Diesel’s new Spring 2010 lookbook video combines three of my favorite things: videos, wasting time and shopping. Instead of watching, clicking about the website to find that killer red dress and then buying it, the new video allows you to mouse over said dress and put it in your cart right away. Admittedly, the shopping feature is a tad clunky in execution, but they get major points for sticking it to old media with this one. Check out the Real Thing here.

Cross-posted from my blog on TrueSlant.com

Not one to lie down and take it, Newmark in turn pinned the blame on sloppy reporting that doesn’t live up to public expectation. “They failed on that weapons of mass destruction thing. And they failed on that financial collapse thing,” he said. Both true, but neither argument is central when it comes to the demise of the printed word.

On the one hand you’ve got Wolff fawning for the cameras and bitching about Craigslist when the fact that Craigslist now claims most of the classified ad content in the US is true but irrelevant. Yes, it happened and print can’t  sustain itself without that business. But local papers could easily outdo Craigslist in terms of localized personals (bikes for sale, etc.), they just haven’t gotten their shit together enough to do so. The problem is not just a loss of classified revenue, it’s a lack of ingenuity. That said, I still think most papers have got a little more than 18 months.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Cultural historian and media scholar in the Department of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and author.

The Book: “The Wealth of Networks” by Yochai Benkler

“It’s a formidable manifesto about the ways the digital technologies will alter our sense of value and our understanding of how we build things in the world. Benkler wants us to think beyond scarcity. What he is saying is that the tradition of political economy has been, for centuries, about managing scarcity. Coming up with models about efficient distribution of resources, his book sort of blows all of that away and shows a very different picture of world. One in which value is subject to the ability to manage abundance.

It’s too easy to say that we live in a world of unlimited information or information overload. What Benkler is pointing out is that real value is determined by the ways that people leverage this abundance to create huge and functional structures that don’t depend on the old reward systems where you had to pay somebody with goods, services, money, to get them to do something. Benkler points out that there are some really elaborate and valuable experiments in an electronic networked economy that don’t require you to reward people with those sorts of things. The reward is sociality, being part of something. The two best examples are Linus and Wikipedia. The reward for them is the deep reward of human beings working with each other.

Whether you buy his argument one, 50 or 100 percent, you can’t ignore this book. It’s a great conversation starter about the changes we’re going through.”

Josh Benton, director of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab.

The Book: “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky

“It’s about how the Internet makes organizing groups trivially easy and how that process changes the kinds of groups that get formed and how it disrupts business and other structures that are based on doing that group formation in the old, expensive way.

I’m most interested in it from a journalism perspective since that’s what I do. Fundamentally, it gets at how the Internet eliminates a lot of the power that comes with owning a distribution channel. Before, if you had a group of people who wanted to know about city council in Boston and you had a group of people when knew about city council in Boston, to connect those two people you needed to have a journalist in the middle who would talk to the people who know what they’re talking about and would then share that knowledge with a large audience of people who buy the newspaper or watch the TV broadcast. That channel isn’t as important anymore. It’s easier to get around that channel; it’s easier for groups with like interests to assemble themselves without the intervention of a middle man, which is unfortunate for those folks who’ve made a living being quality, competent middle men.

It’s perfectly aligned to beatblogging because it’s all about how groups form. And around every beat there’s an invisible group of people who care about that beat and know about that beat. No matter how good a reporter you are pre-Internet, you were only going to be able to know a tiny fraction of those people. When that community can form around a Web site and form around this blog, the communication doesn’t have to be the reporter seeking out a source blindly or going to the same place you always go to. Now the sources have the ability to come to you and that really ties back into what Shirky is talking about.”

Two more after the jump…

Brian Reich, Managing Director of little m media and author of Media Rules!: Mastering Today’s Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience.

The Book: “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives” by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser

“The book is not about how to master social media or the technologies that will fuel engagement and change in the future. Rather, Palfrey and Gasser dig deep into “the future opportunities and challenges associated with the Internet as a social space,” as well as “the legal and social ramifications of the Internet with regard to the generation of “Digital Natives” born after 1980. I don’t think technology is the answer and too much of the attention in social media is paid to the tools, the channels and the like. For example, Twitter is not, itself, important — it is what short-form/micro communications represent about our society and how our communications are changing that we must understand. A first and important step to understanding how to engage, educate, mobilize and social effectively is to understand the audience you are trying to reach. Few books do as good a job as Born Digital at breaking down how digital natives communicate and what their expectations are for those who try to communicate with them.”

Howard Rheingold, author and critic on the topic of the social, cultural and political implications of modern communication media.

The Book: “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” by Fred Turner

“Fred Turner makes a strong historian/journalist/media-analyst case that the Whole Earth Catalog and several of the counter-cultural ideals and driving forces that merged in it, and especially the WELL, set the scene for personal computing and Web culture. Any number of cyberculture historians and theorists have come up with their analytic frameworks for understanding the importance of the WELL, but Fred Turner is the only one who really got it right.

He invokes some ideas that come from the sociology of science. He speaks about “network forums” that bring together networks that had not intersected before, in ways that lay the groundwork for people to create new sociotechnical forms. The Whole Earth Catalog readers and contributors, and later the WELL, are examples of network forums that brought together the people who were interested in self-sufficiency — an old American tradition that goes back to Emerson’s “Self Reliance” with the old-tech people interested in self-sufficient energy systems like windmills.

It’s not only an excellent historical analysis of the roots of digital culture, but it offers analytic frameworks for looking at social-cultural change. It is also a great example of how someone can go through two primary source materials, seek out people to interview and come up with an explanation of what a particular group of people did 25 years ago — so accurately that those people agree it is a good portrayal. It’s important to understand the dynamics of the historical emergence of web culture.”

Photos: Amazon.com

But for Sterne, who had just received her BA from New York University and was, no doubt, full of that particular brand of youthful idealism that makes problems seem scalable, that didn’t seem like enough. Her belief that “there was no public pressure about Darfur because the public didn’t have a personal connection with the issue” plagued her, inspiring the founding of GroundReport.com in the summer of 2007. An open source global news site that shares revenue with its far-flung network of 4,000 citizen reporters, GroundReport has been called “the Wikipedia of news.” Its professed goal is to democratize the media by making original, intelligent reporting possible for amateurs and professionals alike. More importantly though, the site produces international news at a fraction of the cost of the mainstream media by relying on the locals for coverage.

Though still in its infancy, the start up site has already garnered a decent amount of attention. Early on interviews with CNNMoney.com have since been superceded by features in Business Week, which recently named Sterne one of its Top 25 Social Entrepreneurs. Similarly promising are content partnerships with the likes of The Huffington Post and Mogulus.

Given the journalism world’s recent and widespread adoption of the Throwing Spaghetti At A Wall and Seeing What Sticks, this attention comes as no surprise. Because while the concept of using a worldwide network of reporters to cover international news is nothing revolutionary, GroundReport’s reliance on citizens and its willingness to share the profit with them is something of a new experiment.

The site joins the ranks of comparable start ups like international news site Global Post, self-proclaimed protector of the weak ProPublica, and, in a much smaller way, The Huffington Post, too. By “smaller” here I mean that, on the one hand, The HuffPost and Ground Report are not so much competitors as they are natural partners. HuffPost gathers its content from every corner of the web as it is, making its ongoing content partnership with GroundReport a natural thing. With its new investigative reporting initiative, however, HuffPost could become competition. Aside from the 1.75 million dollar funding, the specifics are unclear, but word has it that citizen journalism is expected to account for some of the investigative project.

Less directly in competition is ProPublica. Though the January ’08 born site shares GroundReport’s soft spot for the underdog, the former is peopled by journalism vets like founder and former editor of The Wall Street Journal Paul Steiger. ProPublica is driven by a full time staff of investigative reporters, meaning that nary an amateur writer is to be found on the website, whereas GroundReport subsists on them.

Global Post, too, with its cadre of professional reporters living abroad, maintains a level of professionalism and a scale of pay well above that of GroundReport. A base rate of  $1000 for four posts a month and a 10,000 share stake in the company brings in “journalists who are, from what I could gauge, of a considerably different realm” than those found on GroundReport, says Charles Sennott, Global Post’s Executive Editor and VP.

And yet this lack of professionalism does not phase Sterne, who maintains that the coverage you get from people who are living the stories they’re reporting is irreplaceable. “You get the sort of perspective that a reporter from the states can’t really get,” says Sterne, bent over her laptop at the WeMedia Game Changers conference. She is just shy of 5’11”, thin with brown hair and the sort of cute that makes believing she’s a web journalism geek a little difficult. Until, that is, she continues, talking about the video that she’s streaming from the conference through GroundReport and elaborating on her belief that first hand coverage from the people most affected is the way to go. “Everyone who’s reporting is experiencing these things first hand,” she says. And Sterne counts on this close up view to create public pressure around events like the genocide in Darfur.

But is coverage from the locals enough to turn GroundReport into more than one of many promising experiments vying to solve the problem of hands on reporting in a digital world? Can you get quality reporting from a network of reporters who, for the most part, do not speak English as their first language? Sterne points us towards the Wikipedia-like editing style and quality rating system in answer to this question. “The editorial team can revise any content on the site, a rating system determines what goes on the front page and in our RSS feed, and a flagging system catches copying,” says Sterne, noting that these steps keep the good stuff on the front page and the bad stuff at bay.

While citizen journalism critics balk at the very fact that the bad stuff is allowed to exist on sites like GroundReport, others are more optimistic. “I have no problem with citizen journalism, no worries about the quality. That gets filtered out quickly,” says Charlie Beckett, director of POLIS and author of Super Media: Saving Journalism So It Can Save the World. Far more problematic for Beckett is the tendency on the part of international news sites to, well, “suck.” Plagued by problems of lack of feedback and disorganization, international reporting sites can easily turn into disjointed messes requiring the sort of navigation that few readers are looking to participate in. In this way, GroundReport is ahead of the curve as far as low-funded start ups are concerned. The site’s organizational interface—aka sending the good stuff to the front—disposes of the problem of digging for the read-worthy.

Also on GroundReport’s side are its ridiculously low overhead costs. The aspect of the site that is most often questioned—its complete reliance on untrained citizen journalists and volunteer editors—is also the project’s saving grace as far as money is concerned. GroundReport shares ad revenue percentages based on the quality and popularity of contributors’ articles, which spurs better contributions but also puts a natural cap on the amount that the site will have to pay for each specific act of journalism. Writers succeed only when the website as a whole does.

And while sums like $52.59 for 33 postings look paltry to Americans, they don’t seem so puny to contributors like Kenyan Fred Obera. “I’m not in it for the money, but it does make life better for a poor journalist like me,” he says. “It’s enough to make participating worthwhile for some of our contributors in developing countries,” says Sterne of GroundReport’s Third World correspondents.

“It’s just the right thing to do,” says Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, of sharing revenue with contributors. “If it turns out to help produce better journalism, all the better. But it starts with doing the right thing by people who are doing the work,” he continues. Aside from being the right thing to do, the revenue sharing is also a major piece of what makes GroundReport worth looking at. It keeps the reporters in the most hard to reach areas feeling appreciated without setting hard and fast salaries that the site may not be able to meet.

Like most start up ventures though, GroundReport’s growth is hindered by a lack of capital. The site launched in 2007 with seed money from Sterne’s own saving and family contributions. Since then, cash prizes like those GroundReport won at the German “Open Source Meets Business” conference, content partnerships and advertising have helped defray the costs, too. At this point, the site is paying for itself, something few global start ups can claim. But the money being generated is enough to continue and subsist, not grow to the extent that Sterne would like. “The logo is probably the only thing I’m happy about right now,” she says of the amateurish appearance of the site. But until GroundReport sees an infusion of capital, the visual mock up of a more professional looking site will remain nothing more than a mock up.

The site is called See.Click. Fix and it functions much like a digital version of reporting something through 311 (non-emergency problems). With this site though, previously reported issues are visible and you can add to them, track their progress, and know that they haven’t been entirely lost.

I’m not sure how much it will do in New York where the problems reported aren’t so numerous and the bureaucracy is enormous, but the site’s already had some success in terms of smaller towns subscribing and legitimately using the site to monitor public space problems. Anyway, here’s to hoping that my bitching about blocked bike lanes will do something…

I’m excited about what they’re doing with their investigative reporting project, but mother of god, the most common sense, boring list ever. Honestly, it almost makes me question citizen journalism in general the the HuffPost expects to be receiving posts from people who don’t even understand that web content should include links and may be edited by, well, editors. Is this just the HuffPost assuming we’re idiots or are wannabe journalists actually dumb enough to need these reminders?

Photo: Flickr CC

What is the potential for beatblogging in an increasingly networked world?

I think the key to it is understanding what we mean by the beat, what that area is. What is the cue, or the subject? And that’s changed. In the past, it was kind of obvious. It would be your neighborhood…and if it was a subject, it would be basketball or medicine. But as they get more hyperlocal and specialized, in a way they get more complicated.

If people want extremely hyper-local sports reporting, they concentrate on just one team. When you see networked journalism, they often plot new genres because the public doesn’t think the same way the journalists do. They’ll do comedy and the football club, they’ll be talking about sex on the same forum, they’ll be talking about really specialist discussions about injuries that those football players have got. I always think that’s amusing because you get joe public sometimes w/out an expert view, but sometimes there’ll be joe public who happens to be a sports physiotherapist and has a very expert view, and they comment on that blog.

What I’m saying is it’s all very complicated. Even on the hyper-local level, how people define their community is much more sophisticated than it used to be. When you think of geographical, it’s obviously much harder because people who live on separate street may have nothing in common with each other. I live in north London, where my kids go to school and have a lot of interests in common with people whose kids go to the same school. But my football team is in East London. I was born and brought up in South London where I have a lot of connections. And my wife’s from West London.

What is hyper-local for me? It’s difficult to define. But once you do define it—and I think, increasingly, non-professionals are much better at this than professionals—it’s a very rich, creative thing.

Social networks are brilliant for defining “what is a community?” cause they don’t worry about he definition, they just get on and do it.

When do you think the major shift occurred and how is the potential different now?

At one level, it hasn’t occurred yet. Beatblogging, hyper-local, hasn’t really taken off in a way that has huge capacity. There’s a lot of failure out there, partly because it’s difficult to define and partly because it doesn’t have a lot of momentum. The danger is that, by it’s very nature, something that becomes hyper-local or very specialized may not move much, in journalism terms, anyway. You know, the story doesn’t change much and it can be quite static. So I don’t see it necessarily as something that kind of replaces mainstream journalism. I think it’s additional.

Where it’s ahead of us already is, say, in the social networks, where people are creating areas of interest already. It took off when Facebook took off. In a way, some bloggers have been very, very good at turning themselves into hyper-local beat reporters. The political ones especially. You can be a blogger who covers a beat.

I’m a blogger who covers a very specific beat. It’s called academic journalism or something in Britain. And I have a very small network of people who come to me because they think I will report on stuff. I’m kind of that person. On the other hand, it’s been difficult for me to scale that up or turn it into a richer network. I don’t put a lot of effort into crowd sourcing and the other techniques. That takes an effort, and that’s sort of what Jay Rosen and Paul Bradshaw are very good at looking at.

Bottom line is that it does take effort. It doesn’t necessarily blossom by itself.

How will the beat reporter’s world change as the network potential of the web expands?

I look at social networks and I see people creating what are reporting communities without ever worrying about it. It’s only the journalists who worry about ‘well, is this a basketball personality blog or is it a celebrity basketball blog?’ Just do it and see what people are interested in.

It’s two directions of travel on this. One is from the audience. One of the problems at the moment is that people aren’t sure where to find this kind of information. Once you set up a hyper-local blog, how do you tell the people in that locality that you’re there? It’s partly about usage and media literacy and sheer volume and scale. You’re kind of shouting in an empty room. The people are in the next room and they don’t realize. You’ve got to bring them into the room.

From the other side, the information disseminators, the journalists, we are still struggling to change the model from the broadcast model—the idea that if we shout something loudly enough, people will come and get it, they’ll sign up for subscriptions and come to us. We are still struggling with the online technologies such as collecting meta data, understanding traffic flow. You know the stuff about putting Brittney Spears in every story, that’s kind of the level of our understanding at the moment. And I think that’s really changing. I’m not a technologist, but that really fascinates me.

If you look at stuff like the social network marketing applications on Facebook. Of course, the money grubbing bastards always lead first, they develop quickest. And the journalists have to get the same tricks, which is listening to what people are saying online and then getting in on those conversations. So that way you can find the people and what the subjects are. That way of understanding the meta data intelligently is only just evolving, really. The use of people’s day to day data about people will be a really valuable resource for making journalism proximate to people’s lives.

*Photo from CharlieBeckett.org, a site worth reading.

DePaul University grad student Craig Kanalley wants to make opinion quotes and eyewitness accounts easier to wrangle. His site, BreakingTweets.com, uses Twitter and a group of editors to format news stories in an unusually interactive way that provides quotes for other journalists.

It starts with an editor, who writes a one or two paragraph explanatory intro about the story, then come the tweeters, who send opinions, analysis and eyewitness media. Editors cull the best and most insightful tweets from the bunch, as well as occasionally interjecting with their own updates.

“I think a well done Breaking Tweets story can be just as valuable as a longer form traditional news story on the same subject,” Kanalley said.

More importantly though, it’s a model you can use for your own blogging. Whether your blog is geographically anchored or just subject-specific, the Breaking Tweets method translates to hyper-local blogging easily. Use it to enmesh your own authorship with reader opinion, to collect media and organize the endless comment stream that is Twitter.

Below you’ll find an interview with Kanalley about where Breaking Tweets came from and how his team is making it work:

Lily: Where did you get the idea for Breaking Tweets?
Craig: I first thought of doing something like Breaking Tweets on Nov. 4, when I saw the amount of people twittering about Election Day and how Twitter can serve as a place for breaking news, very personal feelings and eyewitness accounts.

I didn’t actually follow through on the idea until Jan. 31, 11 days after I attended Barack Obama’s Inauguration in D.C. That event got me even more excited about Twitter. And following what people in Australia were saying about the Australian Open on Jan. 31 put me over the top — I finally created the Breaking Tweets blog. It was meant to be a personal blog at first but quickly grew into something more. We’ve had 35,000 page views since the site launched and visits from 116 countries.

L: How is your team set up?
C: We have 28 content editors. I found them either from school or through Twitter. Almost all of them are journalism students — 27 of the 28 are, from across the country. There’s also a foreign correspondent.

L: Tell us about Breaking Tweets tweeters. Where do they come from and how do they contribute?
C: Some parts of the world use Twitter more than others, and that’s our biggest hindrance. But in the future, we’d like to develop affiliate sites for specific cities and provide just tweets from that locale. For now, it’s mostly people commenting on events, but we are growing a network of followers through Twitter from all over the world and have been utilizing them as tipsters to get closer to the scene.

Eyewitness accounts can be tough because, like I said, not everyone has Twitter. Plus, you have to be careful to verify what people are saying. We do the best we can with that and at times we have to discount a certain tweet because it doesn’t appear to be authentic.

L: Do you have editors available 24/7 to monitor authenticity?
C: Since one of our editors is overseas in Scotland, and I tend to stay up into the wee hours of the morning, we pretty much do have editors available 24/7…ready in case something major breaks. We have a system where a story is read by at least one senior editor before it goes up. But we don’t obsess over breaking news — we like to get things right and verify material first.

We want to make this a journalism project first, so people who at the very least understand how to construct a story in a journalistic way — essentially how to model stories after what we post now. It’s basically a 5-10 sentence set up and then into the tweets with occasional updates from editors.

L: What benefits does basing your program in Tweets as opposed to your own entry fields afford you?
C: Tweets are great because they are short, quick and, in many ways, they are just like quotes that journalists would often use anyway. They are instantaneous and, as a result, they work well with news in general, also across a wide geographic scope.

People also like that they don’t have to spend a ton of time going through stories. So for now we’re weeding out tweets that aren’t as compelling and trying to limit to the best ones. Four to six tweets is ideal. It gives enough flavor for the story, especially if those tweets are from the region the news is occurring.

L: How does Breaking Tweets fit into the greater framework of journalism/new media?
C: It’s a new type of journalism. I haven’t seen anyone doing anything remotely close to this besides Global Voices, but they focus more on blogs. Breaking Tweets changes the practice because it focuses on editing the Web. There is so much clutter out there but it takes it all and seeks to make sense of it. I think a well done Breaking Tweets story can be just as valuable as a longer form traditional news story on the same subject. It gives a different glimpse into the story.

People all over the world are commenting on news stories and in some ways reporting themselves. They just need someone to sift through all of that mess and create some meaning through a filter that gets rid of the spam and nonsense.

L: Where do you see the site going in the future?
C: The format currently used to treat tweets as quotes has worked well, and that’ll probably be at the core of whatever we do. But in the future, our content editors will be interacting more with users through Twitter to probe for more information and eyewitness accounts.

We also want to develop our niche content better. I’d like the site to be useful to people who aren’t particularly interested in world news. We’re growing, and we’re launching niche affiliate sites soon: Breaking Tweets Sports and Breaking Tweets Entertainment. We want our comments to go through the roof, for people to be active and to tell us, “hey, give us some forums and more places to have the discussion.” Our focus is always content first and the people will come.

*Initially posted by me on Beatblogging.org

Mark Josephson’s suggestions weren’t particularly shocking, either. But they are fairly astute and all in one place, so let’s give it a look. Josephson puts all his hope in three pillars: aggregation (duh), curation (well, yes) and networking (shocker!). I’ll reserve my bitchiness for a moment though for an analysis of what Josephson means by each pillar. His explanations are less trite than his single word pillars would imply.

Aggregation- not just linking, copying, all that crap. It’s all about “dynamically sourcing every single local piece of content and organizing by discrete neighborhoods — or even specific addresses — gives the kind of targeted and timely local coverage that print newspapers never dreamed of attempting,” says Josephson. This should be obvious, but clearly isn’t when you look at the often random junk that so many blogs link to.

Curation- Kind of like aggregation, but classier. Don’t just link to any related post, make every link count. The Times has been practicing this linking method for a while, at first far too stringently, linking only within The Times site to maintain their editorial voice. Everyone on the web knows that you need to be less stingy with your links, but you don’t need to go giving them away for free to every fast and loose blog that occasionally agrees with you.

Network- I almost don’t even want to talk about this one, because the thought of touting the importance of social networking feels passe to the point of death by boredom. I will say only this: new media is about individuals developing ridiculously specific networks like never before. Without the contacts that these groups bring, things will fall apart.