and attention at the expense of institutions such as media and government that organize power geographically through a controlled model of community.

We view a diverse, connected society as a civic strength; our ability to express differences though many forms of media makes us stronger.

Our thinking has been influenced by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, famous for his 2000 book Bowling Alone. Now comes an apparent downside.

In new research, Putnam finds that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. The findings are unsettling, especially to a rigorously relevant researcher like Putnam, a Pied Piper for civic engagement.  Far from offering a doomsday scenario of societal breakdown, Putnam says his research illuminates initial human reaction and how to overcome it. But the research – from a survey of 30,000 Americans in 41 areas – fuels an already
fractious debate about immigration and diverse communities in America, among other matters.

Does the research now give validity to the message from MSM about its traditional model of organizing community? Or help explain declining trust in big media (because media itself is becoming more diverse through the Internet). Or do democratic media in all their disparate, fragmented forms represent an emerging system of trust that changes the nature of community, media, and civic engagement? iFOCOS is forming a
workgroup to consider. Contact Dale or Andrew if you’d like to get involved.

Great, yet another profile to manage
Just when you thought you’d had it up to here with your Facebook friends, Mashable pals, not to mention your secret thing for Buzznet beauties and your out-of-control iTunes bill, you’ve got to, simply got to, hang with all the digerati now cuddling via Dopplr. It’s a new social network designed around tracking people’s travels. The travel angle makes it good for global nomads – people who bounce around the globe and now have any easier way to find out who’s in town. Cool? We thinks … yes. But there’s so much coolness out there.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Now that the Bancrofts have agreed to sell Dow Jones to Rupert Murdoch, maybe the whining that has masqueraded as reporting about a Murdoch-run Wall Street Journal will subside. Coverage from journalism’s elite here on the Right Coast has reeked with hypocrisy. Not that the priesthood has ever embraced change among its ranks, depleted as it is by a generation of corporate media families who’ve managed the future of newspapers into near-oblivion. At least Murdoch has a vision for the digital age and a track record of growing and investing in news and information businesses. After a decade of denying a digital future, Humpty Dumpty CEOs have lost about half the value of their news companies (not to mention all of Knight Ridder) that elite reporters favor (read on). OK, Rupert is old school, and he owns, what, besides the Fox “News” Channel – almost everything? Journalism that matters – and a lot of journalism jobs – might be better served by new owners rather than the feudal princes of the past. Saving the Bancroft dynasty wouldn’t have helped.

It’s been 25 years. Let’s try something new.
Meantime, new leadership at Gannett is shaking up local news operations. While Murdoch will likely attempt to leverage the reputation and resources of The Journal with the global distribution channels of News Corp. including Fox and MySpace, Gannett has launched its Information Center strategy with reader participation at 11 sites in the U.S. Even that detractor of the tired, Wired magazine, has taken note. Look for Gannett’s go-go leaders Sue Clark-Johnson, Mike Maness and Jennifer Carroll (an IFOCOS board member) to stir thinking about newspapers the way the last big newspaper idea – USA Today – did 25 years ago. Journalism’s elite didn’t like that idea either.

Always On (Surveillance)
A security camera that the Army Corps of Engineers placed alongside the Mississippi River in Minneapolis captured the collapse of the I-35W bridge, the most arresting image of the disaster. Atlanta-based CNN scored a coup when a tipster leaked the security camera video. The local Star Tribune, whose newsroom is less than a mile from the bridge, played catch-up. CNN and most major news sites now aggressively seek amateur news footage from viewers after years of denying We Media as a legitimate reporting tool. More: localism has given way to gloclalism – local events with global interest or implication. Beyond We Media we see cameras embedded pervasively into the environment, altering architecture, experience, behavior and assumptions about what’s local – or private. Look for our coming report.

Now the iSymphony
The iPod made its live concert debut with the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap, the national park for the performing arts, located just down the road from iFOCOS world headquarters in Reston. The performance of “Fantastic Planet” A Symphonic Video Spectacular” enabled the audience to hear recorded music and commentary from conductor Emil de Cou in one ear with live music from the orchestra in the other, all while watching dramatic video footage from NASA on a big screen. Had to be there to get the full effect of enriching the live experience for a connected culture.

So much for eHarmony’s 29 dimensions of compatibility
Novelist Robert Olen Butler has written the Pulitzer Prize of emails about how his wife, the much-younger novelist Elizabeth Dewberry, left him for an older but richer coot, media tycoon Ted Turner. Indulge in delicious Gawking about the lascivious literati and that randy captain of capitalism.

The next big old thing
Google is reported to have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a cellphone project developing prototype handsets and making overtures to operators. Look for multiple manufacturers to make devices based on its specs and multiple carriers to offer them. The payoff: more advertising revenue for the world’s richest and largest advertising company. Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes ads in mobile phones are twice as profitable or more because they’re personal. We saw the branded mobile phone as a big opportunity for news companies more than five years ago. That doesn’t mean we were right. ESPN’s investment in its own “skinned” mobile service last year was a flop. Now The New York Times, for one, says it is finally getting serious about the mobile play. Timing is right. Follow the money.

Stay connected to the trends and developments shaping media and the conneced culture at iFOCOS.

Or maybe Sprint is just trying to shed  whatever brand yuckiness accounted for the company’s 95 percent drop in profits and the loss of 714,000 customers in the previous three quarters.

One of the ways Sprint is trying to open up is symbolic – by changing the way it tells its story. Sprint has launched a new blog to share at least some of the company’s internal thinking about its new broadband service. Through the blog Sprint is thinking out loud about what it means to be a carrier that both controls and profits from a network and yet is open to unhindered and unimagined uses for that network.

The blog also gives the company a place to acknowledge and think out loud about unfavorable feedback to the new brand name, like this from CrunchGear:

It xounds like “home” but with a z and the reaxon there’s an x in there ix becauxe “The X-factor makes it cool.” Mmmhmm.

 (iFOCOS says: Xohm ryhmes with ohm, or with the sound of a cat expelling a fur ball).

Strange thing, though. Last week the Xohm blog was linked from the Xohm promotional web site, which otherwise has  nothing of use to anybody other than an email signup for Xohm alerts. This week, the blog link is gone – although the blog itself is still alive and kicking. Which makes you wonder if the mild blowback over the (insert coughing sound – xmmm) brand provoked second thoughts on the whole blog idea within Sprint. If so, allow us to offer some third thoughts: put the link back and relax.

The outcomes were as predictable as they were quick. Flip-chart wisdom validated pre-planned outcomes including (1) research and education agendas sustaining journalism; (2) “breakthroughs across silos of thought and practice;” and (3) a framework for launching the Next Newsroom, a business with margins that appeal to the low financial expectations of civic-supportive, community investors.

While its agenda is earnest, JTM suffers from dated, naïve assumptions about the ongoing transitions in journalism, community and civic life. And then there are JTM’s breezy rules of engagement: “whoever comes is the right people/whatever happens is the right thing ….” That’s just silly. Serious plans require rigor, talent and scrutiny.

We’re all for journalism that matters. Who isn’t? As far as we can tell there’s nothing stopping journalism-that-matters from happening. Better reporting from the very people who seek better reporting is a good place to start. So would the inclusion of the fairly brilliant innovators outside of journalism’s tortured and clubby network. With so many inspiring innovations, enabling technologies, fresh investment and creative ideas emerging from a media-savvy society it’s hard to embrace a woe-is-journalism agenda. The wind blows forward.

The situation reminds me of the fertilizer problem at my golf course. We hire an enterprising service called Birds-B-Gone to chase away the flock of geese that summers by the lake on the 16th Hole. Trained dogs cause the geese to fly off to a nearby course. That course then hires the same service to chase them back to ours. Birds-B-Gone gets good both ways.

Though they share terminology, the two Next projects come from different parts of the goose: JTM from the heart, Newspaper Next from the, ah, wallet. The competing initiatives, both aimed in some way at saving newspapers, exacerbate the rift among journalists and publishers about solving a common problem. Only the goose-chasers make out.

See: paidContent and Gigaom.

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.