Center for Citizen Media

Nokia is working on WidSets, the ability to use web services on mobile phones. This is extremely impressive stuff.

Jane Genova: Playing In Traffic – Social Media Ain’t for Unreconstructed Old Print Folks. Look forward to plenty of road kill. The speed associated with social media requires specialized skills. Those skills only come from hands-on experience.

The speed mainly requires an appropriate level of skepticism, and an ability to not pull a trigger before aiming. Is this so hard to get? I wonder.

The Knight Foundation’s Gary Kebbel writes:

We’re seeking your comment, and that of your readers, on a multimillion dollar request for proposals that we are calling “The Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge.”

The request will be issued in September, but now we are seeking ideas that will help us shape the rules of the challenge.

If you had millions of dollars to give away to improve news and community, how would you do it?

(Note that our emphasis in this challenge is on physical communities, not virtual ones, except as they create or strengthen physical communities.)

How can cyberspace improve life in physical space?

We’re seeking organizations, companies or individuals that will do in the 21st century what the Knight brothers’ newspapers did in the 20th century. Those newspapers helped define communities. They described the happenings and defined obstacles and opportunities. They created a sense of place by creating a shared experience. They did it with integrity and insight. They created a critical mass of thinking and feeling. Their news was the glue that held communities together.

How can information, news and journalism perform those functions in the 21st century? That’s the Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge.

You can read more information and join the discussion here.

I’ll be posting a response soon, and encourage you to weigh in as well.

David Isenberg (a colleague at the Berkman Center) deconstructs a dramatically flawed Washington Post editorial on network neutrality, observing, that the Post, “like the blind man and the elephant, gets a few things right, a few things wrong and draws the wrong conclusion.”

Journalist Chris Carey is partnering with Mark Cuban on a new project that offers great promise and raises some serious questions.

Chris writes, in an e-mail:

I’m leaving the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the end of this week to launch an investigative business journalism site, Sharesleuth.com. The blog-style news site will be devoted to exposing stock fraud and corporate malfeasance.

My partner (and the site’s sole investor) is billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, whose holdings include the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association, HDNet, HDNet Films, Magnolia Pictures, 2929 Productions and the Landmark Theatres chain.

The site will go live next month and will feature my reporting, aided by stringers and a global network of amateur researchers. We’re going to spotlight questionable companies and activities, and dig deeply into the people and stories behind them. We’re going to take a multimedia approach to the tales, using the Web, Cuban’s television network and his movie-production capabilities.

One of his companies, HDnet Films, was behind the documentary, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” which came out last year.

I’ve been a business reporter for more than two decades, at the Post-Dispatch, the Indianapolis Star, the Orlando Sentinel and the Messenger-Inquirer in Owensboro, Ky. I was a finalist for a Gerald Loeb Award in 2005 for a series on global stock fraud (www.stltoday.com/stockfraud) and spent the 2005-06 academic year studying the criminal subculture in the securities industry as a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan.

Cuban alluded to this project in a posting late last month — Why Journalism Matters — on his site. I’d missed this posting. It includes the following item:

Business is an easy place for me to start because the fraud and sithlord wannabes uncovered can not only create great stories of interest for the webite and HDNet World Report, but also allow me to buy and the sell the stocks of the company. A journalistic conflict you say ? Not any more. Not in this world. It will be fully disclosed and explained. This site is for the profit of its owners and we will buy and sell stocks that are discussed, before they are made available on the site. So make any decisions based on this information accordingly.

This makes me a bit uncomfortable, because the journalistic conflict is real. It will inevitably raise questions about motives. In the traditional journalism world, it would be basically unthinkable. (UPDATE: The Houston Chronicle flagged this on the top of its story about Cuban’s venture.)

But in the more diverse journalistic ecosystem that’s emerging from the world of blogging and other conversational media, advocacy (for financial and other reasons) is part of the process. And in that world, transparency is essential both for the people doing the journalism and the audience.

The Wall Street Journal’s great articles on options back-dating are trustworthy in significant part because I know the paper’s ethics policy prevents the journalists from profiting on what they learn. Yet the tipsters who tell journalists can profit, unless they’re corporate insiders.

All of this gets complicated fast, however, in a world where the one role blends into another.

Former Journal reporter Foster Winans went to jail for his role in tipping brokers to stories he was about to write about various companies in the paper. How will sharesleuth.com be different? One difference, I believe, will be in the direct disclosures, which were missing in the Winans situation — where it was argued that hiding the dealing was the actual fraud (never mind the journalistic violations).

I will read sharesleuth.com avidly, and will do what I can to help them bring citizen reporters into the mix. But Mark Cuban and Chris Carey should understand that their site will have some credibility issues to deal with. And the audience will need to refract what it reads through the lens of their disclosures.

I’m heading to Helsinki for Aula 2006, an event that brings together some interesting folks to chat about the direction of media and technology. More to come…

AP: Fines to Rise for Indecency in Broadcasts. Congress gave notice to broadcasters on Wednesday that they would pay dearly for showing material like Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction,” passing legislation that would multiply indecency fines 10 times.

Congress also gave notice — as if we needed it — that rather than deal with the real problems this nation faces (such as drunken-sailor spending that will bankrupt us sooner or later) it prefers to deal in trivial matters.

What Congress is also ensuring with this action is that anything remotely interesting will end up on satellite, cable or the Internet. Is the plan to kill broadcasting? Not a bad way to go about it.

But the affront to free speech is dramatic and alarming. The First Amendment is apparently beyond the understanding of our lawmakers. Shameful.

Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft for a company called PodTech. Interesting move, to say the least. Congrats to Robert, who’s doing the right thing.

David Cay Johnston writes a commentary for the Newspaper Guild, saying:

(O)nly a fool would think that newsrooms will escape a trend that has already ended the careers of aeronautical engineers, software designers, auto workers, machinists, call center workers and growing legions of other Americans. Indian firms like Hi-Tech Export solicit work from proofreading and copy editing to polishing novels and rewriting technical documents into plain English.

Journalists have been cheerleaders, for the most part, for the outsourcing wave. Meanwhile, other economic factors have threatened their employment much more. The professionals have much more to worry about now than Indian workers.

Brian Akre of General Motors’ PR staff says he tried and failed to get his company’s side into the New York Times after GM was slammed (I think with some accuracy) by Thomas Friedman. In “The Ban on `Rubbish’ in The New York Times,” published in GM’s FYI blog, you can read Akre’s account.

If it’s accurate, Times is guilty of transcendent arrogance. It’s the classic gatekeeping move by an outfit that seems to edit letters to the editor more carefully than some of the journalism that appears in the news pages.

Of course, GM has one thing in its favor: The Times counter-productive paid-subscription service for online column reading means that many, many fewer people saw the Friedman piece in the first place.