Invisible Inkling

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education.

All About citizen-journalism

Community-funded news launches at Spot.Us

Fellow Knight News Challenge 2008 winner David Cohn took the wraps off the latest iteration of Spot.Us over the last few days, launching an engine for community-funded reporting from donation to publication.
Here’s the explanatory video:

Spot.Us - Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.
I love the idea that Spot.Us could do at least three jobs:

Provide [...]

Cross-pollinate or shrivel

I’m profoundly enthralled by things like rapid news-driven development in Django, and building a CMS that can switch from a beautiful feature layout to a Drudge-like breaking news linkbomb on a dime, and of course, leveraging the steady stream of free embeddable tools showing up online every day for your own newsy purposes.
But none of [...]

I happen to know some people with ideas.

If you’re not already subscribed to the PBS IdeaLab blog, the forum for Knight News Challenge winners to talk about their projects, spout off on related topics, and generally try to change the world, now would be a good time.
Here’s a few recent posts over there that I’m still thinking about:

Amy Gahran on learning to [...]

Citizen journalist killed in Iraq

{ Those of us that were in the room during the ‘Video’ session at the Networked Journalism conference in October remember witnessing Brian Conley of Alive in Baghdad basically make a plea to anyone from the numerous large, profitable news organizations at the conference to help out the cause of citizen journalism in Iraq with [...]

Crowd wisdom, some assembly required

Scott Karp points out the difficulty in waiting for the monkeys to write Shakespeare and Ian King reminds us all that free content requires filtering that costs time and money.
Both are talking about the NYT bit on Heinz’s ketchup-stained UGC ad ploy.
Which brings me to the point: User-generated advertising content should be amateurish. That’s the [...]