No need to answer just yet – sleep on it. A new report says U.S. tax policies make it difficult for such businesses to get off the ground in the first place. The report from the Council on Foundations says the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has declined or delayed non-profit tax status for several journalism startups because the government does not consider journalism a qualifying educational activity.

The report, funded by the Knight Foundation, the philanthropy most active in funding journalism-related non-profits in the U.S., recommends the IRS change its procedures to ease and speed up the approval of journalism startups that seek non-profit status.

Analysis: This is an example of how government policy, even around something as arcane as tax administration, can influence the scope, role and influence of journalism in national and local life and culture. But tax laws are a side note to the troubled business of news. Adjustments to U.S. tax policy should make it easier for social entrepreneurs and philanthropies to launch and finance non-profit journalism startups. Good luck to them. Raising capital and sustaining news startups, regardless of tax status, will still be difficult. They’ll need to be nimble, tech-saavy, ambitious in marketing, sales and fund-raising – as well as journalism.

Further reading:

• Council on Foundations full report
• Council on Foundations report summary
• Nieman Lab

Disclosure: The Knight Foundation has funded programs at iFOCOS, a non-profit research partner of We Media.

Main Hall. A nostalgic nod to books as design.

The first impressions of the new James B. Hunt Library at North Carolina State University leave you speechless. But unlike most libraries, talk here is encouraged. The first words are typically “where are the books?”

The vast majority, about 1.5 million volumes, are in the basement, packed in industrial storage bins stacked four-stories high. Find the volume you need at computer station then watch behind a glass wall as Transformer-like robots called bookbots roam the floor, locate the appropriate bin, and expand into rotating arms and hands that remove the bin. The bookbot delivers the bin to one of the few humans working in the place. The humanoid removes the book, then scans a code from the first page. Check-out complete. It takes about four minutes.

And that’s the ordinary part of the library. The real brilliance is what happens on the other four floors.

Each brings an architecture for the way we learn. You can lose yourself in a Womb Chair for private, contemplative study. Or you can collaborate with a friend, study group or team around a white-board table, study pod, private office or Fishbowl — think tech/startup culture.

Since most people – all students? – consume and create information on video screens, screens of all shapes and function spread information, hundreds of millions of pixels, through The Hunt. But don’t expect the TV control-room look. High-definition screens are designed for distinct spaces, integrated with the intended learning experience. Some screens are built into walls. Some are embedded in table surfaces. Some are part of the architecture. Or part of the furniture. Nearly all respond to touch.

Technology enhances spaces for large-scale visualization research, videoconferencing and multimedia production. One room is dedicated to high-end gaming, not just for entertainment but for a host of serious applications. There’s a reconfigurable Creativity Studio with sliding and rotating walls. Remember the Holodeck on Star Trek? The Teaching and Visualization Lab allows students and teachers to create a virtual, immersive environment such as the bridge of an aircraft carrier – or the Starship Enterprise.

The Hunt goes where no library has gone before. As I said earlier, talking is encouraged. So is writing on walls. There are nearly 100 rooms that students can reserve to work together on projects, with screens to display work from their laptops and the room-sized whiteboards formerly known as walls.

Photos? Snap away. The Hunt encourages visitors to take an awesome photo, upload it to Instagram and tag it #Hunt.Library. Photos are display and shared on a wall-sized video screen and at go.ncsu.edu/myhunt

Collaboration is key to the curriculum at NC State’s Centernnial Campus, a research campus developed in partnership with tech companies at the nearby Research Triangle Park just outside Raleigh. Students are taught to work collaboratively, and are accustomed to it, but they’ve had few suitable places until now. The library is so thoroughly digital that all functions run off a supercomputer, allowing students and faculty to work on projects wherever they are: the library, their offices, dorm rooms or labs.

Did I mention the architecture? There’s nothing quite like it in the U.S. The Hunt was designed by Snohetta, the cutting-edge Oslo firm that also designed the new library at Alexandria, Egypt.

“For the first time in my career, I just fielded a call from Architectural Digest,” David Hiscoe, director of communications for NCSU libraries told the News & Observer newspaper.

Interestingly, I couldn’t find any magazines or newspapers in print. No news boxes, magazine stands or analog Periodical section.

For all its so-now design, The Hunt still nods subtly to libraries past. A glass wall more than 300 feet long and 50 feet high creates a light-filled hall for reading with views of Lake Raleigh and the woods bordering the campus. Trees and water are essential ingredients of paper-making. The main hall – a place usually given to rows of card catalogs – honors the nostalgia for pulp with a metaphor: low, semi-circular shelves for books written by faculty. You can almost hear the voice of humanities dons at planning-committee meetings: We must see books somewhere! Fortunately, the sentimentality is restrained; the architects interpret the shelves as room dividers for communal space.

Without stacks, card catalogs or check-out stations a library lacks a defining, visual statement of action. The State of North Carolina has provided one at the entrance: the interactive Emerging Issues Commons.

“We believe the vision for the state and the answers to our most complex challenges will be found among the people of North Carolina. NO ONE PERSON HAS THE ANSWER. The Emerging Issues Commons will help our citizens work together to explore the issues that matter to them and collaborate to continually improve our state and its communities.”

It’s an expensive vision. The state, which is to say its citizens, spent $115 million to build the library and adjoining parking deck (no driverless Google cars were found, a disappointment). Citizen funders are encouraged to get into the act. At an interactive kiosk, North Carolinians can sign up to act on one of four issues: the economy, education, health and environments.

The Hunt experience is so encompassing, so collaborative that it’s apt to make gatekeepers everywhere a little uncomfortable. Like Google and Wikipedia, it doesn’t just add new technology to a very old idea, it creates a new idea that removes controls and moves toward consilience – unity of knowledge. So complete is this remaking that traditionalists and visionists alike wonder if The Hunt should even be called a library. Doesn’t matter. The Hunt transforms libraries into what they need to be.

A few photos from my iPhone. Go to the Instagram #Hunt.Librarypage for a sweep of the sweeping design.

One of three Bookbots – the yellow crane in the midst of four-story industrial stacks.

The spiraling info crawl at the library’s entry, Center for Emerging Issues.

One of dozens of collaboration spaces with video walls.

– The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

Established media – publishers and journalists alike – have a choice.

They can whimper their way to irrelevance and bankruptcy by trying to incrementally transform their businesses and their approaches to audiences, tweaking and adding onto long-standing approaches that are failing.

Or, with a bang, they can create an audience-centric publishing model that replaces old ways with something new, daring and frightening, something with the potential to better serve their audiences, uplift their communities and allow them to profit in new ways in a new audience environment.

That’s what this blog is about. It will share ideas and examples of the promise of invention and the perils of transformation. It will explore. It will push. It will challenge. It will empower.

For all of the fear and gloom surrounding publishing, there is great hope and promise as well. In fact, some in the industry are taking a number of bold and bright steps and we will examine them here. This blog will explore a future than can indeed be bright.

We will share a variety of insights in addition to mine. And we will continue the conversation beyond the blog in a variety of forums.

So who am I? I’m a veteran of legacy media — editor of The Detroit News, The Courier-Journal at Louisville, The Tennessean at Nashville, Gannett News Service, and the Rockford (IL) Register Star. And I’ve collaborated on change projects as a corporate news executive at Gannett.

Looking across the industry today, there are too many whimpers and not enough bangs as audience members increasingly use technology and their own relationships to disrupt traditional media.

The stakes are high — including the ability of an informed and connected population to engage in the democratic process in a constructive way. By now you are well aware that retailers and message-makers bypass legacy publishers and broadcasters, engage audience members directly and enlist those audience members to retransmit their messages with a peer-to-peer stamp of approval. Their success lies in making their message a part of their audiences’ experience.

Trust, accuracy and singular insight remain the values that audience members most seek as they choose media and as media messages find them. And that trust, accuracy and insight are most effectively created when publishers and journalists share experiences with the audiences they are trying to serve and when they collaboratively create knowledge.

Creating an audience-centric media company is a bang. Trying to transform an existing business with a little more engagement here or  a random new product there is a whimper. Why waste time adding onto something that’s broken? Trying to transform a print newspaper audience experience into a mobile phone audience experience is a sure path to failure.

This blog will look at those issues with broad brush strokes and with granular detail.

The relationship between audience members, journalists and marketeers. New jobs and structures and organizations. Mobile strategies. Approaches to make revelatory and explanatory journalism more powerful and more effective. Different ways to make money and enable communities to better themselves.

With a bang, not a whimper. Please join the conversation.

We call it Bang. Our goal: reinvent the news enterprise. The journalism. The business. The structures. The platforms. The thinking. Everything.

Bang will unfold regularly on this blog. Mark Silverman, a top newspaper editor who worked on change and innovation projects at Gannett, joins us as a blogger, consultant, strategist and trainer on the project. Mark contributes to an agenda that includes publishing, research, invention, building, exploration and pushing boundaries.

Look to this site and Mark’s blog for solutions and presentations, conversations and exchanges, ahas and unconventional thinking. We’ll alert you to findings and activities on our newsletter. (Please sign up here). You can also follow us on Twitter @wemedia.

No one is as smart as everyone, so contact us, too, if you’re interested in blogging, adding capabilities and sharing your expertise.

We’re also seeking to work with a few organizations that have come to the crossroads: reinvent or fail. Since the disruption of the internet in the mid-90s, whimpers from news media have not changed an inevitable fate. Nor do the current sounds. Incremental innovation, the shallow attempts of the past 17 years, is not working. We’re not trying to be unkind or disrespectful, just factual. We’ll cite empirical evidence that makes reinvention an imperative.

We believe that the “people formerly known as the audience” – the “we” part of We Media – lead the way forward. That’s a significant change from internal programs that seek to direct and control transactions for the good of the company but not necessarily the needs of citizens. Our perspective, informed by data, experience and observation, is that the social interactions enabled by new and emerging information technologies better serve those needs. They fundamentally change the way people know. The “next journalism” is already here. So are the next businesses. We’ll show how to create them.

We see “next” as an opportunity to expand knowledge and build futures around an informed society. News is just a part of it. We’ll also address how social interactions and personal technologies unify knowledge throughout a range of connected, human experiences – communications, media, learning, civil society, business, marketing, entrepreneurship, the internet of things and the shape of things.

Almost nothing has been invented yet. We’re working on that. Bang.

News of Pope Benedict’s decision to step down broke about 1 a.m. Monday morning and it became an all-morning, all-day topic on television, radio, Web sites galore, and across social media.

Come Tuesday, The Baltimore Sun rightly took a next-day approach in print, “Next Pope, new questions.” http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=MD_TS&ref_pge=gal&b_pge=1

Yet the Tuesday front page of The Washington Post led with a headline that assumed its readers had no access to radio, television, Web sites, Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media — not to mention conversations at work, school, the gym, bowling alleys, restaurants, or even in church. In fact, readers probably knew more than The Post’s editors.

In an approach seemingly ripped from a 1980 news desk playbook, The Post on Tuesday morning announced “Pope Benedict to resign” http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=DC_WP&ref_pge=gal&b_pge=1

Perhaps the Post’s print editors assumed no one had read its own Web site, which plastered the news across its home page before dawn on Monday.

The Post was not alone in assuming that its readers were unaware by Tuesday of a 1 a.m. Monday story. That’s a mistake that too many newspapers still make — reporting yesterday’s news tomorrow. It suggests that some print newspaper editors are trapped in a pre-television and radio, pre-Internet, pre-social media mindset that isolates them from their audiences.

This is like playing baseball. No one can run faster than a thrown ball and no print product can beat digital information in a race to a reader.

News organizations need to understand how audience members use media, how they find news and how news finds them. Journalists need to understand what audience members expect of each platform they use.

Social media delivers breaking news first. People typically then turn to broadcast media for elaboration and to Web sites for an initial dose of depth, impact reporting and conversation. What news consumers want from next-day print — if they use it — is context, analysis and a “what’s next” approach that goes beyond what the news organization posted on its own site the day before. Fact is, print does have a future with some audience members but only if it fills that role for them.

Using a “Pope to Resign” headline in this case did nothing but paint a print newspaper as dated and out of touch with its audiences. Small-type refers to analytical and reaction stories on inside pages do little to diminish the dated and out-of-touch feel  that a “yesterday headline” creates on the front page.

To succeed, news organizations need to create content and conversation with audience members on the platforms that audiences choose at the times the audience members want to use the platforms. That means news folks need to understand audiences, one at a time, and become a part of the journalism experience within each audience. All of that argues against maintaining separate digital and print operations. Let the audiences drive the approaches.

The alternative is to arrogantly ignore the real world of news creation and consumption, to believe that the publisher’s news is more important than any other news, and to maintain that nothing is official until you read it here first. And that’s a ticket to disaster.

With credit to the Freedom Forum’s front-page gallery, here are some other newspaper front pages that got it right on Tuesday morning.

Arizona Republc 

It’s over. Today, newspaper buildings designed by some of world’s greatest architects are being abandoned or sold. Surviving properties are valued more for their real estate than their public purpose. Economics favor tearing them down for parking lots or converting them into condos.

The dismantling of the news industry’s landmark architecture occurs throughout the U.S. claiming even the contemporary architecture of the modern news business. The New York Times Co. moved into a new 52-story headquarters designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano but sold the building and leased back a few floors to pay down debt. Gannett and USA Today have leased parts of their stark, twin towers  in Washington’s suburbs to at least five other companies.  Last week, The Washington Post announced it will try to  sell its iconic, 63-year -old building in downtown Washington. That would complete a Capital District three-fall where Marcel Breuer’s Bauhaus masterpiece, the American Press Institute in Reston, Va. was vacated in January.

But to see ambition reach for the sky only to fall to the ground, you must go to Chicago. Here is where the once proud and powerful Tribune Co. is emerging from  bankruptcy with a coming asset sale that will likely include the landmark Tribune Tower. A sad fate awaits the “Cathedral of Commerce.” Built by an authoritarian publisher as a symbol of his empire, Tribune Tower has passed from an owner who flips real estate to  new owners — creditors,  two investment firms and bankers — who aim to sell parts to pay off debt.

Tribune Tower was built in 1922 by Col. Robert R. McCormick, the publisher of the The Tribune and a grandson of its founder. Like Pope Julius II, who in 1505 commissioned Michelangelo to create a tomb for him of unparalleled power and grandeur, McCormick sought to stir a 20th Century renaissance in a city where the architecture of the Industrial Age flourished. He created a turning point in American architecture with an international competition to design the most beautiful office building in the world.

The winning architects, John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, combined the traditional elements of the engineering marvel of the day, the skyscraper, with the imposing  architectural influences of Europe’s cathedrals: soaring spires, flying buttresses and grotesques. Tribune Tower was built as a tower of religious power. Newspaper publishers everywhere wanted one. And so they built them.

There is more to this than nostalgia for grand buildings and the indignity of decline.  It’s personal, not just for me but for the thousands of newspaper journalists who once filled the empty desks of our newsrooms. I was reminded about the connection between architecture and common purpose when the Detroit’s two newspapers announced last week that they were abandoning the historic The Detroit News Building built in 1917 by Albert Kahn,  “the architect of Detroit.”

I worked at The News in the ‘90s and redesigned Kahn’s elegant assembly-line into a newsroom modeled on a vision of a wired village. Change overtook history. I left The News for an Internet job before the new  newsroom was completed. My payment: Kahn’s original blueprints.

After reading the obituary on The News Building, I emailed the link to my friend Mark Silverman. “No mention of Peskin’s newsroom design, just that Kahn guy” I wrote. Mark, who lived in the newsroom as editor for eight years, emailed back: “Kahn created arches. You created community.”

That’s a legacy I value more than seeing a new idea become old. I’ve become comfortable with the incomplete, just as I have come to terms with moving toward the new before the old becomes obsolete. So must those who still live the mythology of newspapers.

The cathedrals that came to embody the progressive values and moral authority of industrial America are slipping away.  Their forms, either the classicism of the past or the streamlined modernism of the present, proclaimed a faith in controlled efficiency and the power of authority.

We now proclaim a faith in the power of us all.  We hold the new cathedrals in our hands.  How we use them completes the unfinished architecture of our future.

The lights went out on the traditional TV commercial and on to social media during Sunday’s Super Bowl. The smart cookies at Oreo figured it out in real time, the news of the moment.

“You can still dunk in the dark,” Oreo tweeted on a spur-of-the-moment ad cast in so-cool shadows and darkness. As the world groped in confusion during Zero Dark 34, the tweet-ad went viral — retweeted 15,000 times in 14 hours.

Oreo was one of several companies that reinvented the 30-second spot for the Super Bowl — a $3.8 million misfire for most. advertisers. Rather, it assembled a social-media command center at 360i, its digital ad agency in New York. It required that ad agency and client executives be at the same place at the same time. The group included the agency’s creative directors and its tech-support team. When the lights went out during the game, it took them just five minutes to conceive and produce the ad.

Oreo didn’t need to reserve TV airtime or print space in advance. It was able to move at the speed of the news. Its use of Twitter enabled the brand to speed a message to the marketplace by eliminating the middlemen, the mass media, and  the cost of mass media advertising. We watched in real times as Twitter and  social media crushed another traditional media model. “Lightening in a bottle,” said one ad exec.

Oreo has been cultivating the moment for months, creating a Twitter following with a campaign of culturally relevant ads. And it would have missed its opportune moment had it not paid millions for a Super Bowl TV spot.

Social media’s disruption of advertising is just beginning. We’re in the early, somewhat chaotic, transitional phase of this revolution — 15,000 retweets pale in comparison to the 110 million people who watched the Super Bowl on TV.

The International Women’s Media Foundation will award three grants of $20,000 each, along with coaching from leading entrepreneurs and digital news media experts (I’m one of them). The application deadline is Jan. 25. Details here: http://iwmf.org/2013grant

J-Lab, a journalism innovation center at American University in Washington, DC, will award four grants of up to $14,000 each to women-led journalism startups. The application deadline is Jan. 23. Details here: http://www.newmediawomen.org/applying/guidelines

See the treatment from The Verge, complete with a video summary “supercut.”

To compare, here’s the full Qualcomm presentation.

Got engagement? Need some?

Our client, an Israeli startup called Tok, has created a new kind of discussion tool for digital publishers. It isn’t a forum, chat or comment engine – it’s something brand new: a visual, structured conversation object designed to be embedded within content. It uses Facebook to network participants and extend their conversations across the social web.

Tok has been testing and improving the experience for the past several months. Now we’re seeking a small group of digital publishers to try it on a larger scale with their communities.

Tok is designed to help individuals get more out of their online discussions – and also help digital publishers better engage and extend their communities through conversations driven by their content.

Tok lets you embed a discussion simultaneously on many pages or sites – just like a Youtube video can be embedded anywhere. So a conversation becomes networked across communities and audiences (and also through Facebook). Unlike comment sections at the end of articles that vanish with the news cycle, a tok can unfold over time and in many places.

Here’s an example – this is live, you can log in, then vote, comment, like and share it with your Facebook friends:

You can see the same Tok on the Tok Facebook app.

And here:
http://wemedia.com/2012/11/06/lets-write-the-new-script-for-american-politics/

And here’s another example of Tok embedded in an article:

http://peacenow.org/entries/peace_now_activists_on_mahmoud_abbas_peace_overture#.UKOxpeOe-EY

The Facebook layer (and login) is important. For one thing, Facebook now dominates people’s online time, attention and conversations. The time people spend on Facebook dwarfs their time with news and information providers.

Facebook authentication also provides a strong mechanism to ensure discussion participants use real identities. This strengthens self-policing to cut down on spam and nasty comments.

I’m most intrigued by some big ideas and design innovations we’ve baked into Tok.

First, the potential to “re-patriate” conversations about news and current events with the brands that spark, inform and drive them. That’s not trivial. The business model for online news is precarious. If the businesses that produce journalism can create stronger connections with their communities and generate more traffic and revenue from the conversations that unfold from their content, that’s a step forward for the economics of news and journalism. It’s also a potential win for brands and campaigns that use conversation and social media interaction to inform and engage supporters.

Second, Tok attempts to connect conversations and communities that span multiple pages or sites – as well as Facebook. This could lead to richer conversations on smaller sites, because they can be networked with bigger sites; but it also could lead to a higher signal-to-noise ratio on all of the networked sites by collaboratively filtering and selecting the best and most shared threads and participants.

Finally – Tok imagines a new approach to publishing in which conversation is a new kind of story format, rather than simply an appendage slapped at the end of articles or alongside videos. Instead of thinking of conversation as secondary, Tok imagines articles as context – and conversation about what’s going on in the world as the principal objective of audiences, rather than the consequence and afterthought. This leads to new thinking about story formats, headlines and other elements of publishing.

For now, you can see the beginnings of this new approach: Tok’s “headlines” are questions. A survey mechanism enables color-coding of participants for a faster visual cue to sentiment – and allows participants to sort responses for more efficient browsing.

Next Steps
We’re putting together a group of news and current affairs web sites, blogs, brands, non-profits and causes that want to experiment with curating and expanding conversation within their online communities. There’s no cost to the pilot partners – and mutual learning about the value of curating and driving conversation to improve engagement, traffic and social sharing.

Along with a strong online brand and audience, if you’d like to use Tok with your community you’ll need to be nimble enough to implement something quickly. The technology is simple – it uses an embed code like a Youtube video. But you will need to designate an editor, social media or community manager to lead, launch and promote conversations through your platforms and communities.

If you’re interested in using Tok on your site, contact me (andrew AT wemedia dot com). I can arrange a more formal demo and introduction to the app and how it works.

When the Israel Defense Force (IDF) live tweeted its strike that killed a Hamas leader, it ignited not just a deadly conflict but a Twitter war with frightening implications. Hamas responded by launching rockets into Israel — then its own Twitter feed. A new kind of warfare emerged on common ground called #Gaza, a continuous stream of short reports, links and stories. A few examples of what unfolded:

• From his base in the Gaza Strip, blogger Majed Abusalama tweeted incessantly, chronicling seemingly every bomb, every death with a sense of fear and outrage. “I am hearing bombs everywhere in #Gaza. What the hell is happening?” 
• Independent journalists and bloggers throughout Gaza and Israel – people like Lilian Wgby and Mohammed Mahmoud - used personal media devices to capture and tweet eyewitness accounts that included photographs and video from the scenes taken on smart phones.
• Between televised reports from a rooftop in Gaza City, CNN’s Anderson Cooper calmly tweeted about the rocket fire reigning down on him. Meanwhile, fellow correspondents from the BBC, The Guardian and Al Jazeera tweeted news alerts from the streets.
• From Hamas’ Health Ministry in Gaza City came an anonymous tweet about a doctor at Shifa hosptial who was called to treat an injured six-year-old only to arrive to find the boy, his son, was dead. The report, initially considered apocryphal by skeptical journalists,was later confirmed and reported by the BBC.
• Gaza resident Samir Zaquout, who heads the al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, explained how he tried to comfort his five children during the bombings: “The whole house shakes when the shelling starts, It is terrifying. Death feels very close. the children get even more scared when they watch the news. I try to distract their attention by telling stories or playing cards with them. I keep telling them that our house is safe. I do my best to comfort the kinds but I’m terrified myself.”

It is likely that more people followed the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians on social media than on all other forms. A stream of tweets, posts and links provided a graphic, real-time narrative for millions of followers around the world.

The story played out increasingly online, with both sides broadcasting attacks in real time on social media. Israeli officials said there were 44 million cyberattacks on government and security services websites during the Gaza conflict.

Fearing that Israel would shut down access to him and everyone else inside Gaza, blogger Abusalama prepared alternate ways to stay connected by stockpiling SIM cards that would allow his mobile phone to connect to wireless networks in Egypt. He downloaded special software for his smartphone that would allow him to stay online even if local wireless networks were shut down.

It’s not uncommon for governments in the Middle East to shut down telecom networks to control the flow of information during conflicts. The Mubarak regime cut off most Internet and cell service in Egypt uring the Arab Spring uprising there. Last June, Syria’s government shut down Web access to stifle news about escalating protests and violence.

A team of telecom experts funded by the State Department has been building technology that creates a virtual wireless network when a government shuts down or monitors telecommunications systems.

Israel changed the rules. In its calculated attack on Gaza it used social media as a weapon. In perhaps the most chilling communications tactic since Tokyo Rose, it put an information war into the hands of a 26-year-old, snowboarding Belgian immigrant named Sacha Dratwa. For the past two years Dratwa has led a team of social media soldiers that have shaped the country’s Twitter, Facebook and You Tube presence and turned it into a globally visible weapon of the Israeli military.

“We believe people understand the language of Facebook, the language of Twitter,” Dratwa told Tablet magazine. His team tweeted, for example, about an Israeli girl injured by a Hamas rocket, after a photo of a baby killed by an Israeli missile was posted on Twitter. The IDF also commissioned a Foursquare-style game for frequent visitors to its blog, and it posts YouTube videos of drone strikes and assassinations.

Lt. Dratwa remains remarkably accessible on social media. Just head over to his mostly public Facebook profile to discover that the officer running Israel’s cyberwar is an ordinary guy who likes drinking with his buddies, hitting the slopes and “commanding a cyber propaganda squad.” Since the cease-fire in Gaza, Dratwa now asks for a measure of privacy on his Facebook page: “Due to the amount of public attention I’ve garnered in recent days I have decided to restrict access to my page, in order to protect my privacy and prevent further cynical use of the information therein.”

But is it journalism?
It would be a mistake to confuse the stream of news and information on Twitter as mere propaganda or strident partisanship. When the IDF tweets that it has targeted a city for missile attacks, getting out of town becomes a credible message.

But is it journalism? The question doesn’t come up when your brain is telling your feet to move fast. It does come up, though, if you’re still arguing about what journalism is or what it means in a connected world where almost anyone can be a reporter who commits random acts of journalism.

(What do you think? Use Tok, a new social news app, to add your views …)

The flow of news has changed once again. It is now commonplace for those caught up in the news to provide the first accounts of events unfolding around them. We first reported this phenomena more than a decade ago in a report called We Media that presciently forecast the ability of all citizens, empowered by personal media, to set the agenda for news and play “an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.”

With the emergence of Twitter as a key medium for news and information about major events – a trend we saw in 2007 when students at Virginia Tech used the new micro-blogging service Twitter to report the news even as they were under siege – actors in news events now take on various roles in a real-time, networked awareness system that offers diverse means to collect, communicate, share and display news and information.

This is not your father’s journalism, or the one-way coverage of past wars, but a new, collective intelligence system we take into the future. Twitter allows a large number of users, including traditional journalists, to communicate with each other simultaneously in real-time based on an asymmetrical relationship between friends and followers. The messages form streams of connected data that provide value both individually and in aggregate.

The social experiene
Sometimes confusing, sometimes messy, the social experience of news manages to fulfill in unexpected ways. The Twitter stream at #Gaza ensured that the world got a real-time picture of what was unfolding. It assumed, correctly I think, that followers understand the roles, perspectives and bias of the reporters. That’s not so different from how news consumers regard stories from, say, the New York Times or Fox News. And, yes, most news consumers in our informed society are smart enough to understand the differences and the nuances that edited or produced news platforms provide.

The other big change: the controls. Twitter turns them off. Informed sources that once channelled information exclusively to reporters of legacy media now communicate directly to and with the public. The public, in turn, responds and contributes. The interaction is potent. It took years for televised images from Vietnam to turn public opinion against that war. On Twitter, pubic opinion ebbs, flows and changes as the news happens.

For journalists who have lost some measure of control, the #Gaza stream raises vexing questions about the ethics and implications of live-tweeting a violent conflict. They worry about the blur between credible sources and partisans with an agenda. They question the democratic, everyone-has-a-voice nature of Twitter, known better for shallow comments or giving voice to strident protesters.

The emergence of a participatory culture, however, challenges past notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than treating producers, sources and consumers as media players with separate roles, #Gaza shows us how to see them as participants who interact with each other.

Independent journalists have ben particularly effective at assuming multiple roles. By seeding and pruning “following” and “followers” lists on Twitter, reporters such as Jaffa-based Lisa Goldman assemble their own interactive community of thought leaders, expert sources and fellow journalists. On Twitter, Goldman is followed by 9,000 people with as many as 1000 following at any one time. Followers of independent reporters like Goldman can include political leaders such as Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, influential news editors such as The Washington Post’s Marty Baron, and heads of international humanitarian groups such as UNICEF.

Some reporters affiliated with large, international news networks such as the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN have cultivated large numbers of followers, ostensibly to market their popularity in traditional channels. Gameela Ismail, an Egyptian TV host and politician (remember the multiple roles…) counts 470,000 followers on her Twitter page in Arabic. Others, like “This Week” host George Stephanopolous has more than 564,000 people following ego-lame tweets like this: “Just finished breakfast (flatbread w sour cherries) in Tehran. Saw President Ahmedinejad yesterday. Trying to see Roxana Saberi today.”

Mark Luckie, who left The Washington Post to become manager of journalism and news at Twitter, urges all journalists to use Twitter as reporting tool. Tweet your beats and post content from sources outside their affiliations, he urges. Working in conjunction with Twitter’s Platforms and Analytics team, Luckie combed through thousands of tweets sent by journalists and news brands to discover that “retweets” from other sources tripled engagement, a key online metric.

Legacy publishers are wising up, but still trying to maintain control. The Guardian.com, the online site of the UK’s Guardian newspaper, used a curation tool called Storify to manage its own Twitter stream and link to coverage about Gaza from its reporters.

More
More is coming. Technologies applied throughout the world will accelerate the democratization of media, empowering the rest of the planet. Expect more chaos as we embrace new ways to communicate. History may provide context for the wars we wage and the means we use to try to understand them. It will be up to us to find the common ground of truth. Bang. Tweet.

Republicans and Democrats alike answered this way in recent weeks: Spend it on television for bad political advertising.

More than $6 billion was spent in the 2012 election, making it the most expensive and wasteful in history. The irony is that a central theme of the campaign was responsible spending in a challenged and turbulent economy.

Business leaders who contributed millions to American Crossroads, the pro-business Super-PAC that backed Mitt Romney, are asking what they got for their money. How could it spend $300 million on mangled messages that insulted the intelligence of citizens, turned off voters and failed to sway the election? Now, days after the presidential campaign, we’re left to consider questions that take us closer to a financial cliff.

Who are the bigger fools?: The wealthy partisans who contributed millions to dark Super PACs to misjudge and distort the presidential race? The leaders of both parties who, historian David McCullough said, shamefully spent an unconscionable amount of money for a bad show? Or us?

Our legacy as innovators and capitalists are at stake. We can no longer afford to trust the cynical messages of a broken political system. One way out of the box is to innovate the way we finance and conduct our political campaigns.

Go back to that question again: How could $6 billion be used to stimulate the economy? Here’s one idea: think of political campaigns as entrepreneurial investments instead of cynical arguments. Turn Political Action Committees into Economic Action Committees (EACs)

EACs would seek investors rather than donors. They’d recruit citizens with a stake in the economic success of our nation with the goal of participating in the political process to launch new businesses, create revenue and jobs, and advocate necessary changes for the business landscape Contributions formerly made to finance campaign ads on TV would, instead, be used to create investment funds. The investors would set terms and advocate a political-business agenda for job creation, tax structure or economic policy. Candidates could align with the interests of an EAC and “approve this message.” If elected, they would be accountable to their constituents as well as the investors.

Economic Action Committees could be established at all levels of government — local, regional, state and national. They’d serve as private-pubic partnerships for entrepreneurship and economic development.

There’s another seismic shift shaping this idea: the transformation of advertising. For money to flow to EACs instead of PACs, contributors, candidates and political parties would have to participate in the shift to social media as the principal vehicle for political advertising. All advertising is going social. At its current rate of growth, social media will crush traditional advertising on local television and national networks by the 2016 elections.

Candidates and political parties can utilize social media channels such as You Tube, Twitter and Facebook to distribute more human stories about the candidates and their positions. They should look to commercials like Embrace Life an advocacy video on seat-belt usage praised for its intelligence and emotional impact. Made for the Internet by the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership in Britain for $72,000, Embrace Life has been shared and viewed 15 million times without the expense of TV distribution.

Like the local partnership in Britain that created Embrace Life, EACs could be vehicles for making and spreading powerful social, human and political messages in the public interest. The Obama campaign gave us a sneak peak on Election Night 2012 with the posting of “The Hug” at the moment the president was declared the winner. The “most-liked” photo in history was seen 3.5 million times on Facebook and retweeted 700,000 times from Obama’s Twitter page within hours. The cost: virtually nothing.

That’s the shape of things to come: increasing use of social networks and social media to spread the word inexpensively, build affinity, craft messaging, share with supporters, organize and grow audience. Frequency and reach — the two of pillars of advertising on legacy media — are already achieved more effectively and less expensively through social media as citizens connect with messages on the ubiquitous devices they carry everywhere.

The television campaigns from Super-PACs, a failed investment in 2012, are an even worse idea for a nation spinning toward 2016. We just can’t afford to let creepy, political committees characterize Americans as lazy victims. Let’s put the next $6 billion to work in a campaign that tests our ingenuity and produces a return on our investment.

Send us other ideas. We’ll share them and see where they lead.

Four years ago, election night felt like history. This year, it felt like Tuesday. The campaign was an endless Monday. What a drag.

Let’s lay blame, call bullshit on the bullshitters: Mitt Romney waged a cynical, in-your-face assault on reason. Obama let him get away with it. Half the country, more or less, went for it.

The professional media played its part to the point of farce. The journos reported, aggregated, repeated whatever the candidates and their “surrogates” said. You want polls? We got polls. Fact-checking, which might have been a matter of fact, became a product and brand, but was still a rarity. My friends on Facebook had smarter things to say and said them with more style.

It was clear this year that the role of professional journalists was simply to be there: to stay in the game. If they had all dropped out, boycotted politics for a month or two or three or four, would we have learned any less about the candidates or the implications of their election?

How much did Romney earn or pay in taxes in 2010? Or 2009? He says he knows how – “I know how” – but how, exactly, would he create jobs? How does lowering taxes and increasing military spending reduce the budget deficit? How would a repeal of Obamacare “on day one” be good for the middle class and poor, or small business owners? How, exactly, would it make health care more accessible for more people?

We never knew, did we?

As I write, the talking heads are warming up for the ritual election night play-by-play. Victory. Defeat. Crowds. Cheers. Flags. Tears. A new day. Thank you. Now the hard work begins. God Bless America.

It’s like, what? We’ve seen this before somewhere?

We’re in there too and we know our role: We are the people formerly known as the audience. But we’re still the audience.

It’s time for a new script, no? So let’s write it. Here’s a start, from my friend Farai Chideya (@faraichideya), a journalist-blogger-novelist-broadcaster and one of the election night faces on BET Television. Today she sent me an email that asked the provocative and aspirational, “What do you want to see four years from now?”

Let’s look ahead. Let’s get specific. Let’s write the story.

Hashtag: #4YearsLaterAmerica

Some examples:

#4YearsLaterAmerica will have more children who read at grade level, are healthy and strong.
#4YearsLaterAmerica’s prison population has shrunk AND crime has gone down.
#4YearsLaterAmerica has more people working than ever in its history.
#4YearsLaterAmerica has become a peacemaker, not a war maker.
#4YearsLaterAmerica is not bragging about who it killed.
#4YearsLaterAmerica the president is chosen by popular vote.
#4YearsLaterAmerica women’s health decisions are made by women.

Post your #4YearsLaterAmerica messages on Twitter. Or share your ideas here.

Photo by kvanhorn

Guggenheim Museum, NYC

Also practical: Here’s a code to save $100 on the registration fee. We Media is a sponsor and we’d love to see some We Media friends there.

Use this code: WEMEDIA
Here: http://lisa2012.eventbrite.com/

Enough about practical. There are other reasons to go.

I’ve got two.

1. Inspiration and insight into the creative process.

Spend a day within an icon of 20th Century architecture surrounded by artists and their ideas. Allow your mind to wander. Look at the world, and your place in it, in a new light. The networked culture is inherently creative. I’m not sure if code is poetry, electricity or oxygen for the digital experience. But it’s undoubtedly everywhere and essential, like language, to business, health, entertainment, communication, commerce, agriculture, food distribution and day-to-day life. The code within provides, simultaneously, a foundation, superstructure, canvas, text and texture for what we know and how we know it. Software, devices and always-on, pervasive human connections empower us to express new forms of creativity through new channels and for new purposes. Creativity also leads us to unexpected places – like cyberwarfare and drones; global meditation; and new ways to fact-check politicians.

For me, art and artists pull these threads together – and pull them apart to suggest new ways of thinking about the world, my place in it – and what I create.

2. Laurie Anderson.

She’s a musician, poet, technologist, painter – and I really don’t care what she means to you. Few artists in any medium have moved me the way she has. Laurie Anderson’s chords, words and designs cut through me. Her rhythms, movements, sounds, observations and humor take me somewhere I’d like to be more often. If you don’t know about her, learn more here. Then sign up to learn more from her at LISA 2012. She’s a keynote speaker.

Photo Credit: By librarygroover via Flickr

The win allowed us to arrive at the beta stage without compromising much on the features that we wanted to include in the first version. Also, winning We Media has been especially significant for us as this was the first time in our project’s life (while it was being conceived, redeveloped and reincarnated) that it’s been recognized by an outside community of internet entrepreneurs.

This gives us confidence that we can succeed in what Screen is trying to achieve – find new audiences for visual journalism and engage regular citizens in important social issues through storytelling.

All of us, co-founders of Screen – Liza Faktor of Objective Reality, Ivan Sigal of Global Voices Online, James Wellford of Newsweek, Bjarke Myrthu of Storyplanet and Frank Kalero of Ojode Pez – come from slightly different backgrounds and have been working inside the media market for years.

We are fascinated by many things in the new digital reality, among them:

• How to significantly enlarge the audience for quality journalism.
• How to improve distribution and facilitate production of great stories and groundbreaking visual work.
• How to build communities around content.
• How to connect the consumer/citizen and multimedia journalist directly with each other.

One of the answers is to make all parties realize the importance of in-depth documentation and having a dialogue around it. That’s why training is a huge part of our platform. I guess we’ll see about the other answers to our search in the months after we launch.

It’s important to realize that Screen is not only a website or an app. We are producing and screening real work in the real world.

Last month we held our first event in Moscow in co-production with Objective Reality Foundation – Projections of Reality. Focusing on multimedia journalism, production and distribution, the program featured lectures by internationally acclaimed multimedia producers and photojournalists: Claudine Boeglin of Thomson Reuters Foundation, Adrian Kelterborn of Magnum In Motion, photojournalists Olga Kravets, Oleg Klimov and Marcus Yam of The New York Times and three of Screen’s co-founders: Bjarke Myrthu, Ivan Sigal and Liza Faktor (me).

The program also included a 3-day multimedia workshop with 14 participants taught by Boeglin, Kelterborn and Anna Zekria of Salt Images. The masters will follow up on the participants’ work online as soon as the Screen website goes live. So this will be our first online training activity to look forward to!