According to the AP, this Post Should Cost Me Over $60

In an attempt to demonstrate just how absurd the AP’s new plan is for charging bloggers who want to quote five words from an article $12.50, I present to you what the AP would like to charge more than $60 for me to share with you:

“is good for the economy” – LINK

“didn’t approve the full amount sought” – LINK

“believed to have been arrested”  LINK

“engaged in tit-for-tat attacks, but”  LINK (note: unclear on charge for hyphenated words…)

“World War II may be over”  LINK

Yup, I certainly feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth.  You?

Citizen Journalist Blow Lid Off Fake Vegan Restaurants

The newspaper people will tell you that if they are obliterated by the evil internets one of the big loses will be investigative journalism.  If it hadn’t been for those gritty investigative journalists the newspaper hires there’d be no Watergate, no Whitewater Gate, no ‘Gates of any kind.

Of course, that’s just plain silly.  Newspapers didn’t invent investigative journalism any more than they invented news or reporting news.

In fact, in this digital age where anyone willing to do the work can spill the beans to a massive audience, there is more reason than ever for independent investigators to step up to the plate.  The folks at QuarryGirl, a blog dedicated to animal rights, have done just that.

Having been given a great deal of anecdotal proof that some food at Vegan restaurants around LA contained animal by-products, they decided to see if they could prove it.  One might assume, as a bunch of bloggers with, potentially, no J-school experience whatsoever, they might make a hash of things.  Instead, they made a plan:

Here’s an outline of the plan:

* Locate a facility that has no traces of egg, casein or shellfish in which to perform the advanced tests
* Purchase anti-contamination equipment including industrial sterilization supplies, lab coats, uncontaminated bags, swabs, razor blades, gloves and floor coverings
* Obtain highly restricted industrial food testing “kits” only available to the food manufacturing industry
* Develop a regimented process to test each food item with the highest standards of inter-test cleanliness, ensuring that absolutely no food particles from one food item contaminate another
* Select a diverse set of menu items from 100% vegan-only restaurants throughout LA (with one exception, see later)
* Order the food for carry-out, and seal it in an airtight bag in its original packaging either inside, or very close to the point of purchase
* Transport the food items to the testing facility intact and sealed, and perform the tests within 48 hours of purchase, keeping them refrigerated until immediately before the test
* Develop a strict bracketing control, with a thorough analysis of the testing facility and equipment before testing: A negative control to ensure no pre-existing contamination, and a positive control test on a known-positive food product (containing all three target non-vegan items) to ensure that the tests do indicate positive results
* Conduct the test in absolute secrecy to ensure that no restaurant would know they were providing samples, and pose as regular customers ordering take-out food in a normal way, with no disclosure that the items would be used for a test.

So, we divided up the work between us, and dedicated a Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday as well as over $1,000 of our collective money to pulling off the most extensive scientific test that we know of to find out, once and for all, if samples of restaurant food are vegan or not.

Not sure about you, but that sounds like a pretty sound plan.  Find out what happened here.

This is just one example of how the inevitable death of newspapers will simply not be the information apocalypse they’d like you to think it will be.

Qik and Brightcove May Soon Present “Live From…Anywhere.”

Sure, the terrible violence and politcal unrest in Iran is a tragic and disheartening story, but the “real” story continues to be how social media sites like Twitter and YouTube have been bringing the sad story to the world.

While it remains to be seen what will happen to Mahmoud and company, the writing is clearly on the wall for traditonal journalism.  The “citizen” journalists are rising up and taking reporting of the news into their own hands.  Is it neat and tidy and fact-checked? Not really.  Is it instantly more compelling, engrossing and informative than any half-hour with Tom Brokaw could ever promise to deliver?  You bet.

Of course, what’s been largely missing in this journalistic uprising is live video reports from down in the trenches.

Qik has been providing a service that allows certain cell phone users to live stream to the internet.  While they are expanding the number of devices offering this service, they are combining forces with Brightcove, a very large internet video distribution company, resulting in, eventually, the ability for ordinary folks with cell phones to “broadcast” live over a potentially massive network of sites reaching, theoretically, millions of viewers.  All of this without any satellite trucks or multi-million dollar news-vans.  No FCC, no corporate overseers and no commercial sponsors to placate.

As technology like this becomes more widespread it is going to become harder than ever for anyone to hide.  Imagine the power of not just, say, audiotaping an encounter with a NYC police officer detaining you unlawfully.  Now imagine live streaming that same encounter.

It will be very interesting to see how various goverments react to these innovations.  As Lancaster, PA has proven, the government loves the idea of cameras watching our every move but what happens when the cameras are turned back onto them?

Is VBS.TV the Future of Investigative Journalism?

Say what you will about Vice Magazine, their original web video site, VBS.TV is showing the world how it’s done when it comes to compelling, engaging and important content.  For those who fear investigative journalism is in its death throes this is strong proof that we are just on the cusp of a whole new approach to the form.

VBS has taken their small, daring crews to places no major news orginaztion would touch, from deep within North Korea to displaced persons camps behind enemy lines in Sudan.

Their latest 9-part series is an in-your-face look at the photo-journalists behind Mexico’s hugely popular tabloids featuring gruesome pictures of the recently murdered.

Far more than shock journalism (although be warned, this stuff is truly shocking and not for kids), this is a legitimately exciting and disturbing piece of investigative journalism, the kind that some fear will die along with dead-tree newspapers.

What is most impressive about the news video created by VBS is that it treats its audience like intelligent, critical thinkers.  There is no spoon-feeding and no fear-mongering.  I also love seeing how our new technology, from tiny cameras to mass distribution is allowing many more people to take their shot at finding and reporting the news.

Far from the death of news, I believe we are just entering its finest hour.

Service Journalism: Brilliant MicroPayments Takedown

Many in the newspaper industry are exploring the potential of building revenue online through charging readers micropayments on a per-article basis.  This is sometimes referred to as a iTunes approach.

Most arguments against this plan have been based on why is not economically sound – any newpaper that puts up a paywall will simply drive most users to find the same or similar news on a free, ad-supported site.

Greg, at The Digitalists, has an even better argument against micropayments for journalism:

What exactly do these people think that newspaper execs will do with data showing exactly how profitable every single article is? Just sit on that information? Or will they use it to make business decisions about which departments, types of articles and individual journalists are delivering the most ROI? “Sorry, Woodward, we know you won the Pulitzer last year, but your articles only generated $97.85 in revenue, so we’re going to have to let you go.” Of course, it wouldn’t just influence the executives. Journalists themselves would start shading their stories to what sells, and the most successful would be the ones who were the best salespeople (or who knew the most tricks). Get ready for a lot less zoning-board recaps and a lot more “Top 10 Sexual Positions.”

Greg goes on to make some excellent points about what it is newspapers should be doing instead of focusing on micropayments.

Read the whole thing here.

The Nation’s Newspaper Solution? Collusion, of couse.

There are numerous reasons why traditional newspaper are facing the need to change or die.  Technology is evolving to a point where many people simply don’t see the need for a dead-tree format while at the same time the technology needed to obtain and transmit news has allowed many more players onto the field.

Of course, the majority of old school thinkers simply blame “the internet” for stealing the news and then giving it away for free.  This is such a Luddite view of the world and misses almost all the important factors that have led to a change in the way news is gathered and disseminated. This wrong-headed thinking has led to some presumably smart people making really dumb statements about how to “save” newspapers – a concept they often confuse with saving news or saving journalism, things that do not need newspapers to thrive.

For my money,  Michael Moran, writing for “The Nation” has made one of the most bone-headed suggestions yet:

The online information ecosystem that has grown up around their freely proffered content will barely notice if one–or even a half-dozen–major publications put their news behind subscription walls. The only way newspapers can save something of the franchise that took hundreds of years to create is to work together to stop giving away their content without charge.

Call it NOPEC–the Newspaper Owners Print and Electronic Cartel. Only when newspapers cast aside the ethos of free content can the revenues needed to support serious journalism at home and abroad return.

That’s right, Mr. Moran is suggesting that newspapers collude in a price-fixing scheme that will somehow remove any form of competition and force people to pay an artificial price for new reporting.

Besides being highly unethical and possibly illegal, it’s complete unworkable.  There will always be those who either want to provide news for free or who are able to make a profit through other revenue models than subscription or micropayments.

NOPEC is my winner for Worst Idea Ever to “save” newspapers.

LINK

“Pirate” Journalism

Ok, I’ll admit I might be over-using the term “pirate” on this blog to describe anything that seems to go against the mainstream methods of marketing and consumerism but, darn it, it’s fun to associate everything we’re doing to being pirates on the high seas!

TechDirt has an interesting post about the fact that the very first “news” organization to break the story of last week’s minor earthquake in the UK was Twitter-based.  He draws a number of ideas from this, including:

“…the line between professional and amateur journalism is blurring, and will continue to do so. Someone we would ordinarily consider just a blogger can break news if he happens to be at the scene of a story or he happens to be the first to notice newsworthy happenings being reported elsewhere on the Internet. “