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.

Emerging Trends in Journalism

After a closed and private beta at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, reporterist is ready to start opening its doors to many more journalists.

We've been very quiet when it comes to describing exactly what reporterist is. So I thought I'd take some time to talk about our thoughts on journalism, and where reporterist fits into that picture. I'll try to do this in small chunks over the next few posts.

Your comments are most definitely welcome.

Great News

When I think about what has traditionally made people follow a particular news publication, I think of three aspects:

1. Reporting: Probably the first, and most obvious thing is the quality of the reporting itself. Timeliness, perspective, objectivity, thoroughness... all of things that make for a good story and increase the trustworthiness of a news brand.


2. Selection: Slightly more subtle is the selection of news. We look to great news organizations to tell us what's important in the world. Sometimes it's like taking medicine. For example, I may not really be interested in all the stories in a given issue of The Economist, but I will read at least the first few paragraphs of each story - and usually try to read it cover-to-cover just because I have entrusted that the editors at The Economist to tell me what important things happened in the world this week - for some definition of important.
   


3. Editorial: I know many people that get the paper only to read the editorial pages. Those regular, 'expert' opinions, were once only available in the opinion sections of newspapers.
   

So how has that changed?

1. Editorial: Probably the most obvious change that has been talked about to death, is the ability for anyone to have a soapbox to stand on. I'm standing on mine right now. And so is every other blogger out there. For almost a decade now, but most definitely in the past five years, newspapers no longer determine who gets up on their soapbox. I could go on and elaborate; but you know the drill. The topic of blogs and democratized publishing has been discussed to death over the past five years so I'm not going to elaborate.


2. Selection: There has been no lack of buzz around the topic of selection, either. As information becomes abundant, we need ways to make sense of an filter it. There are many approaches to this:
   
   
   • Traditional, human powered: There's nothing wrong with having human editors. Most people still rely on human editors to tell them what's important. That's a big part of what newspapers and magazines are selling you.
   
   
   • Populist: "Read what everyone else is reading." digg comes to mind immediately. Most news sites now have a 'most emailed' and 'most viewed' list of articles that approximates the same thing. I'm assuming that Google factors this into the stories shown on their page.
   
   
   • Social: "Read what other people read". Slightly different than reading what everyone reads, is some subset of that. This includes awesome social bookmarking sites like faves, the link sharing features of sites like facebook and, don't forget, just sending your friends a link in email.
   
   
   • Categorization: Whether it's by tagging (del.icio.us) or topic search another way of selecting what to read is by looking for particular topics.
   
   
   • Recommendations: Findory was an awesome news site, started by an ex-amazonian, that used a "people who read this also liked to read..." approach to news.
   
   
   
   There are undoubtedly others that I haven't mentioned - the point is that there are many really smart people trying to figure out new ways of helping people sift through the vast sea of content out there.
   


3. Reporting: There are some great new initiatives in reporting. User Generated Content is another buzz-phrase that most people are sick of hearing. But there's oh my news, CNN ireport, msnbc's FirstPerson and all of the examples of citizen journalism during and after the Virginia Tech massacre, the Minneapolis bridge collapse, and hurricane Katrina.
   
   But I still believe that there is still not enough emphasis placed on actual reporting.
   
   Citizen Journalism has been an awesome source of information during times of crisis, when amassing community support around issues, or in specific areas such as technology.
   
   But most blogs out there are still reactions, commentary, and discussion based on stories that are reported by traditional media and wire services.