On the surface, it defies logic. I think most people would agree that whatever economic value news and information has, it's greater than a virtual piece of clothing, or something that gives your avatar a special power in a gaming environment, or that gives you elevated status on a social network. But in terms of consumers' actions, the exact opposite is true.

I've been thinking a lot about this issue because the market for virtual goods has exploded. People are expected to spend $1.6 billion on virtual goods this year in the U.S. alone. The emergence of this market, I think, is one of the most important business trends on the web. In Silicon Valley, it's reshaping assumptions about online business models. As the focus on ad-driven models loses favor, the virtual goods market is generating a lot of interest.

Lessons for the News Business?

Does the rise of the virtual goods economy have any lessons for the business of news and information? I think so, but I'm not sure exactly what they are. And that's why I'm writing this post. I want to share some of my thinking about virtual goods and news. I'm throwing it out there in hopes of sparking a discussion, or catching the eye of some entrepreneurs (or future News Challenge applicants?) who might take this a step further.

The phenomenon of virtual goods confounded and fascinated me for a long time. I couldn't get past the absurdity of spending money on such trivial things. And part of me was in denial that so many people were doing it.

My thinking began to shift when I visited the folks at Second Life last fall. It's a company that had been written off by many, but which is in fact still growing and is profitable. Rather than rely on advertising, the "in-world" economy revolves around the buying and selling of virtual goods. This revenue stream has continued to grow and enabled Linden Lab, which created Second Life, to do just fine during the economic downturn.

Consider, also, the success of Zynga, the social gaming company that created mega-hits Farmville and Mafia Wars for the Facebook platform and other social networks. From nowhere, Zynga has grown to 750 employees in just 2.5 years, and has 300 job openings. That means it's almost as large as Facebook, which has 1,100 employees. One of Zynga's prime sources of revenue is virtual goods.

Or check out this interview that TechCrunch's Michael Arrington did with the founder of Slide, Max Levchin. In this chat, Levchin explained how Slide, which makes many of the most popular widgets on Facebook, has moved from an ad-based business model to one built around virtual goods:

Levchin discusses the "shift from advertising to virtual goods" and reveals that most of Slide's revenues now come from sales of virtual goods, whereas it was the reverse a year ago. Slide makes some of the most popular apps on Facebook and other social networks, and the fact that it is no longer focussed on advertising says a lot about the prospects for social ads.

The True Value of Virtual Goods

The person who helped me begin to get my head around this was Susan Wu, a virtual goods pioneer and former venture capitalist who has started an online gaming company called Ohai. Here's what she understood early on about the value of virtual goods: In the real world, we have all sorts of intangible interactions, from shaking hands to smiling to offering blessings. The value of virtual goods is not about the object, but rather its ability to express an emotion or feeling in a way that has value.

"Sending someone a virtual beer is not about the beer," Wu told me. "It's a way to show, 'I have an affection for you.' It's the same reason people have bought bouquets or other ostentatious gifts -- to demonstrate a feeling."

She pointed me to a post, "Virtual Goods: The Next Big Business Model," she wrote for TechCrunch outlining her vision of virtual goods. That was published in 2007. It's a good starting point if you want to dig into this topic.

Applying it to News

I've been trying to apply this framework to news. I think it provides an interesting, and different way, of thinking about where the true value lies: Not in the thing itself, but in something adjacent to the thing, some feeling you have about it, or something you can do with it in terms of expressing yourself.

Is there a feeling or emotion or something around consuming or sharing news that possibly has some value that can be captured and expressed?

Are there virtual goods that news organizations could create that would entice people to spend some money?

And are there models in social gaming that provide structural lessons for news organizations of all shapes and sizes that would demonstrate better and more powerful ways to harness the power of social networks?

I think the answer to all of these questions is, "Yes." But that said, I don't really know. It's still a considered hunch at this point.

I do think this convinces me that, in terms of business models on the web, we are still in early days. There's been a lot written here, and elsewhere, that the search for business models is futile. I would agree that there is no single revenue stream that will ever replace the classified, ad-based model. I think most news organizations that are sustainable will have to be built on a vast array of revenue streams.

I'm wondering if virtual goods is one of them. What do you think? Do virtual goods have anything to teach us about the economic value of news and information?

The Open Media Project grant is for a four-part effort that began with a re-building of the software we developed to automate an unprecedented approach to user-generated and community-powered TV in Denver. The second phase saw our team implement this re-built Drupal software and business model in six additional public access stations across the country. Third, we took the lessons learned from the beta-test implementations and released an installation profile that incorporates the contributions and lessons learned in the seven beta-test sites.

The fourth and final phase has our team focused on content-sharing among these stations, enabling us to cooperate as a true network by sharing the top-voted content from each station, and building a collection of truly engaging content unlike anything else you can find on TV. As we tackle this fourth phase, we are also facing the challenge of sustaining this project (and our team) without ongoing support from the Knight Foundation.

Earned Income

From the beginning, we anticipated that the long-term sustainability of the Open Media Project would be based primarily on earned income. We hoped the success of the Open Media Project would generate a strong demand from public access TV stations and other organizations looking for support in implementing a similar model. This approach enabled Denver Open Media to thrive even without the general operating support most public access TV stations enjoy from their local government or cable operators.

Our first such client arose in San Francisco after the city drastically cut operating support for public access and then selected the Bay Area Video Coalition to launch their new public access TV stations, SF Commons. We have found a great partner in BAVC. They are now poised to set a new standard for participatory, community media, and are committed to be a part of an open source movement that has each of us benefiting from the investments of the others. The earned income from this project (and others to follow) will hopefully help our team sustain its success and continue to build upon the expertise we've gained over the past five years.

Cooperation and Partnerships

No successful open source project can be carried by a single organization. The Drupal modules we've developed have been downloaded by over 100 organizations, ranging from public access TV to community colleges. Several of these partners have contributed back to the software in ways that are benefiting the entire community. But this hasn't come about easily.

Over the past decade, many public access TV stations have developed open source software, but few projects are built in a way that enables the software to be truly useful in other environments. Our initial foray into Open Media Project tools included myopic code and assumptions that made the software more difficult to leverage in other stations than if they built their own software from scratch.

Developing the code in a manner that makes it useful in diverse environments involves a sacrifice that few organizations have been willing or able to make. It requires investing resources in development that we hope will pay off in the future when partners use and contribute back to the code.

Early partners made the same mistake as us, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into code that is practically useless in any setting other than their own. The Knight News Challenge award enabled us to take the time to better collaborate with the Drupal community, host code sprints, attend conferences, and, ultimately, back-track and re-design a more extensible code base.

With our grant period soon coming to an end, we have a number of partners poised to take the reigns and collectively help ensure the continued growth of the project. Davis Media Access in California has devoted significant time to improving the code and is a clear success story. Their work has, among other things, extended the OMP code to integrate with a new broadcast server.

Our growing relationship with Tightrope Media Systems, and their recent commitment

to open source software, can largely be credited to the efforts of Darrick Servis and Davis Media Access. Other successes and failures of the beta test process are equally valuable. Ongoing cooperation with Boston Neighborhood Network, Channel Austin and others will continue to yield benefits to the project.

We're most excited about our newest partner: the Bay Area Video Coalition. They bring a commitment to open source collaboration that we've not yet seen in previous partners. Everything about their SF Commons effort gives us confidence that they will set a new example for the next generation of networked, user-driven public access TV. Though their operating support is meager, they have strong, visionary leadership in Ken Ikeda and Jen Gilomen. They also stand to benefit from their close proximity to organizations like Archive.org, Creative Commons, and the Wikimedia Foundation, all of whom inspired our software and business model from the beginning.

Even if the Open Media Foundation were to shut our doors, I'm confident that organizations like BAVC would keep the project alive and growing... of course, we're working on making sure that isn't the case.

Expanding the Open Media Project

While earned income has the potential to maintain the level of activity we've enjoyed here for the past two years, our true vision of building an entirely new kind of participatory media network is going to require a significant ramp-up of the project. The Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program funding available through the stimulus plan represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do just that.

We partnered with Free Speech TV, the Alliance for Community Media, and 20 other public access TV stations across the country to apply for $2.2 million to expand the Open Media Project. The proposal addresses the many lessons learned from our Knight-funded beta test, and proposes a more self-contained and supported solution that can transform a wide range of public access TV stations into gateways for broadband adoption for disconnected communities.

Statistics show the primary factor preventing individuals from using broadband is not a lack of infrastructure, but the perception that the Internet is not relevant to their life. Our partner stations will encourage and support these communities by conveying the relevance of broadband access from the perspective of those communities. Together with Free Speech TV, we will collect the best of this content and provide national exposure to perspectives on broadband's relevance that simply haven't been seen before.

In case our first round application doesn't receive funding, we've invested heavily in planning an application in response to the second BTOP opportunity for funding. I encourage other Knight News Challenge grant recipients (and rejectees) to read the Notice of Funds Availability and investigate if their Knight News Challenge project would be a candidate for BTOP funding.

Regardless of future grants and funding, we are optimistic about the future of the project. We've had our share of pitfalls, but that's to be expected when you're pioneering new territory. The Knight News Challenge experience has opened doors and helped our organization grow in a way that will forever alter our work. If we can sustain the project beyond our KNC award, we'll be part of an entirely new kind of non-commercial media system, serving interests and engaging communities that are left out of today's commercial media conversation.

Every change begins with a new conversation.

Back in 2005 it took the Los Angeles Times a year of internal discussions to settle on its ethical guidelines for journalists. The Committee for Concerned Journalists took four years, did oodles of research and held 20 public forums, in order to come up with a Statement of Shared Purpose with nine principles (which was subsequently fleshed out in the excellent "The Elements of Journalism" by Kovach and Rosenstiel).

Time spent thinking can then translate into a lot of principles. The BBC's editorial guidelines -- which include guidance about more than just journalism -- run to 228 pages. The New York Times' policy on ethics in journalism has more than 10,000 words. Principles needn't be so wordy. The National Union of Journalists (U.K.) code of conduct, first drafted in 1936, has 12 principles adding up to barely more than 200 words.

But, once defined, these principles serve multiple functions. They act as a spur to good journalism, as well as a constraint on bad. They provide protection for freedom of speech and of the press -- particularly from threats or intimidation by the government or commercial organizations. And they protect the public by preventing undue intrusion and providing a means of response or redress.

Principles in the Online World

In an online world, principles can serve another function. They can help to differentiate journalism from other content published on the web, whether that be government information, advertising, promotion, or institutional or personal information.

One of the key elements of hNews -- the draft microformat the Media Standards Trust developed with the AP to make news more transparent -- is rel-principles. This is a line of code that embeds a link within each article to the news principles to which it adheres. It doesn't specify what those principles should be, just that the article should link to some.

Now that lots of news sites are implementing hNews (over 200 sites implemented the microformat in January), we're getting some pushback on this. News sites, and bloggers, generally recognize that transparent principles are a good idea but, having not previously made them explicit online, many of them aren't entirely sure what they should be.

When we started working with OpenDemocracy, for example, they realized they had not made their principles explicit. As a result of integrating hNews, they now have. Similarly, the information architect and blogger Martin Belam, who blogs at currybet.net and integrated hNews in January 2010, wrote: "it turned out that what I thought would be a technical implementation task actually generated a lot of questions addressing the fundamentals of what the site is about... It meant that for the first time I had to articulate my blogging principles."

So, in an effort to help those who haven't yet defined their principles, we're in the process of gathering together as many as we can find, and pulling out the key themes.

This is where you can help.

Asking for Feedback

We've identified 10 themes that we think characterize many journalism statements of principle. This is a result of reviewing dozens of different (English language) principles statements available on the web. The statements were accessed via the very useful journalism ethics page on Wikipedia; via links provided by the Project for Excellence in Journalism; and from the Media Accountability Systems listed on the website of Donald W. Reynolds Institute of Journalism.

These themes are by no means comprehensive -- nor are they intended to be. They are a starting point for those, be they news organizations or bloggers, who are drawing up their own principles and need a place to start.

We'd really like some feedback on whether these are right, if ten is too many, if there are any big themes missing, and which ones have most relevance to the web.

Ten Themes

Our 10 themes are:

1. Public interest Example: "... to serve the general welfare by informing the people and enabling them to make judgments on the issues of the time" (American Society of Newspaper Editors)
2. Truth and accuracy Example: "[The journalist] strives to ensure that information disseminated is honestly conveyed, accurate and fair" (National Union of Journalists, UK)
3. Verification Example: "Seeking out multiple witnesses, disclosing as much as possible about sources, or asking various sides for comment... [The] discipline of verification is what separates journalism from other modes of communication, such as propaganda, fiction or entertainment" (Principles of Journalism, from Project for Excellence in Journalism)
4. Fairness Example: "... our goal is to cover the news impartially and to treat readers, news sources, advertisers and all parts of our society fairly and openly, and to be seen as doing so" (New York Times Company Policy on Ethics in Journalism)
5. Distinguishing fact and comment Example: "... whilst free to be partisan, [the press] must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact" (Editors Code of Practice, PCC, U.K.)
6. Accountability Example: "The journalist shall do the utmost to rectify any published information which is found to be harmfully inaccurate" (International Federation of Journalists, Principles on the Conduct of Journalists)
7. Independence Example: "Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know... [and] Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived" (Society of Professional Journalists)
8. Transparency (regarding sources) Example: "Aim to attribute all information to its source. Where a source seeks anonymity, do not agree without first considering the source's motives and any alternative, attributable source. Where confidences are accepted, respect them in all circumstances" (Australian Journalists Code)
9. Restraint (around harassment and intrusion) Example: "The public has a right to know about its institutions and the people who are elected or hired to serve its interests. People also have a right to privacy and those accused of crimes have a right to a fair trial. There are inevitable conflicts between the right to privacy, the public good and the public's right to be informed. Each situation should be judged in the light of common sense, humanity and the public's rights to know" (Canadian Association of Journalists)
10. Originality (i.e. not plagiarizing) Example: "An AP staffer who reports and writes a story must use original content, language and phrasing. We do not plagiarise, meaning that we do not take the work of others and pass it off as our own" (Associated Press Statement of news values and principles)

There are, of course, many excluded from here. We could, for example, have gone into much more depth in the area of "limitation from harm," which is only briefly referred to in number nine. Principles to inform newsgathering could form another whole section in itself.

There is also the growing area of commercial influence. In the U.S., the FCC FTC has become pretty animated about bloggers taking money to promote goods while appearing to be impartial. In the online world, the line between editorial and commercial content can get pretty blurred. Right now this is just covered by number five, independence. Should there be a separate principle around independence from commercial influence?

Any and all responses are much appreciated, so please leave them in the comments. Also feel free to get in touch directly if you'd like to continue the discussion (I'm at martin DOT moore AT mediastandardstrust DOT org).

If you haven't seen the list of features we originally promised to build into Printcasting, let's just say it was pretty darned long. So it's with great satisfaction that I can say that, 18 months after our Knight-funded Printcasting project started, we have finally completed all of the features we promised.

But that doesn't mean we're finished. If anything, we've made our list even longer thanks to constant feedback from people who call us up to say, "Printcasting would perfectly fit my needs if you could just add this one extra thing..."

Introducing Printcasting 1.5

To those of you who have been asking for more control over publishing and design -- pay attention. This week we'll take a huge step forward by rolling out Printcasting 1.5, which is all about giving more control to publishers. You can see a quick preview of some of the 1.5 features here:

The elevator pitch for those who don't want to watch the video is that Printcasting 1.5 has much more professional-looking templates, more options for how text and pictures can be arranged on a page, more control over fonts, and some really cool design features for header images.

We call this a "dot-five" release because it's really an incremental step toward the even more ambitious Printcasting 2.0, which will be a complete rewrite in Drupal 6 that will be more usable by the open source community. (We will also open source the Drupal 5 version once we're satisfied with where it's at).

We say that this release is all about publishers because, until relatively recently, we were still working on an extremely complicated self-serve advertising system. It was important to get the advertising system to work (and it was an important part of our Knight News Challenge proposal); but, to be frank, we haven't seen a lot of interest from the small businesses it was designed for.

One reason is the economy. Many of those businesses either cut their marketing budgets or flat out went out of business in 2009. You could say that it was the second worst time in American history to launch an advertising tool, with the first worst being the Great Depression. I continue to be a believer in the idea of "democratizing" print ad publishing, but it will take more time to get the features just right, and attract interest from time and cash-starved businesses.

Surprise! Businesses Need Democratized Publishing, Too

We also continue to get attention from the tech community. MIT included us in a list of Research to Watch, and O'Reilly will include us in a session at their Tools of Change in Publishing conference, along with our friends from RIT's Open Publishing Lab and Spot.us.

Looking Ahead

• Launch Printcasting 2.0 on Drupal 6. My challenge to the development team is to complete this by the end of February.
  

• Roll out more partnerships We've inked one to-be announced partnership with a Latin American newspaper, with a second in the wings, and are deep in discussions with a well-known membership organization. We also hope to work with some smaller non-profit news organizations that have reached out to us. Think your company and organization could make for a good Printcasting partner? Fill out this form and we'll get in touch with you. (On a side note, we've had many discussions with U.S. newspapers, but sadly most have stalled as most of those papers deal with collapsing business models).

• More promotion in Bakersfield through our sponsor / partner The Bakersfield Californian. After Printcasting 1.5 launches, the Californian plans to seriously ramp up marketing of the service in both print and online. We've already seen some increases in usage from some test promos.

• Experiment with e-book formats starting with ePub, which is what Apple is using for the recently announced iPad. I was really excited to see Apple adopt this open standard, rather than promote a new proprietary format. Those of you who think Printcasting is all about paper may be surprised to hear that we're thinking about e-books, but the truth is that Printcasting has never been just about print. It's a digital technology platform that creates content that is designed to be read in your hand. The more visual e-readers become, the more important layout and design will be. We hope to make our service an integral part of the e-book and e-publishing ecosystem.

So that's what we're up to. Please give Printcasting 1.5 a try this week (we'll post an update on our Twitter feed when it's ready), and get ready for more fun stuff in the future.

UPDATE on 2/4/2010: Printcasting 1.5 went live on Feb. 3. Read more about how to get started on the official Printcasting blog.

The Chicago Tribune's Election Center, developed by the team that includes the first two programmer-journalists (whose journalism educations were financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships), is a great example of what's possible. The site provides an essential guide to tomorrow's primary elections and dramatically simplifies the task of deciding whom to vote for. (If you're interested in seeing it live, you'll want to check it out before the polls close tomorrow, because once the election is over, the Tribune will shut down some of the key functionality -- and begin gearing up for the general election).

Here are the key elements of the Election Center (you can view screenshots in a Flickr slideshow):

• Type in your address and you get information about your polling place and a sample ballot customized to where you live.
• If you don't know whom to vote for in a given race, mouse over the candidate's name and you'll have access to his or her biography, relevant news articles, and endorsements from the Tribune's editorial board.
• With a click, view all of the Tribune's endorsements.
• View lengthy Q&A's with candidates in the most important races.
• As you decide whom to vote for, click to check off your preferred candidate.
• When you're done, produce a printable ballot you can take with you to the polls.
• Share your choices via email, Facebook or Twitter.

Much as I like the Election Center, it's only fair to point out that there have been versions of this in the past. My Medill School colleagues Owen Youngman and Darnell Little tell me that as far back as 1996, the Tribune's Web site allowed people to type in an address and get a customized ballot. And in previous elections, many papers have made use of vendor-supplied technology (especially the ballot tools provided by thevoterguide.com) to provide similar capabilities. But I think the Tribune's site nails the combination of comprehensiveness and usability better than anything I've seen before.

When the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation funded scholarships to lure computer programmers into studying journalism, we were hoping to get coders excited about applying their skills to accomplishing the missions and goals of journalism. Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark, the first two scholarship winners, did exactly that, and helped launch the Tribune's "news applications team." A third team membrer, Joe Germuska, is featured in this news video about the Election Center.

There's one desirable piece of functionality I don't see on the Tribune's site: a tool pioneered years ago (I believe) by Rob Curley's team at the Lawrence Journal World and copied by others. It's basically a game where users register their opinions regarding key campaign issues, then are shown the candidates whose views are closest to their own.

I'd also point out that local media -- including the Tribune -- should do more to help educate voters about the election process. My Northwestern colleague Mary Nesbitt nicely captured some of the needs in a blog post last year about helping new voters.

One feature on the Tribune's site that I haven't seen before is the capability of sharing your ballot choices by email, Facebook and Twitter. I haven't seen anything quite like it before. But I have a feeling it's not going to be widely used -- in part because primary elections don't get much attention and in part because most people will be reluctant to share their voting intentions with people beyond their closest family and social circles.

Still, the concept of ballot sharing deserves further creative thinking and experimentation. What could be better for democracy than to have people telling their friends whom they're voting for and why, even if -- especially if -- that causes conversations to take place that would otherwise not occur?

Having a celebrity ambassador will be helpful for a lot of reasons. One, he is going to help us in our outreach to TV news networks whom we are approaching to air content produced by communities. His name will mean a lot there. Also, he can help us popularize community media amongst his fans and his peers in the Bollywood film industry. This is important because we don't want community media to always be seen as alternative and unusual. The poor represent the majority of humanity and so their media representatives needn't always be seen as "special" and alternative. He and his friend Imtiyaz Ali, a director of some of the best Indian films of the last few years, stood on the stage and told the Producers at the screening that their videos were better than some of what was coming out in Bollywood.

As young people get more into making their own media - mash ups, facebook, cell phone videos, etc.) and seeking it out proactively from hundreds of sources- a massively beneficial side effect is that they learn to critique the media. Though we may not have seen it yet, I think in the next few years we'll see people turning more towards documentaries instead of TV. As these kids teach themselves to make media and express themselves on what they are passionate about, won't they naturally be drawn to the media form - documentary - that is most driven by someone's personal passion and concern for an issue? So in that sense, when a big star wants to tell his own audience to see the connections between the alternative and the mainstream media, I think he is tapping into something bigger.

I had met Abhay Deol earlier at TED India, where I was one of the TED Fellows. He was one of the speakers, talking about storytelling and how he works to get his passion projects taken up. So many of the issues he cared about - issues with Muslims, Tribals and other disadvantaged groups -were issues we work on so it felt like a real affinity. His latest film is essentially an Indian "Cinema Paradiso." He plays a guy who travels around India with a projector showing films in villages... very similar to what we do! We talked about VV's work and he was excited, and so agreed to come on as an ambassador for us. We have a few more ideas for press events with him, like having him do trainings with the community producers and inviting some key magazines for that, and this weekend he's the guest editor for one of the major Indian papers and will be interviewing us. I've always thought that people from Hollywood would be natural endorsers or supporters of new media projects but never knew how to reach out to them. So we're excited this has happened.

Here's what he's said, which has been quoted directly in some of the articles:

"They need financial support and have over 100 trained producers. They are also willing to provide new content to TV channels thus making reporters out of local people who make short films on community issues like infra- structure, domestic violence, child marriage, clean water. Anybody who is interested in filming can join. They teach editing and computers too."

Abhay feels, "This is the potential of the digital revolution, the poor in India can finally make their voices heard to the mainstream media and to government," says Deol. "And in a place like India, with high levels of illiteracy, video and film are a perfect medium. Giving people the tools to make their own media is a great way to enable more people to participate in our democracy."

Manthan award and scalability

We actually won in a special category, getting the Juror's Distinction Award, which makes us even better than the best! The award was for GRINS (Gramin Radio Inter Networking System), the community radio broadcast system we have developed. There is no equivalent open-source or even commercial radio automation system which supports the extensive features that we do.

This is a very timely award for us. Manthan is focused on community media in South Asia in a big way. There were many organizations from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Thailand that attended the awards and conference. It has helped put us in touch with all these groups from around the world, and they are all very keen to use our system and publicize it in their networks.

We are evolving an interesting model to help us scale our outreach. In terms of installation, we have kept our system absolutely plug-n-play so that we just have to ship out a GRINS box and radio stations can be up and running after hooking on the right cables and transmitter. But the challenge lies in how rapidly can we churn out boxes given our limited resources, and how can we provide support and maintenance around the world. So, what we plan is to identify resellers in different countries. Resellers may include small companies or individuals that do IT installations in offices. Such resellers will have the technical knowhow to install GRINS like systems, and also have a clear commercial incentive to convince radio stations to use our technology. At the same time, we will also make efforts to tie up with non-profits in different countries and do pilot projects with them to convince more organizations about the validity of our techniques.

Second release

The second release was a huge increment. We now support telephony, so that the radio station operator can make and receive phone calls through the GRINS user interface. This simplifies the task so much for them, because otherwise they would have to change mixer settings to archive conversations, or do something different to put the callers on air. Commercial radio stations also find this very despite more expensive equipment that they use, and most stations only play out pre-recorded phone conversations. The GRINS telephony interface looks as follows:

The radio station operator can specify whether they want to start accepting phone calls. Then, when a call comes, the operator can accept it and talk to the caller, and optionally even put the person on air. If multiple phone lines are available at the station, then a conferencing can even be set up among multiple callers. So, for example, a doctor can be asked to stay online over phone, and women or children from the villages can be invited to call and discuss their problems with the doctor. The entire conversation can be archived or played out instantaneously.

We are now working on what we call offline voice applications. Here, people can call and record questions or comments, and others can give answers to these questions. All the various audio snippets will get archived, and can be later played out on air. So, we can have voice applications for agricultural consultancy where farmers can call and ask questions, or for capacity building of healthcare workers where nurses and mid-wives working in villages can share knowledge with each other.

Here are a few interesting photos from our last trip to Orchha, our pilot location. The radio station has a wireless phone service, and we see here our man sitting in the sun on a grassy patch waiting for a call! The same phone actually also plugs into GRINS when the radio station wants to open itself to accept phone calls.

And this below is the coolest radio/transistor set I have ever seen! It can tune into FM and AM broadcasts, play out cassette tapes and mp3 from a USB stick, and even has a remote! Unbelievable! Somebody has retrofitted components from all sorts of junk and made this, talk about ingenuity!

Here are so many people from the radio station, reading the morning newspaper. Disconnected from the city and not having a television set in office, this is the only source of daily news for the people, which they use to make interesting radio programs.

More pilots

Our plan is to set up two more pilots of GRINS. One will be in the beautiful mountain city of Dharamshala, the Dalai Lama's residence, where the Tibetan's Children Village is running the radio station. The other pilot will be close to Delhi, in the suburbs of Gurgaon near an automobile factory. Both pilots present a very different demographic from Orchha. The Dharamshala radio station is actually run by kids! They sing poems, make educational programs for themselves and their families, and have singing competitions. The Gurgaon radio station on the other hand is an urban community radio station meant for the factory township, for workers and their families. Our first pilot at Orchha is so much different, here the radio serves about thirty remote villages with people working primarily around agriculture. We hope to have quite a few interesting stories to report very soon!

We are also getting requests for a lot of community radio stations in India to use the GRINS box. So, we will start making shipments of the box in about a month, and expect to have the box installed in more than twenty radio stations in 2010 itself.

Community radio and co-casting

I had earlier written about many challenges that the community radio movement in India was facing. Much needs to be done to pick up pace, but licenses are being given out steadily and now there are almost fifty community radio stations. Not all of them are entirely community-centric, many of them actually being campus radio stations run by educational institutions, but even these stations do serve a community of students afterall! We keep getting inquiries from a lot of places on how to set up a radio station, and so we put together a brief manual, a 101 on community radio, to outline the different things that an organization needs to do before it can set up a radio station.

All along while we were developing our system, we also realized that the system is more widely applicable than just for radio stations. So we developed a new concept, which we call co-casting! It is short for community casting or contextual casting or cooperative casting -- a new paradigm for communication in rural areas which is centered around specific communities that share a common informational interest. Co-casting is different from community radio broadcasting in the way it defines a community. Communities are geographically defined in a radio broadcast, but co-casting communities are information specific. Our rationale for having co-casting communities is that a centralized radio station becomes unscalable to be able to deal with the information needs of multiple communities present around its geographical footprint. Second, it is impractical to expect the radio station staff to have expertise in different types of information, which is not the case with co-casting.

To illustrate with an example, a local co-casting community for health would include nurses and midwives in the village, doctors, and local women folk. To set the community moving, an NGO will be required to set up a GRINS box in the community they cater to, and community members can then call into the box and leave questions, or conference to interact with experts and other members. Educational videos made locally are also offloaded on to the box and can be played out to listener groups during scheduled sittings together with an expert or local mediator. These local mediators can be recruited from among more skilled community members who know the topic in detail.

But note that co-casting is not just technology. The people and process are more important. Co-casting advocates that experts and mediators should interact with their communities not only over phone or by sharing videos, but even in person, to be able to attach themselves more closely to the local context and help members internalize the information effectively.

We have put together a detailed manual about co-casting which describes the technology and processes in more detail.

The next steps

With so much going on, we need to be very clear on what we want to prioritize next! Our agenda for the next couple of months is going to be around increasing our footprint. We are productizing the GRINS box, so that any community radio station or co-casting adventurer can just buy the box from us, or buy the hardware and install our software on it, plug it in and get started. At the same time, we will start looking out for resellers in different countries who can spawn off an installation activity at their end. All our software is open-source, so the resellers just have to find clients, buy the hardware, and download and install our software. At the same time, we are also looking at how to help make the community radio stations financially sustainable. Our current thinking is around tying up with content providers in education, consultancy, advertisements, etc and use the radio stations as a rural outreach arm for these content providers. The revenue will get passed on to the radio stations and help them cover their operating costs of staff salaries, utility bills, etc.

Stay tuned!

We were there to conduct a workshop about entrepreneurship in the creative field of video. The purpose of our recently-launched program in Sao Paulo is to create "video entrepreneurs," and this post is a snapshot of one of the exercises we did while we were there.

The nine young people were all from favela/periphery areas of Sao Paulo, and on that day we were conducting a workshop on how to market to clients. One young man started to read aloud from his introduction:

My name is Allan Jones. I'm 24 years old and live in the Guarulhos municipality of Sao Paulo State. My parents were born in the Amazon. My mother works as a seamstress and my father, I do not know who he is. I graduated high school only last year because the work I had to do did not allow me to study. I've worked in several areas, including as an installer of air conditioning, and around this time I had the opportunity to visit several theaters and see many shows. It was there that sparked my desire to work with theater and learn video.

Today I'm part of the project VCU.br, which is about how young people can work as independent videomakers, and I want to work in the area of script and production. I'm making a video about community theater in my area. My video tells the story of Mrs. Santa Catarina, an independent artist. She is self-taught and without resources or support, but manages to run a theater workshop in the community of Vila Isabel, in Guarulhos."

h2. Turning Disadvantages Into Advantages

The primary purpose of the exercise was to teach these young people to write compelling video proposals for different clients. But the deeper purpose is to teach them to turn their disadvantages into advantages, and to inspire others to see it that way.

If they are going to go into the market and compete with professionals, they must be able to communicate the value of their personal perspective. Why? Because their perspective as people who live close to the stories they are telling is the only thing they have that a professional does not. The problem is that they have spent so long hiding the fact that they're from the disadvantaged parts of the city that they're reluctant to write about it.

The personal narratives they wrote during the workshop revealed the challenges faced by the poor in the big cities like Rio, Sao Paulo or Mumbai. These include the long distances the poor have to travel from their homes to work in the city centers; the high costs of public transportation; the need to support their families financially; and insufficient public schools. In terms of our exercise, they all also highlighted the fact that they didn't have any professional contacts.

For one participant, all it took was a kind word from a TV reporter covering a story in his favela when he was 16 to give him the courage to ask for advice and tips about breaking into TV news. That was a turning point, and it gave him the conviction to pursue a career in media. Compare that to the 101 pieces of career advice that a privileged young person will receive by the time she is 21. Is it any wonder our Fellows seemed a little incredulous when we told them that their backgrounds are in fact a strength?

"It's because we live there that we're unique!"

As the days went by, the Fellows learned the step-by-step process of managing an independent video business, from identifying clients and writing proposals to creating a budget and rate sheet and "closing the deal."

But, really, they were learning to tell and celebrate their personal stories, and to find the personal connection that makes all work meaningful. We told them that they need to dig deep inside themselves to find this connection. Being an entrepreneur, ultimately, is about finding your personal power and confidence, and believing in yourself and your ideas.

The reality is that even if they send a compelling favela story to a television producer, the TV producer will always have the option of sending his own more "professional" freelancers to cover it. Our Fellows/Producers need to learn to convince people that they have something the professionals don't -- a perspective that will enlighten and captivate the audience.

After a couple of hours of them slightly struggling to "get" this concept, Beatrice jumped up. She is a beautiful and lively girl. Over the course of our three weeks together, her hair transformed from extension corn braids to a Nefertiti-style tall wrap to, finally, a beautiful disco-inspired Afro.

"I see!" she said. "It's because we live there that we're unique!"

From there, they started making the connections. One girl, Layla, used to work handing out fliers on the street. She knows what it's like to feel invisible on the street and have people walk by you as you try to get their attention. That's why she can tell an interesting story about street artists that have to fight for the acknowledgment of passersby. Another girl, Juliet, is the right person to tell a story about schizophrenia because her brother is schizophrenic.

A third person felt inspired to tell the stories of stray and injured animals because he used to see dogs getting run over when he worked as a delivery driver. This was just one exercise, but the process, I think, was key to the whole idea of community video as a social venture for the poor. Community producers need to be their own agents in terms of convincing the "market" of the value of their background. That means not just having self expression -- a voice -- but also self-reflection, and a large degree of self-awareness.

Identifying Entrepreneurs

Going into this project, one of our concerns was whether we would we be able to find people who were entrepreneurial, and who would want to run their own video business. The reality is that other jobs are less satisfying, but they can guarantee work. We had our doubts about whether entrepreneurship could be taught, so we needed to find that drive in our Fellows/Producers.

Business skills are easy to teach, but personal drive or motivation is another thing. Not everyone is an entrepreneur. If we were to tell our staff one day, "from today onwards, no one is getting monthly checks; instead, everyone needs to earn their own salary," most people would quit. Yet that's what many people in the NGO sector expect the poor to do.

As we saw our group's business plans develop, we became convinced they were the right people. All are committed to a career in video; all are committed to developing their own creativity, and to working for their communities.

For example, Rafael is now writing government proposals for him to create video projects in the slums. Luana is pursuing internships with TV stations they connected with during the project. Another participant, Layla, had this to say:

My experience in VCU.br was so good and the other Video Producers are such interesting people. Next year, I hope we'll get together to make some production companies. I want to really go ahead with videos, and I think I also have the capacity for fiction, too. I don't want everyone here to go off on their own and leave the group, so I'm thinking about how to make the idea of a group production company happen. Some of us love to write, some like to produce, others to edit. For me, we have a production company right here.

Stalin and I are convinced, as we always are with our community producers, of one thing: there is an abundance of undiscovered talent and knowledge out in the world, and we need to start tapping into it. When you give people opportunities, and you help them find their voice, there is no end to what they can achieve.

By contrast, when we started Video Volunteers in India, there were only two other groups in the country running permanent programs in community video. So the difference in Brazil, where we recently launched, was amazing and wonderful to see.

Below I've collected some of our observations about Brazil, and listed a few of the inspiring moments and facts regarding Brazil's community media that we learned during our month spent visiting the different groups. (I hope I've gotten all the facts correct, but please correct me if you see any mistakes in what I've written below; much of this information is from notes I took during fascinating discussions.)

Brazil's Commitment to Community Media

The Brazilian government is committed to supporting community arts and culture. There is a three percent tax break for corporations that support the arts, and this only applies to the arts! The government created a "points of culture" program around the country, where they have invested in 150 community arts projects to the tune of R$150,000 (around $75,000) per year, for three years. Many of the media NGOs we visited were funded in this way. The singer Gilberto Gil is currently the minister for culture and, given that he's one of the most revered celebrities in the country, this focuses citizens' attention on the importance of the arts.

It makes sense that this level of investment would be happening in Brazil and not in countries where poverty is more prevalent. One of the major societal challenges in Brazil is to keep young kids from favelas out of gangs and drugs and violence. Speaking to them in the languages they understand and love -- hip-hop, graffiti, video -- is possibly the best strategy for reaching disaffected youth.

Susan Worcman, director of the Brazil Foundation, said this is because "artistic talent in Brazil is generally very high. We have a lot of creative people." Driving around Sao Paulo seems to confirm this. The city is the graffiti capital of the world, and some artists from favelas have exhibited in major museums in Europe.

All over the city, as much in the hipster area of Villa Madelaina as in the favelas, you see incredible graffiti murals. It integrates the middle classes with the favelas in powerful ways. For instance, there was a community fresco program in Sao Paulo a few years ago, where kids from favelas worked with professional artists to create frescoes on the sides of buildings all over the city. All of the works included plaques reminding people that they were produced by slum kids.

The quality of community arts work is generally very high. Several NGO programs were started either by famous film directors (such as, Cinema Nosso which grew out of the film, City of God), TV producers (Instituto Criar in Sao Paulo, which was started by a Globo Executive) or musicians (such as Afro Reggae, which was started by a hip-hop artist).

As a result, community video work has been seen on TV, won awards, and one even resulted in a feature movie deal ("Cine Cufa," though the project may now be on hold). For us, we've put less emphasis on how artistic a community film is and focus more on how it will inspire action. But because of their quality, these Brazilian films are more marketable to the mainstream.

Photography Class at Observatorio de Favelas

The purpose of most of the community media groups we met is to empower youth to fight stereotypes about the favelas that dominate Brazilian media. One great organization we visited is the urban planning organization Observatorio de Favelas. Its very name implies changing the point of reference of who is watching whom. It is about the favelas observing the rest of the city, and this is a very different way of doing urban planning. Instead of talking about the "city center" and "periphery areas," they highlight areas of high and low public investment.

Portrayal of Favelas in the Media

It is clear after spending even a brief time in Brazil that the image presented of the favelas in the media is as sites of violence. They are never shown as the culturally and creatively rich areas they are. This creates real fear among the middle class population of Brazil.

The receptionist at our hotel begged us not to go to a certain area when we asked her for directions. Cab drivers refuse to take people to some places. The point of most of the community media we saw is to challenge the stereotypes and teach the kids to be critical of the media. (As a result, there is relatively little community media/journalism being done the way VV does it, where the purpose is to screen media back to communities.)

Arts and Culture vs. News and Information

Each country VV has worked in has a different outlook or way of using community media. In India, at least in terms of our work, media is a tool to empower people to take action; it is a tool to accelerate other social change efforts. In the U.S., the scene is much more about news and information, and how we can respond to the current crisis in journalism.

In other parts of South America, there is a very strong indigenous media scene that unites different tribes. In Brazil, the focus is definitely "community arts and culture." It's about community media as a right in itself, and as an educational tool. Most of the organizations we met were focused primarily on training, as opposed to the distribution of that content or its use.

Brazil Media Stats

We learned some interesting media and policy facts from our conversations with Flavio at Ashoka, Bia Barbosa at Intervoces, and John Prideaux, the Economist's correspondent in Brazil. Newspaper readership in Brazil is extremely low compared to other countries. TV is by far the dominant information source in the country, and nearly everyone watches only one channel, Globo.

We saw for ourselves how media-watching habits seem much more unified in Brazil. A recent and very popular "telenovela" was a drama set in India, and everyone mentioned it to us. People were coming up to my Indian partner Stalin in the subway, giving him a Namaste bow and repeating "arre baba." It's just one of the ways you see these two incredibly strong emerging markets coming together through globalization.

Ninety percent of the country is reached by terrestrial TV, thanks mainly to the efforts of Globo. Very few people have cable or satellite TV. We asked Barbosa at Intervoces if media activists and community media organizations had tried to jointly create a TV channel, given that there is such a huge amount of content produced by community media groups. She said an impediment to this is the fact that terrestrial TV is the only option.

All of Brazil media is controlled by six families/companies, and there are no limits on cross ownership of media, or on how much of the audience one company can reach. Barbosa is fighting for the introduction of these limits, because as it stands corporations are able to heavily influence public opinion. Other policy efforts undertaken by media activists include:

• The creation of independent public TV, a la BBC, which doesn't currently exist. The government recently created an education channel, which did create more space for socially relevant media -- but it is controlled by the government.
• The increasing of diversity on television. Barbosa said that with so many community media groups and productions, the government should make space for programming that truly reflects the diversity of the country.
• The liberalization of Internet laws. One upcoming fight will be to allow political parties to use the Internet to gain support. What Barack Obama's did with the Internet would currently be illegal in Brazil.

There is clearly much more to learn about the movements in Brazil to reform and democratize the media, and these are just our first impressions.

Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices, a Los Angeles-based citizen media project, is a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California. In its own words, Mobile Voices is "a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. VozMob helps people with limited computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere."

For the last eighteen months, three programmers have been working on Mobile Voices. I talked to Sasha Constanza-Chock, one of the developers of the project, about the process that went into building the Mobile Voices platform. I asked why Mobile Voices built a custom platform for the project, why they chose to use multimedia messaging for content delivery, and the lessons they have learned about using MMS.

Goals

David Sasaki, an Idea Lab contributor, previously wrote a good introduction to Mobile Voices. The project's primary goal is to develop a platform through which day laborers can broadcast their voices to a wide audience using mobile phones. The software needs to be scalable in order for it to be used by many day laborers. (The initial group only had 10 laborers, but a much larger audience is expected.) Another goal of the project, which is especially relevant to building the software, is the idea of using so-called participatory design: the technology would be designed according to needs and requests of the laborers, and built with their direct input.

The Platform

The current Mobile Voices platform is a customized Drupal system that lets day laborers blog by sending an MMS message to a Mobile Voices email address. Users can also text in via SMS, or call a local number to leave an audio message. They can register to start mobile blogging just by using their phone. They can also subscribe to blogs using MMS, translate posts, and more.

Why Custom Software?

Sasaki, in his review, offers three points of criticism (or "push-back" as he calls them) about the Mobile Voices project. I started my interview with Constanza-Chock with Sasaki's third point, questioning the cost and resources needed to build a custom Drupal system in favor of using a pre-existing commercial software platform like Brightkite, for example.

Constanza-Chock noted that there were four reasons: participatory development, scalability, customizability, and privacy. To enable participatory design methods for the project, the Mobile Voices team wanted to be able to modify the software in any way requested by the users. They did not want limitations imposed by a commercial platform to hinder a particular feature the day laborers wanted.

Moreover, Mobile Voices needed targeted scalability because they eventually want to extend the platform so that any day laborer could use it. Day laborers also tend to use low-end phones, and most commercial platforms are geared toward tech-savvy smartphone users. (For example, iPhone apps are often favored over lower-end phones.) VozMob anticipated bending over backwards to fit each of its user's needs, and needed a customizable platform.

Constanza-Chock also explained that an open source framework was chosen so they could protect their users' privacy completely -- a must when dealing with immigrant workers.

Why Choose Multimedia Messaging?

MMS is rarely used in mobile projects focused on social development. They typically use SMS, WAP browsing, the Internet, and even voice-based applications. However, the VozMob team uses MMS heavily. They even wrote software to combine a set of pictures, audio and photo captions to make up soundslides in blog posts (see an example here -- click on the picture to see the slideshow). So I asked Constanza-Chock why VozMob chose to use MMS as one of its primary phone technologies.

VozMob, true to good participatory design principles, conducted extensive user surveys. The team examined which phones, plans, and types of non-mobile Internet access the laborers had. Seeing mostly voice-based usage (only 31 percent of respondents sent texts), the team proceeded to build an audio-blogging system accessible by simply calling a number. They used a simple voicemail-based system which they could access from Drupal through email, with minimal effort.

Soon, users were asking how they could upload pictures and other content to the site. The initial survey results showed 47 percent of the laborers take pictures, and AT&T prepaid plans (which a fair number of users were using) had cheap messaging plans. So VozMob decided that the technology that fit the users' desires and needs best would be an MMS-based solution. (Constanza-Chock tells me they also considered J2ME-based applications, but the prototypes showed little promise).

How Has Using MMS Fared?

In the United States, all mobile carriers offer email gateways to their SMS and MMS services. The VozMob team chose these email gateways for getting their users' MMSs. While Drupal already had a module that would import email, the team needed to put in some work to specifically receive email that came from MMS.

One basic difficulty working with MMS-generated email is that different carriers format messages differently. Some carriers attach text or multimedia ads for their networks, others send WAP links to media files (but no file in the message), and still others send files as email attachments. VozMob wrote the filtering and processing software necessary to get multimedia content in each of these different formats.

Another problem VozMob encountered was that unlocked phones are often hard to configure to use MMS. Constanza-Chock said providers were unwilling or incapable of working with the project to enable non-carrier-bought handsets to work with MMS, and highly technical engineers stumbled in making some phones work.

On the other hand, the team also encountered some pleasant surprises working with MMS. According to Constanza-Chock, most phones (even low-end ones) can compose elaborate MMS messages. With some digging, phones can compose a single MMS message that contains multiple pictures, sound, as well as text (the example from above was created using a single MMS). Mobile Voices has used this functionality to allow laborers to blog detailed slideshows, all using one MMS message.

What Worked Well

After a year and a half of development, Constanza-Chock is happy that most of the core functionality (for uploading) is there. Day laborers can upload photos, audio, and video using cheap MMS messaging. And they are excited about doing so: Constanza-Chock said users have introduced their friends to the system.

For the development process, Constanza-Chock said their use of an issue tracker was very helpful. The project ran participatory workshops to help design the software. The laborers would report problems and desires, which would turn into bug reports and feature requests on a RedMine issue tracker. Face-to-face code sprints, as well as face-to-face meetings between developers and the clients also helped the project along.

Challenges and Sticking Points

When I asked Constanza-Chock about the challenges the project faced, he pointed out that the telecommunications operators were hard to deal with. Not only did they refuse to work with MMS configurations on unlocked phones, they had unpredictable price changes in MMS packages. Constanza-Chock was also frustrated by expiration dates of MMS messages bought by clients. (AT&T prepaid sells messaging packages that offer a specific number of messages, but they  expire after one month).

Constanza-Chock also said working on a project such as this requires a lot of time and energy. There are often many possible ways of accomplishing a goal, especially when using free and open source software. Simply evaluating the pros and cons, and finding the right tools, takes a lot of work. A sustained project that is designed to provide a certain service to a user base requires sustained time and energy, Constanza-Chock said, which can be challenging.

Future Work

The project is not yet complete. Constanza-Chock told me a few ways they are looking to expand the project. The team focused on building the core software, and hasn't spent a lot of time on marketing or outreach to day laborers. The Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, the resource center the laborers use, is building training kits so more laborers can start blogging on the VozMob platform.

The project will also focus on actually broadcasting the laborers' voices. Going forward, the Mobile Voices blog will get a face-lift, there will be more publicity, and they plan to add tools to share and spread the workers' stories using social media.

Finally, the VozMob developers will also re-factor the code they have produced so far, so it can be integrated into Drupal modules. The work on MMS and SMS filtering and processing using email gateways will be put back into the Drupal mailhandler and SMS Framework modules.

Part two of the Mobile Voices article will focus on the challenges of implementing a citizen media platform with marginalized populations. This series is cross-posted on MobileActive.org

For those journalists who have just woken up to the changes in their industry, I know that this issue couldn't be more fascinating and pertinent. But if you worked in the news business on the web from the start, as I did at Salon.com beginning in 1995, this hunt has become an overly familiar routine and, at its worst, a rite of futility.

Over the course of the decade I spent at Salon, we tried it all -- pay walls, partial and total; e-commerce and transaction-based income; personal ads and affinity clubs; fees for add-on services and even an ill-fated cruise. Each of these efforts had its merits, but we never found the magic formula that would allow us to profitably support a newsroom for the web. (Salon is still working creatively on the problem; I left the company a couple of years ago, but remain a shareholder and friend.)

Now, it's true that we never tried the "metered" approach the New York Times announced last week, occasioning a vast spill of ink, virtual and otherwise. Maybe this plan will provide the paper with much-needed new revenue. Maybe it will drive readers away and cut into ad revenue. I'm sure the Times execs have thought through most of the angles, and since they've given themselves another year to launch their scheme, they've got plenty of time to fine-tune their system and message.

Still, my first reaction was: Good luck. You'll need it. My skepticism stems partly from some practical lessons I feel I learned from our ancient mistakes at Salon, and partly from a strong belief that the entire Great Business Model Hunt is the wrong approach.

Some Practical Concerns

First, the practical stuff. Since the web is built on links and open access, barring visitors for any reason is a big deal. The perception that you are operating a "pay site" discourages links and visits. (The Times says visitors who arrive via referring links won't be "running the meter"; that's smart, but risks creating a strong incentive for readers to stop using the site's own front page or indexes, and allow others to "edit" -- filter -- the content.)

In a passionate defense of the Times plan, media columnist David Carr wrote that the approach will let Times managers adjust the dials of their site on the fly, turning the knobs to boost the free traffic when the ad market is hot, or to bolster subscription revenue during a downturn.

That sounds great, and maybe it will work. But it risks confusing readers, and a confused reader online is an ex-reader. Once visitors encounter a barrier -- or even if they get it in their heads that maybe there's a barrier -- they tend to go away and not come back. At Salon, our full pay wall was only in place for a handful of months, nearly a decade ago, and yet I still bump into people who tell me they don't read the site because they don't want to buy a subscription.

The Wrong Question

The larger reason for my skepticism is more abstract. Journalists who set out on the Great Business Model Hunt are trying to figure out how to support a newsroom. This is entirely understandable. If you have a great newsroom -- and as a lifelong reader I certainly feel that the Times does -- then of course you're going to worry about that around the clock once you realize that your old business model is doomed.

But it's the wrong question. It's backwards. The newsrooms of today acquired their size and shape and structure thanks to the business model that supported institutions of their size. The world has changed; that model is vanishing. We shouldn't be asking "What sort of business can support a newsroom online?" The question is, "What's the best kind of newsroom that the online business can support?"

In a recent post here at Idea Lab, David Cohn fished a thoughtful quote out of one of Clay Shirky's essays on this topic. Here it is. Read it again:

The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn't because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident

It was just an accident. This truth is painful to accept. It means that there is nothing inevitable about the survival of the newsroom. But it's also a hopeful insight. There will be new accidents!

The good news is that the web is a great environment for accidents. Risk-taking is cheap, and that means we're going to have accidents galore, and eventually one or more of them will surprise us by supporting the journalism our society needs.

But I don't think these accidents will happen out on the trail of the Big Business Model Hunt. They'll happen where we don't expect it, and we will all slap our foreheads and cry "Of course!"

Our site is a collaborative enterprise that incorporates an aspect of social networking, and relies on user-generated information for news and events. We're taking care of the stop-specific promotions by working with local merchants, and we hope this creates an initial "sticky" factor by keeping users coming back to check for a new deal each day. Fix-it projects for local communities seem to be a big hit as well, and we're hoping they add to the stickiness of the site.

Why do I keep talking about stickiness? Activity on our site is crucial. We've taken steps to generate stories and event listings from freelance journalists and local entities -- however, we need to get users to start using the site and generating buzz.

We've laid the groundwork in our efforts last year by hosting events in local neighborhoods around the rail in order to gain support and demo our site. During these events, we met individuals who will most likely be our new adopters and influencers. Now we've got to take the example from social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace and spread the word to as many people (within our target audience) as we can to get users on our site!

Here we go...

OaklandLocal is summarizing a new report on a shootout in March that left five people dead. They use Scribd to embed reports directly on their site, but can't provide annotations.

California Watch is looking at what campaign season generosity bought for agribusiness in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. They put together a great Flash widget that highlights noteworthy portions of the documents they reviewed, but they had to sit down with a highlighter, circle relevant passages, and then scan each document for the site.

ProPublica, the Los Angeles Times, ABC News and the Washington Post are collaborating to report on civilian contractors injured in Iraq that are now struggling to get badly needed health care. But if you want to read the Congressional report that found covering private contractors has proved quite profitable for insurance companies, you'll have to download the whole report.

If the reporters behind these stories had DocumentCloud at their fingertips, we could have saved them a decent amount of work, made the documents they wanted to share more accessible, and invited deeper reader examination. And that is just the beginning. We don't know yet what that examination might yet yield. Stay tuned!

As we work, we really do want to know: What are you doing with documents now? Can you point out a recent story that you'd like to look at more closely? Please share your thoughts and feedback in the comments.

So let's keep that bit of honesty alive in this post in order to talk broadly about journalism. (If you just want the updates on Spot.Us, scroll down to the bottom.)

Robert Niles at OJR wrote two recent, fantastic pieces. In the shadow of The Economist's article proclaiming this to be "The year of the pay wall," Niles wrote "there is no revenue model for journalism" and that "doing journalism is an act of community organizing."

Doing journalism as an act of community organizing is something I've been writing/thinking about for a long time -- ever since Assignment Zero first failed. (Its failure only becomes more beautiful and poetic with hindsight). But I want to focus on Niles' first point.

"There is no revenue model for journalism."

That's not an easy thing to say. Probably not good cocktail conversation at a journalism mixer. But let's entertain Niles for a minute.

He says there are three main ways publishers can make money.

1. Direct purchases, such as subscriptions (or pay walls), copy sales, and tickets
   
2. Advertising
3. Donations, including direct contributions and grant funding

Niles then proceeds to break down the three and concludes, "Publishers must take a sober look at these three options and decide how best to maximize their income opportunities within them."

Others might disagree with Niles and cite a plethora of other revenue streams (see: How to turn journalists into profit centers), but I don't think we can outright dismiss Niles's point of view by dreaming up other revenue streams outside of these trusted few.

Keep in mind the tone I mentioned earlier: Honesty, both the good and the bad. So let's take a good long look at just the headline. Certainly, Niles didn't mean there were no revenue streams. He simply meant there is no new revenue stream to pluck out of the sky aside from those main three.

But let's take his headline to the extreme for a minute. We can keep these three revenue streams and, as the trends show, entertain the idea that journalism just isn't sustainable. That's what I did in a thought experiment while witnessing the back and forth banter of two friends on Twitter, an exchange that was archived by Deanna Zandt. 

My response to 'journalism mimics art' in full was captured in a bit of a rant:

....a hard cold truth might be that [journalism] isn't sustainable.

But you know what - even if journalism isn't sustainable in that classic sense it doesn't mean it will disappear. There are plenty of endeavors that have NEVER been sustainable in the true sense of the word.

I use poetry as an example. Poetry in and of itself has never been sustainable in the way we might think of other goods and services.

Are we afraid poetry will die? No. Has it ever even been scarce?

I think we could extend this [lack of sustainability] to almost all of the high arts (as opposed to pop arts).

One of Clay Shirky's most profound and popular posts about newspapers had this to say:

The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn't because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing
budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident.

And while we all agree with the wisdom of this, we seldom take Shirky to task. If Wal-Mart won't subsidize journalism, somebody else must step up. But perhaps whoever that is won't have profits and sustainability in mind.

I'm not proposing that we just give up, all join co-ops and grow dreadlocks (although that would be cool with my internal hippie). What I am suggesting is that, in this age of experimentation, which we all agree is happening, there are certain assumptions we make that steer the direction of our thought.

One of those assumptions, and I claim this all the time, is that there will always be a market for news and information. That marketplace is in flux and hard to pin down at the moment, but people want accurate and thorough news and information. If this assumption is true, then journalism will be sustainable once we figure out the marketplace again and how to "sell" the news.

Compare this to poetry, where there is little demand. There is no robust marketplace and poetry is not "sustainable" in the true sense of the word. Instead, it is traditionally professionalized through patrons of the arts.

The Relative Importance of News and Information

In conversations with people that conduct audience research I've come to realize that news and information is not as important to the average reader as it is to folks like you and me (bloggers, journalists, news junkies, etc).

Here's what they tell me: two times a week. That's how often people have the urge to dive into civic issues at the local level. Of those two times it's unclear whether or not news and information is even desired, or if it's just the urge to tutor the kids at your local school, or do some public gardening, etc.

I wonder how often people feel the urge to hear poetry?

I don't claim to know any truths about the value of journalism and original reporting. Hey, I'm biased! I'm just suggesting that, as journalists, when we have this discussion we should recognize our bias and tendency for over-valuation.

In that vein, I want to follow this train of thought to an extreme. For me, it's often helpful to think in extreme examples and then determine the factors that lead to one or the other extreme. I could very easily write a blog post where the value of news and information is compared to food (three times a day, please) instead of poetry. Following that path would give us different conclusions.

So fear not! No truth has been discovered in this post -- it's just an attempt to shake things up.

Spot.Us Updates

1. The Redesign is making progress -- It's always slower than you want it to be. But so is transportation. One day, we'll just be able to snap our fingers and, presto-insto, be somewhere new.

2. Pitches are coming in and going through the pipeline -- We still need to figure out a better way to keep pitches on a deadline. A last resort would be to start deducting money from pitches that go past deadline, but that is a last resort. I'm sure there are other measures we can put into place to make sure deadlines are met. By the way, the newest pitch comes from a very cool Peter Byrne who wants to investigate the UC Regents.

Internet technologies give governments an unprecedented ability to monitor our communication, internet activity, and even the microphones on our cell phones. The Internet, however, also empowers citizens with new tools and tactics to hold their elected officials accountable, increase transparency in government, and promote broader and more diverse civic engagement.

Rising Voices, the outreach and citizen media training initiative of Global Voices Online, has launched a new interactive website and global network of researchers to map online technology projects that aim to promote transparency, political accountability, and civic engagement in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and Central & Eastern Europe. Over the next three months eight researchers and eight research reviewers will document at least 32 case studies of the most innovative technology for transparency projects outside of North America and Western Europe. By thoroughly documenting and evaluating each project with a standard methodology we aim to come to a better understanding of what tactics, tools, and tips are most effective in 1) making government information accessible to the general public in a meaningful way, 2) holding political and corporate leaders accountable to the rule of law and their campaign promises, and 3) promoting civic engagement so that a wider and more representative portion of citizens are involved in policy making and political processes.

Over the next three months we hope to find concrete answers to the following questions: Can technology for transparency projects be evaluated individually for impact, or should they only be seen as part of a larger accountability ecosystem? Does citizen participation in such projects lead to greater overall citizen engagement and more widespread demand for accountable public institutions? Do public institutions change their policies and behavior based on the input from citizen-led initiatives? To what extent does the usage of technology tools drive action around transparency?

The Need

As of January 19, U.S. cellphone users have donated more than $22 million in text-message donations alone. In fact, roughly one-fifth of the $112 million total that the American Red Cross has so far raised for Haiti has come via text messaging. Technology has clearly had an impact on global giving for humanitarian relief efforts. The priority right now is that the money gets to Haiti quickly and is spent as effectively as possible to save lives, and provide medical care and shelter. But in the longterm, as billions of dollars of aid money flow in to help rebuild infrastructure and entire industries, how can both Haitian citizens and donors hold institutions accountable so that development programs are run properly and without corruption?

As traditional media companies are forced to cut their budgets because of falling advertising revenue, investigative journalism and international coverage are the two most common areas to be disappear. David Simon, in his testimony before Congress about the death of the newspaper industry, said that with a vacuum of investigative journalism, "it is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician." Meanwhile, Transparency International's 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index reveals that corruption is still a severe and worldwide problem.

However, there is also growing enthusiasm about the use of social media as a powerful tool in promoting transparency and fighting against corruption. But how does the use of technology to promote transparency differ across regions, cultures, and types of governance? What skills and expertise are missing from the current technology for transparency projects? What types of relationships have they formed with media, government, and civil society organizations to increase their impact? We will document in-depth as many technology for transparency projects as possible to gain a better understanding of their current impact, obstacles, and future potential.

The Team

Global Voices has long been reporting about uses of digital media and technology to improve governance and fight against corruption. Several veteran Global Voices contributing authors are joined by leading transparency activists around the world to make up our team of researchers and research reviewers. We are also fortunate to count on the experience and insight of a board of advisors made up of the leading thinkers in the field of transparency and good governance.

For those of you on Twitter we have made lists of our researchers, reviewers, and advisors.

The Results

As of today you are able to read three case studies documenting projects based in Jordan, Chile, and Kenya. Ishki.com is a complaint brokerage which collects and organizes complaints from local citizens about the public and private sector. Vota Inteligente uses technology to provide Chilean citizens with more information about their elected officials. Mzalendo tracks the performance of Kenya's Parliament by documenting votes, publishing records, and providing analysis and context.

Over the next two weeks these three case studies will be joined by eight others. In addition to publishing at least 32 case studies over the next three months, we will also facilitate 16 discussions on Global Voices that provide more context and background information about the state of transparency, accountability and civic engagement in specific countries and regions. We are also building a toolset of the most effective tools used by the projects that we document. Click on any of the tools and you will see which projects have incorporated it as part of their strategy.

We realize that these are busy times and that few readers will be able to read all of the thorough case studies, background discussions, and tool profiles that we publish. For this reason we have created a weekly podcast that will feature five-minute interviews with leaders of some of the most interesting technology for transparency projects that we come across. You can click on this link to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. So far we have interviews with Waheed Al-Barghouthi of Ishki, Ory Okolloh of Mzalendo, and Felipe Heusser of Vota Inteligente.

At the beginning of May we will also publish a traditional PDF report which highlights the most innovative and effective tools and tactics related to technology for transparency projects. The report will make recommendations to funders, activists, NGOs, and government officials regarding the current obstacles to effectively applying technology to improve transparency, accountability, and civic engagement. It will also aggregate and evaluate the best ideas and strategies to overcome those obstacles.

Our research will complement - and collaborate with - the work being done by like-minded mapping, discussion, and toolset projects including ParticipateDB, Participedia, the International Association for Public Participation, the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, ePractice, MobileActive's mDirectory, and LocalLabs.

How to Help

This is a collaborative research project which is open to the participation and input of anyone interested in the intersection of technology and good governance. If you have suggestions for case studies that we should document and evaluate please get in touch via our contact page. If you are interested in contributing as a volunteer researcher you can register for a user account.

You can subscribe to our RSS feed for newly published case studies and to our podcast for interviews with leading doers and thinkers in the field. Please follow us on Twitter and become a fan of our page on Facebook to receive extra updates about daily news and information related to technology for transparency. Finally, if you would like to engage in debate and discussion about the application of technology to improve governance in countries outside of North America and Western Europe, please subscribe to the Transparency for Technology mailing list.

For years now there has been an ongoing debate about whether the Internet is good or bad for democracy. But we have few case studies and even fewer comparative research mappings of Internet-based projects that aim to improve governance, especially in countries outside of North America and Western Europe. Hopefully the Technology for Transparency Network will lead not only to more informed debate about the Internet's impact on democracy, but also to more participation and interest in projects that aim to empower and improve the livelihoods of citizens who were previously excluded from political participation.