Micah, I think we're just at the beginning. Back in 1994, the only people with websites were those who figured out HTML. Today, there are an overwhelming number of ways to get a site going: a blog on wordpress.com or blogger.com, a wiki, etc.

Also, today, the only people with solid maps are those who speak the tech talk. But give it a few years. And as we saw at Transparency Camp, there are many experiments underway now, each with a different approach to mass collaboration.

I'm very interested to see where this goes, not just for journalism, but for governing. That'll be a critical set of tools for really using the power of the net to choose the best regulatory path, for example. We need to break away from the old paper model of person A (in gov't) writing a proposal and people B-Z commenting, then A going through them.

I'm not convinced a wiki is the way to go; too many disparate viewpoints to really write collaboratively. But maybe we could use a suite of tools? One set to identify the various viewpoints, then a wiki or whatever to help each group coalesce their thoughts.

Micah,

Here's what's really seeming to bother you, if I may be so bold: Paul Steiger, formerly of the more conservative Wall Street Journal, and his more mainstream all-star cast of board members and journalists, are not in the leftwinglittlemagazine-o-sphere or the lefty blogophere you want and need and fervently wish to support for reasons of ideological avocation. Maybe there aren't enough buyers for the leftwingosphere, I don't know. What happens when the cash runs out in either foundation model, right or left? It might be that Steiger's model, which only costs $10 million a year which isn't THAT much, can be done for half or a tenth as much by smaller and leaner and less famous operations -- good! In fact, many newspapers still live. In fact, they already went online. So it's not over til it's over.

There's nothing wrong with a business model if it works. The thing about business is that when it doesn't work, it folds and finds new models. Which it is doing. Moving online isn't death. Despite what Clay Shirky keeps ranting, micropayments haven't been tried, nor have subscriptions. The Times could start charging, for example, to comment, and find that more people will pay to publish their own comments than they'll pay to see other's content, following the concept of MMORPG and online community premium subscriptions.

Crowdsourcing? Please show me a crowdsourced or wikicultured source on foreign news that isn't about, oh, Code Pink and the Gaza strip or something that will have both a predictable obsession and a predictable bias.

1. We don't need better tools for "mass" collaboration. Good God, Micah, give up all this Marxist and Soviet fascination with "the masses". There are no masses, just because a million people can watch a YouTube. How about better tools just for collaboration with people who are like-minded, but with the possiblity for democratic correctives from those who are not like-minded -- which, at the end of the day, is what civic culture is all about?

That isn't the average Drupal or geekrun website, in which the tools exist mainly to blog out and mute people or make them jump through hoops to register and have their IP address harvested. And we don't need 40,000 comments on a bill that nobody can read through. We need someone to watch the 40,000 and report on the trends, and that person will have to be educated and connected and not muting outside agitators. We need I.F. Stone's Washington Weekly -- the Izzy Stone who will read the bills, even read the 40,000 comments, but then say something coherent in his weekly newsletter.

A few examples where you might find good Samaritans aren't scalable in the YouTube geek insolence culture and the geek-control culture that responds to it; the tools have to get easier for groups of like-minded to work easily by not be able to endlessly control *commentary* (note that your big friend Clay Shirky does not allow comments on his blog whatsoever, only his culled trackbacks. That's one way to solve the problem, Comrade!).

2. Visualization is fun, but stupid. Tag clouds do not add knowledge. They make for silly unintended interpretations. Charts and graphs are not the same as analysis of news. In fact the tools of Microsoft Office Suite and Google docs are now such that a 14 year old can easily make pie charts and tables and graphs. You're just not 14.

3. It's not that we need to "find and share" investigative reporting only. There's a scarcity of the right kind of unbiased reporting, and too much blogging on the left masking as "investigation". (The right seldom does investigations in the same enthusiastic way).

There is a real disconnect between the supply (leftwing blogging and Tweeting) and the demand (mainstream and conservative readers schooled in conservative or mainstream media which you cannot convert by persuasion).

What needs to be done is create better interfaces for expressing the social demand for investigative reporting and the social rating and voting on the results of such reporting, not in the "vote yes" sort of way one often finds, or the Digg gamed way of jacking up or down stories you don't like, but the newscred.com way of being able to rate and comment both on sources and individual stories -- and ultimately, have the commentators be accessible to sharing in an RSS feed that could appear like the new shared alltop.com so that a more valued set of commentators and raters emerge than you can get from a Digg.

Let's say someone really wanted to connect the dots on improper sealing of court records, and not merely cite it in a facile way as some purported civic good that "somebody" should do. If there were a craigslist of want-ads for news divided into city and categories, then those who really do care about sealed records can ask for the skilled reporter to cover the story. Those skilled reporters looking for work can put up the ad offering to research it. Could a kivo.org micropayments system paying a reporter in $25 and $5 bits work? Probably not, but no one thing will work, and lots of things can be tried without prejudice -- the $10 million Paul Steiger experiment and the $10 microreporting experiment can all be tried once you stop demanding that news be free or that news stop being a business that can't have a capitalist market check and balance on it, and has to be subsidized as propaganda by the government or by liberal foundations.

4. Your notion of using the intention economy -- the searches of what people are interested in which reflect their intentions to some degree -- as a way of ordering news strikes me as pretty crappy. People look up all kinds of things. You find this out when you see all the Google searches that lead people to your blog for all kinds of reasons. If what you suggest were viable, Google would long ago have created a news front page as a landing spot that had intention searches guiding the news. But they don't. Because they don't want to look like Yahoo Answers, which has top stories about what to do when your cat barfs.

5. Technologists can't spur democatic culture and practice by welding their leftwing views into the tools to skew the news and get predictable results. That is, they can for a time and get a burst of coverage in old media doing that, but it wears off. People won't pay for it. Technology isn't science anymore; one of the things wrong with technology know is that increasingly in fact its divorced or separated from science. Science, which doesn't ignore feedback by muting it, will tell you that most people are anonymous and insolent on the Internet in a setting like YouTube because they still do not feel empowered by new media, but feel intimidated by it because it is biased and still elitist.

I've been writing about this a bit at OpEdNews.com and huffingtonpost exploring the state of journalism. We, meaning democracy, need journalists but not necessarily newspapers. We need investigators and analysts, muckrakers and data diggers, catchers, scoopers, finders, see-ers and detectors. We need the work of journalism. That needs to be funded somehow. Printing newspapers is fading as a viable economic model. But the WAY to get the news out to people, the technology to take content and enable it to be found by the people who need it is better than ever. If anything, the use of the newspaper, pay to read model is hampering the process of enabling news and the product of journalists to be found.

There are blogs and wikis, on-line media sites like propublica and OpEdNews.com and huffingtonpost's off the bus and newsvine and other sites offer ways for independent writers to get their information and idea out. OpEdNews.com already has a group support function that enables groups to join and share information, and we also have pages for every nation in the world, every state, county and major metro area in the US and all provinces in Canada and Australia.

We had dozens of articles by Nepalese freedom fighters before democracy was achieved and the monarch stepped down. We've had numerous reports from The Pakistani regions where Bin Laden lives and routinely know about missile strikes, taliban actions and the like days before CNN reports it. Did it cost $10 million to build or maintain it? NO. We did it with member contributions under $60 K a year and a total of $21,000 in grants from sunlight, bread and roses foundations and a private donor. We also do polls, customized action pages, and we have some of the most sophisticated software available for volunteer editors to use to run an article submission queue and to deal with flagged comments.

What the USA and the world needs is a new way of thinking about funding journalism and journalists who can feed content to existing and emerging FREE content sites like the ones described above. I believe the model to use is the way the arts are funded. The government provides hundreds of millions in funding and should be spending more. Construction companies must include, in many locales, an art budget when building major edifices. Communities create arts councils, fairs and events to support and promote local art. We should do this with journalism. The government should invest a billion dollars to fund 20,000 journalists, for starters. Consider this an investment that will be paid back many times as the journalists uncover waste and corruption and educate the public. Communities should support local journalism efforts-- full and part time. Corporations should pay a small tax to support a fund that goes to pay for journalists that investigate those corporations-- to protect the investors from corruption, waste and abuses of power. Again this will be an investment that pays for itself many times over.

When I propose this idea, people have a knee-jerk reaction that it's a bad idea for the government to employ journalists. But artist who receive funding are not government employees. They are independents who get grants. The same can be done with funding journalists.

Here's where it gets interesting. Crowdsourcing and the wisdom of the crowds can be used to decide how much journalists are to be paid. Articles can be offered free through various feeds and access points for editors and users to post to their blogs to facebook, to digg, to all kinds of sites. When readers like the articles and value them, they can rate them and give the writers points that will accumulate. The writers with the most points, and this can be a basket of the many possible measures-- page views, email forwards, number of comments, ratings on different measures, favoriting, number of fans... At OpEdNews.com we use most of these as a way to enable our readers to navigate using different forms of "popularity.

The bottom line is that funding investigative journalism is just about sure thing-- that it will result in savings and loss prevention-- monetarily and societally-- far beyond the money spent. We need to jump on this soon. The old system is already failing, on its death bed and no longer doing the job we need it to do and which could be done so much better.

Just because all the possibilities have not yet been sorted out yet doesn't mean we should wait until the last final death throes are over before doing something to replace our archaic media system. We need to start talking about and funding the new journalism NOW-- and that may mean we have to walk the gauntlet of accusations of socialism that Universal healthcare is also subjected to. Just remember that the people casting the accusations are the ones who benefit most from the lack of light caused by the death of the old media. They have to be taken on and overcome. They will decry and attempt to diminish the light-- it's truth, it's purity, it's reliability-- because they do their business better in darkness. They are losing. They will fail. But we must take action and not assume that as the newspaper industry dies, journalism will simply, naturally adapt. We have to make the new world of journalism happen.

At OpEdNews.com our readers and writers-- 27,000 registered members, 400-800K unique visitors a month-- describe us as "the People's media." The future is bottom-up journalism on the web, accessible by all forms of media technology.

Rob Kall
Founder, publisher, OpEdNews.com
Host, Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 Philly Metro Area
Regular Contributor, Huffingtonpost.com

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