Big banner on the wall: “How can the intersection of journalism & technology serve democracy?” That’s the overarching theme of NewsTools 2008, where 200 or so folks are gathered today (and tomorrow) at Yahoo! as well as Saturday at a Sunnyvale hotel for Innovations in Journalism Expo 2008. I’ll post a few highlights from today:
ReelChanges
The most impressive new venture I’ve come across today is ReelChanges.org: viewer-funded documentaries, which launched shortly after midnight last night.
I knew of founder Hal Plotkin from his days as a tech reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Now he and his small team have been “working in a cave” for the past year to open the nonprofit Center for Media Change, which just launched the nonprofit ReelChanges.org and an upcoming site, ReelChanges.com.
ReelChanges is all about audience-funded media, particularly documentaries and investigative journalism. Films already on the site include Life on the Inside, a moving behind-bars look at a wrongful conviction and life inside the nation’s largest women’s prison. “Our goal is to democratize the media,” said Plotkin, who contrasted ReelChanges’ model with the agenda of the corporate media. The site’s guidelines for filmmakers are here.
Plotkin said some of the site’s functionality, such as its “transactional module” for donations, is still at least 10 days away. Plotkin and team have grand ambitions for ReelChanges, with an eye on becoming a major player in the transaction journalism space, suggesting a prospective “transformation of journalism.” He cited one early user’s willingness to pay for a video roundup of a scrapbook convention and he could see the day when people want to pony up for coverage of an event important to their niche interests. (Think of parallels to Eventful.com, which uses the power of the crowd to entice music acts or speakers to make an appearance. Here it would be stories you’d like to see covered, a la Christopher Allbritton‘s audience-funded trip to Iraq or Josh Marshall’s coverage of the 2004 presidential race.)
I’ll be watching ReelChanges’ progress and pulling for it to succeed.
Other sites worth a look
Other urls that have come up today:
• Redwoodage.com, (Think. Share. Act. Live.), what used to be called a lifestyle portal — a site that appeals to the over-40 crowd.
• MediaRights.org, a site that “maximizes the impact of social-issue documentaries and shorts. By
engaging with the MediaRights community, filmmakers reach audiences,
educators and librarians bring films into their classroom, and
nonprofits and activists integrate media into their campaigns.”
Good news
Best bit of news I heard today was that Geneva Overholser will become the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication this fall. Congrats, Geneva!
Other folks I spotted or chatted with today: Larry Pryor, Amy Gahran, Leonard Witt, Charlotte-Anne Lucas, Jon Garfunkel, Robert Niles, Mary Hodder, Dan Gillmor, Barry Parr and many others.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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