Yeah, so what? Why should journalists and news organizations care about these tools? How can this help their communities, journalism, and (most critical right now) business opportunities? What’s in it for journos and news brands?

That’s what Meabh Ritchie, a reporter for the U.K. Press Gazette asked me to clarify. She’s writing a story on this, and I’ll link to it when it’s up in February 2009. The short answer is: This stuff is effective and (more importantly) FUN! — for journalists and news audiences.

But here’s the full version of my answer…

…By the way, the tools I demoed for the News21 educators were Gigapan, ManyEyes, Silobreaker, and the interactive/realtime graphics at Envirovote. UNC professor Don Wittekind demoed Flash games and calculators. Also, multimedia journalist and 10000 Words blogger Mark Luckie demoed Mapbuilder, Dipity, Intersquash, and Widgetbox.

Generally, I think the value of using interactive visual tools in sharing news, info, and journalism is that people don’t just think in words — so words often aren’t always the only or best way to tell a story. Furthermore, words, static graphics, and linear multimedia (audio or video that just plays) are almost NEVER the best way to encourage people to explore a story, so they can discover their own points of relevance and interest.

In short, interactive visual tools make news and info far more personal, compelling, and fun. And right now, news definitely could use a whole lot more fun — in its creation, content, and experience.

…Don’t kid yourself: There are valid, important reasons why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are kicking butt as news sources while newspapers are declining and dying. People need to laugh. Also, fun and humor are elegant, effective ways to layer context and insight onto information — and to just give people enough motivation to get interested and stay “tuned in.” The “eat your veggies” approach so common in the mainstream journalism mindset definitely has problems.

Oh, and speaking of interactive visual stuff, did you see Stephen Colbert’s Green Screen Challenge? Here’s the winning entry:

But I digress…

Used well, interactive visualizations inherently have far more potential to engage and involve people than passive “you just read/watch/listen to us” media. Plus, they tend to get people’s imagination and pattern-recognition abilities cranking.

Playing with visualization tools (especially applying them to data you think might yield a story) can help you find stories or angles. I regularly use ManyEyes to help me spot patterns or anomalies, particularly with data related to energy or the environment.

On the business side for ad-supported sites (or other sites where success is measured at least partly by traffic), visualization tools applied to news tend to “go viral,” attracting tons of inbound links, which boosts search visibility. Unlike most kinds of news content, this traffic tends to build, not decline, over time. This content also can be widgetized or made embeddable, providing a powerful teaser that gets people interested in your stories and then steers them back to your site for full coverage — or that at least promotes your news brand.

Finally, many great interactive visualization tools are free and easy to learn and use. They all take practice and have their quirks, but this stuff is not rocket science. You don’t need a programmer or even much money or time to make this work. Even an independent journalist working alone can make good use of them.

That’s what David Cohn is trying to do with Spot.us, which launched yesterday. This project, funded by the Knight News Challenge, is attempting to support local investigative journalism through crowdfunding. Poynter’s Ellyn Angellotti described this project her recent centerpiece feature. Here’s Cohn’s short explanation of how Spot.us will work:

Yes, crowdfunding is a very different approach to journalism. And the unfamiliar always seems potentially dangerous. That’s why most mainstream media articles so far about Spot.us, like this one from the New York Times, include some variation of this caution: “Critics say the idea of using crowdfunding to finance journalism raises some troubling questions. For example, if a neighborhood with an agenda pays for an article, how is that different from a tobacco company backing an article about smoking?”

That’s a valid concern, but I think it must be considered in context…

1. Journalism has always had funding strings attached — often implicit, sometimes explicit. Great journalism has always been subsidized by people, organizations, or sectors with various agendas. And, more often than most journalists would care to admit, this has skewed coverage. This explains why so many newspapers have long offered meaty real estate, auto, travel, and lifestyle sections. It also explains why many news orgs take extra care (including, sometimes, outright avoidance) when covering news that might hurt the economic interests of big advertisers. To navigate this morass, most news orgs have devised processes (including the advertising/editorial firewall) that address internal conflicts of interest — not perfectly, but generally well enough.

2. Could crowdfunding actually work? We don’t know yet — hence, the experiment. And Spot.us is just one experiment; typically several experiments are required to fairly test a hypothesis. Leonard Witt analyzed the prospects of Spot.us according to Clay Shirky’s “three rules of crowdsourcing” test. (See Ch. 11 of Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody.) Witt thinks that so far, Spot.us succeeds on two of Shirky’s criteria: “Is there a plausible promise?” and “Are the tools effective?” Witt says the open question remains on the third: “Is there an acceptable bargain with the users?” I agree: This needs to be a good deal all the way around. That’s why the first few Spot.us projects should offer blatantly obvious value and impact to the Bay Area. Without great content, the model might be unfairly judged.

3. The traditional approach is broken, perhaps beyond repair. It has become glaringly obvious that ad-supported, mass-media news orgs — the key support infrastructure for most investigative and enterprise reporting — are in dire trouble. Alarming numbers of them are shedding staff and cutting costs fast, yet still remain in danger of folding entirely, sooner rather than later. While national-level investigative journalism will probably continue at the major news orgs left standing after this shakeout, local projects are very much in jeopardy. For this reason, more than any other, I think we need experiments like Spot.us. We cannot dismiss a community’s willingness to pay directly for investigative journalism without giving it a serious try.

(NOTE: I originally posted this on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

This series is a work in process. I’m counting on Contentious.com readers and others to help me sharpen this discussion so I can present it more formally for the Knight Commission to consider.

So please comment below or e-mail me to share your thoughts and questions. Thanks!

If you want to strengthen communities, it helps to ask: What defines a community, really? Is it mostly a matter of “where” (geography)?

Last week I got into an interesting discussion with some folks at the Knight Foundation and elsewhere about whether “local” is the only (or most important) defining characteristic of a community. This was sparked by an event held last week by the new Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy — an effort to recommend both public and private measures that would help US communities better meet their information needs.

From the time I first heard of this project, I thought it was an excellent idea. It bothers me deeply that many (perhaps most) Americans routinely “tune out” to issues of law, regulation, and government that not only affect them, but also that they can influence — at least to some extent. (I say this fully aware that I often fall into the “democratically tuned out” category on several fronts.)

The problem then becomes, of course, that when citizens don’t participate, their interests are easy to ignore or trample.

Why do so many Americans abdicate their power as citizens in a democracy? It seems to me that many are too quick to “blame the victim,” pointing to widespread apathy, ignorance, or a prevailing sense of helplessness as common democracy cop-outs.

I think there’s a different answer: The way our democracy attempts to engage citizens actively opposes human nature. That is, it just doesn’t mesh well with how human beings function cognitively or emotionally.

Fighting human nature is almost always a losing battle — especially if you want people to participate and cooperate….

Face it: It’s hard to stay motivated about participating in democracy when your attempts usually leave you feeling like you’ve been bashing your head against cloudy plexiglass, struggling to read documents written in Latin. In 5-point type. In bad lighting. With the pages lacking any discernible order or context. And you only have time to read a tiny fraction of them.

…I’m not kidding. As a journalist, I’ve covered energy and environmental policy at the federal, state, and local levels. So I’m intimately familiar with such civic info-inspired headaches. I’ve wrestled with obtuse legislative information systems. I’ve probably sacrificed years of my life to decoding cryptic legalese and bureaucratese, to learning the dialects and idiosyncratic processes of various governmental bodies, and to collating conflicting or seemingly unrelated information from disparate sources. I’ve sat through many, many mind-numbing public hearings and meetings. And I’ve interviewed public officials and employees who treat transparency primarily as a threat to their fiefdoms.

I expect would-be newcomers to the democratic political process (people who want to initiate ballot initiatives, or run for office) face even steeper learning and procedural hurdles.

My experience is why I suspect that apathy, ignorance, and helplessness are probably not root causes of US civic inaction. Rather, these inhibiting emotions are totally natural effects that occur when human beings repeatedly encounter overwhelming obstacles to participation.

As things currently stand, simply finding and staying informed about relevant issues brewing at all levels of government — as well as understanding the processes of, and forces at work in, a huge multilevel representative democracy — is damn hard work! I don’t expect it to be effortless, but it’s certainly much, much harder than it needs to be. Or should be. Or could be.

We could do much better by developing civic information systems that work with human nature — our abilities, our constraints, our preferences, how we relate to each other, and how our brains work.

In the rest of this series, I’ll sketch out some ways we might achieve this goal.

(NEXT: Part 2, Beyond Government…)

UPDATE SEPT. 15: I’ve launched a new series fleshing out this discussion. See Being a Citizen Shouldn’t Be So Hard! Part 1: Human Nature

When it comes to information that helps people function better as citizens in a democracy, how important is local, really?

Geographically defined local communities are the focus of the new Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. Earlier this week, I posted this comment (and this one) on the Commission’s blog questioning the Commission’s assumption that community = local.

Don’t get me wrong: I love that Knight is trying to determine what kinds of information people really need to function as citizens today. I agree that’s a crucial line of inquiry these days. However, I’m concerned that by assuming those needs are inherently tied to “local,” the commission could miss a very important (perhaps the most important) part of what “community” really means to people today.

I was honored to see this very thoughtful response to my comment from Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. He made several good points, including this excerpt…

“We chose to look at information needs of communities defined by geography because our democracy is structured along geographic lines. …But [our premises may be wrong]. Or they may be premises that are less relevant going forward, given a population more interested in other ways to bond. As Amy suggests, the younger the citizen, the more likely it is that his/her communication preferences are digital and are more focused on subject matter and areas of interest than the physical community or political subdivision where they happen to live or send their kids to school. That reality will surely influences our thinking.

“And maybe the conclusion we’ll reach is that the powerful force of new communications is so strong that, if a community in a democracy needs informed participants, we need to redefine communities. And maybe that the future structure of our democracy needs to be changed to fit the way we get information — not the other way around.”

That’s pretty big-picture, powerful stuff. I’ve been trying to envision how to move this conversation forward. But there’s been a problem.

I’ve been stricken by writer’s block this week. Believe me, it’s not often I’m at a loss for words, but this has been that kind of week. So although I’ve been reading the discussion I sparked, and thinking a great deal about these issues, I haven’t yet pulled my own thoughts together into a new blog post. This weekend, I hope to accomplish that. So stay tuned to Contentious.com, there’s more to come.

In the meantime, several other people have chimed in on this discussion. Here are some links to their posts and comments

• Defining an alternative to mass vs. niche media, by Donica Mensing
• I also posted about this topic to Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits on Monday. Check out the comments.
• Our Continued Wishful Thinking about “Media Localism”, by Adam Thierer. He published this back in July, but it’s relevant to this discussion.

That said, many sites make it surprisingly hard to post. Not excruciatingly difficult — but just laborious enough to be a barrier to some would-be contributors.

This week I’m experimenting with using different tools to post to Contentious.com. Here’s the first one:

My Tumblr Experiment

I’m doing this because some of my clients use fairly complex content management systems, where each post requires a surprising number of steps.

Most commonly, here’s what site contributors must do…

1. Visit a web page.
2. Log in to the site CMS.
3. Navigate to the appropriate place to write a post.
4. Enter the post title and content in the appropriate fields (Including manually specifying links).
5. Fill in other fields (categories, tags, byline, subheads, siderail copy, etc.) needed to integrate the post with the site’s format.
6. Go through a separate process to upload and caption images or other media.
7. Preview the result.
8. Publish the post (or save it as a draft to be reviewed).

That many steps may be warranted if you have something substantial to say. But what if you just want to post a quick brief pointing out something interesting, a la Jim Romenesko?

Like Romenesko, I work with Poynter Online’s content management system on a daily basis. It does the job, but it’s very complex and labor-intensive. Each brief Romenesko post requires  more steps than what I listed above. And for the posts on the E-Media Tidbits blog? All told, not including editing the copy, I must take about 30 steps to get a post onto that blog and integrated with the site. (Add another 5-10 steps if I’m including an image, which I usually do.)

…Which is probably why most of those “Tidbits” aren’t very short. Personally, I think ethat’s way too much work to do for brief items. But even given the length of Tidbits, on average, I spend much more time producing those items on the Poynter site than I spend writing or editing them.

I’m not complaining about the Poynter site or CMS. It does a lot of things remarkably well. But it’s no secret that it is labor intensive.

The same is true for other sites I work with based on customized versions of Movable Type and Expression Engine, among other tools. Posting there is probably more work than it needs to be.

Fortunately, there are interesting microblogging tools such as Tumblr, Posterous, Delicious, and even Friendfeed that might offer solutions, if they can be integrated with the sites effectively.

Here’s what I think is needed to make it work:

• Bookmarklet for posting, so you don’t have to go to a separate page. When you’re browsing a page you want to post about, just hit the bookmarklet and a little posting window pops up, pre-populated with basic information about the page or other content item you’re viewing.
• Simple interface. This tools is meant for posting quick hits — so don’t try to cram in tons of options.
• Mobile-friendly posting. That’s simply crucial to any online publishing tool these days. Too many CMSs don’t make that easy — but most microblogging tools are pretty good at it.
• Posts (or cross-posts) directly to the main site. That is, the content being posted becomes part of the main site’s archives, can be linked to directly, and can be found through the site’s search engine.
• 3rd-party interface posts are integrated with posts from the CMS. That is, I could post two briefs via a microblogging service, then one meatier piece via the site’s CMS then two more briefs via the microblogging service — and they would all appear in the blog in sequence, as if they all came from the same place.

So far, Tumblr is lacking on those last two point, as far as I can tell. I don’t think (thought I’ll check again) that the Tumblr posts syndicated to Contentious.com are getting archived here. And I dont’ think I could get them to post as regular Contentious posts, mixed in with the posts I do via Wordpress.

The latest version of Wordpress (2.6) did bring back the “press it” microblogging bookmarklet-based tool, which is excellent. But what about cumbersome CMSs that don’t offer that kind of option? Could a thrid-party posting tool fill in the gap?

I’m sure my readers collectively know far more about this area than I do. Please comment below to help me learn how to address this issue. Thanks!

I really used to hate stereograms.

When they became popular in the early 1990s, they often reduced me to serious frustration and headaches. I would stare at them — glare at them, really — trying to will their embedded 3D images to leap out. Everyone else seemed to enjoy these hidden illusions with ease. But my eyes and brain stubbornly refused to do the trick.

Then one day, I realized that I was looking at a dolphin. I just glanced at the cover of a book of stereogram art, and there it was. I was delighted to discover that the image wasn’t “leaping out” at me — rather, I was “seeing into” it. I wasn’t even sure how I’d started to see the hidden picture. All of the sudden, and quietly, it just worked.

Years later, I’ve come to realize that whenever I’ve identified a key mission or purpose I should pursue, it’s emerged (very much like that dolphin) from the background of the world around me. I get a sense that some vision is waiting to be seen, and I prepare my mind to be open to it. Then eventually I see it, and it feels like I always should have seen it.

In contrast, whenever I’ve tried the top-down, primarily rational (rather than intuitive) approach to choosing a course in life, I usually end up not really wanting what I’ve been working for, or liking what I’ve done — which is frustrating and demoralizing on many levels.

I’ve been quiet on this blog lately, mostly because I’ve been spending more time conversing, research, reading, and journaling. To be honest, I’ve been searching for purpose. For a couple of years now — although I’ve been doing a lot of interesting work, meeting a lot of interesting people, and learning a lot of interesting things — privately I’ve been feeling like I’ve been flailing around, seeking direction and purpose.

Finally, I feel like the picture is starting to emerge. Here is the outline so far…

• Relevance: I think I can help foster a greater practical understanding of relevance — connecting the dots between information and people. This could, in turn, help people create automated tools that can spot and convey relevance. Imagine a “relevance engine” that could scan a seemingly random group of news stories or datasets and indicate not just which ones are probably most relevant to you, but explain how each is relevant.
• Helping people discover and share useful information. On this front, I think I could be most immediately useful by helping to free professional and amateur journalists from the constraints of traditional news organizations (most of which probably won’t be around much longer, and which have also succumbed to a toxic culture that directly undermines journalism and communities). Journalists have developed very useful skills, and I don’t want that value to be lost as this particular corporate house of cards collapses.
• Energy. My work and interests keep bringing me back to energy (electricity and fuel). It truly makes almost every other good in the world possible. Plus, the fragility, unevenness, and difficulties of how energy is produced, transported, and used around the world lie at the root of many thorny problems (war, poverty, drinking water, medical care, climate change, etc.). I want to directly support the development of more diverse, less destructive, and less centralized energy sources around the world — as well as more efficient ways to use that energy.

…That’s what I’ve gleaned so far from the patterns in the world around me and how they’re resonating in me. I have a sense that there’s a deeper purpose that unifies these three missions — but I can’t quite articulate that yet. Still, I do believe it’s important to keep my personal focus on practicality, not theory — on helping people in the real world. And I am passionate about all these missions.

I’m curious what Contentious.com readers think of this emerging outline for the next big phase of my life and career — as well as my intuitive process for choosing direction.

How do you figure out what you should be doing in life? Are you rational about it, intuitive, or both? I’d love to hear how other people wrestle with this kind of quest — or if it’s even a conscious effort you make.

Here’s what I like and don’t like about it so far…

(UPDATE: Heh… OK, another thing I don’t like.. Apparently embedding a Seesmic video in a Wordpress blog like this one isn’t as easy as it should be. Obviously, it’s not playing. Bummer. For now, here’s a link to my video post.)

Also, I haven’t yet investigated how mobile-friendly Seesmic is. Would be nice if you could combine some of the live/mobile functionality of Qik here.

Follow me on Seesmic: I’m agahran there. Send me a video! Tell me what you think of Seesmic so far. I’ve also enabled the Seesmic widget for this blog ,so you can see my latest video posts in the sidebar. I’ve also activated video comments for this blog.