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In Chicago this week, I had a conversation with fellow News Challenge winner David Cohn (creator of the very cool Spot Us community-funded reporting system) that got me thinking. David is skeptical of relying too much on advertising to fund journalism. He has various reasons for this which he can explain much better than I, and he has some good points.

One thing that we can both agree on 100% is that advertising that is not fair and honest is incompatible with the goals of journalism. But where we don't completely understand each other yet is over the idea of what advertising actually is, and what it can be.

So for the purpose of this post, I'm going to intermittently substitute the problematic term "advertising" with the phrase "business marketing." Regardless of how you feel about the ability of advertising to fund journalism -- and I will be the first to agree that the current models are clearly crumbling, especially for newspapers -- I don't think anyone will disagree that businesses have the need and even the right to get the word out about their services.

The whole basis of business marketing, of which advertising is one piece, is the need for a business to deliver messages about its products and services to a target market. Marketing is essential to the very survival of a business -- something I've experienced firsthand in launching and promoting 10 niche-focused community sites and publications from scratch in Bakersfield. We tried everything from Google Adwords and flyers, to having booths at events and reaching out to local bloggers.

Every one of those activities cost time and money, which is to say that they all cost money since my time was paid for by The Bakersfield Californian. When we continued to invest in those activities, site traffic and usage blossomed, and when we didn't it started to fall. That was business marketing, and that's really what I mean when I use the term "advertising."

But there's another aspect to business marketing: people like to see ads for products they like, and some even pay for that privilege. Over the years, I have noticed that many journalists cringe at the fact that lots of newspaper readers see advertising as valuable content, especially in the Sunday paper. The core of this audience for newspapers is women who look for specials and coupons, but the phenomenon is not limited to them. I know quite a few guys who look forward to the weekly Best Buy insert so they can stay up to date on new tech toys and HDTVs and get them when they go on sale.

The reality is that we're all consumers and we like to buy things that speak to our needs and tastes. For that reason, we respond positively to business marketing that matches our interests, and we ignore or respond negatively to messages that don't match our interests -- or messages that annoy us. A good example of the latter is the "Are you overweight?" Facebook flyers that disproportionately target middle-aged women, and "Get in shape" ads that target 36-year-old guys like myself. Yes, I feel fat and need to get in shape, but reminding me of that doesn't make me feel good about your business and, in fact, makes me want to ignore and boycott you.

So why are so many journalists who confess to being distrustful of advertising talking about how to improve it -- including people like me who came out of newsrooms and pure online community? Because the print display advertising that used to fund the journalism product is faltering. At a Knight Digital Media Center leadership seminar I spoke at last week, I heard one online newspaper editor say that he'd gone as far as getting approval to hire his own ad salesperson within the newsroom. He was willing to do that because he wasn't satisfied with the track record of the advertising department, whose failure to grow revenue was requiring him to lay off reporters.

The larger context for this trend is that news organizations are dependent on advertising to continue to produce good content. But the advertising model that's still paying most of the bills is out of synch with the direction that online business marketing is going. It's difficult to see how locally-sold online advertising can fund journalism when advertising is so much cheaper and efficient on the Internet. If you want to learn more about why, read up on media consultant Vin Crosbie, who points out that eliminating a printed paper would remove 90 to 95 percent of a newspaper's revenue but only reduce expenses 40 to 50 percent -- thus putting a newspaper in even worse financial shape.

But the bigger issue is that Internet advertising is just too dang good for the good of journalism. When you compare the cost of a Google Adwords marketing campaign, in which you pay only for the 1% of people who are actually interested in what you're selling, to that of newspaper ads, in which you also pay for the 99% of people who most likely won't want to buy your stuff, the end result appears clear. Relying solely on targeted local online advertising as it exists today -- and especially the Google model, which works great for Google due to its global customer base but yields less for one geographic area -- is not going to cut it. We need new models, and more of them, to continue to fund the audience-based activities that drive our local value. 

That's what leads people like David to come up with novel ideas like Spot.us, where individuals in a community volunteer to fund specific stories because they think they're important. And it's also behind the idea of Richard Anderson's Village Soup, which charges advertisers a set monthly fee for the right to publish messages about their products and services to a local community, and also publicly converse with a community. The LJworld Marketplace does something similar by charging a monthly fee for enhanced business profiles. We plan to follow that path in Bakersfield with enhanced profiles in our Inside Guide. (The only reason we haven't done it yet is because it's taken much longer than expected to build a directory of 26,000 businesses in town -- if you're considering such a directory, don't underestimate how much time it can take to get it right).

Printcasting will pursue a hybrid revenue approach. I will be posting more about this as our ideas start to take shape, but the underlying principle is to make it easier and cheaper for local businesses to get their messages out on the street in community-produced print publications than is possible with the local newspaper. We're doing this not just to make a buck, but also because the health of local businesses is important to us. If you think advertising is evil, think about how you feel the next time your local bookstore goes out of business because it couldn't compete with Amazon, Borders and Wal-Mart. Efficient, targeted local marketing is absolutely critical to the survival of the local franchises that help define our communities.

We know that around 60% of businesses in almost any city can't afford to place ads in the daily newspaper -- what's now referred to as the "long tail" of advertisers -- but they can afford the rates of our 6 smaller niche print publications. You would think that online ads in niche products would be perfect for them, but we've found that online is still a hard sell (this is also seen nationally, with only 22% of small businesses marketing online in any way in 2006/2007, according to Intuit's Steven Aldridch. Many also prefer the smaller publications because they reach a more defined audience.

One of our goals for the end of Phase 2 of Printcasting (September 2009) is to have at least 100 niche publications that are produced by the community and printed on home printers. In addition, the Californian will print and locally distribute a subset of those that show the most promise in exchange for the right to sell additional ads into them.

Our vision is to make local niche advertising as easy as posting a blog entry, or posting something in Craigslist. We'll give them a way to type in very simple messages that appear in both the PDFs, and the versions we print and distribute around town. They'll then choose the publications where they want their ad to appear, or let us choose publications that match their target demographics, and their messages will automagically be turned into very nice-looking display ads. It's similar to the approach of Village Soup, but with some back-end magic that makes these messages look great automatically in printable magazines.

Why spend all this time making ads look great in print, using online tools? For all the talk about ads on Web sites and even cell phones, nothing is more powerful for a business in a small local community than seeing someone walk in the door with a printed coupon it paid for.

Are Printcasting ads, and Village Soup conference-room-floor style marketing feeds, and Spot Us tip jars going to save journalism? I'll answer that right now: no! Because not any one of these approaches alone is going to come close to replacing the millions of dollars in local ads that a typical printed newspaper produces. But I'm fairly certain that each one of these efforts will tap into new revenue streams that the daily newspaper has never gotten before.

It will require new innovations like these, plus many, many more, to preserve the news function of local communities. I think the fact that more of us "content types" are working on such ideas says a lot. We care so much about quality local journalism and community information-sharing to put ourselves out on a limb and experiment with new models. I hope that all of us would agree that the time has come for more true innovation in revenue to come from the advertising departments at newspapers (and from without). If you have such an idea, I urge you to submit it to the 2008/2009 News Challenge.

It's my sincere hope that our successes, failures and resulting iterations inspire more people from all disciplines to not just discuss, but actually do something that answers the question on everyone's mind: How will we continue to pay for all this journalism?

I recently took another look at Organic City, a project launched in 2006 to provide residents of Oakland, California with a place to listen to and share stories about happenings in their respective neighborhoods or to take audio and video tours of the city - all created by locals. The stories are tagged to specific locations in the city via a Google map, and the site also offers a special mobile version allowing stories to be uploaded and downloaded via a cell phone or other mobile device.

Organic City is one of thousands of locative media projects created over the last several years as participatory media and location-based technologies collide in new and interesting ways. Organic City is certainly not exceptional in its use of locative media or the selected technology, but its community storytelling approach is indeed something special - the underlying assumption being that stories by and for local people are important and worth hearing and sharing. It is a slightly different assumption that drives projects like Story Corps, which rely on shared experiences and universal emotional connections as opposed to geographic proximity.

Another apparent assumption (or a presumption on my part) around Web and mobile-enabled hyperlocal storytelling projects is that people actually want to hear the local stories of friends and strangers. And that once a locative story sharing service is made available it is only a matter of time before it will catch on and "earballs" build in the form of increasing participation and audience. It is this second assumption that I wonder about. In other words are people listening (locally) and do they care about what other people in their neighborhood want to share in the way of personal stories and anecdotes? Another more crass way of putting it... is there marketplace enough to justify more efforts aimed at local storytelling?

I ask this question because Organic City, for example, does not appear to have taken off. The site has been around a couple of years and has apparently not seen much new activity since the spring of 2007. (Note: this may be because not enough people know about the site or because it is no longer being actively managed.) I wonder if other geographically relevant "man on the street" storytelling and tour sites have gotten any traction. And I don't mean local news aggregators, citizen journalism, or professional tourism projects. I mean people who are sharing and swapping stories as if they were sitting around a campfire or leaning over a neighbor's fence - not engaging in intentional journalism. Think of a kind of informal digital storytelling to place.

At the end of the day, despite the fact that we all love stories and participatory media is hot, does hyperlocal sharing go beyond local news, the classifieds, Google maps, and advertising?

Maybe I am asking the wrong questions? Perhaps the local aggregation and sharing of stories should not be viewed as a buy and sell commodity that is measurable and gains value by appearing high up on a Digg ranking. Maybe the fact that we can more easily share stories is good enough in and of itself, without needing to assess click through rates and business model potential.

But that still doesn't resolve the central question of whether there is an appetite for local storytelling. And it doesn't begin to scratch the surface of an important and related question: Can an online or mobile medium do word-of-mouth storytelling justice? Can it help to create community? Can it (or should it) offer us something of value that we don't already have?

Every political campaign, whether local, state or national, is a battle of competing narratives. The role of the media in general - this includes editorial, advertising and in the case of hyperlocal news/social sites conversation - is to serve as vehicles for the competing narratives. Candidates attach themselves to these narratives and voters choose.

The conversation on Paulding.com, a hyperlocal media site, was decisive in the local primary election in July 15th with the site being credited as being a key influence in the landslide victories of three candidates that rejected incumbents, including a well-funded two-term incumbent commission chairman who ran the most expensive campaign in county history.

Consultant's conventional wisdom challenged

Two weeks ago I wrote here about the role of political consultants in local races. In that piece I mentioned how the incumbent county commission chairman was using a well-funded negative campaign in an attempt to win his third term. That campaign sought to define his relatively unknown opponent as a mega-developer who sought election primarily to grease the wheels for his private real estate ventures.

I mentioned how those allegations were largely an exaggeration of the consultant but that historically, with no other media around to care, much less correct such communications, such tactics were highly effective. The question was whether the presence of an active hyperlocal news/social site where conversation about the mailers was a topic of discussion could counter and neutralize this proven strategy.

I'm happy to report the direct mail negative campaign formula for victory was handed a notable defeat in Paulding County, Georgia. With that defeat is the understanding that a hyperlocal web site with reach in the 30-40 percent range is a more powerful tool in defining the narrative in a local market than targeted 'negative' direct mail.

So how did the challenger accomplish this task and, in the end, overcome a relatively solid record of accomplishment on the part of the incumbent?

First, the incumbent's record of progress is one that in most places would make his effort at re-election almost assured. Indeed, earlier this spring the conventional wisdom was that the Chairman would easily win re-election.

On its face, his campaign narrative was solid. Essentially it said, "Look at my accomplishments, what we're doing right now, I'm running for the right reasons; my opponent, a mega developer, is running for the wrong reasons (self-interest)." For a litany of his accomplishments, here is a video of the Chairman at an early March Chamber meeting presenting his State of the County address.

So what happened?

It is important to know that Paulding.com was helpful in the 2004 re-election of the now defeated chairman. He had used the site to create a narrative that characterized his opponent in that election cycle as one motivated by revenge against his ex-wife, a high-level county employee.

The chairman was accepted on the site and, with 1376 posts, was an active participant on the site from September 2003 through roughly July 2006. The self-proclaimed "Chair dude" ceased posting in 2006 because of unrelenting challenges by several folks who felt they were stuck personally with the bill for political favors he, as chairman, had performed for his benefactors.

With the Chairman now absent from the site, the posts of these individuals and others were less focused on him. Instead, their cynical commentary reinforced the well-established (in the south) narrative which paints a picture of mega developers gaining advantage by mega-marketing through their bought and paid-for good-old boy public servants. The group of gored constituents was so successful in establishing this narrative that the chairman's consultant sought to use his superior resources to cast the challenger as the 'real' Boss Hogg representative of the 'robber-baron mega-developers.'

And that was not a faint hope. The challenger, who holds a real estate license, is the older brother of mayor of the county seat. His family owns a 400-acre parcel that was zoned for over 900 homes in 2006 and had developed a subdivision in 1987. In short, he was vulnerable to the charge of being a mega-developer.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that the challenger advertised on Paulding.com (the incumbent did not). The incumbent also reached out to the group of gored constituents, two of which were personal friends and one, a long-time volunteer on Paulding.com. Indeed, the chairman's decision to not advertise on the site as well as allegedly block it from the county's administrative computers, was also taken as a personal challenge.

Paulding.com decisive in closing days

The belief is that this race remained competitive until the final two weeks. Two events changed that.

First, an email memo from the county's administrator suggesting a tax increase was in the offing and the county was seeking a waiver from a state law to postpone that announcement until after the primary election was leaked. Posters on the site suggested the chairman was being disingenuous by hiding a tax increase and Paulding.com's local news video program included comments from upset residents on that topic.

At the next commission meeting one of the interviewed citizens confronted the Chairman about the video in public session and was told that he was being played for a fool.

The video showing that exchange came across as him abusing a citizen who had the audacity to asked him about the leaked email memo. A member on the site created a YouTube video of that exchange that was viewed 1,300 times (mostly in topics criticizing the on the pcom). That video caught the eye of the head of a state ethics organization who was so outraged, he presented a litany of allegations against the Chairman the Friday before the election. Those orchestrating that presentation sought but failed to get Atlanta TV coverage but the coverage in the Paulding.com's weekly newscast was viewed some 1,200 times before election day. Here is that news video.

The result was the decisive 70-30 landslide with the challenger defeating the incumbent.

Site had impact in other ballot contests

However that wasn't the only landslide. A poll started on July 1 on the site was predictive in all cases including the other "landslide" races. (Pcom's poll predicted a 77-23 outcome in the chairman's race which was decided 69-31.) The only outcome not predicted was the six-man sheriff's race that polling on the site suggested would be forced into a runoff. (Our poll still had the eventual winner, who avoided a runoff with 50.38 percent of the vote, polling strongest with 44 percent.)

Only one incumbent won the night; that being the coroner of 16 years who won with 65 percent of the vote. (Pcom's poll predicted his victory with 59 percent). The two other incumbents, both schoolboard members, lost. In the one race where there was little buzz and the Pcom community predicted that winner with 52.4 percent of the vote compared to an actual 51.9 percent margin of victory. In the other, the incumbent was active on the site under an anonymous user ID (supporting the status quo including a somewhat unpopular defense of the commission chairman.) The challenger, who was public with a political membership, was simply more active, more well liked and while she held a 4:1 lead in the Pcom poll she ultimately won with only 61 percent of the vote.

Bottom line

Bottom line is that political contests are contests between competing narratives. In a pluralistic society - whether local, state or national - no person, politician, consultant or publisher controls the narrative. However, this case demonstrates that the community that surrounds a news/social site like Paulding.com can have greater influence on that narrative than hitherto acknowledged.

That the "campaign chest" used to create Paulding.com over the course of the past five years was smaller than the campaign chest of the incumbent chairman in this election cycle is one of those things I'm still pondering.

Every political campaign, whether local, state or national, is a battle of competing narratives. The role of the media in general - this includes editorial, advertising and in the case of hyperlocal news/social sites conversation - is to serve as vehicles for the competing narratives. Candidates attach themselves to these narratives and voters choose.

The conversation on paulding.com, a hyperlocal media site, was decisive in the local primary election in July 15th with the site being credited a key influence in the landslide victories of three candidates that rejected incumbents, including a well-funded two-term incumbent commission chairman who ran the most expensive campaign in county history.

Consultant's conventional wisdom challenged

Two weeks ago I wrote here about the role of political consultants in local races. In that piece I mentioned how the incumbent county commission chairman was using a well-funded negative campaign in an attempt to win his third term. That campaign sought to define his relatively unknown opponent as a mega-developer who sought election primarily to grease the wheels for his private real estate ventures.

I mentioned how those allegations were largely an exaggeration of the consultant but that historically, with no other media around to care, much less correct such communications, such tactics were highly effective. The question was whether the presence of an active hyperlocal news/social site where conversation about the mailers was a topic of discussion could counter and neutralize this proven strategy.

I'm happy to report the direct mail negative campaign formula for victory was handed a notable defeat in Paulding County Georgia. With that defeat is the understanding that a hyperlocal web site with reach in the 30-40 percent range is a more powerful tool in defining the narrative in a local market than targeted 'negative' direct mail.

So how did the challenger accomplish this task and, in the end, overcome a relatively solid record of accomplishment on the part of the incumbent?

First, the incumbent's record of progress is one that in most places would make his effort at re-election almost assured. Indeed, earlier this spring the conventional wisdom was that the Chairman would easily win re-election.

On its face, his campaign narrative was solid. Essentially it said, "Look at my accomplishments, what we're doing right now, I'm running for the right reasons; my opponent, a mega developer, is running for the wrong reasons (self-interest.) For a litany of his accomplishments, here is a video of the Chairman at an early March Chamber meeting presenting his 'State of the County' address.)

**So what happened? **

It is important to know that paulding.com was helpful in the 2004 re-election of the now defeated chairman. He had used the site to create a narrative that characterized his opponent in that election cycle as one motivated by revenge against his ex-wife; a high-level county employee.

The chairman was accepted on the site and, with 1376 posts, was an active participant on the site from September 2003 through roughly July 2006. The self-proclaimed "Chair dude" ceased posting in 2006 because of unrelenting challenges by several folks who felt they were stuck personally with the bill for political favors he, as chairman, had performed for his benefactors.

With the Chairman now absent from the site, the posts of these individuals and others were less focused on him. Instead, their cynical commentary reinforced the well-established (in the south) narrative which paints a picture of mega developers gaining advantage by mega-marketing through their bought and paid-for good-old boy public servants. The group of gored constituents was so successful in establishing this narrative that the chairman's consultant sought to use his superior resources to cast the challenger as the 'real' Boss Hogg representative of the 'robber-baron mega-developers.'

And that was not a faint hope. The challenger, who holds a real estate license, is the older brother of mayor of the county seat. His family owns a 400-acre parcel that was zoned for over 900 homes in 2006 and had developed a subdivision in 1987. In short, he was vulnerable to the charge of being a mega-developer.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that the challenger advertised on paulding.com (the incumbent did not). The incumbent also reached out to the group of gored constituents, two of which were personal friends and one, a long-time volunteer on paulding.com. Indeed, the chairman's decision to not advertise on the site as well as allegedly block it from the county's administrative computers, was also taken as a personal challenge.

**Paulding.com's News decisive in closing days**

The belief is that this race remained competitive until the final two weeks. Two events changed that.

First, an email memo from the county's administrator suggesting a tax increase was in the offing and the county was seeking a waiver from a state law to postpone that announcement until after the primary election was leaked. Posters on the site suggested the chairman was being disingenuous by hiding a tax increase and paulding.com's local news video program included comments from upset residents on that topic.

At the next commission meeting one of the interviewed citizens confronted the Chairman about the video in public session and was told that he was being played for a fool.

The video showing that exchange came across as him abusing a citizen who had the audacity to asked him about the leaked email memo. A member on the site created a youtube video of that exchange that was viewed 1,300 times (mostly in topics criticizing the on the pcom). That video caught the eye of the head of a state ethics organization who was so outraged, he presented a litany of allegations against the Chairman the Friday before the election. Those orchestrating that presentation sought but failed to get Atlanta TV coverage but the coverage in the Paulding.com's weekly newscast was viewed some 1,200 before election day. Here is that news video.

The result was the decisive 70-30 landslide with the challenger defeating the incumbent.

**Site had impact in other ballot contests**

However that wasn't the only landslide. A poll started on July 1 on the site was predictive in all cases including the other 'landslide' races. (Pcom's poll predicted a 77-23 outcome in the chairman's race which was decided 69-31.) The only outcome not predicted was the six-man sheriff's race that polling on the site suggested would be forced into a runoff. (Our poll still had the eventual winner, who avoided a runoff with 50.38 percent of the vote, polling strongest with 44 percent.)

Only one incumbent won the night; that being the coroner of 16 years who won with 65 percent of the vote. (Pcom's poll predicted his victory with 59 percent). The two other incumbents, both schoolboard members, lost. In the one race where there was little buzz and the Pcom community predicted that winner with 52.4 percent of the vote compared to an actual 51.9 percent margin of victory. In the other, the incumbent was active on the site under an anonymous user ID (supporting the status quo including a somewhat unpopular defense of the commission chairman.) The challenger, who was public with a political membership, was simply more active, more well liked and while she held a 4:1 lead in the Pcom poll she ultimately won with only 61 percent of the vote.

**Bottom line**

Bottom line political contests are contests between competing narratives. In a pluralistic society - whether local, state or national - no person, politician, consultant or publisher controls the narrative. However, this case demonstrates that the community that surrounds a news/social site like Paulding.com can have greater influence on that narrative than hitherto acknowledged.

That the "campaign chest" used to create Paulding.com over the course of the past five years was smaller than the campaign chest of the incumbent chairman in this election cycle is one of those things I'm still pondering.

Visualization tool: ManyEyes from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

At the Future of Civic Media conference at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from
the co-creator of Many Eyes.

Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, described some of the uses for this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don't know" and "I don't recall."

Here's a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and mobile media. You can see it as a tag cloud, as a word tree, or in other ways.

Eleven days ago on this blog, Paul Lamb described a similar visualization tool: Wordle. With a little imagination, one can think of a variety of classroom settings and online news applications for these tools. Both a word tree and a tag cloud can help lead online readers through reports and complex, in-depth series.

Watch or download video in high-quality (H.264) on Ourmedia
Watch video in Flash on Vimeo

No matter the medium, the subjects were the same. Jesse Jackson made some rather unwise remarks about Barack Obama and the New Yorker published a satirical depiction of the Obamas that many thought missed the mark.

The difference came when you looked at how those stories were covered on the web compared to the "traditional mainstream" media. In the end, that was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the controversies because it was illustrative of the pros and cons of both forms of media.

While some in the "mainstream" media struggled with how to characterize Jesse Jackson's off-camera and ill-advised remarks to a fellow panelist during a taping at the Fox News Channel, bloggers and members of listservs immediately began debating whether the remarks signaled, or should signal, a generational shift.

To its credit, The New York Times did tackle the issue of the shifting political landscape in the African American community. Yet, in a move that called into question the piece's credibility, the reporter chose not to quote any African American sources on the subject, opting instead to rely on the expertise of failed presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale's presidential campaign manager and a white professor from Emory University.

The last assured us that harsh words from Jesse Jackson would in no way cause the African American community to turn its back on Obama and then went on to recount an anecdote that left you wondering what it had to do with the Jackson-Obama flap.
"He recalled being in a restaurant in Georgia that was giving away tickets to an Obama event recently; 50 people, most of them African-American, were still standing in line even though the tickets were all gone," The Times told us.

Over on the web, the response, if you knew where to look, gave much greater insight into what people in the African American community were actually thinking. " The 32-year-old blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this on his blog:

My Dad is gonna kill me. But here's Jesse -- on Fox News no less -- telling some other dude that he'd like to cut Obama's nuts out. Nice. I'm not even sure this hurts Obama in anyway. Even Jesse's own son condemned him. There is a certain strain of the civil-rights era that really just needs to have a Jack and Coke and call it a day. It's not that we aren't grateful. We so really are. But this is getting embarrassing...

Both accounts agree that Obama was not hurt by Jackson's remarks. However, it struck me that reading the mainstream media was sometimes like eavesdropping on a conversation strangers were having about you while reading the web was very much like having an important conversation that you are fairly certain no one else is bothering to listen to.

Neither provides the public with the entirety of the information it needs to understand what's at stake and to make informed decisions. And both remind you of how disengaged we can be from each other in this country.

It was that disconnect that the New Yorker got caught up in when it attempted to take on some of the erroneous ideas people have about the Obamas. The problem, as many pointed out, is that it's very difficult to satirize a community you don't have much contact with.

With newspaper and broadcast staffs still between 75 and 85 percent white and the country's population a little over 30 percent people of color, it's not a surprise that there is a disconnect between the journalists and those they cover. Nor is it a surprise that people of color are using the web to create a more robust and nuanced conversation. The trick is going to be in finding a way to bring our separate conversations together, no matter the medium.

"In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in the position of having to play detective" --Walter Benjamin 1938

In the research on media effects, one of the most fully developed findings is what is known as the "mean world syndrome." Research finds that the average citizen grossly over-estimates how dangerous her neighborhood is because she reads the newspaper and assumes that the crime reports are actually a sample of the whole and thus amplifies them accordingly. In practice, a higher portion of violent crimes get reported than most people assume, although there are statistical biases as a result of the under-representation of crimes based on the race and class of the victims.

A larger problem is created by the over-representation of crime and the under-represented of everyday acts of kindness and generosity. The news often shows us people acting at their very worst without allowing us to see those moments where people help each other out. How might this under-reporting of good deeds also contribute to the mean world syndrome?

This is a question which is guiding a new research initiative being launched by Alyssa Wright, an MIT Media Lab student who is affiliated with the Center for Future Civic Media. The center is a collaboration between the Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies Program and has been funded by the Knight Foundation. As one of the co-Directors of the Center, I've listened to lots and lots of proposals for projects that might enhance civic engagement and community consciousness, some good, some bad.

Alyssa's project, Hero Reports, is among one of the very best I've heard. It's practical enough that she's already begun to implement it in New York City. It's provocative enough that it's already begun to attract media interest. It was featured several weeks ago on WNYC The Takeaway. And it is suggestive enough that it has generated great conversations with everyone I've mentioned it to.

Wright says the project was inspired by New York's "See Something, Say Something" Campaign in the wake of 9/11. The campaign sought to solicit everyday citizens in New York City to be on the look out for suspicious activity. They became, in effect, agents in the war on terror. Maybe playing this role left them feeling more in control over their situation. Or perhaps, the act of performing this role left them in a permenant state of alert and anxiety, depending on your perspective. Given how broad the mandate is, it is no surprise that the city received many many reports. One recent advertisement boasted that the government had received 1944 such reports. The New York Times found, however, that very few of these reports resulted in arrests and that the bulk of the reports were directed at brown people whose suspicious activity mostly consisted of being brown in public.

Often, we see what we are looking for and our cultural biases literally color what we see. A campaign that invites us to look for suspicious behavior forces us to scrutinize our neighbors for signs and symptoms of terroristic activity. So, Wright wants us to reverse our lens and look for people who are doing things that are socially constructive. She wants us to find evidence of the good conduct that surrounds us all the time and bring it to greater public attention - the person who goes out of their way to help someone else, the people who intervene to stop a domestic dispute or a violent act, the people who give up their seats on the subway to accommodate a passenger with special needs, the person who cares enough to contribute to the homeless or give directions to someone who seems lost.

She is collecting these reports via her website and she's investigating news reports of everyday heroicism that she reads in the newspaper trying to flesh out a portrait of the ways that her fellow New Yorkers are making life better within their communities. She is also deploying state of the art mapping tools to construct accounts of "everyday heroicism" in different neighborhoods, hoping that they can be read alongside maps which show crime rates and other negative factors, to give us a fuller sense of the places where we live.
Ideally, such maps can become a source of local pride as people work to improve the perceptions of their communities by doing good deeds.

What follows are some of Wright's reflections about the project:

Hero Reports was inspired by the "See Something, Say Something" Campaign in NYC. What disturbed you about that campaign and how do you see Hero Reports as responding to that concern?

Alyssa Wright: I was in New York on 9/11, and I was very scared. In its wake, I saw myself start to evaluate safety with different checklists. And it's still "different" than it was before. Just today, I was on a subway car and there were all these men with luggage. The trigger goes up. "Why are there so many attended packages on the train?" but then I pieced together another, probably more likely, story. It's the end of a 4th of July weekend and a lot of people travel at the end of a 4th of July weekend. And oh right. I'm on the subway
that goes to the airport. It's all about context but after 9/11 and after the anthrax scare in particular, the only context I absorbed was fear.

What got me thinking about a project, were 3 rather contemporaneous events:

1) How people responded to cherry blossoms. When I walked around with cherry blossoms, I was under the radar. I was a girl, white, wearing makeup. And yet I was walking around with a backpack that looked like a weapon. People didn't "see something" let alone "say something."

2) I went to Madrid and learned about March 11 bombings. And I rode their metro. And guess what. They still had cans to throw away garbage (the MTA got rid of most garbage cans, the few remaining are supposedly "bomb proof") AND they weren't surrounded by instructions to say something. I'm not sure when it happened, but I left that trip CONVINCED that because of its history, Spain can recognize the encroaching signs of facism.

But then there's 3) --> the follow-up in the See Something series. "Last Year, 1,944 New Yorkers Saw Something and Said Something." I can't recall the first time I saw the initial 'See Something, Say Something' campaign, but I do recall the first 1,944. It was a bus. And as I watched it go by, I turned and said something to the effect of: "What the f--- is that? What the hell does that number mean?"

And that's when things became a bit comical. Like the farce was over. I mean, are we supposed to be impressed by that number?

These three combined with another lesson from Cherry Blossoms, the power of the Iraq Body Count (IBC) database. I am forever in debt to Hamit Dardagan who started keeping count of news reports. Now that was a number I wanted to see. And that was a number that gave context. They took what already existed and aggregated. Together these left-to-the-archives reports found new "life." A life whose range included my exploding backpack and a Bush speech citing IBC as his body count reference.

I see Hero Reports akin to IBC. Essentially Hero Reports starts with collecting what already exists -- the stories of everyday heroes. That aggregation holds the possibility of for social change, and the seeds for many other projects. Artistic, academic, political, economic.

But back to my thoughts about See Something: The campaign makes me feel caught in the role of civilian detective. In its most dramatic version, they tell me I can be a hero no different than the army solider, engaging with the monster on the ground. But even as I reject that version, my vision and behavior is effected. I'm caught in a dichotomy. Having grown up in the '80s, all of this feels soooooooo much like the war on drugs.

I believe that the MTA had best intentions. If there was ever a time when New Yorkers needed to know that they had agency in the city's security -- that they weren't helpless -- it was after 9/11. Whether intentional or not, the campaign has nonetheless been proven ineffective and most activism done in response has been critical in nature. Its important to have critical work, it has a strong place in the dialog. But because this is a formula that we have been doing for much longer than the war on terror, we also need to build another formula. So Hero Reports offers an alternative approach.

You've used the suggestive phrase, "Everyday Acts of Courage," to describe what
you hope to find through your project. Give us a sense of what you mean by this concept?

Wright: Everyone can be a hero -- cape and all. At its beginning, I was very much inspired by the battles of Terrifca and Fantistico, dueling real life superhero and villain, that roam the streets of New York. They were not waiting around in silence or stirring in anger. They were taking matters into their own hands, and bringing the extravagance of camp into a dialog with the civilian detectives.

In my opinion, the term "hero" has been co-opted by institutions like Hollywood and the government. The firefighter is the hero. Iron Man is the hero. Because these her stories are so enrolling, the everyday person does not need to be heroic. Our myths set it up so that its a loss and not a gain, to get involved. Our misinterpretations of equity (e.g., should I help the old lady across the street, or will she be offended), our laws (e.g., the Seinfeld Good Samaritan Law) and our technologies (e.g., the iPod) create an attention span where we select not to see others. And if we do see, we decide it is someone else's responsibility to help in an accident, someone else job to put out the fire; someone else's good nature to return the wallet.

We are constantly trained not to get involved, and this is gendered and classed in particular ways. And we continue to build systems that support this lack of involvement. It helps explain, why I find myself pissed off at people -- and at myself -- all the time. Why the hell does this man need to spread his knees three feet wide while we're all packed in like sardines? Why the hell does this woman on crutches have to stand against a pole? And why doesn't anyone say anything? Why don't I say? And why when I saw an accident on 14th street, why was my instinct not to help?

Hero Reports proposes to value the opposite.

What is a Hero Map? What do you see as the value of mapping where "everyday acts of courage" occurs?

Wright: In its present iteration, a Hero Map is the positioning of a Hero Report to a GPS location, and correspondingly a neighborhood. This mapping gives the heroic moment a collective memory, which in turns gives the Hero Report political and economic weight.

Typically an heroic moment, particularly an everyday heroism, has a very narrow frame. These moments are not connected to each other, but appear as disconnected blips on the radar. When they do appear, the attention is on the self and the individual. What did it take for said person to take that risk? Would I do the same? It does not reflect other cultural factors like race, gender, and class. This focus on the individual stops any possibility of these moments gaining a larger perspective, and cultural impact. By aggregating them, and mapping them, we give the heroic moment weight. This weight can be placed back onto a community, a cultural bias, and a neighborhood.

For instance, consider the power of the Hero Map in how we evaluate real estate. In the search for a home (aka apartment) one might look at crime rates, school systems, transportation access AND hero statistics. How would this inclusion change our priorities? And our economy? The perspective fits into a more general trend of aggregating neighborhood specific, qualitative data. Rottenneighbors' search for local dirt is directly relates to potential power of Hero Reports. But also sites like Outside.In and Everyblock illustrate this trend of filtering importance through geography. It's as if ranking systems are no longer as useful.

You are hoping to present 1944 reports of civic heroism to the transit authority. What's the significant of that number and how far along are you towards meeting that goal?

Wright: The significance of this number is still being investigated by conspiracy theorists. The MTA claims that 1,944 New Yorkers Saw Something, and Said Something. It's an objectless number that can easily translate into racialized forms of perception. But this objectless number, also makes it useless. And comical. What does 1,944 number mean? In a city of 8 million?

I'm fascinated by the number's lack of context, its classified nature, its broadcasting with pride and perhaps most circuitously its connections to D-Day. (Read here the letter Eisenhower wrote to the troops.)

Because of this fascination, one goal of Hero Reports is to collect the same number of reports into a book and present it to the mayor. How such a book will be curated/edited
is still unclear, but at its heart, it would be a transparent narrative of security.

We are 300 into this goal number, but much more are needed, before we being to edit. (And editing here being akin to what the MTA did. About 4000 New Yorkers actually said something.)

What is the most interesting story you've received so far? What kinds of incidents are you hearing about the most?

Wright: Actually, I find what I'm hearing the most to be the most interesting. A LOT of things happen with taxi drivers. This is significant because the majority of taxi drivers are the skin color (brown) most targeted by this campaign. That means, that while only brown people were arrested in this See Something campaign, brown people are the city's most consistent heroes. This reinterpretation of a community bias I extremely powerful.

Another recurring theme is "proof" that a personal hero story wasn't as impossible as it seemed. From my personal archives, there are two examples of this.

The first is a story about the stones of my engagement ring falling out and the women who dropped on their knees to help find it. For me, this incredible moment is re-enacted with a story from taxi driver and his finding of a passenger's ring.

The second is when on a cold winter night transfer, an out of service train gave myself and a friend a subway ride home. This illegal moment of courage was verified when a transit worker told me of the time when he was out of uniform, and a train picked him up (not written up yet). He concludes with: "See! We're not so mean. We're people too."

Besides the patterns, there are some amazing stories. A number of the more dramatic are covered in the press, and I've taken the content from such news articles. The latest in this category is someone giving birth on a subway platform. Here, the media did cover how strangers came together to make it happen. (Though I suppose something would have happened regardless) Most times, however, the media coverage of these dramatic stories neglect the heroes. For instance, the other week there was a pitbull attack. When I interviewed him, the man had a story about police incompetence and expressed amazement towards a neighborhood. When this man screamed "Help!" it wasn't a Kitty Genovese moment. People came pouring out of their home to help. "And Louis was amazing." Now there's no mention of Louis in the news coverage. Louis doesn't sell.

Part of Hero Reports is to spin Louis's story so that he sells. Turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. That's what Hollywood does, when Hollywood does it well. It is at the heart of novels, theater and comedy.

Its about the framing. Tackling how this sort of everyday heroism can sell is the challenge of Hero Reports. ("Sell" here not being synonymous with "make money," but rather sell meaning, create cultural weight and urgency.) Hero Reports is more likely to fail than succeed. But personally I think technologists (especially at the Lab) should be taking on such challenges and such risk. We're so afraid it's not going to work, that we don't play with failure. And when it comes down to it, not only do most things not work, but by not tackling these questions we contribute to this society of suspicion and isolation.

Huang Qi, the Chinese dissident who had been working to uncover information about school buildings that collapsed during the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, China, was formally arrested last week for illegally possessing state secrets. He had been in detention for weeks.

Huang had already served five years in prison on charges of inciting subversion after publishing many articles critical of the government on his Web site, http://64tianwang.com/. He claimed that he was badly beaten in jail, and suffers headaches and depression.

The parents of children who died in collapsed school buildings have been considered a possible threat to the Chinese government. Their protests and harsh questioning of officials was seen as having a chance to grow into an opposition movement shortly after the earthquakes. The arrest of Huang and other steps taken by the Chinese government have quelled this movement ahead of the Beijing Summer Olympics.

As the person at EveryBlock responsible for working with local government to get more public data, I couldn't help but feel small seeing someone go to jail for reporting on building code standards. Our work focuses, in part, on obtaining building permits, code inspection records, and other public data in United States cities. Huang Qi is a living legend for someone like me.

The nature of this particular case -- involving building standards after a disaster -- also reminds me of the work of Stephen Doig and dozens of others at the Miami Herald after Hurricane Andrew. Their What Went Wrong series was a data-oriented look at building permits, wind speed, and damage reports. They won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service that year "for coverage that not only helped readers cope with Hurricane Andrew's devastation but also showed how lax zoning, inspection and building codes had contributed to the destruction".

It's good for me to take a break from whining about this or that city official not calling me back, or some municipal department that turned down my Freedom of Information Act request, or some agency that provides partial data rather than every field I requested. I've got it made. For some, it really is life or death, captivity of freedom, torture or awards. And there are legends of this business that still live and breathe. Let's try to keep them free, and appreciated, and keep working as hard as we can, wherever we are.

A few days ago I was snooping around Digg when I noticed a popular submission titled The Difference Between Digg and Reddit. I clicked, eager to learn, and was presented with an image juxtaposing two very distinct flavors of user-submitted comments surrounding the breaking news of Tony Snow's death. The first comments shown at Digg offered generic words of respect that you might expect to hear about a public figure that passed away. The top comment at Reddit, however, was a bit more candid to say the least.

The discussion that followed ranged from folks saying "maybe I should join reddit..." to full blown conversations about what works and what doesn't work in user-moderated comment systems. I have since been thinking a lot about what comments on media items are meant for, what makes a good system, and what tradeoffs exist.

The value of comments
I wasn't around when the grand forces decided that comments were a must have for digital media outlets, but the conceptual benefits are pretty clear. From what I understand they provide an opportunity for readers to hear what others have to say, contribute their own two cents, show off their wit, and at times simply vent.

It seems like most organizations think of the feature in those terms, i.e. as a way to engage the individual and get some feedback. While that is nice, the real benefit of a comment system is the way it can drive collective intelligence. To put it in less geeky terms, comment systems should take the voices of a large group of people (the collective) and present what they have to say in a way that spreads knowledge and facilitates wisdom (the intelligence).

In particular a good comment system will...

• Harbor insight - chances are there is an expert on the subject who is reading the article. It is also possible there are readers who are aware of valid points either on their own or via another source.
• Reveal related information - there are probably resources out there where readers can learn more. Users will link to or otherwise share those resources.
• Challenge assumptions - if there are false claims, incorrect citations, rhetorical gaffes, or questionable perspectives in the article or in other comments then someone will identify and address the potential mistake.
• Answer questions - one article can rarely cover everything. Let the hive mind tie up loose ends.
• Entertain - in the same way that there is room for funny headlines and Jon Stewart there is room for funny comments. It makes the whole news experience more enjoyable and increases the odds that people will pay attention.

Common pitfalls
The magical transition from noise to information is where most comment systems fail, but there are lots of reasons why. Here are a few that I could think of:

• Ignorance - there will always be people who are outrageously closed minded or blatantly incorrect. I can't tell you the number of times I have wanted to slam my head against the wall when reading comments on mainstream and local news sites alike. A system needs to account for this and prevent these types of comments from dominating.
• Group think - It is hard for groups of people to tell the difference between "wrong opinion" and "other opinion." This means that systems have to prevent the larger group from taking over the conversation and squelching valid alternate points of view.
• Information overload - Once there are more than about 20 base-level posts it gets hard to take everything in. A good comment system will mitigate this effect and make sure that every useful contribution reaches somebody.
• Inability to respond - without conversation there is no way for individual ideas to mix and match. This means that users sit around isolated and unchallenged. As a rule of thumb, strictly linear layouts like the kind you see here on the IdeaLab won't work in settings with an average of more than four or five comments per item.

A Possible implementation
Like any other piece of technology, there is no "best system" here. A local paper that has never had more than 3 responses on any article might not care much about implementing a robust collective intelligence suite. That being said, a good system on a decently trafficked site will get used.

I want to throw out a few ideas that might help the situation. Some are quite old, some are new, but none are used everywhere just yet.

• Threads - threads are standard on social media sites but they really ought to be standard everywhere. Users should always have the ability to reply to someone directly and have their replies appear in context. This naturally organizes information but it also helps to contain flame wars and hot debates that might otherwise take over and stifle new thoughts.
• Rating - it is difficult to find a perfectly pure way to rate subjective content such as comments. Despite this it is a worthwhile addition even if it is only used to get a general picture about where community stands on the issues.
• Randomization - you can't view all of the posts all of the time, but by including an element of randomness when deciding on which comments to display at the top a system gives a chance to the ones that would have otherwise been lost in the crowd. This will help to prevent the lazy voting feedback loop where the top posts are rated higher simply because they are seen by more people.
• Categorization - it is hard to compare comments. Some are informative, some are funny, some are insightful, some are insulting, etc. In order to account for this you can allow users to categorize them into predefined buckets. This could be combined with rating by having users select reasons why they rated something up or down.
• Burial - some comments simply aren't fit for print. Automatically hiding terrible comments helps clear away some of the noise, but how can you identify them? Ratings may be prone to group think but through categorization it becomes possible to see the difference between bad and unpopular.
• Geotagging - I haven't mentioned geotagging in a while, but comments should absolutely be linked to location. This provides some degree of context to individual statements and also gives a sense of scope when looking at conversations. Furthermore you can apply some of the targeting practices that I've talked about in the past in situations of information overload.

Now that I've said all that I charge you with the task of going out and fixing the way comments work on your sites. Just let me know if you need any help!

(A Street Team '08 video by our Connecticut reporter plays at Election HQ in MTV's Virtual World.)

One of the main components of Knight and MTV's big citizen journalism experiment, Street Team '08, is MOBILE. In our case, the already loaded term has many meanings...our project includes mobile phones, on both the production and distribution sides, and mobile journalists, or those young, carefree reporters-on-the-go with no need for an office, who you keep hearing about.

But mobile takes on another connotation for us, in that our audience (14-24-year-olds)--and the technologies that they prefer--are themselves mobile, portable, ever-moving entities. We also know that our audience often consumes, and even produces, many types of media at once. A Pew study released back in January gave us even more insight into where and how they have been consuming news, in particular:

...most internet users do not go online for the sole purpose of learning about the campaign. Rather, a majority of web users (52%) say they "come across" campaign news and information when they are going online to do something else. This practice is particularly prevalent among younger web users: 59% of web users under age 30 come across campaign news online compared with 43% of those ages 50 and older.

Therefore, it became apparent early on that we must embed our Street Team's work into as many places, and across as many platforms in our audience's media landscape, as we could. There were two reasons for this: (1) to increase consumption; and (2) importantly, to increase awareness and cross-marketing of the availability of that content on other platforms (most notably, on mobile devices.)

Now that we are several months into the project, we thought we had conquered, or at least tackled, most forms of new media. Our Street Teamers' work appears regularly on mobile video carriers, a mobile wap site, several websites, and on-air via MTV's broadcast networks.

Then, a few weeks back, I was approached by an MTV colleague about a whole new area of distribution that, I have to admit, I had hardly considered before: THE VIRTUAL WORLD. I'm talking about something right outta web 3.0 : a 3-D, interactive, virtual reality experience where one can have a "second life" via their avatar persona--a walking, talking, digital version of their better selves--online.

I am pretty tech-savvy, but this is one area that I really have not explored. I can barely keep up with my real life! Who needs a second one? My colleague assured me that our audience, apparently, does. In fact, they are coming to MTV's Virtual World droves. There must be something to it. After all, even CNN has a virtual news world.

So, the THINK Building, a virtual election headquarters of sorts, broke ground in MTV's Virtual World this week, and I must say, it is really cool! Any member of Virtual MTV can drop in to watch Street Team videos and talk politics. Next month, we will begin bi-weekly, interactive meet-and-greet sessions with various Street Team '08 reporters from all over the country (or, at least, their avatars). Meanwhile, one roving promotional crew per candidate will roam the virtual world to get the buzz going about the election, hold rallies for their perspective candidate, encourage dialogue about the election and promote these Street Team '08 events. All of this activity will be building up to a big get-out-the-vote event and party at the THINK Building on the day before the elections.

I am eager to see what kind of response this new phase of our experiment gets from our audience, but I am even more curious as to whether this activity in the virtual world will translate into real action at the polls on November 4.

(A Street Team '08 video by our Connecticut reporter plays at Election HQ in MTV's Virtual World.)

One of the main components of Knight and MTV's big citizen journalism experiment, Street Team '08, is MOBILE. In our case, the already loaded term has many meanings...our project includes mobile phones, on both the production and distribution sides, and mobile journalists, or those young, carefree reporters-on-the-go with no need for an office, who you keep hearing about.

But mobile takes on another connotation for us, in that our audience (14-24-year-olds)--and the technologies that they prefer--are themselves mobile, portable, ever-moving entities. We also know that our audience often consumes, and even produces, many types of media at once. A Pew study released back in January gave us even more insight into where and how they have been consuming news, in particular:

...most internet users do not go online for the sole purpose of learning about the campaign. Rather, a majority of web users (52%) say they "come across" campaign news and information when they are going online to do something else. This practice is particularly prevalent among younger web users: 59% of web users under age 30 come across campaign news online compared with 43% of those ages 50 and older.

Therefore, it became apparent early on that we must embed our Street Team's work into as many places, and across as many platforms in our audience's media landscape, as we could. There were two reasons for this: (1) to increase consumption; and (2) importantly, to increase awareness and cross-marketing of the availability of that content on other platforms (most notably, on mobile devices.)

Now that we are several months into the project, we thought we had conquered, or at least tackled, most forms of new media. Our Street Teamers' work appears regularly on mobile video carriers, a mobile wap site, several websites, and on-air via MTV's broadcast networks.

Then, a few weeks back, I was approached by an MTV colleague about a whole new area of distribution that, I have to admit, I had hardly considered before: THE VIRTUAL WORLD. I'm talking about something right outta web 3.0 : a 3-D, interactive, virtual reality experience where one can have a "second life" via their avatar persona--a walking, talking, digital version of their better selves--online.

I am pretty tech-savvy, but this is one area that I really have not explored. I can barely keep up with my real life! Who needs a second one? My colleague assured me that our audience, apparently, does. In fact, they are coming to MTV's Virtual World droves. There must be something to it. After all, even CNN has a virtual news world.

So, the THINK Building, a virtual election headquarters of sorts, broke ground in MTV's Virtual World this week, and I must say, it is really cool! Any member of Virtual MTV can drop in to watch Street Team videos and talk politics. Next month, we will begin bi-weekly, interactive meet-and-greet sessions with various Street Team '08 reporters from all over the country (or, at least, their avatars). Meanwhile, one roving promotional crew per candidate will roam the virtual world to get the buzz going about the election, hold rallies for their perspective candidate, encourage dialogue about the election and promote these Street Team '08 events. All of this activity will be building up to a big get-out-the-vote event and party at the THINK Building on the day before the elections.

I am eager to see what kind of response this new phase of our experiment gets from our audience, but I am even more curious as to whether this activity in the virtual world will translate into real action at the polls on November 4.

One of the graduate students working with our Center for Future Civic Media at MIT was offended by the New York City "See Something, Say Something" Mass Transit Authority's anti-terrorism campaign. Alyssa Wright felt it had an unhealthy impact on her city, encouraging people to look at each other with heightened suspicion. She read in a New York Times article that the campaign generated 1,944 reports to the police, but apparently none of them had led to any arrests of actual terrorists. There were reports of seeing someone who was wearing Muslim dress, or engaging in Muslim prayers, or some other activity that seemed alien and therefore, suspicious to the witness.

Alyssa decided to try something to counter what she felt was the toxic cultural impact of the "See Something, Say Something" campaign. She recognized that she couldn't eliminate that campaign entirely, because people do want to be vigilant against possible acts of terrorism. But they could also understand strength and security in their communities a different way--as a matter of people taking care of each other, even as strangers. She decided to invite people to start looking for acts of heroism, generosity and civic engagement, however small or fleeting they might seem.

Her "Hero Reports" project (http://heroreports.org) has since won the attention of John Hockenberry's "The Takeaway" morning public radio program, and may be replicated in other cities. Here is how it works: anyone can go to her website or text message her in order to fill out a very brief form citing an act of courage, selflessness or special courtesy they have witnessed or experienced. It can be "challenging a racist stereotype, providing a stranger's bus fare, helping a disabled person across the street, assisting someone in difficulty," Alyssa says. She counts even small "acts of community" as heroic. The forms collect information about the date, time, place and description of the hero report. She is gleaning some of them from first-person accounts, and some from news media accounts. She hopes to collect at least 1,944 reports to match the number of suspicion reports under the See Something, Say Something MTA campaign.

At the end of the summer, Alyssa will present a collection of her Hero Reports to the New York MTA. She also is mapping the reports on her website, so that New Yorkers can see their security in a new way, as a series of places where acts of civic heroism--rather than crimes, which are so often plotted on these news maps--have taken place.

Alyssa's challenge was to design, build and operate the interfaces, website and database. She wanted it to look like the MTA's advertisements. Anyone who wants to contribute a report should do so soon--and if anyone wants to give feedback to Alyssa about the project, she is at apw217@mit.edu

I've gotten a small handful of emails commending me for my fine work on our latest game, the NYC Voting Arcade -- the only problem is that we launched that game in 2004, long before I got here. We did link to it in a story earlier this week about state campaign filings, though, and the voting arcade games are altogether timeless (unless you happen to know that Doug Kellner left the city Board of Elections in 2005).

This has gotten me thinking again about games, gaminess and complexity. Most of our voting arcade games are downright silly. Most of them you can't win. You don't get a score. Each game in its arcade makes its point fairly quickly. And? They continue to be hugely popular.

So what does make a game a game? Are games like our recent budget maze too long and drawn out?

Or, should I be asking not "which game is more fun" but "which game does a better job of engaging the reader/player in civic issues?"

Maybe information and explanation ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems.

What put me in that mind is a special episode of "This American Life" called The Giant Pool of Money. It's a one-hour explainer on the mortgage crisis, the product of an unusual collaboration between Ira Glass, the host and force behind This American Life, Alex Blumberg, who works with Glass, and NPR, which lent economics correspondent Adam Davidson. He used to work for the show he was collaborating with.

If you don't know "The Giant Pool of Money" you should (download the podcast) because it's probably the best work of explanatory journalism I have ever heard. I listened to it on a long car trip when everyone else was sleeping. Going in to the program, I didn't understand the mortgage mess at all: mortgage backed securities were ruining Wall Street firms? And I care because they are old respected firms?

Coming out of the program, I understood the complete scam, why it happened, and to whom. I had a good sense of the motivations and situations of players all down the line. Civic mastery was mine over a complex story, dense with technical terms, unfolding on many fronts and different levels, with no heroes. And the villains were mostly abstractions!

Typical of the program's virtues is the title. It's called The Giant Pool of Money because that is where the producers want your understanding to start. They insist.

Lots of people have noted how effective the program was. Adam Davidson told NPR's ombudsman, "By a very long margin, this is the most positive response I've ever seen to any story I've worked on." I knew there would be fans of this episode listening, so I asked the people in my Twitter feed what made it different and "explainey" to them.

• Mike Plugh: Compression of time and space, like in a classic movie, "a broad network of characters into a few representative types."

• Liza Sabater "Because when Richard finds out the bank lied about his monthly income, it sums up how the loans were just a scam."

• Denise Covert: "Because it used small words. Because it still used big words for those of us who could grasp them."

• Scott Karp: No demonizing. Instead, "why it seemed like a good idea at the time... What were they thinking when they were doing all this? And why did they think it would work?"

• Howard Sherman: It met the ultimate explanatory test. "I could actually explain the mortgage debacle to someone else." He calls it viral: you can pass the explanatory gains on. "It also made me really angry. Their incredulity was contagious."

• "You can almost lust, with the characters, after the money that the idiots have left available." Oh, sorry... that was me, talking on Twitter.

I noticed something in the weeks after I first listened to "The Giant Pool of Money." I became a customer for ongoing news about the mortgage mess and the credit crisis that developed from it. Previously I had skipped over such reports because I just didn't understand the story. Now I did. 'Twas was a successful act of explanation that put me in the market for information. Before that moment I had ignored hundreds of news reports about Americans losing their homes, the housing market crashing, banks in trouble.

In the normal hierarchy of journalistic achievement the most "basic" acts are reporting today's news and providing other current information, as with prices, weather reports and scores. We think of "analysis," "interpretation," and also "explanation" as higher order acts. They come after the news has been reported, building upon a base of factual information laid down by prior accounts.

In this model, I would receive news about something brewing in the mortgage banking arena, and note it. (""Subprime lenders in trouble. Must keep an eye on that.") Then I would receive some more news and perhaps keep an even closer eye out. After absorbing additional reports of ongoing problems in the mortgage market (their frequency serving as a signal that something is up) I might then turn to an "analysis" piece for more on the possible consequences, or perhaps the work of an economics columnist. I thus graduate from the simpler to the more sophisticated forms of news as I learn more about a potentially far-reaching development. That's the way it works... right?

But there are certain very important stories--and the mortgage crisis is a good example--where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of them because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop. I respond with indifference, even though I've picked up a blinking red light from the news system's repeated placement of "subprime" items in front of me.

And on top of that, if I decide to buckle down and really pay attention to "subprime loans go bad" news--including the analysis pieces and the economics columnist--I am likely to feel even more frustrated because the missing master narrative prevents these efforts from making much of a difference. The columnist who says he is going to explain it to me typically assumes too much knowledge ("mortgage-backed securities?") or has too little space to actually do that, or is bored with the elementary task of explanation and prefers that more sophisticated interpretations of the latest developments appear under his byline. Or maybe, as with this story, the very people paid to understand the story barely know how to explain it. That's the opening theme of this column from The New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt, "Can't Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club."

I spent a good part of the last few days calling people on Wall Street and in the government to ask one question, "Can you try to explain this to me?" When they finished, I often had a highly sophisticated follow-up question: "Can you try again?"

And he does give it his best shot. I remember reading this column at the time and feeling grateful that someone at least tried. (He got about a third of the way there.) But Leonhardt's column wasn't displayed or classified in the right way. It should have been a tool in the sidebar of every news story the Times did about the mortgage mess. Instead it was added to the content flow, like this: news, news, news, news, "analysis," news, news, news, "interpretation piece," news, news, news, news, "Leonhardt: explain this to me," news, news, news...

That's messed up. That's dysfunctional. We have to fix that.

This American Life and its brilliant host, Ira Glass, started with the same feelings I had: ill-informed, overwhelmed, and out of the loop about the "subprime" story. But then they mastered it; and it is that trajectory--from drift to mastery--that the listener takes during "The Giant Pool of Money." In a way the star of the story is understanding itself. It struggles but emerges victorious.

What's basic? If the providers of information aren't providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don't deserve those customers and won't retain them. So as we think about new models for news we need to think about expanding that little what's this? feature you sometimes see on effective web sites. That's not about web design. That's a whole category in journalism that I fear we do not understand at all.

The participants of Media Mobilizing Project and Juntos's Immigrant and Low-Wage worker video project have finished their first batch of videos. The videos tell a wide array of stories focusing on health in the community, discrimination against immigrants, the role of unions in protecting immigrant workers and community outreach.

As a reminder, the project is threefold. Through Our City Our Voices we: 1) offer video and web workshops to immigrants, 2) we teamed with the city of Philadelphia to get participants both computers as well as Internet access and 3) we are in the process of creating an online portal (drupal based) which is a home setting for these learners to post their videos but also to discuss their life experiences.

Please check out the first video Does Discrimination Exist Against Immigrant Workers. To see the rest of the videos go to our provisional website.
We are having a screening of the first 6 videos this weekend and our excited as we begin to see this process unfold.

While we have completed two series of workshops thus far, this summer we have two workshops planned, one for Spanish speaking youth and another for English speaking youth and two more courses planned for the fall.

Hi we're Sandra Ekong and Angela Antony, cofounders of The Beanstockd Project.

We write to you from sunny Philadelphia, where we are currently building The Beanstockd Game: a competitive social network which incentivizes environmental behavior in small geographic communities and which, coincidentally, happens to be the focus of this blog.

Why Philly? We're here thanks to DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia-based incubator program which is providing resources and mentorship to help build Beanstockd into an environmental empire! Well, not an empire, but definitely into something great.

To give you a bit of background, we created The Beanstockd Project during our junior year at Harvard after returning to the states from our study abroad trip to Paris. During our 5 months abroad, we adopted habits standard to the European way of life--air drying clothing, using the water intermittently during showers, only taking public transportation. Within only the first 3 months abroad, these habits became normal to us simply from living in a cultural environment where people minimized their consumption. Upon coming home to the states, we found ourselves wondering if there was a way to recreate that positive social pressure in the States...

... and, The Beanstockd Project was born.

We developed our hypothesis, pinpointing three major gaps in the environmental movement, then crafted The Beanstockd Project to address them. These three gaps are:

1. Negative stigma - environmentalism is, despite all the press it's getting, still popularly perceived as hippie or granola OR is mistrusted as a marketing ploy; the movement still does not genuinely resonate with the young adult generation.

2. Lack of accountability - people don't really know the extent of their environmental impact.

3. Lack of incentives - nothing drives individuals to make the more environmentally conscious lifestyle choice when there is a more convenient or economical option available.

Beanstockd targets all three of these problems through media and gaming.

1. Negative stigma: Beanstockd News

Makes accessing environmental information entertaining and appealing to young adults - reporting on the latest in pop culture and current events and including a contextually related green spin to reach readers through the news stories they actively seek out.

2 & 3. Accountability and Incentive: The Beanstockd Game

Allows players in closed geographic communities to internally compete in an environmental competition; the most environmentally-active team wins the competition, a prize, and social recognition. The concept is unique because it approaches environmentalism from an unprecedented direction - it uses entertainment and competition to promote environmentally conscious behavior.

We believe that entertainment, immersion and competition, as embodied by games in general are powerful qualities that can be harnessed to drive an individual or group of individuals to change the way they perceive social issues, to change the way they live their own lives, and to change the world itself. To give you a sense of the power of gaming, Alternate Reality Gaming celeb (yeah those exist!) Prof Jane McGonigal writes "I'm trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032." We're clearly not alone in our thinking.

In the following weeks we'll be updating you on the execution of the concept, asking deep questions like: what makes a game a game?, asking fun questions like: how do we add entertainment value to the competition?, and asking silly questions like: what is the environmental impact of Jamie Lynn Spears' baby?

That's it for now. Tune in next week for more...

Hi we're Sandra Ekong and Angela Antony, cofounders of The Beanstockd Project.

We write to you from sunny Philadelphia, where we are currently building The Beanstockd Game: a competitive social network which incentivizes environmental behavior in small geographic communities and which, coincidentally, happens to be the focus of this blog.

Why Philly? We're currently located here thanks to DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia-based incubator program which is providing resources and mentorship to help build Beanstockd into an environmental empire! Well, not an empire, but definitely into something great.

To give you a bit of background, we created The Beanstockd Project during our junior year at Harvard after returning to the states from our study abroad trip to Paris. During our 5 months abroad, we adopted habits standard to the European way of life--air drying clothing, using the water intermittently during showers, only taking public transportation. Within only the first 3 months abroad, these habits became normal to us simply from living in a cultural environment where people minimized their consumption. Upon coming home to the states, we found ourselves wondering if there was a way to recreate that positive social pressure in the States...

... and, The Beanstockd Project was born.

We developed our hypothesis, pinpointing three major gaps in the environmental movement, then crafted The Beanstockd Project to address them. These three gaps are:

1. Negative stigma - environmentalism is, despite all the press it's getting, still popularly perceived as hippie or granola OR is mistrusted as a marketing ploy; the movement still does not genuinely resonate with the young adult generation.

2. Lack of accountability - people don't really know the extent of their environmental impact.

3. Lack of incentives - nothing drives individuals to make the more environmentally conscious lifestyle choice when there is a more convenient or economical option available.

Beanstockd targets all three of these problems through media and gaming.

1. Negative stigma: Beanstockd News

Makes accessing environmental information entertaining and appealing to young adults - reporting on the latest in pop culture and current events and including a contextually related green spin to reach readers through the news stories they actively seek out.

2 & 3. Accountability and Incentive: The Beanstockd Game

Allows players in closed geographic communities to internally compete in an environmental competition; the most environmentally-active team wins the competition, a prize, and social recognition. The concept is unique because it approaches environmentalism from an unprecedented direction - it uses entertainment and competition to promote environmentally conscious behavior.

We believe that entertainment, immersion and competition, as embodied by games in general are powerful qualities that can be harnessed to drive an individual or group of individuals to change the way they perceive social issues, to change the way they live their own lives, and to change the world itself. To give you a sense of the power of gaming, Alternate Reality Gaming celeb (yeah those exist!) Prof Jane McGonigal writes "I'm trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032." We're clearly not alone in our thinking.

In the following weeks we'll be updating you on the execution of the concept, asking deep questions like: what makes a game a game?, asking fun questions like: how do we add entertainment value to the competition?, and asking silly questions like: what is the environmental impact of Jamie Lynn Spears' baby?

That's it for now. Tune in next week for more...

Over the past few weeks, I've been interviewing candidates for an associate editor's position at the Daily News.

Several things about that process convinced me that the tide has turned, both for our organization and for online news:

• I've been explicit with our candidates about the risks involved. We're a start-up, and it's possible that our grant funding will go away within a year. More than one candidate has told me that, given the state of our industry, he considers working for us LESS risky than taking a job with a daily newspaper.

• More than half of the applicants for this position were journalists of color. This absolutely stunned me, but I suppose it makes sense. Given our business model, and the massive network of citizen journalists that we're building, it's clear that we're a different kind of news organization that's open to new stories and new voices.

• We're attracting applicants that are shockingly qualified. Yesterday, I had the somewhat embarrassing task of running a former New York Times editor through a tryout on our desk. Frankly, I'd consider myself lucky to take dictation for some of these candidates, let alone supervise them.

The fact that we're attracting this caliber of applicant is great for us, but should be concerning to editors at newspapers. As papers shed jobs and stumble forward with little in the way of mission or business plan, the brightest talent will migrate to the online competition.

Back in April, I blogged over at the Citizen Media Law Project about New York's Libel Terrorism Protection Act, which bars the enforcement of foreign defamation judgments unless a New York court has found that the foreign court proceeding provided at least as much protection for freedom of speech and press in that case as would be provided by both the United States and New York Constitutions. "Libel terrorism" (a term I am not a big fan of) describes the practice of libel plaintiffs who pursue claims against American publishers in foreign courts that offer few, if any, of the protections for speech available in the United States. 

New York's Libel Terrorism Protection Act was meant to address situations like that of Rachel Ehrenfeld, who was sued for libel in the United Kingdom by Saudi banker Khalid bin Mahfouz over her book, "Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Funded and How to Stop It," which she published in New York. According to evidence in the case, a mere twenty-three copies of the book were sold in England, but that was sufficient for a U.K. court to exercise jurisdiction over Ehrenfeld. As a result of her refusal to appear or contest the court's jurisdiction, the court entered judgment against Ehrenfeld in the amount of $225,000. Ehrenfeld then sought a declaratory judgment in New York federal court stating that the U.K. judgment was not enforceable in the United States because it did not comport with the First Amendment. Punting on that issue, the federal court certified a jurisdictional question to the New York Court of Appeals, which held that New York courts did not have authority to hear Ehrenfeld's case.

After Ehrenfeld's plight became widely known, the New York legislature passed the Libel Terrorism Protection Act to give Ehrenfeld and others who are sued abroad for libel the right to obtain a declaration by New York courts that U.S. law protects their speech. Governor Patterson signed the Act into law on April 28, 2008.

In a similar effort at the federal level, Senators Arlen Specter and Joseph Lieberman have introduced the Free Speech Protection Act of 2008, which would allow a federal court to enjoin the enforcement in the United States of a foreign libel judgment if the speech at issue would not constitute defamation under U.S. law. 

Yesterday, Specter and Lieberman published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal explaining the proposed law:

Our bill bars U.S. courts from enforcing libel judgments issued in foreign courts against U.S. residents, if the speech would not be libelous under American law. The bill also permits American authors and publishers to countersue if the material is protected by the First Amendment. If a jury finds that the foreign suit is part of a scheme to suppress free speech rights, it may award treble damages.

First Amendment scholar Floyd Abrams argues that "the values of free speech and individual reputation are both significant, and it is not surprising that different nations would place different emphasis on each." We agree. But it is not in our interest to permit the balance struck in America to be upset or circumvented by foreign courts. Our legislation would not shield those who recklessly or maliciously print false information. It would ensure that Americans are held to and protected by American standards. No more. No less. 

Apart from Specter and Lieberman's gratuitous reference at the end of their op-ed to "Islamist terror" as a justification for the federal law, this is an important issue for both traditional publishers, who are increasingly moving to online distribution, and citizen media, who already use the Internet to reach audiences all over the world, including in countries that don't have adequate free speech protections. Let's hope that Congress acts quickly on this.

Where will today's journalists will find tomorrow's jobs, Amy Gahran asks, and partially answers, in a recent Idealab post. She opened by quoting Alan Abbey, a commenter on her Poynter blog, discussing journalists' job losses:

this downturn does feel similar to the widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago. What can we do with our outdated skills?

If we in the media had covered the economic downturn and widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago with more care, respect, and investigation into how economic and political systems affect people, we would have much more of a basis for understanding and changing our own situation now.

Indeed, the textile and other factory closures following NAFTA fourteen years ago, and home foreclosures and increasing hunger today, are sad expansions of the lack of opportunity that affects many people all the time-- a large majority globally.

By not looking at how decisions by government and business officials affect our lives, let alone how we could make decisions and take action ourselves, traditional media has failed the country (and the world). In the words of Jon Stewart speaking on CNN to the hosts of Crossfire four years ago, most of our media are "hurting America".

My Knight-funded project, Related Content, will help people make raw connections between events and policy and ideas to change things, but more is clearly needed.

If journalists are to save more than ourselves, and rise to our historic charge to help make the world better for all, we need to show connections between people and policies the world over at a very deep level.

David Sasaki took on three obstacles to a global conversation in an excellent post, also to Idealab, but he skipped over the biggest one, which didn't make his list, as too big: time.

The solution to having more information and people than there is time, of course, is known as journalism and the editorial process. Having an elite - our broadcasting corporations - choose what this common knowledge will be has not turned out too well. The fragmenting of some people's attention to many sources with smaller reach (and the tuning out of any explicit news-seeking by many more) hasn't changed the fundamental situation.

We can turn filtering news and information over to the experts on what is important to people-- namely, the people. We can do this by giving everyone an equal voice in deciding what we most need to know with a form of editorial jury duty.

What does this have to do with working journalists?

A media system that serves people's needs just may be supported by people.

Moreover, covering and uncovering what matters will need more reporters than creating the words, sounds, and moving pictures to encourage people to buy consumer products (and to buy into plans for our passivity).

There isn't any any business model for this yet, but people like Idealab's David Cohn are already on it.

More important to the broader point: the problem of getting resources to flow to more people for more reasons is not unique to journalism or journalists. The global economy has been failing the majority of the world for, well, ever since it began.

News flash: Now economic unfairness and failure is threatening a few more percentage points of the population, namely you and your friends.

To take a microcosm: how has the situation for most people in the most powerful country in the world failed to improve materially since about 1973?

A big part of the answer is that it wasn't fair in the 1970s or before, and since then those with the most power and spare capacity to hire professional liars and bribers have managed to make thing much more unfair.

This can only happen with a media that ignores facts like extreme wealth for some and curtailed life chances for many more. This can only happen with a media that avoids stories with such epic themes as justice in favor of cultural sideshows.

No, the media are not singular. But the media that most of us get, that filters through the popular consciousness most fully, has failed us.

We always needed something new in media. If journalists are to help bring the new, are to save ourselves and help save the world, we need a radically expansive vision and ambition.

We need to put connecting people - each other - to take control of our lives at the heart of what we do. In more journalistic language, we need to provide information that makes possible organization in better and more human ways.

Not just for humanity, but for ourselves.

Welcome, journalists, to the rest of the world.