As one of the very early members of the Online News Association,
I’ve attended my share of ONA conferences over the years. This year, I
wasn’t able to attend the annual gathering that ended in Washington,
DC, over the weekend. Instead, I spent most of last weekend at TechCrunch50, a technology conference in San Francisco now in its second year put on by TechCrunch, one of those upstart startups that may put the San Jose Mercury News out of business some day.
Reviews of the ONA conference have been mostly positive, especially for the keynote delivered by my friend and fellow tech blogger Robert Scoble. (To get a glimpse of the future of media and Web TV, watch his talk here or read his Q&A with ONA here.)
But I wanted to mention one of the more intriguing startups I came across at TechCrunch50: iamnews, a small outfit run by an Israeli, Nir Ofir. The site took the top People’s Choice award at the conference.
We didn’t get to talk at length (though he did make his way to a Chinatown dinner outing I put together), but I could tell Nir is philosophically simpatico (or whatever the Hebrew word for that is). Ofir describes iamnews as "a global open newsroom powered by you."
(Because it’s only as open as each publisher wants to make it, perhaps
a better way to describe it is a DIY, or Do It Yourself, newsroom.) The
site says it’s geared to "independent reporters, photographers, media
moguls and anyone who wants to connect with reporters from the world
and collaborate in the creation of news."
Alas, the site is still in a closed alpha and is seeking investment
capital, but what Ofir showed me was impressive. It has the makings of
a modest content management system, giving publishers or editors the
ability to designate members with certain roles (assignment desk
editors, reporters, etc.) and a workflow queue similar to the editorial
review process in a newsroom, as well as Web 2.0 features such as
reputation systems for citizen journalists.
The goal is not to become a stand-alone destination site but to
power blogs and citizen media sites that want to bring paid or
volunteer contributors into a more structured editorial publishing
environment. The site, Ofir told me, is for bloggers and publishers who
don’t have the resources to start their own full-fledged news site.
Ofir writes on his site:
The Web is the Newsroom
I believe that the Internet of
today is already a global newsroom, and we all take part in it. Video
sharing, photos, blogs, and social network platforms are our tools for
creating news. The most current example of this were the recent reports
of the earthquake in China; reports that were communicated by means of
a platform such as "Twitter". These reports preceded formal TV news
reporting by the traditional mass media.However, there is problem with this global newsroom. The content and
sharing tools which are available today, (such as we could only dream
of three or four years ago) are not sufficiently adequate. The main
reason for this is the excess of information. There is so much incoming
information that the news networks are unable to screen the material,
or select the preferred topics. There is also no current solution for
quickly investigating the reliability of this material, or the
reputation of its sources. There is simply no way in which to gather
the information from so many sources, or effect the collaboration of
these sources for the purpose of creating reliable news. Even if this
were possible, there would still be no way to compensate the
participants for their contributions.
iamnews will try to help remedy those shortcomings in the citizen
media ecosystem. (Ouriel Ohayon has an interview with Ofir — in Hebrew — here.)
It’s comforting to know that, as 20th century media empires and
business models begin to crumble, there are enterprising folks out
there who still believe in the fundamental importance of news — gathering, editing and distributing the news — to our lives.
Cross-posted to the Idealab blog.
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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