uncle sam causing delays

We still have a lot of invite-requests that we have not responded to. My apologies. I think we're going to have to stop trying to respond personally to even some of the requests, and start sending out a lame automated email.

Also, March 1st requires tax filings, which requires us to have all of our books in order. Being a startup, that's something that we're still learning how to do efficiently. So I'm going to have to take a break from all of the fun product-development and customer-service stuff and bury my head in accounts for a few days.

Crowdigation

I've been meeting on and off with John Curley to exchange thoughts on journalism, and about how/where reporterist fits into the larger picture. John is amazing to talk to. He's engaging and insightful both on very tactical stuff ("What would editors think about electronic payments?") as well as more strategic stuff ("We want to enable an ecosystem of people contributing to the news creation process. What might that ecosystem look like?").

Towards the end of our conversation this morning, we did a little back-and-forth that ended up with a thought that was very clarifying for me - which I'd like to share, even though it may be obvious to some...

Many people use the term 'citizen journalism' to refer to tools such as twitter, faves, digg, or to the act of blogging or posting a photo online.

Why? I think it's because soliciting and aggregating voices has always been an important part of journalism. I wrote the following comment on the OJR story the other day:

Gathering 'voices from the crowd' has always been an important part of journalism, and the tools available today make that increasingly easy to do. Blogging tools allow for easy digital expression, and all of the aggregating tools out there make it easy to collect those voices together.

But journalism is also about more than that. And we'd like to provide a platform and revenue model for those people who are willing to go (and passionate about going) the extra mile to dig deep on a story, or to actually go interview someone.

I posit that the term 'citizen journalism' should be used to refer to the fact that technology has made it easy (it was always possible) for people not traditionally identified as 'Journalists' to do two things:

1. Perform an 'act of journalism'
2. Share that act with a meaningful audience

On the other hand, the tools and technologies that allow people to create, publish, and aggregate content should be called 'crowd sourcing' or crowdigation ('crowd content creation and aggregation'). Crowdigation tools are great for citizen journalists, but it's not at all the case that they constitute citizen journalism.

So where does reporterist fit in?

It IS a tool for citizen journalism and for citizen journalists. It is not a crowdigation tool.

beaming

One of the most exciting things about the past few days, apart from the sheer volume of invite requests we've gotten, is the wonderful words of support and encouragement.

I cannot describe to you how motivating it is to have been working on this for literally 18 hours a day for the past year, and to suddenly get this amount of validation.

We're going through the requests we've gotten in mostly chronological order, and sending out invites one at a time.

When I get a chance, I'm going to put up some of the notes we've gotten.

new users

We're slowly going through the invite requests we've gotten, and we're glad that some of you have already started creating portfolios, as well as using our tools to pitch work to editors.

We have a bunch of features in the pipeline, so definitely stay tuned.

a quick note...

I'm really excited at the buzz around reporterist.

I blogged recently with the intent of writing more about what we do; but I've since been really busy iterating on the product and meeting people.

If you've signed up for an invite - please be patient.

Getting some press

The Online Journalism Review interviewed us this weekend. Here's the reporterist interview.

It's a pity that the title pitches us as an eBay for news - because Sindya is quoted as saying

The intention is not to turn it into an eBay.

But that's okay. It captures a bit about how we're starting off. I'm in L.A. right now, and had the pleasure of having some an awesome conversation with E. J. Wilson - the new dean of USC's Annenberg School of Communication.

I also got to chat with Robert Niles - the editor of the Online Journalism Review. It was great to hear about the industry from his perspective, as well as get solid validation for what we're doing at reporterist.

I love the sense of urgency at USC, regarding the need to rethink how journalism is taught and practiced. It's definitely an exciting time to be in this space.