Despite my bias, the "Why Spot.Us Should Have Used Drupal" title is tongue-in-cheek. I'm pretty sure David Cohn (who is smarter, better looking, and always better dressed than me) and the Spot.Us development team will get the following enhancements in place quickly. Especially since, when it comes to winning friends and influencing people, there is nothing like a polite, personal, respectful, and massively cross-posted note (but hey, I couldn't find an issue queue).

For what it's worth, here's the list of features that the Spot.Us site lacks that would be automatically or easily provided by a Drupal-based framework:

• Instant log-in when registering (LoginToboggan)
• Better workflow when registering in general: Currently, you are left on the registration screen after registering, and clicking on the "check your e-mail message" happens to lead to a 404 file not found error (featuring LOLcats, so it's worth registering just to see this.
• One-click email confirmation instead of cut-and-paste your temporary password (Drupal core functionality)
• Ability to be alerted when pitches are added to selected categories (core Taxonomy module and Notifications). Update: The site has categories, but despite signing up as interested in everything I've yet to receive notice of anything.
• Donations to the site in general, not just specific pitches (ECommerce or Ubercart. These could be added as matching funds to others' donations. (Lots of traffic was generated in news articles about the site, and people enthusiastic about the idea with no stories matching their interests should have been able to donate, indeed set up recurring donations, to support the site and the stories chosen by others).
• Integration with other Drupal sites. Not really automatic, but if written by Drupalers there would already be a Spot.Us Drupal module (and probably a Wordpress plugin and a generic drop-in widget) for sites with a stake in a pitch on Spot.Us to solicit donations to that pitch. Drupal sites like the Bay Area's Public Press or, on the other side of the country, Open Media Boston, could pull information from Spot.Us and have one click to get their readers and members involved in crowd-funding a story.
• RSS feeds! Also related to promotion, a Drupal Spot.Us would have built-in RSS for listing of tips and pitches and every category.
• Turn-key local Spot.Us groups (Organic Groups). Instead of only encouraging other people to download the free software (though that is great), Spot.us could allow selected people to curate or manage regional editions beyond California's Bay Area. (Furthermore, people who do install the software themselves could draw on the huge Drupal ecosystem of modules to plug in all this functionality and much more.)

There, I hope that's lit a fire under some Ruby/Rails folk! Now, with all that said -- and with only the dedicated few still reading -- here's the real point of this post:

None of the above matters.

Just as the code language (PHP) and even quality of Drupal is secondary to its amazing community, the technology of Spot.Us is a distant second in importance to its passion, purpose, and the energy that flows from its reason for being.

As readers of Idea Lab know, Dave launched this thing with a wiki (oh, and a Drupal site of about three pages, which was undoubtedly the critical factor in Spot.Us' success).

Technology can certainly help or hinder the development of community -- that is, after all, the premise of the Knight News Challenge -- but tools matter far less than a sense of purpose and a drive to see it through.

Of ideas whose time has come, community-funded reporting is definitely one. Please, just to spite me, go make Spot.Us a resounding success without a drop of Drupal. The new breed of local, independent, and smart news sites it will help flourish are as likely as not to be built in Drupal anyway!

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.

Every article or blog on the internet can become part of the permanent record, but the publisher doesn't control how and when people access this information- for the most part, search engines become the gatekeepers.

However, news organizations can and should take responsibility for ensuring their piece of the permanent record provides their best understanding of reality.

JD Lasica (also an Idealab blogger) quoted Terry Heaton riffing on a post by Mike Orren. In case you lost track, this is Heaton writing about

journalistic responsibility in an era when online search goes a long way toward determining a person's identity and character. This is a new animal in the history of the press, and I think it bears discussion. Here's the nut of it:

A media company with lots of Google Juice does a "man charged with" story. A search for that man's name puts that story high in the search results. Later, the charges are dropped but the search results don't change.

Orren, who cites personal examples in his post about the subject, thinks journalists might have some responsibility to update the original story in such a way that it assists the reader in determining the truth. That could be by adding a link to or otherwise re-editing the original text, things that could only be done with direct access to the database storage of the archived content produced by the media company.

When most of your readers - over time - find your content through search engines, it is vital to post updates to old information.

This doesn't have to be a costly burden. By allowing site visitors to connect articles, blog entries, and other pages on your site to one another both more easily and more prominently than they can with comments, Related Content can help even the smallest - or the largest - online news organizations meet this responsibility.

John Nichols is most certainly one of my favorite organizers of the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), going on now in Minneapolis. He visited the earlier, far smaller New Pamphleteers and represented what is wrong with the NCMR model of conference.

He dropped in without having attended the rest of the New Pamphleteers, without having had the experiences all the rest of us had.

Nichols told us that a circular arrangement of chairs just didn't work. To be fair, he did this to draw a parallel with what we are doing on the Internet, where every experiment doesn't work- but that out of all the failures, someone will figure out how to do it right. Nichols went on to give a fantastic speech, and we the participants of this gathering overrode the facilitator to have Nichols finish.

But it was a speech, not a talk. Nichols felt the need to teach us to applaud when, for example, he thanked Bill Densmore (the driving force behind gathering) and credited Densmore as the reason he was there. Nichols didn't understand that when you're in a conversation with more than one hundred people, you naturally dial down the applause response to keep the flow going.

At NCMR, Bill Moyers is speaking now- scheduled to begin at 8 a.m., in a brilliant move of putting the headliner at a time at which no one would come out for anyone else. The National Conference for Media Reform also puts people with genuine radical perspectives-- I don't wake up with my mind set on reform, I wake up with my mind set on freedom, Addrienne Maree Brown said yesterday at NCMR's opening plenary.

The problem, though, is with the structure of the conference. Many of the wonderful speakers are not there learning and growing with us in the smaller breakout sessions. At past conferences this can be jarring-- you feel like in the past few days you have progressed in your understanding and readiness to build a media that will make real democracy possible, and you get a speech written a month earlier.

One of the problems with the media reflects this structural flaw. Society can't help but go through a learning curve when lied to repeatedly and blatantly about war, the world, the economy, and the environment. But the establishment media is there as if to hit a giant reset button, with - as Bill Moyers is saying - the same people on television and in opinion columns who got everything wrong on the U.S. invasion of Iraq retain their near complete monopoly of the microphone.

Janis Lane-Ewart, also part of yesterday's rousing opening of NCMR, said media reform means universal access to communication.

When there's a stage and there's simply no way for most people to get on it and be something more than audience, that is not universal access.

This is not an insurmountable problem of scale. At Journalism That Matters "The New Pamphleteers," many participants indulged me in discussing one route to this seeming impossibility of giving everyone - potentially everyone on the planet - an equal chance to communicate.

At the New Pamphleteers, Tom Atlee explained that the concept of pulling a small group of regular people together to make decisions - with more time and opportunity to learn about an issue at hand - has been seriously considered as a form of democracy or a supplement to other forms of democratic decision-making.

For all the advantages this approach may have for making policy decisions, it makes perfect sense for making decisions about the distribution of news. Is this information important enough to take the limited time of this community of 30 thousand or 30 million people? Asking everyone defeats the purpose. Asking a random draw of people called to serve jury duty to curate the knowledge democracy needs to survive-- that just might work.

This is of course more of a digital solution, but applicable to all forms of digital communication which now covers television to newspapers, than something that would also work in the physical space of the Minneapolis conference center with 3,000 people interested in media reform and/or revolution.

Jen, sitting next to me, said the Allied Media Conference manages to have both scale and better face-to-face, collaborative interaction. That's coming up in Detroit on June 20-22. I'm conferenced out and too far behind on work to go, but on the other hand I'm ready to go anywhere for a chance to learn about, talk about, or build structures that get us closer toward universal access to communication. That's one nice thing about media conferences though, they always have really good coverage, so I bet bet there will be reports online that are the next best thing to attending.

It's making coverage that's also a conversation that's the trick...

Jason wrote in to ask why I thought that the newspaper industry was in a Dip. In my book, I point out that with classified ads disappearing and the web thriving, the days of newspapers as we know them are clearly over. That shouldn't mean the industry is in trouble. In fact, there are more people reading more news every day than ever before--without the cost of printing and distributing a costly piece of newsprint every day. Happy days...

But (many of) the people in the industry have built their lives around the trees. As a result, the industry is over. A new industry is being built in its place, often with new people doing work that might be done far better by the old hands, the ones who are stuck defending the wholesale slaughter of trees.

If you think your job is to keep the printers busy, then you see the world differently. You focus on per issue sales, you worry about people sharing a paper (!), you don't count online readers as valuable (even though they're more valuable). You focus on one edition, not a thousand different versions. You focus on having one front page, not dozens based on who is reading.

If you work for a newspaper that feels this way, every day you stay is a day wasted.

Godin often disclaims that he offers solutions. He says he tries to get people to see the right problems. That leaves a lot unanswered here- far too many unanswered questions to be of immediate use to people like ourselves who are already grappling with this situation. But as a bracing outside voice, maybe the above quotation can shake up our thoughts a little.

Personally, I want the future of news to be online because - as long as we retain net neutrality - the barrier to entry for starting a news operation is much, much lower on the Internet than it is in print. (A new Knight News Challenge funded project could vastly reduce this divide between online and paper, Printcasting.)

However, disregarding the difficulty in developing a financially sustainable business model online to replace the longtime easy-money paper business model is folly, and not because wringing our hands is useful.

The difficulty with building content-producing businesses around digital media shows some critical problems with the current and future media landscape. Government policy determines the economics of media, and the current model is based on either controlling distribution or getting a third party (mostly, advertisers) to pay.

In both cases the result is less than optimal for meeting the needs of a democratic society. With restricted distribution, news gatherers withhold important information from people who need it. With outside (advertiser, government, even foundation) subsidy, reporting on critical concerns is distorted by the perspectives of those who pay. (This helps explain why buying and borrowing are important to media, while bankrupcty law and surviving the sinking of a skewed economy is not.)

The fact that both models are weakening gives us a chance to replace them, but we're only have a chance of gaining something better if we both acknowledge, first, the role of government policy in shaping the economics of media and, second, the flaws of the current model apart from the current risk of financial insolvency for journalism.

To kill trees or not to kill trees isn't the most important issue from the perspective of investigating and disseminating the hard news we need. Instead, my takeaway and starting point is this:

Laws that try to treat information as property are harmful to journalism in the public interest.

Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio.

Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools.

I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can't. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem.

As mentioned by IdeaLab bloggers and elsewhere, solving this problem is a key opportunity for people doing journalism.

With original investigation and with editorial discretion, real reporting serves to increase the signal and filter out the noise.

However, most ways of generating revenue from journalism come from the editorial role, and news organizations are losing control of this role. Yet the real issue isn't whether Google, Inc. or the New York Times Company does the filtering, it's how whoever has this power uses it.

Ultimately, we can trust controlling the flow of information to no one but ourselves. The future of journalism (and consequently democracy, and humanity, and all that jazz) depends on not allowing private interests to monopolize the lifeblood of human organization, communication.

If we expect to pay for aggregation and filtering services through attention, loss of privacy, and lack of control, and the work of hard reporting is not paid directly, then journalism truly is in trouble.

Subverting this expectation will help build an environment where people sustain hard journalism. We can and should do aggregation ourselves. Investigation we should expect to pay for.

At NewsTools2008 (Journalism That Matters, the Silicon Valley sessions) this week I will be talking to anyone who will listen about mass communication for collaboration with moderation by the many, not the few.

But the reason I have the privilege of a blog at PBS.org/idealab is a less ambitious, more practical project: Related Content.

From before proposing this tool and in the time since, developers have released dozens of modules relating to relating content in Drupal.

What will set the Knight News Challenge-funded Related Content project apart from others is the focus on using computer-suggested relations to make it easier for people to establish human-vetted connections.

So far the project has its information architecture - URI (web address) based, rather than Drupal node-based - and a plugin system to use other modules for related content suggestions. The first public release is coming soon.

The goal is to greatly lower the barrier people's participation in increasing the signal to noise ratio. And yes, to prove we can do it ourselves. Not as opposed to journalistic editorial decisionmaking, which will always have a role in journalism, but as opposed to the overarching aggregators (online and off) that tempt us to exchange control of communication for convenience.

To be charitable, there's only so many media narratives any one person or even campaign can try to change at one time. That's my question for today: how are these media narratives formed in the first place, and why?

Easier question: Did you see the videos below? The seven and ten minute versions, not the seven and ten second versions?

Obama, in his speech, chose to defend Wright as a person and a leader, but he denounced the statements as divisive and reflecting a static view of progress in history. In fact, the sermon where "God Damn America" came from is all about progress, real and potential, and the fact that governments change:

In short, Wright said that God (who does not change) damns what is bad about the United States or any government - that which is against love and justice - and which can and must change.

Perhaps Obama decided it was more important to stress what I (with perpetual wishful thinking) saw as a key point of the "More Perfect Union" speech: people of all colors and creeds facing a system gamed against them have to stop hating or fearing each other and unite to change this system.

And Obama addressed media distortion directly when he said, repudiating the handful of selected Wright statements but not Wright himself, "there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way."

Take "America's chickens have come home to roost." Wright stressed right in this "footnote" to his sermon that he was quoting a white man, former ambassador Peck speaking on Fox News. The sermon itself, meanwhile, was about "the insanity of the cycle of violence and the cycle of hatred" - the danger of moving "from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents."

Watch it, if you would like:

News media, especially television, wield awesome power in the decisions made about what will be pushed into everyone's consciousness and what will not.

And as they use this power, what are they thinking?

Could media have shown excerpts of the longer sermons - to say nothing of other sermons, or the context of their content - in the hours of looping and analysis? There's no work to put Wright's words in context, minimally: just show a little more of the video! (One of the few reality checks came from former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee (whose own sermons escaped media scrutiny during a 14-month campaign).

After all this context about the lack of context, I still have just the one question.

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman wrote Manufacturing Consent in 1988 (sorry the web site looks that old too). They made a case that an environment of relationships, rewards, and repercussions in a system ultimately owned and controlled by the rich results in a media hostile to changes that reduce the privileges of the powerful. In 2008 I hereby discharge them and all others from the responsibility of continually supplying details of exactly how media works against democracy.

Instead, I ask those who do make decisions about what to cover and (how to cover it) to explain: What the hell are you thinking?

Media aren't following the people. Obama acknowledged that YouTube was helping distribute the clipped pieces of Wright's oratory, but the online audience - more than 4 million people - overwhelmingly chose to watch Obama's full speech instead.

Fortunately, the plans of AOL and most every other large media corporation to create closed, controlled online portals which you should never leave have died, for now. But most of us still get content via the Internet in ways that are "push" (television, radio, newspaper 'what gets handed to you' style) more than "pull" (seek, interact, choose). From the sobering state of the news media report:

Even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience, than in the legacy media.

My Knight project of easily relating content could help people follow from a 12 second clip of Wright to that clip's context in a sermon about putting an end to a history of terror.

Combined with an open layer over the web to make every page part of a conversation, as ShiftSpace tries to do, this could really do a lot of good.

But not nearly enough.

We the people need our own media that is about reach - that can reach more people than television even if we have to stand on street corners to do it - and I argue it must be controlled by everyone.

So, I have unwillingly paid attention to the wider media world for another week. I come away with one question, which is not rhetorical and I would love to see answered:

• What are media decision makers thinking?

And a second conviction to add to the first:

1. We need a democratic aggregator.
2. We are not capable of making worse decisions than current gatekeepers.

Let's pause a moment for an overarching view. Turn off the bright lights and stare into the empty studio.

Markets - selling and buying at prices set by supply and demand - don't work for news and information.

Valuable news is a public good. All right, if you care about journalism, you already believed that. But news is also a public good in the sense economists use the term: once one person comes into possession of it, everybody can have it.

Expensive investigative reporting in particular is undervalued in the market compared to its benefit to people. Soft news features, pictures, video, comics, opinion and all that is more about the experience than the facts have fared somewhat better.

Although a networked digital world makes the picture starker, none of this is new.

The economic model of journalism has always been broken, and the business of selling news has always been one of hacks and workarounds.

Because information wants to be free, because market incentives break down for anything infinitely shareable, the public interest suffers from the underproduction and underdistribution of news. Perhaps even more so, the public interest has suffered from the subsidy of news - press releases, staged events, canned content, announcements, and access as much as advertising and underwriting itself - by corporations and governments that don't necessarily share the public interest.

The decoupling of news from its traditional means of support is an opportunity.

With raised stakes, vastly raised difficulty, and I hope a clearer understanding of what we're up against, I ask you to return to Chris O'Brien's challenge to come up with more new business models for journalism.

It's only the future of the world at stake. Have at it in the comments!

[Cross-posted to RootTruth.org]

Will Global Voices' coverage of Iranian bloggers have any influence one way or the other on a potential US invasion? It is comforting to think that it could, but realistically, I doubt it.

(I'm going to project a little there and clarify that it's comforting to think it could prevent a U.S. attack- which would probably be in the form of Guernica-esque bombing, rather than a land invasion.)

Oso concludes:

the fragmentation of media is part of the democratization of media, an important step forward. But as more and more and more content comes to us, will we ever form a relationship with it like we did with the Little Prince?

This blurs relationship and reach a little. Yes, some of us are getting information from so many sources we may be less likely to form a relationship with any of them. However, more of us will probably form a close connection, a relationship similar to and potentially richer than that of readers of the Little Prince, with one or more of these many sources.

For me the real question is how many people will a given voice, a voice that may really matter, reach?

If Global Voices and other media providing connections to the people of Iran reached most people in the United States - as many who hear the Bush regime's ghost tales - it could stop another tragic, chosen war of aggression.

To have both democratization - with its fragmentation - and reach, I propose (tirelessly, I think is the polite way to say it) a solution in which we all take responsibility to do a little bit of the filtering. A fresh sample of people drawn from a wider network can decide for each item what will have the widest reach. Democratic communication, publishing by jury - call it what you will - a network for news and information controlled by nobody and everybody is a unifying force necessary to make more media from more sources a transformational force.

In 1996, a series of articles by Gary Webb showed the Central Intelligence Agency's complicity in bringing crack cocaine into Los Angeles. Profits from the new, highly addictive, and illegal drug supported the U.S.-backed Contras' war of terror against the people of Nicaragua during the 1980s.

In those first days of the World Wide Web, the Mercury News supported and promoted Webb's investigative series with a full web site and CD-ROMs with confirming documents. This digital savvy helped the story gain a far wider readership and influence than it would have otherwise. And the newspaper threw it all away. Bowing to a campaign against the articles led by the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times - even though the facts reported were never credibly challenged - the San Jose Mercury News took down the web site and destroyed CD-ROMs. Later, an internal CIA investigation confirmed key conclusions of the wide-ranging series of three articles. The CIA's 1998 revelations, natural opportunities to build on the investigative work Webb began, received very little media attention.

You can see the original web site here, now hosted by the Narco News Bulletin with introduction. (Disclosure: I volunteer for the Fund for Authentic Journalism which financially supports this work.)

Dan Feder wrote that Webb

provided extensively documented evidence that while poor communities in L.A. paid the price of the crack explosion - from rampant addiction in their neighborhoods to oppressive law enforcement and jailing with Reagan's stepped-up "war on drugs" - the United States government protected the men moving a great deal of the drugs coming into the city. Local dealers faced life sentences while the bigtime narcos from Washington to Managua went free.

Stories like these risk a radicalizing effect on people who may decide that the people running things should not be running anything any more.

Online media innovators do a lot of work to lead newspaper horses to water and duct tape digital hoses in their mouths. If all the code and culture of conversation and community we can provide still leaves unaccountable gatekeepers, I don't want any part of it. The discussion about democracy that many Knight grantees return to here on Idealab is a critical part of forging public interest journalism worth saving.

Unable to get work as an investigative journalist in a major U.S. newspaper, Pulitzer-winning reporter Gary Webb took his own life in December of 2004.

You may not know much about this issue. A Google news search turned up one article, in the independent Charleston Gazette.

I am meaningfully aware that people self-injure only through a friend's yearly blog post to mark self-injury awareness day:

"We are male and female. We are artists, athletes, students, and business owners. We have depression, DID, PTSD, eating disorders, borderline personalities, bipolar disorder, or maybe no formal diagnosis at all. Some of us were abused, some were not. We are straight, bi, and gay. We come from all walks of life and can be any age. We are every single race or religion that you can possibly think of. Our common link is this: We are in pain. We self-injure. And we are not freaks."

The American Self-Harm Information Clearinghouse wrote (when last updated in 2002) that about "1% of the United States population uses physical self-injury as a way of dealing with overwhelming feelings or situations," but the Mayo Clinic estimates "about 3 percent to 5 percent of Americans have deliberately hurt themselves at some point in their lives." (Neither scope assessment includes harmful eating disorders.)

This is a health and mental health issue affecting a significant number of people, yet the media reflection of ourselves hides it.

I started out blogging on IdeaLab asking What is News? and What is Your Definition of News?

To me, news is what matters: how many people are affected, and how seriously?

By this definition, our major news media fail terribly every day. Self-injury, indeed, is minor in impact compared to the deaths, incarceration, illnesses, mistreatment, challenges, and denied opportunities people face without commensurate or consistent media focus.

One of the only organizations that I know of in the U.S. for covering the day-to-day things that matter as news is not print, but radio- Free Speech Radio News, if only because their reporting doesn't stop at the border of country or celebrity. (Disclosure: I am on the FSRN board of directors, which has no connection to news policy.)

In most media, most of the time, just about anything big and important that affects a lot of people regularly over a long period of time gets virtually ignored or covered as isolated incidents.

Of course, every ongoing matter of importance is always generating news events. And good news is news too. From my friend's post again:

I haven't cut in almost 2 1/2 months. To some, that seems like nothing. Great, you beat it. Not so easy, I'm afraid. It's a daily struggle, it always has been and it probably always will be. Decisions aren't so easy to make sometimes, and the decision not to cut is often the hardest decision I have to make in a day.

There has to be some newsprint space among the ads, some television time between the commercials, some reporter talent amidst the cutbacks to dedicate to simply reporting on the human condition.

Creating a day, or a week, or a month for every conceivable cause or issue is a desperate plea for help.

And media must listen.

Forget about the hottest new viral video web 4.x social network. If news organizations don't cover what affects us, in ways that can make a difference, more and more people will instead be reading (and commenting on) their friends' writing on LiveJournal.

Nice to know that journalists are ahead of the marketers on this. Every self-respecting journalist I know cringes a little when some business-side person at a conference calls readers/viewers/listeners consumers.

Indeed, many of us have lept over readers/viewers/listeners to pay "the people formerly known as the audience" a great mark of respect (from a journalist) by calling them citizen journalists.

This term has received pushback from professional journalists who don't want amateurs claiming their status and from bloggers and contributors who don't want to. (Some feel the calling is too difficult to take on; some may just not want journalism's approval ratings in the 20s for many metrics.) I object to the citizen part. Although Godin uses it to include, the definition of citizen is tied to the nation-state and therefore excludes, well, non-citizens (hat tip: J.D. Lasica).

Jay Rosen's excellent phrase used above, "the people formerly known as the audience" (perhaps building on Dan Gillmor's "former audience"), is too long and makes us think too much for regular use. It is a seven-word manifesto. Note that it specifically does not equate the shifting balance of power (more ability to make their voices heard on the people's part, less ability to ignore this discussion on the gatekeepers' part) with the practice of journalism by everybody.

We need a word that reflects the technology-allowed shift of people from passive observers to the more natural state of active participants. Even the term participant, though, presumes too much- many people will be potential participants, but they are still already more than an audience.

So what are you going to call me?

"What I really want to talk about is power," Ross said early in her presentation.  "Because powerful people can make change."

"At the heart of every nonprofit you are trying to give people information, and information is power."

Ross and other presenters and many side conversations brought up social media tools - bookmarking, video, fundraising widgets, RSS, blogs, online conversations (forums), popularity contest sites, wikis, and comments and trackbacks everywhere - and the desire to use them more.

Most organizations know they could do much more to use these tools to further their mission and want to use them more.  Many seem to understand that any new dominant media will have social elements, which is to say person-to-person, horizontal communication tools.

Some really get it.  Two featured organizations, DonorsChoose and Kiva, have created their own platforms for horizontal interaction that go well beyond our current networking platforms.  (As if to drive home the point about this power, a Kiva loan to which I contributed was repaid that day).

The record of actions and the attitudes of attendees - nonprofit founders and staff brought together simply by their use of or interest in SalesForce software (oops, online service) - made the 200 or so person gathering impressive.  One speaker mentioned that the goal of every nonprofit should be to put itself out of business (amen), several echoed the idea that effectiveness, not tax status, matters.  Many talked immediately of the broadest possible goals, transforming consciousness, economies, and societies.

Powerful goals, practical actions, savvy use of technology- what more could a radical nerd want?  More.

Nonprofits are not setting their sights high enough.

Justice-seeking not-for-profit organizations, and all people who are working for change, need to change the environment in which we do our work if we are to be truly effective with our most important projects.

Nonprofits need to form their own media.

These organizations, their supporters, and their constituencies form a critical mass of people and passions.  We are not yet bonded together by much more than working for below-market financial reward (as workers and volunteers), receiving a lot of the same begging mail (as donors), or getting  regular benefit from the kindness of strangers (as constituents, which includes all of us who appreciate common goods like the environment).  We, the actively involved of all these overlapping groups, need to communicate with one another and collaborate on communicating to and with the whole population.

Nonprofits can be key stakeholders in developing and supporting a journalism infused with the direct connecting potential of today's technology, a journalism that transforms society local community by local community.

[Cross-posted on RootTruth.org]

The web site WikiLeaks.org (if you're in the United States, right now you'll have to access it through their IP address) reports that it has been censored by U.S. court injunction (it is also banned in China).

The point of the web site is to allow people to post anonymously information - in large quantities - that governments and corporations don't want people to know.

This is bad. Taking down a domain name is a drastic measure for suppressing information on the Internet. If this is not pushed back against strongly by everyone who believes in journalism and the right to an informed public, it will have a chilling effect on all media that operates online. Which is to say, almost all media - from the largest corporation to the smallest local forum.