Mark Cuban was a keynote speaker yesterday at the Online News Association conference in Washington. There were rumblings in advance of dissatisfaction with that selection because of ethical discomfort with his ShareSleuth.com project with former Post-Dispatch business reporter Chris Carey. There were some questions raised by Jeff Jarvis and Rich Jaroslovsky and I thought Cuban handled them fairly well.
Try as I might, I can't get my undies in a bunch about ShareSleuth. Cuban is using the information Carey churns up to short stocks, and Cuban has access to that information before the rest of us. He's also open about that fact.
It's not unusual for journalists to leave the news profession and work as researchers and analysts for investment companies -- Rich did that, in fact, before returning to journalism for Bloomberg. What's unusual is that Carey is publishing his findings (and inviting tips). The combination is different than the way WSJ makes money on the unequal distribution of information in society, but I won't jump to the conclusion that different is bad.
If you haven't looked at the work Carey is doing at ShareSleuth, you should. Fascinating stories, especially if you're not unlucky enough to have invested with the pondscum he's exposing.
Cuban was asked what newspapers should be doing online, and his answer -- get members of the community to video their lives and their kids' lives and upload them into a shared local space -- is basically what we're already doing with Spotted (and with great results). We do not yet support video with Spotted but it's in the pipeline and I don't think our timing is at all bad. Despite all the hoopla about YouTube, the number of people shooting video is still very small and the future growth opportunity will be great.