Noteoreous

People who illegally download music from the internet
also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music
spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly.

The system relies on two established open-source technologies to gather the election reports.

The text messages are collected via a free-platform known as FrontlineSMS, developed by UK programmer Ken Banks.

The system was originally developed for conservationists to keep in touch with communities in national parks in South Africa and allows users to send messages to a central hub.

It has previously been used to monitor elections in Nigeria, and has now been combined with a "crowd-sourced, crisis-mapping" tool known as Ushahidi, which plots the reports on a freely-accessible map.

The system was developed in Kenya when violence erupted following the disputed presidential elections between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga.

reporters check veracity of sms reports which are put on a map to monitor elections and look for irregularities.

Breaking news and press conference type events are going to be crowdsourced. Whether that is better or worse is moot. It is. Now, how can we educate people in some kind of media literacy, to be able to triangulate information about events and pull out the facts from the propaganda?

Many critics were now gone due to newspaper layoffs, more bloggers were in the room, and many people had laptops open to live-blog or Twitter the sessions.

The old workflow -- critics preview the networks' TV shows, interview the stars and withhold coverage until later in the year -- was now obsolete. In its place was a new workflow. Critics now would have the biggest news from the press tour posted to their Twitter feeds and blogs and only run longer stories in print that happened outside the ballroom.

Good discussion of WORKFLOW and how tools change workflow as well as who are the workers.

You bet.

Visualizing Health care --
The lobbyists, the Dems, the Repubs
With an audio from NPR to help explain it.

Great fillout of the zogby demographics

What’s Social Journalism?  It’s what you do when you gather information in social media channels and then report it to your readers.  Watching a Twitter #hashtag for posts related to a critical local issue or big event, then publishing them in a roundup or sidebar on your news site?  That’s Social Journalism.  Scanning YouTube for the latest video from a protest, county fair, or city council meeting?  That’s Social Journalism.

New service from Publish 2

Nichepapers aren't a new product, service, or business model. They are a new institution. They're a living example of the institutional innovation that is the key to 21st century business. They're not the same old newspaper, sold a different way. They are 21st century newspapers, built on new rules, that are letting radical innovators reinvent what "news" is.

Here are eight of the most essential:

Knowledge, not news. Newspapers strive to give people the news. Next stop, commodity central. Nichepapers strive to impart meaningful, lasting knowledge instead.

Commentage, not commentary. Newspapers dictate to their reader what news and opinion are. Nichepapers co-create knowledge through "commentage." Commentage is the kid sister of reportage: it is the art of curating comments to have a dialogue with the audience — because the audience can fill gaps, plug holes, and thicken the foundations of knowledge. Many newspapers have comments — so what? Almost none are having a dialogue with commenters — who are mostly stuck in a twilight zone where they can only talk to one another. Nichepapers, in contrast, are always having deep dialogues with readers.

Topics, not articles. That's why Nichepapers develop topics — instead of telling quickly-forgotten stories. When Talking Points Memo exposed the Bush administration's series of politically motivated firings, it did so in a series of posts, that let the story develop, surface, thicken, and climax. Stories are for information — topics are for knowledge.

Scarcity, not circulation. Newspapers strive for circulation, by telling the same stories in the same ways — in slightly different places. Nichepapers strive for scarcity: to develop a perspective, analytical skills, and storytelling capabilities that are inimitable by rivals.

Now, not then. Newspapers give you the news then. Nichepapers give you knowledge now. Why have weekly columns and daily articles — that then get lost in the wilderness of a vast archive? It's an arcane, obsolete way to produce content. Nichepapers develop topics of conversation, not individual stories, and let them co-evolve with readers.

Provocation, not perfection. Newspapers seek perfection: perfect grammar, perfect ledes, perfect headlines. Nichepapers seek provocation instead. Sometimes, yes, that provocation is mere titillation. But more often than not it's authentic provcation: nichepapers provoke us to think; they challenge us; they educate us in ways that newspapers stopped doing long ago.

Snowballs, not sell-outs. Newspapers long ago sold out to advertisers, PR flaks, powerful "sources," and lobbyists. When was the last time the WSJ bit the hand that fed it? Why is the Post's editorial page so predictably tepid? Nichepapers haven't sold out — and if their economic promise delivers, they won't have to. They "sell in" instead: they pitch topics and stories to the community, and let the best ones snowball — through contributions like tips, criticisms, and corrections.

Tasks, not tech. Nichepapers aren't about technology. They might use a blog post, vlog post, podcast, wiki, series of tweets, or a long-form article — or all of these, all at once. They are tech-neutral, using whatever works best for a given task.

Here are four models for Nichepapers that apply these rules in different ways. Each is named after an archetypal historical newspaper — because the key to reinvention is getting back to the basics of making better stuff:

The Sentry — Talking Points Memo. The incomparable TPM is the gold standard of a Nichepaper. It's also a very specific kind: a sentry, always patrolling the political arena for malfeasance, misbehavior, and broken promises. By combining reportage, commentage, opinion, and muckraking, TPM delivers perhaps the most hard-hitting, most persistent, and most fearless investigative political journalism in America today.

The Chronicle — Perez Hilton. Perez Hilton is the first 21st century gossip columnist. He chronicles whatever's lewd, crude, and most likely to be viewed in the entertainment world — in such excruciating detail, the result is a paradox: the lurid becomes banal. Yet, like TPM, Perez is unafraid to challenge the status quo, persistently, chronically, and often, funnily.

The Intelligencer — Business Insider. Henry Blodget used to be an equity analyst, so it's no surprise that his latest venture, Business Insider, crosses the line from pure news into deeper analysis — intelligence. Though BI often gets it wrong (here's Joe Weisenthal arguing that bribes create value, for example), the analysis is what counts: it gives readers more food for thought per word than News 1.0.

The Pioneer — The Huffington Post. The Huffington Post is perhaps the classic Nichepaper — and what makes it different is that it's always pioneering new ideas, concepts, stories, and angles. The HuffPo's perspective is politically liberal — and that's its domain. But it is the pioneering that makes the HuffPo different. And it's open to pioneering new ideas from nearly anyone — as long as their ideas are good enough to matter.

Those rules and models above aren't the only ones, or the best ones. They are avenues that radical innovators are already exploring to reconceive news for the 21st century. And they suggest what the endgame of news 2.0 looks like.

Read the original article. This guy nails the "5th Estate."