E-Media Tidbits

io9, a science fiction blog, put together a great blog entry introducing two real world examples of the technology, as well as a great summary of the very techie concept:

Currently I'm on vacation by Lake Leelanau in northern Michigan. This area offers considerable beauty and fun -- but generally spotty cell and broadband access.

That's a steep challenge for me and my friend Susan Mernit, who invited me on this trip. We're both online/mobile media junkies and news hounds. This trip has really hammered home how poorly most news sites handle the mobile Web -- and brought one shining star to the fore: National Public Radio.

Go ahead: grab your cell phone. Turn off the wifi and 3G connections if you've got 'em, and just use the regular old cell network. If you don't have perfect reception where you are, so much the better.

Then, look up NPR.org on your phone ...

It used to be that journalists interviewed sources or otherwise gathered statements from sources and then worked those quotes into a story. With the advent of social media such as Twitter, there's a new way to let communities know what sources have to say: just retweet them.

That's what Ken Ward Jr., environmental reporter at The Charleston (W.V.) Gazette has been doing. Ward, one of the country's top reporters on the coal beat, found out recently that a couple of coal company executives (Don Blankenship of Massey Energy and Gene Kitts of International Coal Group) started tweeting.

So Ward started using Twitter to try to engage the executives in public discussion. Intriguingly, he also started retweeting some of their tweets. ...

As ProPublica's new editor of distributed reporting, Amanda Michel has spent the past few months building a team of citizen reporters that is looking into how economic stimulus dollars are being spent. In a post that was published today, I interviewed her about how this type of reporting fits in with ProPublica's work, what her reporters have learned about the stimulus so far and the challenges of using this reporting method for investigative projects.

In this portion of that interview, she discusses how citizen reporting will fit in at the nonprofit news organization.

Steve Myers: What's your strategy for building a corps of citizen journalists at ProPublica?

Amanda Michel: We have three strategies for building a corps of pro-am journalists and integrating them into ProPublica's mission. Everything will be done under the auspices of the ProPublica Reporting Network, our pro-am journalism initiative, which we launched about a month ago.

Did you publish what you believe is award-worthy online journalism between June 1, 2008, and June 30, 2009? The deadline to enter the Online Journalism Awards competition has been extended until Wednesday, July 8. (Here's the entry form.)

This year the categories are...

Deborah Yao of the Associated Press reported:

Brandi Larsen, director of content for Tribune Interactive, said in an e-mail interview ...