Apple’s iPhone is so much of a game changer on the news reporting front that even local media organizations are rushing to accommodate support for both users and reporters.

Knoxville, Tennessee based KnoxNews released their own iPhone application last month allowing users to upload their own reports to a profile hosted via im.knoxnews.com. Each report can be accompanied by a photo and categorized by subject and search tags, which are also chosen by the user.

Please note: this is not a simple news reader for people to check the latest headlines wherever they are. This is an application that is best served as a tool for reporters — citizens and professionals alike.

Only two other applications offer functionality similar to the KnoxNews’ app: the CBS eyeMobile and FOX’s uReport. Of course the case can be made that the Facebook application also allows for instant updates of news, but its not directly affiliated with a news organization.

What’s interesting about the KnoxNews app is how the developers have managed to surpass the large broadcast stations in terms of functionality. Both applications from CBS and FOX are limiting to users wishing to conduct a report due to the components required for submission.

“The FOX application won’t even let you begin the report until you take a picture,” says Senior Software Engineer Ben Henderson of Firefly Logic, whose company was commissioned to do the KnoxNews app.

Henderson and Firefly Logic partner Chris McPherson explained to me in an interview that they wanted to allow the users to decide how to best use the features rather than forcing them into snapping a photo as is the case with the applications from the broadcast media companies.

“What we did was basically take KnoxNews’ content management [system] and extended the functionality to the iPhone,” McPherson says.

Cell Journalist, the company behind KnoxNews’ Content Management system, have commissioned a similar iPhone application for their other clients as well.

If you understood the title written above, skip down to the link, install the script and enjoy your FCC violation-free twitter feed that is safe to broadcast over live television. However, if the headline made no sense to you what-so-ever, then don’t worry. It’s still not that difficult. I can explain how to do it pretty quickly actually:

Rather than explain what each part is, I’ll just cut to the chase. First you should be using the Firefox browser (it won’t work unless you use Firefox). The next thing you need to do is download a Firefox add-on called “Greasemonkey,” [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748]. After that you need to download/install (meaning click a button) a greasemonkey script that adds two new fields under the menu sidebar. These are filters for you to Black-list and white-list certain words or users…all you do is type the word in, then hit enter and that word disappears from your feed temporarily.

Want to remove the filter? Just delete the text in the field and hit enter again or reload the page. It’s great for broadcasting a visual of the feed without the fear of cursewords popping up.

It’s seriously that simple. I just tried it out and it works flawlessly. Here’s the link to that particular greasemonkey script:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/36522

(Just remember to stay hypersensitive to all updates and version changes…like when Firefox has an update, just check to make sure the scripts from greasemonkey are still functional…small price to pay in my opinion)

Arguably the country’s most respected newspaper, the New York Times, along with non-profit site Propublica, have applied for a joint $1 mil grant for their “Document Cloud” entry in in the 2008 Knight News Challenge, according to a Nieman Journalism Lab article. For those not familiar with the aforementioned contest, it has three
core requirements, which you can read about on the official site.

My immediate reaction to the entry was of confusion. Why would a well-known media organization need to apply for a grant that funds good ideas? If you have resources, influence and reach then wouldn’t you already be paid to produce good ideas that would have a positive impact on journalism? NewAssignment.net founder/director Jay Rosen, who shared the article on his twitter feed wondered why the Times was asking for donating a million dollars instead of donating it.

Derek Willis, who works for the NYT, pointed out (via twitter ) that the company is well within the bounds of the contest rules, which do not prevent large organizations from applying. And while he and everyone involved in the Propublica/NYT entry are certainly among the forward thinkers of our profession, as a large company they risk altering the news challenge. I think it’s necessary to point out the differences of a large organization applying for the same grant money as a virtually unknown individual.

Money
So if the Times were to win funding, a fifth of the total dollars allotted would be given to a company who has yet to produce anything innovative enough to lead its industry. Instead it’s the technology companies that have paved the way for better tools. What I don’t understand about the NYT/Propublica entry is that if this was such a good idea, why didn’t the company get behind it in the first place? Also, why wouldn’t they push thru the idea because it will help reporting even if it wouldn’t make money? And if the technology is already built and about to be released as open source, what is the $1 mil in funding for? (I realize this would actually be fleshed out in the second round of the challenge).

To give some contrast to the situation, I asked for $75,000 in funding for my idea with the understanding that the open-source community would be essential in helping achieve the goal of my project. But even if I had requested a million to hire out an entire team of developers, I doubt it would be half as good. The community has to will it into existence along with the vision to improve something — (quality of journalism, life, the world). If I needed additional funding for my project, it’s going to be much more difficult to find it. However, the Times cannot necessarily say the same.

Influence
The chances that a good idea to improve local journalism will come from a single person is rare. But a good idea to improve local journalism from a large organization is really just about as likely. The key difference is that while the large organization has plenty of opportunities to get their own idea off the ground, a single individual can blog about it until their fingers fall off from typing too much and still not get nearly the same benefits as winning the KNC. Individuals NEED the news challenge funding and I’m not yet convinced the same is true for newspaper companies.

Reach
As individual I have laughable level of clout in comparison to the Times. This is somewhat obvious but, considering that I would have to approach several leaders of local media outlets with an idea to advance
journalism, it’s significant. If the Times approaches local media with an idea (any idea), they will almost certainly jump on board because they are the New York Times and it would be an honor to partner with a paper like that on anything at all. On the other hand, if I tried a similar measure without winning the KNC, I’d (probably) get laughed at and shown the door.

I’m not saying that the good folks working on the Document Cloud project for the Times are not capable of producing something that would actually help journalism move forward. It’s ridiculous to even consider that a posibility because (I assume) most of them are tech geeks in addition to being dedicated journalists (and vise versa) . Ultimately, I think they’d be more effective as individuals with lots of contacts through their day jobs than they are as a large organization because they’d get the best of both worlds. What we need out of this contest is more applied ideas, not necessarily more people involved in producing each idea.

Rules, standard practices and policies are all null and void when confronted with communicating the news on a new medium. Such is the case with twitter, the web application that allows users to send 140-character messages from virtually any location with at least a cell phone signal.

News organizations usually try one method for using twitter and it then becomes the standard. While some blast the news just like an RSS feed, others are talking back to their followers/readers.

“I really like the ones on twitter that participate in discussion,” says Gerard Barberi a social researcher who is active in many online communities. “Right now, only Chicago papers seem to be doing that.”

Barberi suggested RedeyeChicago and Coloneltribune were among the better news organization affiliated users that knew how to leverage the benefit of discussion in between posting news. The New York Times, which adhered to the RSS feed-like method, was among the worst.

“NYTimes.com used to get on my nerves with their twitter account — 15-20 links dumped at 4 a.m. into the twitterverse,” he says.  “They finally stopped. It was pointless following them.

The Times has multiple account that each feature a section of content, so depending on how you use twitter and how many NYTimes accounts you followed, it could completely drown out the human updates.

“I’m more likely to be responsive to humans,” he added.

But because it’s impossible to define how a news organization should use a service like twitter, I posed the question to my own followers after Nashville’s largest circulated newspaper The Tennessean , started increasing the number of linked stories per day.

From the responses I received, I’ve determined people either prefer to follow only news organizations that participate in an active discussion, or they follow because they appreciate the news being blasted. The noticeable difference between these groups seems to be their familiarity/preference for RSS. The two services are virtually cousins of each other.

Younger users on twitter mostly felt overwhelmed by a huge influx of “dead” messages — messages with no intended desire of a response. But, I really don’t think the age or experience trait holds much weight in this preference. Instead, I’d say it dealt more with how much of your social circle  (friends/family/like-minded acquaintances) used twitter as an essential means of communication.

Again, I don’t think blasting news only through the twitter account is necessarily the wrong use. However, if you have the ability to talk back to your readers and you don’t, aren’t you passing up a great opportunity? 

In the Tennessean’s case, they decided to break the mold by replying to my question with another question: “So what would you like to talk about?”

What, indeed.
—

Below were some comments I found interesting:

gmarkham    @TChed I’ll follow a news org headline feed on Twitter. Rarely click through, though.

erincubert    @TChed I was following a ton via mobile … and then WSJ went nuts, so I had to turn them off … BBC too. I like sleep more than headlines.

sgurne    @TChed I only follow one, just to know what’s going on. any more would be information overload.   about 12 hours ago from web  in reply to TChed

ChristineTatum    @TChed Interesting question. Please let me know what people tell you. And yeah, I do follow news orgs even if they “blast“ only.

Christian Grantham of NashvilleIsTalking helped orchestrate a local milestone in television broadcast news when he convinced executive producers at WKRN in Nashville to use Twitter as a way to interact with viewers on air.

He just posted a blog about his experience, which is definitely worth checking out if you’ve ever been curious about integrating the mircroblogging service into your news gathering:

I’ve been using Twitter for a few months and have wondered whether there was enough critical mass use to introduce it as a tool for anchors and producers to interact with viewers in real time. Then I saw CNN jump head first into on-air use. At first, CNN anchors seem too reluctant to even mention the word “Twitter,” sorta laughing at how strange the word sounded. It only took a couple of weeks before the anchors were saying it confidently, perhaps after using it and seeing its immediate value.

Read the full reaction here.

Well before newspapers hit a decade of exclusive Web-only coverage, they may want to take a look at how they archive articles.

Rarely are instances of breaking news done as one official report. Instead there could be a first version that is a few paragraphs explaining the situation, perhaps a quote. Later in a second version this news “snippet” might be updated with whatever was available at the end of the daily news cycle. Then, the following day a more complete third version is published and — lets say there is an error so corrections need to be made. You’re now up to four versions of the report.

My guess is that some multi-version reports are archived separately and others are updated and archived without any acknowledgment of draft history. Logic would dictate that a final version (with corrections) should be the only one necessary to archive for the sake of clarity. On the other hand publishing everything could provide an absolute record of information as it happened. But are either actions really the best policy?

I highly doubt most publications on the web have given much thought their digital archiving policy.

While there aren’t many news organizations old enough to anticipate what the future will hold for past sins of sloppy archiving, an examination of Wikipedia may give us some clues. The user generated encyclopedia is hardly sloppy in its archiving, but issues of filtering out inadequate content are on the rise. Those that have discrepancies with Wikipedia’s policies are creating alternatives to fill in the gaps.

A good example of this is deletionpedia, a site comprised of 60,000 deleted entries from the English Wikipedia. The site’s rational for its actions states: “Who knows what might be lost to the world if we lose anything? And besides, storage is cheap!”

Ars Technica Senior Editor Nate Anderson wrote a great post in which he states:

“…such sites are part of a new, “never lose it“ approach to information collection. Certainly this has tremendous benefits, but in terms of sheer information overload, does it also have costs?”

It’s a question newspaper publishers should be asking their staffs now rather than later.

The future of news gathering will serve the same purpose as it does today, but changes to the way its gathered might be best interpreted by King Kong — at least that’s the rational of Nir Ofir, founder of iamnews.com, an open newsroom platform that aims to give both publishers and reporters easy to use tools for covering the news.

Iamnews, which won the People’s Choice Award at the TechCrunch 50 demo pit, uses a cartoon version of the giant ape to explain how the platform works.

“’Journalism,’ ‘newsroom,’ and ‘platform’ are big scary words. We wanted people to understand the functionality apart from our big manifesto,” said Nir responding to a question about the colorful illustrations in an e-mail. “Oh..and they are cute.”

Much like the unconventional artwork, the idea for iamnews was born from a fictional story Nir was writing and not a desire to fix newsrooms from the inside out, according to an open letter on the Web site.

I imagined a reality in which the average citizen could be part of an innovative news network… whose reporters are citizens from all over the world, who participate in the creation of news. They would be directly connected to iamnews editors who allocate news assignments… I soon began to realize that this was not the world of science fiction, but something which could be done with today’s technology.

While the site’s name may suggest something metaphorical, it’s actually very straightforward. Publishers post assignments, reporters are invited provide coverage back to the site using several different methods and existing services. That information is then edited and eventually published. [The illustrated version does a much better job.]

Despite a busy schedule, Nir responded to some questions about iamnews and why he believes a new platform for gathering news is necessary:

Could you tell me a little bit about your background?
Prior to iamnews, I co founded blogTV.com, a LIVE social broadcasting platform that enables anyone to create his own TV channel on the web and on the mobile. I am an active entrepreneur in the Israeli and global Social Media space, specializing in the design, development and marketing of products and services in the field of communities and user generated content.

What kind of formal journalism experience do you have?
I had took some journalism classes during my bachelors degree in communications and media.

Why will iamnews.com work better (meaning, gather better news) than traditional mainstream media?
I think iamnews is a great workflow management tool for crowd-sourced news since it is an open platform. I think that for it to work better, iamnews needs to create a trusted network of reporters that will increase the discoverability of news. I also believe that by letting the audience be a part of the news creation process, News outlets can create a relationship with their readers. Relationship is everything for a new media brand.

Same question, but financially, how will iamnews.com succeed where traditional media is failing? (Will publishers pay reporters through the site?)
Well, this a really early stage for us but, we are planing to help publishers to distribute their content and by that create revenue to all the contributors.

Can any organization start using iamnews.com to find reporters to produce content?
We are planing to launch this kind of a solution by the end of the year.

Why is it important to allow multiple methods of submitting news?
We believe that users do not need to change their digital communications habit for becoming reporters on iamnews. Instead of forcing them to use our tools, we are pulling their content and pushing it to the news assignment hubs.

What limits does the site have for reporting news on a local, smaller level?
We do not have any editorial policy for when news starts and when it is ends. iamnews is a tool in the hands of the publishers. We are learning new things about what publishers want to do with this tool every day and we will try to crate the best simple functionality that will fit their needs.

For more information on iamnews.com’s progress check out their blog.

A new video series called “Porkbusters On Patrol” is putting relatively inexpensive cameras into the hands of local reporters in an attempt to monitor unnecessary government spending.

Using a Flip Video Camera, reporters go to the site of governmentally financed projects to show what was produced with large sums of federal tax dollars.

The first video puts the spotlight on a federally funded project from Tennessee and is well worth the two minutes of viewing.

Don’t have a camera or even the funds to buy one? The lack of hardware does not exclude anyone from doing quality reporting for the video series, which was announced by Eyeblast.tv and the bipartisan Porkbusters coalition this summer.

According to K. Daniel Glover on Eyeblast.tv’s blog:

“If you want to join our army of citizen reporters but don’t have a camera, you can get one free in exchange for your work. Just request a Flip video camera when you e-mail your story ideas.”

Journalists get a new tool to use in enhancing their reporting and a much needed spotlight is put on pork barrel spending. Seems like a win-win situation.

When you’re wielding the power to influence society, you’ve got an obligation to deliver the truth at all costs. My fellow journalists, we’ve got to do better.

I’m talking about the amount of hyperlinks found in an average news article, or rather the lack there of. We now have the ability to deliver entire documents in a report, without clouding the understanding by making it more complex. Instead of just listing sources, we can provide a colorfully underlined road map pointing directly to the information itself. We have these tools, and yet, we do not use them often enough.

The utter lack of outbound hyperlinking in traditional written reporting struck me as something more than the usual annoyance after reading a comment from Muhammad Saleem (Mu) on my twitter feed. Mu pointed out the “arrogance” of a particular article on technology news web site Ars Technica because it did not contain a single outbound link. There were links to certain pieces of information in this article, but they were all pointing to previous reports done on their own site. Still, that’s a large leap forward compared to straight text with vague attribution.

Mu, who leads the discussion of social media on a variety of sites [MuhammadSaleem.com Read/WriteWeb and more] was kind enough to elaborate via instant messenger: “Until 6 months ago, [Old media] didn’t link to anything at all. It was like the paper copy pasted online.” And he’s absolutely correct.

Even now, with newspapers rigorously adapting practices from a decade ago, its still absurdly common to read articles on the Internet that behave no differently than a printed copy. Not even simple references that list the URL itself are not functional hyperlinks. This kind of behavior is one part lazy, two parts “arrogance” (as Mu said) — and not just because they failed to add a link. The people inside those editorial staffs would much rather point out your poor verb tenses and ill-placed commas than insert HTML code inside of a story, which takes time and effort since you’re writing content for two separate mediums.

“It shows that you’re drawing from other sources that agree with you, gives you credibility. Plus you have to attribute all non-original research,” Mu says. It’s difficult to make an argument against this kind of logic, since it would strengthen the information and in turn the reporting itself. Yet, somehow traditional editorial staffs have demonstrated that it’s unnecessary to bother with linking to outside research. “That’s their Achilles’ Heel, they just don’t know it yet.”

It’s improbable that a journalist with little to no prior knowledge of a subject he or she is writing about, will be the most qualified person to deliver a report by relaying information from unseen, unexamined and unheard sources. And while there is something to be said for this process serving the free press astoundingly well during the printing press era, it would be down right arrogant to assume future reporting will remain credible without attributing a link for every piece of information.

A typical practice for most editorial staffs is to gather up all the reporters about once a week to pitch/assign future stories. It’s an essential part of the work schedule because it keeps everyone in the loop about what’s going on and also provides an opportunity for feedback from the collective intelligence. For the most part this part of the work week has remained exclusive to staff members and editors, with the other members of the news staff listening in silently.

I won’t pretend there isn’t value in keeping the editorial meetings exclusive, but that is in regard to sensitive stories and probably feature pieces. Everything else should be wide open to others in the community. I’m talking about literally taking a web cam and broadcasting weekly editorial meetings in real time streaming video. The most effective way to accomplish this task is by using the service offered for free by Ustream.tv.

How to do it
Editors should create a budget that does not include exclusive feature stories or other sensitive pieces requiring specific finesse. Split those budgets into categories: education, Crime, City governement, etc. Each of those sections can be turned into individual channels on Ustream thus allowing a somewhat manageable group of outsiders to participate through the live chat that is up during the meeting. It’s not as if you are catering to the crowd, but you aren’t ignoring them either. There is much more value in acknowledging your community than there is with keeping it exclusive for the sake of tradition. Experiment with what works. (Certain categories of news may translate better to the Ustream process than others.)

Why It Should Be Done
Streaming the budget meetings will give the community a tangible location in which to meet the reporters and hear what is being done, what isn’t being done and why. The “scooping” era of journalism on the internet is valid only because people do not care where they get their news from and by the same token most people are weary of trusting newsblogs like they do a newspaper [my own opinion]. Soon the only thing that will matter is a dedicated community. Ustreaming makes the community a part of the newsroom. Don’t look at it as a peeping tom looking over your shoulder as you do your job, think of it as multiplying your newsroom by 10 in every department.

Live, Streaming Accountability
Opening up the staff meetings to members in the community will improve journalism by adding a much needed dose of accountability into the mix. When members of the community are watching the newsrooms they’ll start to identify who the editors are and what departments they’ve been charged with managing. At the same time, those people will start identifying the beat reporters. No more faceless news reports. Streaming the budget meetings will strengthen journalism and make each of us work harder to not only report the news, but rectify any errors made.