David Cohn is the founder of Spot Us, an online journalism marketplace. It's a fascinating experiment where people who want stories done will post the idea, journalists will offer to do the story for a price, individuals can pledge to get the story done. Spot Us will will get the story edited and distributed to local media.

The digital generation is coming of age, and changing everything. So says John Palfrey. He studies the "digital natives" among us, and he says they'll transform everything from our politics to family life. His book is "Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives."

Also today, Wired reporter Jeff Howe explains how businesses "crowdsource" work that individuals used to do. His new book is "Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business."

David Cohn, 26, acreditamente piamente nisso, a que deu o nome de jornalismo financiado pela comunidade (ou simplesmente "crowdfunding journalism", na língua original). Cohn está torrando uma bolsa de US$ 340 mil no Spot Us, a sua resposta para a crise do jornalismo tradicional.

A idéia não deixa de beber um pouco no jornalismo representativo preconizado por Leonard Witt, e já abordado neste Webmanário. Tão pouco é inédita: ao lado de Jay Rosen, respeitável professor da Universidade de Nova York e um dos maiores pensadores do novo jornalismo, Cohn tocou, no ano passado, o Assigment Zero, projeto com o mesmo conceito que não decolou _a prova é seu site, ainda no ar, que apresenta um cenário de terra arrasada que evidencia a ausência de pessoas dispostas a bancar reportagens.

Desta vez, Cohn _bolsista da Knight Foundation_ conta com o "modelo Obama" para fazer sua idéia acontecer. Explico: ele se espelha nas milhares de pequenas contribuições que o candidato do Partido Democrata à sucessão de Bush amealhou no decorrer da campanha. "Eu não sou Bill Gates, mas posso doar US$ 10", disse ele ao New York Times.

Algumas questões importantes se colocam de antemão: estaria o público disposto a pagar por jornalismo? Alguns estudiosos (e experiências anteriores) já sentenciaram que não. Fosse no Brasil, eu assinaria embaixo a petição dos pessimistas, mas o cenário norte-americano (que inclui uma crise bem mais severa dos meios tradicionais, em especial do jornal impresso) é único e, positivamente, se há um lugar onde esse projeto tem chance de vingar é lá.

Outro aspecto que me preocupa com relação aos planos do hiperativo Cohn: suas reportagens serão publicadas aonde? Inicialmente, apenas em seu próprio site. Um alcance, convenhamos, minúsculo se o que se pretende é mobilizar autoridades e conseguir mudanças efetivas no status quo do cotidiano.

Cohn diz que está buscando parcerias com outros veículos para dar maior dimensão ao material produzido por sua equipe de jornalistas. Mesmo que não consiga, e sendo otimista, é crível pensar que a exposição num único site na Web seja capaz de, dependendo da profundidade do tema, sensibilizar a quem de direito.

O problema mais grave do jornalismo financiado é a possibilidade de o poder econômico estabelecer uma agenda própria de investigação jornalística. Contra isso, Cohn diz que seu Spot Us limita a contribuição individual a 20% do custo de uma investigação, além de escolha rigorosa das pautas a serem seguidas. Nada que não possa ser burlado por uma coisa chamada dinheiro.

A idéia, porém, é interessante e merece ser acompanhada.

So what's next? Spot Us will be a nonprofit to test a new business model - community funded journalism.

What I'm going to build will be a marketplace for journalism. News organizations (old or new media) can use the space to support their most enterprise projects. Community and civic organizations can come together, take a stand and let the media know what is being under-reported. Independent journalists can get paid to do what they do best - report on local stories, all while building up their portfolio.

My Next Assignment, Hopefully A Lifelong Contribution to Journalism ,David Cohn

Knight News Challenge 2008 Winners Press Release

2008 Winners

]]> http://kathyrhodes.wordpress.com/?p=270 Sat, 03 May 2008 13:16:23 +0000 kathyrhodes http://kathyrhodes.pt.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/currently-unavailable/ I got pushed. Pushed into doing something I was skeptical of. I'd held back, acted with reason and practicality. Then I succumbed, and it was my mother who made me do it.

It's not the first time she pushed me. I recall the summer Ronald Reagan was running for president. My whole family was spending the day at the Choctaw Indian Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Reagan was scheduled to fly in by helicopter and make a speech. The area was cordoned off by big 18-wheeler trailers, presumably for crowd control and protection. As we leisurely strolled by, my mother apparently recognized what was going to happen on the other side of those trailers and pointed to the space about four feet high under one. The next thing I knew, two hands landed on my back and pushed -- shoved hard! -- along with a guttural command, "Go Kathy. Go under." She pushed me under the trailer ... and followed. We were in. My two tiny kids were out. I'd abandoned them, leaving their grandfather with a stroller and a little hand to hold. Mom and I watched the presidential candidate land, waved flags, clapped and cheered with the crowd, snapped pictures, and listened to the speech. After it was over, she said, "Aren't you glad I pushed you?"

This time, the mighty push had to do with a book purchase. I don't usually need a push; I buy books all the time. But this one was expensive. There was only ONE left in the whole wide world. I'd wanted it for years as a resource for my writing, at times when several copies were available at used bookstores. I almost put it on my Christmas list last year as a suggestion for my husband, but it cost $54 then, and I didn't want to ask for a book with that steep of a price. The title kept coming up in my research, though, so I searched for it online again. ONE COPY AVAILABLE. $100.

I couldn't bring myself to do it. Not that much money for a used book. Ne-ver.

I mentioned it to my mother during a phone conversation, for shock effect. She grew up during the Great Depression.

"Do it," she said. "Get it! Buy it! Order it! I'll even send you the money." She sounded like one of the creatures in "Goblin Market." Come buy, come buy. I stretched my gleaming neck. I felt her hands pushing against my back, clawing, scratching -- even though she is 400 miles away -- moving me up the stairs, to the mouse, to the bookseller, to the cart ... and click, it was done. I bought it -- Where I Was Born and Raised by David L. Cohn.

Page 12. "The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg." This quote I have used in essays and in my novel -- this book, containing the earlier published God Shakes Creation, is the source.

Cohn goes on to explain that, of course, the Delta doesn't begin at the Peabody. It does begin at a point south of Memphis and end at a point north of Vicksburg. The Peabody symbolized the wealth and culture of Delta white folks who used to go to Memphis to eat, shop, rub shoulders in the Peabody lobby with the rich and famous. Catfish Row "is a typical gathering-place of Negroes. Here are no marble fountains, no orchestras playing at dinner, no movement of bell-boys in bright uniforms. Tumble-down shacks lean crazily over the Mississippi River far below. Inside them are ... the music of guitars, the aroma of love, and the soul-satisfying scent of catfish frying to luscious gold-brown in sizzling skillets."

The book is old; its two parts were written in 1935 and 1947 by one who grew up in the Delta and left, then returned to offer an adult re-evaluation of Southern life -- there in that place like no other, a place of complexities and contradictions and a history the rest of the country never understood, a history its own people didn't understand and were/are slow to grow out of. The most southern place on earth.

I got my hands on it. I can't wait to get my teeth into it.

I have enjoyed Vice Magazine for a while. Now VBS.TV carries on the heritage of Vice in the form of online video content. (NOTE: not all the content is for the faint of heart and some is NSFW) Recently PSFK has had several posts about the future of TV, including this one with David Cohn from Vice Media. One of the points he made struck me:

We at VBS need to find those stories and tell them in a way that no one’s doing. That’s the reason to exist, a voice and point of view that no one else is covering.

-David Cohn, Vice Media

When I think of other online sources that get a lot of attention (YouTube, Google, Vimeo, Facebook, Even Current.TV) they are all giant funnels for information that inundate you with massive amounts of content. And by massive amounts I mean, the good and the crap. VBS.TV I value because they not only produce their own content, which gives it a certain level of quality, they also have a point of view to the stories they cover. Regardless whether I agree or disagree with their take on the subject I am always happy to hear it. In a world where everyone is distracted and so busy they can barely make it in the rush from meeting to meeting, it seems the way a media channel can stand out is creating their own voice and providing quality content rather than aggregate the content of others. Really, you could likely do well as a media channel even if you aggregate content from others, but make sure they all maintain the consistency of voice along with the quality and rich content.

Bonus
In honor of earth day be sure to check out the Garbage Island series on VBS.TV Great Work!

That was the gist of the advice I received Tuesday from David Cohn of NewAssignment.net and editor of Beatblogging. org, one of the experiments I mentioned earlier. We talked by phone about what's working or not with Beatblogging, various platforms for social media experiments and community building.

Cohn says one of the biggest challenges for the 13 participating reporters is meshing social media -- blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- into their regular workflow. They've set up their networks but have yet to learn to effectively use them. See his related blog post, on one such struggle for Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired: http://www.beatblogging.org/blog/beat_blogging/index.html 

"Beatbloggers have created a network, but it's like an ant farm," Cohn says. It's "an experiment to look at through the glass."

He's not especially worried, though. He figures they'll find their way. "We're in a Model T stage. Who knows what will work."

And newspapers? Can they be "saved"?

"Journalism will find a way to be sustained," he says, "but that's not a product. That's a process. Newspapers might, but they'll be completely different."

Cohn notes there's plenty of room for innovation and that experimental efforts by media companies across the country, from NewAssignment to Gazette Communications, are encouraging.

"I always say it's cheaper and easier to try something than talk about it," Cohn says.

Also, you may not have noticed but I'm trying to put more content up here than I was doing in the last couple of months. Over in the right hand sidebar you can see how many posts I've done in any given month of this blog and I'd like to get that number consistently up in the couple of dozen range again.

Another thing I'm going to start paying attention to is this site Broowaha. It's billing itself as a citizen journalism newspaper, and might end up a good place for me to do some writing of a less bloggish more journalistic sort. David Cohn (one of the Assignment Zero editors) is the editor there and he says they're going to be trying some interesting experiments. I liked being part of AZ so I hope this'll be interesting as well.

My friend David Cohn has earlier suggested that newspapers become less "products" and more "services." Somewhat related is a post from ReadWriteWeb that suggested that turn around to some extent. They would help people not just find information, but also help them be found, such as with advice on attracting an audience for their videos.