Finalists

reporterist is now a finalist in the prestigious Berkeley Business Plan Competition. We are one of 8 finalists narrowed down from 25 semi-finalists, and over a 100 entrants. I believe there is a good mix of live sites and in-the-works concepts. We briefly met some of our fellow finalists from Kebima - they look like they have an awesome alpha. Good luck guys!

We presented to a panel of judges (from the VC/investor community) yesterday afternoon, and the results were announced at about 7pm. Preparation involved many hours of ms-office-ing.

Happily, I can now get back to building you a better product (for a short time - then we have to take another detour and prepare for the finals!)

looking for a senior engineer.

reporterist is looking to hire a senior engineer. We recently received some seed funding to help us accelerate our development.

Many newsrooms are forced to lay off quality reporters and rely more on wire service stories. The number of places that fund primary reporting and produce investigative journalism is shrinking - and these are increasingly owned by a few large companies.

As a citizen of the world's largest democracy, and a permanent resident of the world's most vocal democracy - this trajectory scares the crap out of me.

Call me a dreamer - but I believe that reporterist will help change this trajectory. And that's precisely why it's a great time to be innovating in the media industry.

We are starting by creating an efficient market for news that rewards accurate, timely, and reliable content. This will increase the diversity, quantity, and quality of original and unbiased news that gets published.

Soon we will start work on a platform that will make it *even* easier for smaller publishers to create high quality news publications.

If that's a vision that excites you, read on. You can find out a bit more about our team here. If you

• have a solid computer science background


• are comfortable programming in Ruby/Java, but know pointers like the back of your hand


• have, ideally, spent several years working with scalable systems

then shoot me a note at innovate-at-reporterist-dot-com.

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.