A Wiki Takes Aim at Obama

Karl Rove helped conceive the political group Crossroads.

NYT - Steven J. Law, the president of Crossroads GPS, a well-financed conservative political group with ties to Karl Rove, had a revelation a few months ago while watching television news.

“WikiLeaks suddenly became a household name,” he said, and he thought, “Amid all of this bad behavior, there is a certain genius going on there.”

Last week, in an attempt to tap into that genius, Crossroads began Wikicountability.org, a collaborative Web site intended to create a database of freedom of information requests that scrutinize the actions of the Obama administration.

Many companies and organizations, including the United States Army, have seized on the Wikipedia model to encourage their members to build up information collaboratively. This seems to be an early effort to use the idea behind WikiLeaks, a repository of secretive or difficult-to-obtain documents, for a specific political end.

In much the same way news outlets have tried to harness social networking tools to improve their reports and then popularize them, Crossroads GPS is experimenting with a system of distributed accountability (or distributed opposition research, if you prefer).

“One of the advantages of the wiki platform that led us to want to develop the site,” Mr. Law said, is that you can “crowd-source both the information and analysis of the information.”

Crossroads GPS, or Grassroots Policy Strategies, is a political group conceived in part by Mr. Rove after he left the Bush White House in 2007. Because of its tax designation it is supposed to focus primarily on issues rather than candidates, and Mr. Law described how Wikicountability was concentrating on topics like health care and high speed rail. The organization was the vehicle for millions of dollars of ads during the 2010 Congressional campaign.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/business/media/04link.html

The Crazy World of Online Journalism

Welcome to Online Journalism. This is a class blog where students will be posting comments and answering questions about class readings and lectures. The course is Jour 416-516 offered at Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.

During the the next 10 weeks, we will examine the impact of the Web on the field of journalism.

To help kick things off, I am posting a story from the New York Times that appeared last year that looks at how reporters and editors are frantic and fatigued. As my spouse, Julie, who works at the Chicago Tribune, put it recently, "You walk into work and they turn on the fire hose."

As a reporter, I used to get months to do an investigative story. Those days are gone as reporters work on three or four stories at once, attempting to produce content for multiple deadlines and multiple platforms.

The notion of Politico as journalistic sweatshop is pure myth, say John Harris, editor in chief, left, and Jim VandeHei, executive editor.

In a World of Online News, Burnout Starts Younger

NYT - ARLINGTON, Va. — In most newsrooms, the joke would have been obvious.

It was April Fools’ Day last year, and Politico’s top two editors sent an e-mail message to their staff advising of a new 5 a.m. start time for all reporters.

“These pre-sunrise hours are often the best time to reach top officials or their aides,” the editors wrote, adding that reporters should try to carve out personal time “if you need it,” in the midafternoon when Internet traffic slows down.

But rather than laugh, more than a few reporters stared at the e-mail message in a panicked state of disbelief.“There were several people who didn’t think it was a joke. One girl actually cried,” said Anne Schroeder Mullins, who wrote for Politico until May, when she left to start her own public relations firm. “I definitely had people coming up to me asking me if it was true.”

Such is the state of the media business these days: frantic and fatigued. Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way.

Tracking how many people view articles, and then rewarding — or shaming — writers based on those results has become increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms. The Christian Science Monitor now sends a daily e-mail message to its staff that lists the number of page views for each article on the paper’s Web site that day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/business/media/19press.html