The Purchase Brothers and DIY Filmmaking

On day two of the event, Suzanne Stefanac, director of the AFI Digital Content Lab, introduced two of the most talked-about innovators in do-it-yourself filmmaking: Ian and David Purchase, a.k.a. the Purchase Brothers. They created the low budget, but visually rich, short, "Escape from City 17." This film combined existing digital assets (videogame backgrounds from Half-Life and photos from Wikipedia) with guerilla filmmaking (on-the-fly dialogue and trespassing on a local train depot), and three months of post-production work.

Watch the Purchase Brothers' "Escape from City 17."

"We thought they were among the most important new filmmakers to hit the scene this year," said Stefanac. "What they did that set them apart was to teach themselves to meld live action cinema with a robust 3D game world. The resulting footage looks as though it cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps even millions. But, in truth, they spent less than $500. Totally self-taught, they are among the new stars emerging from a moribund landscape."

If the Purchase Brothers represent what's possible on little or no budget, Digital Domain's visual effects work on Sony Pictures' "2012" represents the deep-pocketed end of the digital creative process. This is where large teams of specialized animators spend years creating jaw-dropping footage. Marten Larsson, CG effects animation lead at Digital Domain, demonstrated how they used a combination of open source tools and experimentation to layer, simulate and construct the apocalyptic scenes where buildings smash into each other, and cities fall into the ocean.

While Larsson wouldn't reveal how much the two-minute scene he previewed cost to create, he did mention that 100 people spent a full year to develop it. That kind of expense would be truly apocalyptic to DIY filmmakers and indie film producers.

DigiFest presenters emphasized the myriad opportunities to create content and tell stories in ways that haven't previously been done before, mainly due to technology or budget limitations. "The most exciting development on the digital tool front has to be the fact that all of the tools for conceptualizing, shooting, editing, distributing and promoting are becoming so democratized," said Stefanac. "All of these tools can reside on one modest laptop."

For Humans Only: The World of District 9

Laptops represent just one of many screens on which filmmakers and marketers are trying to engage and excite potential ticket buyers. Trigger, an entertainment and brand marketing agency, built the iPhone game and website for "2012," and they also spearheaded the digital marketing initiatives for Sony Pictures' "District 9."

At DigiFest, Jason Yim, president and executive creative director of Trigger, walked attendees through the integrated marketing campaign for the movie. This included an augmented reality component and online game, as well as blogs and Twitter profiles from different perspectives (MNU: Multi-National United and @MultiNationalU | MNU Spreads Lies and @MNU_Lies) that were written in English and in an alien language. The campaign also included a MNU mobile marketing vehicle, and the ubiquitous bus bench sign that declared, "Bus Bench For Humans Only."

"We started this campaign 18 months before the movie came out [and worked] based on the initial treatment, and before they started shooting," said Yim. "So keeping the content updated and still on message even as the actual film evolved was a challenge. I think this speaks highly of the Sony team for creating a strategy that started within the confines of Comic-Con, but could grow and broaden over the next 14 months into an international campaign."

Film Discovery and Anywhere Engagement

Discovering the next great film from self-starters like The Purchase Brothers or developing integrated, global marketing campaigns such as the one for "District 9," are ongoing challenges for digital innovators.

"With the explosion of new content hitting every size screen, we need new filters, new ways of discovering stories that make us smarter, happier, better humans," said Stefanac.

Yim draws inspiration from social media platforms and location-driven opportunities. "The iPhone, social media, GPS and augmented reality represent an evolutionary leap for digital marketing," he said. "Combined, these innovations multiply the effectiveness of marketing by providing relevancy."

He said the rapidly evolving nature of technology and online networks means marketers have to constantly adapt.

"Digital marketing has become exponentially more challenging and interesting because the tools are changing so quickly," he said. "We are constantly asked to develop on new social networks around the world, and while our mobile programmers were busy delivering six iPhone apps this year we still had to staff and start prototyping on Blackberry and Android devices."

****

What do you think are the most compelling digital opportunities for filmmakers or marketers? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Nick Mendoza is the director of digital communications at Zeno Group. He advises consumer, entertainment and web companies on digital strategy, distribution and engagement. He blogs at The Social 7 and is the film correspondent for MediaShift. Follow him on Twitter @NickMendoza.

Last year, Eric Dane, known as "McSteamy" from the show "Grey's Anatomy," his wife Rebecca Gayheart, and former beauty queen Kari Ann Peniche decided to make a home movie. Yes, that type of home movie. The threesome recorded themselves nakedly fumbling around in bed, slurring words, and splashing in a hot tub.

Given Dane's popularity on the show, it was almost a forgone conclusion that the tape would somehow make its way onto the Internet, and Gawker was happy to make it happen. It published the video in August, and has since racked up over 3.25 million page views.

Before posting the video, Gawker whittled it down from 12 minutes to just under four and added some special effects to cover McSteamy's, well, steamy. (Its sister site, Fleshbot, used an uncensored version.) The tape, as edited by Gawker, does not actually show the threesome having sex -- it's not a porno. In fact, if the video didn't show Gayheart and Peniche without their shirts, and bleeped out the swear words, it might be suitable for daytime TV.

Hollywood sex tapes making their way to the Internet are nothing new. It has happened to Paris Hilton, Tonya Harding, and, of course, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.

While lawsuits almost always follow leaked sex tapes, few cases ever go to trial. (Paris Hilton's suit, for example, ended in a settlement that reportedly made the heiress $400,000.) Dane and Gayheart's suit, which was filed three weeks ago in a California federal court, is surprisingly not about invasion of privacy or defamation of character, as is common when a sex tape goes public. Instead, the couple claim that Gawker's publication of the video violates their copyright. This makes it a unique situation.

I recently described for a friend what the video did and didn't show, and explained that as long as Gawker didn't help steal the tape, it does not matter how they got it. After my 15-minute soliloquy, she asked, "So, who will win?"

"I give Gawker a three-point spread," I said.

Here's how the case of McSteamy V. Gawker breaks down, along with a look at the larger legal issues at play.

Does a Sex Tape Fall Under Fair Use?

In 1976, Congress enacted the Copyright Act, which states that a copyright holder has the exclusive right to distribute or reproduce copyrighted material. However, the law includes one big exception, which is called "fair use." Section 107 of the Copyright Act states that a person or business can publish portions of copyrighted material so long as it is for the purposes of criticism, comment, or news reporting.

Gaby Darbyshire, a barrister and the vice president for Gawker Media, told me that the company published the video because it was "newsworthy." But simply labeling something as news doesn't automatically constitute "fair use." In order to determine whether Gawker deserves the law's exception, a court will look at four factors listed in Section 107.

First, a court will look at whether Gawker used the video for commercial purposes. Obviously, Gawker is a for-profit business, but that alone doesn't prevent it from publishing the video.

Instead, a court will consider the purpose and character of Gawker's use of the video. The question here is whether the website posted Dane and Gayheart's video for news or commercial purposes. If Gawker edited the tape to suit a newsworthy purpose, the website would have given the video a meaning different than that of the original, thus making "fair use" appropriate.

Here's the argument that Gawker will likely make: Dane, Gayheart, and Peniche made the tape because they wanted to record sexual acts. According to Darbyshire, however, Gawker posted the tape because they found some news value in the recording. Darbyshire said that seeing "Dane, his wife, and a former beauty queen who went on a reality show to be treated for sex addiction, and reportedly is a Hollywood madam," together is newsworthy. Thus, Gawker will claim that its use of the video added a news element to a home movie.

David Ludwig, an intellectual property attorney for the law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, agrees with Darbyshire. "Newsworthiness does not limit itself to hard news, it can involve celebrities as well," he said.

As a result you can probably score a point for Gawker on this issue.

Second, a court will examine whether Dane's tape was published or unpublished at the time of Gawker's use. In terms of "fair use," the law states that "the fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use." However, "scooping" a copyright holder on their work does make the "fair use" exception less likely. In a 1985 decision, the Supreme Court stated that a copyright holder has the "right to control the first public appearance" of copyrighted material. Gawker's post was the first time the public had ever seen the video, meaning that Gawker does not have much of an argument here. Call it McSteamy 1, Gawker 1.

Third, a court will look at the "amount and substantiality" of Gawker's posting in relation to the video as a whole. Gawker posted just under four minutes of the 12-minute tape. As far as the law is concerned, the posting's length may critically compromise Gawker's claim to "fair use."

In 1987, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held, for a variety of reasons, that appropriating one-third of 17 letters written by author J.D. Salinger did not constitute "fair use" because it was more than "necessary to disseminate the facts." Ludwig suggested that Gawker could have legally posted a screen-shot or a snippet of the video to prove that their story was true. Instead, they excerpted a third of the video. Dane 2, Gawker 1.

Fourth, a court will ask whether Gawker's publication of the video supplanted the need for an individual to purchase a legitimate copy of the couple's tape. This depends on what material Gawker left on the cutting room floor.

If the whole video consists only of the threesome hanging around a house naked, then perhaps, after viewing the Gawker excerpt, no one would be interested in purchasing the full version. Thus, "fair use" would be off the table. "No one is going to buy a work if it's freely available on the Internet," Ludwig said.

However, if Gawker edited out some really juicy material -- sex scenes, for example -- then people could still be interested in a bona fide copy of the recording. Though Darbyshire declined to offer any specifics, you can probably assume the McSteamy threesome gets more interesting than what is currently available on Gawker. Dane 2, Gawker 2.

Fair Use Versus Infringement

To recap, Dane and Gayheart appear to have a valid claim against Gawker for copyright infringement. However, Gawker has a formidable defense by way of the "fair use" exception. It's important to note that the four factors outlined above are not examined in isolation of one another. Instead, courts try to balance them against each other.

In the end, if this case goes to trial, the outcome will likely depend on what Gawker chose to cut from the video. It's a strange reality that, in the case of sex tapes, what a news organization doesn't publish is sometimes more important that what it does.

Rob Arcamona is a second-year law student at The George Washington University Law School. Prior to attending law school, Rob worked at the Student Press Law Center and also helped establish ComRadio, the Pennsylvania State University's student-run Internet-based radio station. He writes the Protecting the Source blog.

The president yesterday defended his position on these issues, saying, "We believe in the values of freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, that are not just core American values but we believe are universal values."

This is a critical time for him to speak up because China appears to be increasing its efforts to censor Internet content, while also cracking down on journalists and bloggers. At the same time, the Obama administration has been sending mixed signals on democracy and human rights to China. For example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted the 20th anniversary of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown, and called on the Chinese government to "provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal." But she also celebrated the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China by congratulating the Party for its "truly historic accomplishment" of "lifting millions of people out of poverty."

Meanwhile, Yang Zili, a young engineer who spent eight years in prison, recently urged President Obama to intercede on behalf of two colleagues still being held in custody. Their offense? Creating a website.

It's true that gratuitous criticism towards China rarely produces results; but excessive restraint is also ineffective. Human right issues cannot be raised only in private, which is why it's important to review some of China's recent abuses of freedom of expression, and its renewed efforts at online censorship.

Cyber-Dissidents in Jail

Beginning around 2003, the Internet started emerging as a major tool for exposing corruption and abuse of power, and for putting pressure on China's central and provincial governments. Today, China has the largest population of Internet users on the planet. It also has 58 cyber-dissidents in jail. In terms of press freedom, China is ranked 168th in Reporters Without Borders' 2009 World Press Freedom Index, out of 175 countries.

In Xinjiang, Chinese authorities launched a crackdown that includes blocking many forms of Internet communication. The region's Internet has been reduced to an intranet that prevents Uyghurs from providing the outside world with detailed information about their situation.

In October, Reporters Without Borders surveyed the level of access provided to websites dedicated to the Uyghur community. These sites, operated by Uyghurs for Uyghurs, are for the most part inaccessible to Internet users based in Xinjiang, and those abroad. More than 85 percent of the surveyed sites were blocked, censored or otherwise unreachable.

On Oct. 1, 2009, Hailaite Niyazi, an Uyghur journalist and the former editor of the Uighurbiz website, was arrested. His family was told three days later that he was suspected of "endangering national security." His arrest appears to have been prompted by an interview he gave about the Xinjiang regional government's attitude towards recent riots. (In the past, authorities have accused Uighurbiz of "encouraging violence" in Xinjiang.)

In Tibet, there have been ongoing arrests and trials of journalists, bloggers and Internet users since March 2008. Three young Tibetans from the village of Dara have been held in jail since early October, when they were arrested for allegedly sending information about Tibet to contacts outside of the country.

Erecting Dams on the Internet

Silencing dissidents is only one part of China's censorship strategy. Last summer, the Chinese government introduced "Green Dam," new piece of filtering software. Chinese officials claim it's designed to protect children from pornographic content online. However, a study of Green Dam by the OpenNet Initiative showed that its key-word filtering was not very effective for porn, yet it was very good at blocking political, cultural and news websites, among other targets.

More recently, Internet service providers in the southern province of Guangdong have been installing a new type of filtering software called Landun (which translates to "Blue Shield" or "Blue Dam"). It's even more powerful than its problematic predecessor. According to an article in the Hong-Kong based Apple Daily, Chinese network providers were given until September 13 to install Blue Shield and avoid being sanctioned. Blue Shield is said to be more powerful than Green Dam and its installation is obligatory, not optional, as the authorities had reportedly promised. It is intended to provide stronger protection against porn sites and to increase the monitoring and filtering capabilities of Internet connections.

Congress has taken notice of China's stepped-up efforts to control the web. In June, Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.) introduced a resolution "expressing grave concerns about the sweeping censorship, privacy, and cyber-security implications of China's Green Dam filtering software, and urging U.S. high-tech companies to promote the Internet as a tool for transparency, freedom of expression, and citizen empowerment around the world."

Chinese Censorship: Made in the USA?

American firms are also involved in Chinese censorship. Cisco Systems helped build the entire Chinese Internet infrastructure, including the mechanisms to censor the web. Yahoo aided the Chinese government in jailing four dissidents by giving their personal data to Chinese authorities. Speaking to shareholders at the Yahoo annual meeting in June, CEO Carol Bartz was questioned about the company's policies in China in light of Green Dam and other controversies.

"We made a mistake, and you can't hold us up as the bad boy forever," she said, referring to the release of information that led to the arrest of the journalists. "It's not our job to fix the Chinese government. It's that simple."

Maybe it's not Yahoo's job. But President Obama has a responsibility to advocate for freedom and democracy, and he should do so publicly when he visits China on November 15.

Clothilde Le Coz has been working for Reporters Without Borders in Paris since 2007. She is now the Washington director for this organization, helping to promote press freedom and free speech around the world. In Paris, she was in charge of the Internet Freedom desk and worked especially on China, Iran, Egypt and Thailand. During the time she spent in Paris, she was also updating the "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents," published in 2005. Her role is now to get the message out for readers and politicians to be aware of the constant threat journalists are submitted to in many countries.

Back in 2000, Stephen King became one of the first major authors to offer a book online using an "honor system" to solicit donations. The book was called "The Plant," and was based on a series of chapbooks King had sent around to his friends in the '80s. He placed the first chapter in various downloadable formats on his website, and downloaders were expected to donate $1 by mail or credit card. King said that as long as 75 percent of readers donated, he would continue to post new chapters.

According to news reports, the first few chapters either reached or nearly reached that 75 percent threshold, though the second chapter fell as low as 70 percent. Eventually, King raised the price to $2 per chapter. To compensate for this increase, he published more pages at a time. I was among the King fans who dutifully mailed in money each time I downloaded a new chapter.

But King's system was flawed in several ways. First, 75 percent is a fairly high threshold to meet. Plus, he counted every single download, so if someone downloaded the PDF but then had to switch to the plain text version, King counted these as two separate downloads. He wanted his $2 (or $4 for later chapters.)

Eventually, the donation rate fell below 50 percent and King abandoned the project, promising to return to it at a later date. He hasn't. Compared to the sales of most mid-list authors, the experiment was a huge success -- at one point King wrote on his site that it had generated several hundred thousand dollars -- but a piece in the New York Times inferred that it was a failure. Still, it garnered huge press attention because of its novelty. The question remains: could this be a viable business model for future works?

Success With Speculative Fiction

In early 1999, author John Scalzi (of the popular Whatever blog) released his book, "Agent to the Stars," as a "shareware novel."

"People could read it, and if they liked it, they could send me a dollar, or whatever sum they liked (even if that sum was zero)," Scalzi wrote of the experiment. "If they didn't like it, well, clearly, they wouldn't have to send me anything. It was a no-risk proposition for the reader. I didn't expect to see a dime from it, but as it turns out, over five years I made about $4,000."

Author Tim Pratt recently turned to the donation model after unsuccessfully shopping around a novella to small press publishers. The large publisher Bantam Spectra publishes his Marla Mason series, and Pratt developed an idea for a smaller work set within that same universe. The work wasn't a full novel, yet it was also too long for short fiction magazines. After the small presses passed, Pratt put off the project -- until his wife was laid off from her job.

"When I saw that [author Catherynne Valente] was trying [the donation model], I thought that I would, and the obvious thing was to write this thing that I already had," he said. "If I knew what the story was going to be, I knew functionally it was just a piping exercise really."

Pratt began publishing the chapters on his blog without any preconditions as to how much money had to be donated before subsequent chapters would be released.

"I would say that most the people reading it are fans of my series," he explained. "But, certainly, some of the donors in the first couple of weeks were people who just felt for my situation, people who saw an opportunity to help us out. It's sort of a good excuse to let people give you charity."

Pratt didn't provide exact figures for how many people have donated, but said he's made more than he would have if one of the small publishers had picked it up. Some of the people gave one large donation, while others donated in small bits as new chapters were released. For the first few weeks, he had four or five new donors a day. Now, several chapters into it, he gets perhaps four or five new donors a week. I asked him if he viewed this as a sustainable business model for established authors who have built-in fan bases.

"It's hard for me to say because I don't know how much of the response to this has been based solely on its novelty," Pratt replied. "It's usually not that common of a thing, especially with books in existing universes that have come out from other publishers...I think going directly to your fans is something that writers should be open to -- an increasing number of musicians are doing it -- but with this particular project, I don't know if it's something I'd necessarily repeat."

'I Can't Do Without My Chapter'

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller went a slightly different -- and perhaps more business savvy -- route when they began releasing one of their works in late 2006. The writing team has been collaborating on projects for years, and in December of that year they began having difficulties with one of their publishers.

"We announced ... that we were going to write this side book, and put it out on the Internet," said Lee. "And the rules were that the first chapter went up for free, anyone could read it. The second chapter would depend on it earning $300, and people could donate as much or as little as they wanted. They could donate 50 cents, or the sky is the limit. And when it got to $300, we'd turn it out into the wild and anyone could read it again. By the time we started releasing the book on the Internet, it was January 2007 and we had five chapters already written. The book was well paid for before we were halfway through [publishing] the book."

Donors who gave a minimum of $25 were guaranteed a free print edition of the book, if one was ever released. They said approximately 1,066 donors reached this threshold.

"About the fifth week, we had an occasion to be a little late [in releasing a chapter], and people began to worry that we weren't going to post," said Miller. "And pretty soon people were setting their clocks in Australia at the right time to get it when the chapter was supposed to come out, and we were getting notes from people saying 'I can't do without my chapter this week.' "

As former newspaper reporters, the duo said that this is the kind of project for someone who is adept at writing on deadlines; otherwise, the author risks falling behind or becoming disheartened by a lack of results. Though Lee felt this could be a good business model for authors with established fan bases, she said it probably wouldn't be viable for amateur authors trying to build a following.

Cory Doctorow's Experiment

Though many writers are just starting to experiment with this new format, there's at least one notable author who's ready to compare its effectiveness to traditional publishing. Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and co-editor of the popular Boing Boing blog, has released several books under Creative Commons licenses. He believed that the free publicity resulting from this strategy would lead to higher print sales. Recently, he announced plans to bypass traditional publishing completely, and then publish his results for all to see.

"Here's the pitch: the book is called 'With a Little Help,'" he wrote in Publisher's Weekly. "It's a short story collection, and like my last two collections, it's a book of reprints from various magazines and other places (with one exception, more about which later). Like my other collections, it will be available for free on the day it is released. And like my last collection, 'Overclocked,' it won't have a traditional publisher."

The book will be put out through a variety of self-published formats -- ranging from e-book, to audiobook, to print -- and Doctorow will record all the income that it generates, whether it's from donations, speaking gigs, or even the money paid for his Publisher's Weekly column on the experiment.

"There's plenty more details, of course -- how I'm going to use Twitter, what I'm going to do to get this into bookstores, the marketing and publicity plan," Doctorow wrote. "But I'm out of space for this month -- and many of those details will fill a column on their own. One thing I need to mention, though: I'm seriously considering writing a book about the experiment, no matter how it turns out, selling it to a traditional publisher and adding the advance to the balance sheet."

Simon Owens is a social media consultant and associate editor for MediaShift. For more about him read his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

However, beginning in 2006, Derakhshan's views started changing. He called for Iran to have nuclear weapons, and engaged in personal attacks against people that he disagreed with politically. He was even sued for libel by another Iranian in September 2007.

A year later, he returned to his homeland for the second time in nearly ten years. While there, he continued to espouse very nationalistic views. His family had advised against his return, but Derakhshan went anyway, and was arrested on November 1, 2008.

This is the story of how he got to this point, and an examination of the lack of information his family has received from Iranian and Canadian authorities up until this point.

This original audio report for MediaShift is based on interviews with people who knew Derakhshan in Iran, and archival tape of interviews conducted with Derakhshan:

You can read Derakhshan's blog, which is now offline, via the Internet Archive.

Addendum

Earlier this week, MetaFilter, users discovered that Hoder.com was set to expire at the end of this month. They wanted to make sure it stayed in Derakhshan's name. Some users suggested that the registrar wouldn't allow the domain to be renewed unless Derakhshan did it himself, which was of course impossible. However, later in the day, the domain's whois records showed that it had been renewed it for a year, though it was unclear how or why it had happened. It ends up that GoDaddy stepped in to renew the domain for him. Read my report on what happened.

Cyrus Farivar is an Iranian-American freelance technology journalist, a freelance radio reporter/producer, and is a wanderlust geek who lives in the city of Oakland, California. He regularly reports for National Public Radio, The World (WGBH/PRI/BBC), and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He also freelances for The Economist, Foreign Policy, Slate, The New York Times, Popular Mechanics, and Wired. He is currently working on a book, "The Internet of Elsewhere," about the history and effects of the Internet on different countries around the world, including Senegal, Iran, Estonia and South Korea. It is due out from Rutgers University Press in 2010.

Those metrics can be important, but there are also qualitative aspects to consider. Are the discussions on your site respectful and insightful? Are members deriving value from the community? Or are you hosting flame wars that lack intelligence and decorum?

In order to create a community of quality, perhaps it makes sense to cut down on quantity, and create an exclusive members-only structure. Few media companies have done a better job of building this kind of exclusive community than the Financial Times. Its Long Room was created as part of the paper's FT Alphaville blog. The Long Room is an "exclusive comment and analysis arena, where finance professionals are invited to share their research and offer thoughts on the work of others."

In order to learn more about how the Long Room has created an exclusive community of value, I spoke with New York-based Alphaville editor Paul Murphy.

Some Background and Context

It's important to first understand that Alphaville and the Financial Times are unique properties. The newspaper's website, FT.com, has a frequency-based pay wall. This means you can read a set number of articles for free, but have to subscribe if you exceed that number.

However, Alphaville is a free daily news and commentary service. Its mission is to give "financial market professionals the information they need, when they need it." On a typical day, the blog gets between 40,000 and 50,000 unique visitors. It generates roughly 500,000 uniques per month.

Alphaville was launched roughly three years ago. Murphy said the goal is to serve a community of "deep specialists in their respective areas. They know more than we journalists know."

In addition to the blog, Alphaville offers email newsletters, news alerts, and Markets Live, a kind of chat session where two journalists instant message each other about the financial markets. (The community can also add comments in real time.) Alphaville also regularly links to news and reporting generated by other media outlets.

"We are a blog and we acknowledge that people are promiscuous," Murphy said. "So we tell them what to read elsewhere if they have half an hour of spare time, and we tell them what they should read in the FT. Being financial professionals, it's a navigational service. We allow them to sample."

The Long Room

The Long Room exists as an extension of Alphaville. It is "an exclusive comment and analysis arena, where finance professionals are invited to share their research and offer thoughts on the work of others." It is free to join, if you can get through the vetting process to be accepted.

The Long Room was inspired by a famous restaurant in the City of London that was a favorite haunt of financial pundits and market movers during the 1980s. The online version of the Long Room aims to be as exclusive as the real-world place. The site says it clearly: "The Long Room is reserved for financial professionals and for people with a clear understanding of how financial markets and products work. Our members-only policy and application vetting process allow us to ensure that these criteria are met."

Indeed, when a colleague of mine applied for membership, he received a call from London informing him that he had been accepted. But they also told him that he could not report the discussions taking place in the Long Room. "What happens in the Long Room stays in the Long Room," he was told.

Murphy confirms the application process is taken seriously. In fact, he handles many applications personally. He said the Long Room's exclusivity and careful vetting process have helped it reach the target group of financial experts and decision-makers: "I'm really impressed by the seniority of the people applying for the Long Room," he said.

Listening to the Community

The Long Room is an example of how intimate knowledge of a community can lead to a compelling service. The Alphaville team discovered that there was a willingness among financial specialists to share ideas and research, and so they created a safe place that encouraged them to do so.

"We simulated the way groups of financial professionals operate in the real world: in small email communities of 20 to 30 people," Murphy said. "They are trading research and commentary, and we wanted this functionality [as part of the Long Room]."

Murphy said the sharing of research and insight had to be done "in a walled garden in order to give them a certain comfort level."

The discussions inside the Long Room are organized using topic-specific "tables," such as those dedicated to market strategy or finance 2.0. Members can apply to host a table. So far, Murphy said, everyone is getting along well. (He mentioned one case when a person was kicked out because they engaged in constant self-promotion.)

Why it Works

Alphaville has been profitable since its earliest days. "It's a very light structure, especially compared to a newspaper, which typically requires a massive industrial process," Murphy said. The Long Room also enables the Financial Times to gather important insight about its readers. This information helps the paper sell itself -- and its special community -- to advertisers.

Alphaville also helps the Financial Times enhance its position as a hub for the financial community in London and beyond. This unique focus is a big factor in the structure and success of the Long Room. Financial professionals need timely and correct information, and so they can't ignore the Financial Times (or the Wall Street Journal).

But the question remains whether or not this kind of exclusive community could work at other newspapers and news organizations.

For his part, Murphy has no doubt.

"The model is applicable elsewhere, whether we talk about cycling or tennis communities," he said.

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What's your take on this "exclusive" strategy? Do you think it's elitist, or that it introduces an element of civility in online interactions? Could this strategy be used by other media organizations? Finally, a last question for the MediaShift community: could this approach help media to survive financially?

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

Fortunately, there are dozens of initiatives that mine and share the data that influence policy and policy-makers. Many are funded by The Sunlight Foundation, which aims to use "the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens."

Below are 10 innovative government transparency projects that employ powerful online databases to make political data accessible (and, in many cases, fun as well). They serve as examples of Public Media 2.0 by providing much-needed intelligence about the relationships between officials, corporations, and policy-makers.

10 Watchdog Projects to Watch

1. Watchdog
Billed as "The Good Government Site with Teeth," Watchdog is a non-profit, foundation-funded project that uses open source software to aggregate government data -- including census information, campaign disclosures, and voting records -- in a single location. In addition to allowing users to search for data by location or officials' names, Watchdog also encourages people to take direct action by contacting their government representatives, and signing and creating online petitions.

2. SourceWatch
A project from the Center for Media and Democracy, SourceWatch is a wiki-style "directory of the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda," including public relations firms, think tanks, activist groups, industry-backed "experts," and government agencies. According to the website, "the goal of SourceWatch is to create the largest and most up-to-date guide in history, both in terms of breadth and depth." As of October 24, the site had 47,321 articles. Interestingly, SourceWatch does not adhere to a "neutral point of view" policy (like Wikipedia), although it does provide guidelines for contributors, and a paid staff of editors oversees the content.

3. Follow the Money
Follow the Money, an initiative from the National Institute on Money in State Politics, is an excellent resource for political funding information at the state level. The site includes comprehensive data, maps, charts, and graphs about lobbyists and government spending. Some of their creative tools include data visualizations such as Pulse, which demonstrates the "correlative relationship between money, incumbency, and winning"; c50, which compares the competitiveness of elections in all 50 states; and Contributions Timeline, which explores campaign contributions over specific periods of time. The site includes plenty of other innovative tools, as well as APIs and widgets.

4. Little Sis
Public Accountability Initiative's Little Sis is the antidote to Big Brother. It's an "involuntary Facebook" for government officials. This user-edited, social networking database profiles close to 30,000 current and former government officials, lobbyists and major corporate executives. It also includes close to 12,000 organizations, including lobbying firms and Fortune 1000 companies. The site provides data about these individuals and organizations, but its primary focus is on exposing the relationships between them (13,8871 relationships are currently highlighted). Little Sis has developed some interesting data visualizations, including this one (see a portion of that above). They are currently working on APIs and becoming an open-source project.

5. OpenCongress
An initiative from the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, OpenCongress uses open source tools to track bills, representatives, funding, and votes. There are plenty of interactive and social networking features on the site. Users are encouraged to discuss, evaluate and vote on bills, as well as provide approval ratings for members of Congress. Registered users can create their own "My OpenCongress" customized portal to track their personal Congressional interests. OpenCongress also features a host of innovative tools, including state and district portals, a head-to-head voting comparison tool, various widgets, and Battle Royale, an aggregated list of the most popular happenings in My OpenCongress.

6. OpenSecrets
OpenSecrets is a large-scale database project from the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that has analyzed money in American politics for over 25 years. The site includes national, state and local political funding information, and provides news and analysis in the form of reports and blogs. The My OpenSecrets tool allows regular users to keep track of their watchdogging. OpenSecrets also offers resources for developers, and widgets that track campaign spending and industry contributions.

7. GovTrack.us
GovTrack.us is an open source database tool created by Civic Impulse, LLC. It tracks members of Congress, bills, voting records and Congressional committees. Users can employ "trackers" -- such as bill trackers, people trackers, subject trackers, and committee trackers -- to follow specific happenings, as well as create personalized "tracked events" pages. It offers widgets and APIs. GovTrack.us was launched in 2004, two years before the Sunlight Foundation formed. It was a source of inspiration for the current government transparency database movement.

8. MAPLight
MAPLight is a database project that "illuminates the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes in unprecedented ways." Users can search for legislators, interest groups, and bills across the United States. (Comprehensive state and local information is available for California and Los Angeles.) Money-related widgets are available, as is a Bill Positions API, which relies on combined data from OpenSecrets, Follow the Money, GovTrack.us and OpenCongress.

9. GovernmentDocs.org
GovernmentDocs.org is a collaborative project from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen, the Sunlight Foundation, American Rights at Work and the ALCU. The site is a vast database of government documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. Registered users are invited to review and comment on the documents. GovernmentDocs.org is information-heavy (some of the government files are hundreds of pages long) and its multimedia elements are weak (the blog on the site hasn't been updated in a very long time). But it offers an invaluable resource by publishing, indexing, and offering public review of formerly secret government data.

10. The Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker
Moving beyond the United States, the Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker from ProPublica and the Sunlight Foundation monitors foreign interests seeking to influence U.S. government policies. Using information from the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the project has digitized and organized foreign lobbyist information by legislator, country, lobbying firm, client and issue. The site is mostly data at this point in that it lacks some of the more fun and engaging user features that many other government transparency projects employ. But it is full of valuable information that's impossible to find anywhere else.

The above list is by no means exhaustive. For example, Project Vote Smart, is a comprehensive resource that deserves an entire post of its own. The open government movement is growing stronger with each passing election, and that means more of these valuable watchdog initiatives are being launched all the time.

Katie Donnelly is a research fellow at the Center for Social Media at American University where she blogs about the future of public media. With a background in media literacy education, Katie previously worked as a Research Associate at Temple University's Media Education Lab in Philadelphia. When she's not researching media, Katie spends her time working in the environmental field and blogging about food.