MTV, the Associated Press and the Knight Foundation today unveiled “Street Team 08,” a stunning collaboration that could help define newsgathering, distribution and a news-business models into the future.

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.

We’ve forecast the inevitability of The News Wars as news providers continue to lose audience and revenue to online aggregaters who redistribute content that others produce, frequently at great expense. Owing to parochialism and intransigence, newspaper publishers have been unable to either mount a united front or to develop meaningful innovation to compete against the Googles and Yahoos. Stay-the-course strategies and desperate deals with the Evil Axis have only deepened their despair.

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.

Google’s pursuit of all things media remains relentless. In recent weeks it announced its Android operating system for mobile phones, its OpenSocial standard to link applications across major social-networking sites, and filed a patent application for a magazine of sorts that would allow users to collate Web content around which Google would wrap targeted ads. Additionally, Google has accelerated its push into traditional media with a jobs-ads initiative as well as a digital, auction-based platform for buying and selling to TV and print publications. All of which multiplies the arenas into which Google can sell advertising, from which it derives 99% of its revenue. The formula is familiar: Sell ads around content it doesn’t own; return some of that revenue to the owner of the content; repeat. Good strategy. Google’s revenues almost tripled, to $11.8 billion, in the first nine months of ’07 and its stock price approached $700 a share. Allergic to owning content, Google sneezes money

A study by Nokia forecasts that 25 percent of the entertainment consumed by people in five years time will have been created, edited and shared within their peer circle rather than created by traditional media groups. Nokia calls it “circular entertainment.”

2007 has been celebrated for digital innovation in U.S. politics. The Huffington Post teamed with Slate and Yahoo! for the first online “mash-up” debate. MTV and MySpace launched instant-messaging forums for online viewers to send questions in real time to presidential candidates. And, of course, all the candidates launched spunky web sites that feature videos of the “real” candidate. Our favorite political moment came during the first CNN-YouTube debate when Democratic candidates fielded a video question from a talking snowman that asked about global warming. How did we ever make informed decisions before digital technology enhanced our democracy by empowering citizens, engaging them in meaningful civic discourse, and exposing manipulation by the candidates and the media?

Are you crunchy? No, that’s not  code for your political leanings, or your eating habits, or the length of your armpit hair. Get with the times, for they are a’changin. It’s code for your digital-business-award-worthiness. Of course. Maybe you’ve already won a Webby; or a Bloggy; maybe you’ve made it to the Always On Top 100 Companies list. Now try the Crunchies, from a consortium of hippy freak do-gooders – uh, no, from tech’s most influential tech startup blogs: TechCrunch, GigaOM, ReadWrite Web, and VentureBeat. I was impressed when Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff at Forrester Research added a  Social Impact category to their Groundswell Awards earlier this year. The Crunchies have followed suit, with a category for "Most Likely To Make The World A Better Place." That’s great. But seeing it among 18 other categories, like Best Video Site, Best CEO, Best Time Sink and Best International Startup, makes me wonder what kind of impact a competition like the Crunchies might have if making the world a better place was the only category. But maybe that’s too crunchy for the times.

See: The Crunchies

It was an emotional morning at the Lake Anne Coffee House where I get my start-of-the-day latte and early take on the day’s current events.

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.

One of the roles of media is to help people understand the world so we can make informed decisions – and then take action. The daily flood of news and information from all the big media institutions we love and love to hate is one approach to learning, sifting, filtering and evaluating all this information. Longer form magazines, books, documentaries, films, formal education and art are another. Talking and listening to friends, family and people we trust is yet another. It’s all so … much. What if you could put all of that wisdom and process in a blender and turn it into some sort of info power drink?

Technorati Tags: wikis, wemedia

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The daily newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, announced on Oct. 23, in an anonymous editorial, that its anonymous editorial section will no longer endorse candidates for the U.S. presidency. "Presidential elections are not our beat," The Virginian-Pilot editorial said. "Our time is best spent on local and state problems, or those national ones that bear directly on us." Not like the U.S. presidency, even if it does have something or other to do with all those aircraft carriers and assorted shippy things at the U.S. Navy base in Norfolk. This is one newspaper that is taking a dramatic stand for the new new in newspapers, the call of the hyper-uber-maximus local local everything. The response to the new "no comment" stand on future presidents either validates the change, or should inspire the unnamed editorialists to find new work, fast. The newspaper’s public editor, Marvin Lake, wrote a few days after the announcement:

"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.

The audio recording of last week’s Power To Change The World Summit is online and well worth a listen for anyone who cares about media as a force for change in the world.

You’ll find the Change Summit audio here.

The context was thinking about media for the next hundred years. You probably think in much shorter terms, and in terms of business models, technology, production or process innovation, or human behaviors and habits, or maybe even professional values and standards. Our over-arching theme last week was thinking about all of that in terms of outcomes – how media and technology, produced and distributed by anyone, can make the world better. That’s a lofty goal, and daunting – and also one that ought to be expressed and discussed more routinely by people and companies that make and sell media. How can our information, and all the human ingenuity and creativity it takes to produce and distribute it, be applied not simply to make more or better media – but to make the world itself better, for everyone?

Why don’t we expect this of our media? Maybe because our expectations have sunk so low. In the first conversation at the Change Summit, Fast Company founder (and iFOCOS board member) Alan Webber noted there’s a moral leadership gap in the United States. It includes media along with many other institutions and sectors.

Our research certainly bears this out, and so does common experience. Media’s “fall” in the United States, in terms of business declines and trust, is more severe than in many other countries. But the implications are global. If media of some form or another is indeed a force for change, and for making the world a better place, the moral leadership gap among today’s media institutions, and others, suggests opportunities for new leadership to fill the gap. That leadership could come from anywhere, and that’s an insight relevant to every sector of our culture.

Case closed, problem solved? Obviously not. We’re going to stick with these kinds of questions at iFOCOS, and in next year’s We Media Miami global forum and festival.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is offering big bucks to support innovation in community journalism. The deadline for this year’s Knight News Challenge is Oct. 15. This is a big deal, especially in the U.S. where the commercial news industry is in decline. But it’s a big deal everywhere – in a connected culture, innovation ignores geographic boundaries. If you’ve got a project in the works, or a brilliant idea percolating, I urge you to send your ideas to Knight.

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

Technorati Tags: journalism, philanthropy, investment, socialentrepreneurs

Here’s an update on who’s coming to the Oct. 24 Power To Change The World summit, a one-day event Dale and I are organizing for UPI in Washington. More details at: www.changesummit.com.

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.

What’s more interesting: Jeff Jarvis skewering Yahoo!, or the smiling ass next to the story? It’s an ad for a … well, never mind, see for yourself. Meetup founder Scott Heiferman rightly notes that the ass web site is not just good, smart or prolific, like Jeff. In Scott’s words, it’s … transcendent. Yes. See Scott’s snapshot here, then explore the ass itself. Go on, it’s ok.

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.

A new report from Harvard suggests that the Internet is “redistributing the news audience in a way that is pressuring some traditional news organizations.”

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.

Each month I have dinner with good friends who happen to be editors at three of the nation’s leading news organizations. Given our friendship and a common kinship to newspapers, conversation invariably turns to journalism and its current woes. As a recovering journalist turned digerati, I am left to defend “Dale’s Internet” during spirited after-dinner dialectic and wine tasting.

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.