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.

Moe outlined the “structural advantages” AOL enjoys over the newspapers, magazines, and television networks that have been letting so many talented journalists go over the past 18 months — journalists who are increasingly showing up on AOL’s payroll. “Principally, we have none of the legacy costs associated with producing print publications, for example. We don’t own printing presses, or fleets of delivery trucks. We don’t have the elaborate editorial structures geared to producing products over a printing press.” Seizing on this advantage, AOL has been scooping up talented journalists right and left, with some 1,500 on board already – a number it expects to double or even triple over the coming year. Some have been hired as full-time employees; the greater portion work as freelancers.

A lot of cities are going to exist without newspapers. There is something that can be done, and the federal government ought to do it: allow sports betting on newspaper Web sites. That would save every newspaper in America. The New York Times.com could do it. Plenty of British papers do this; for them it's a crucial part of their net revenue stream. I know a major newspaper in London that makes $15 million a year from sports betting alone.

You bet.

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

There's a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I'm going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation "M." What do the "M"s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It's a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth "M"s. Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who's Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from. http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/07/today_in_capitalism_20_1.html?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a38:g2:r5:c0.026514:b26750224:z6

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."

A shift from free P2P sites like bit torrent sites to commercial sites.

we come back to the gigantic wind-down costs that would entail, getting rid of parts of the operation that aren’t needed anymore. And that’s the problem: much of it isn’t needed anymore. Just ask the many newspapers that are canceling the service along with their $1-million-a-year bills. (See the Star-Ledger that was produced with a single AP pixel.)

Jarvis on link economy, reverse syndication, and why it is so expensive to try and remake old media into new.

Kickstarter is essentially a hub of interactions between creators and their true fans, after all. It removes the barrier between artist and fan (and, more broadly, producer and consumer), creating the possibility for an exchange that’s more fulfilling, efficient, and emotionally resonant than anything mass-production affords us. What mattered more: the quality of In/Rainbows’ music or that Radiohead went directly to true fans (creating new ones in the process) to release it?

It’s a provocative theory that we all want to believe. It sounds so simple, so weirdly doable when all we ever hear is how internet killed the art star and that your iTunes library can and will be held against you in a court of law. There’s no way it could possibly be true, right?

Based on data from the first three months of Kickstarter’s existence, it looks like there’s more than something to it. To date, if a project manages to get to 25% of its funding goal, it has a 94% success rate. Here’s a visual to illustrate that. The X axis represents percentage funded, the Y axis shows the percentage of projects that have reached that

Now you can see why "information is the oil of the 21st century."

In partnership with the organization, Motlagh’s work has appeared in the public broadcasting show, Foreign Exchange, the Frontline’s iWitness webcam program, and the Virginia Quarterly. But it is unlikely that this concept of “reporting first, money maybe later” will continue to allow journalists to make a career out of reporting.

This has, perhaps, been the plight of freelancers for decades, but what is scary is that veteran newsmen and stalwart news organizations are hailing these projects as exemplars of the new journalism model. Motlagh “is the prototype for the journalist of the future: a free-lancing, multimedia correspondent who knows how to market his work and live on a tight budget,” writes David Westphal in the Online Journalism Review.

If the news industry plans to rely on young, ambitious journalists eager enough to make a career so as to pay for their own breakthrough stories, where will subsequent stories come from? While journalists like Motlagh and Hoshaw should rightly be lauded for their determination and passion, this is simply not a sustainable model. Media scholars should be talking about workable ways to fund these projects and urging mainstream news organizations to get behind them, instead of making the case that this is the future of journalism.

This is a model I think is the future, not just of journalism and reporting, but of most work in the 21st century. What is left out at the historical moment of 2009, is health insurance and social benefits. If the US can work out a way to protect its citizens health and to keep our economy from becoming distorted by the for-profit health industry, I think people working for themselves, and forming cooperatives, will be a viable model for many, many culture and communication workers.

A quickie explaning posterous, and noting they don't have an office. I am using posterous.com to make this entry on my WP blog.

As newspaper advertising revenue declines and technology drastically changes the public’s relationship with news organizations, The Times is searching for new streams of money and opening itself to partnerships and arrangements far from the old model, in which editors decide what news is, assign their own reporters and pay the expenses — all of it supported by hundreds and hundreds of advertisers, none big enough to influence the journalism in any way.

The new relationships come in many shapes and sizes. The Times let Hoshaw use its name in her fund-raising pitch. It has published stories in partnership with ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative reporting unit founded by billionaire bankers. Times executives and editors have even discussed seeking foundation support to underwrite sections of the paper or categories of news, like Science Times, though Catherine Mathis, the company’s spokeswoman, said no foundations had been approached.

NYTimes public editor, Hoskins, talks about NYTimes and a reporter who pitched a story on spot.us, as well as how Pro-Publica and NYTimes work together.

Good examples of hybrid pay/subscribe/free models

They support the new microformats for Value Added News

I call myself “Investigative Communications, LLC”.  It’s a fancy way of saying “investigative reporter for rent.” I’ll look stuff up, I’ll find stuff out, I’ll write it up if you want it. 

One of his early clients was an attorney representing someone who had gotten bilked in a real estate scam.  Rooting through public records on a case like that wasn’t far removed what he had been doing as a journalist for years.  Still, it isn’t the same.

InvestigateWest is an accomplished group of journalists. Our staffers have won or been finalists for every significant national journalism award for investigative and narrative work, including the Pulitzer Prize, White House Correspondents Association Edgar A. Poe Award, the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, Best of the West and the PEN literary award.

More evidence that investigative journalism is too dear to pay for...