Positive Money vs. The FT

Positive Money have a good response to a critical comment in the FT that accuses them of naivety.

Philip Greenspun :

I can't remember exactly what I charged the Press, but it was only a few days of work and I think the invoice worked out to approximately $40 million less than $40 million.

This is absolutely awesome if true.

Palantir appologise to Glenn Greenwald for any part they've played in trying to attack him and liberal journalists who support Wikileaks.

Curioser and curioser.

Update : Greenwald does an excellent job in explaining what's at stake.

Wow!

Unbelievable how powerful the "vast right wing conspiracy which we pretend isn't there even though it's in front of our fucking eyes" is.

Let's get this straight. Vince says he's at war with Murdoch. (Which is the ONLY sane way for any politician to understand his or her job today. Ie. any politician who hopes to represent the electorate rather than a bunch of oligarchs needs to understand that he or she is in conflict with Murdoch.)

He's then turfed out of the job that gives him any power at all over Murdoch (ie. to block the deal to allow M. to buy the rest of Sky).

But he's left with power over higher-education (ie. all the shit that comes from trying make hugely unpopular cuts.)

Shame on Labour for making political capital by criticising Cable for this. They should have got behind him, emphasizing that Murdoch is the problem.

Dave Winer publishes WikiRiver, a river-of-wikileaks-news.

I sometimes say that Rupert Murdoch has more blood on his hands over the Iraq War than George Bush.

I'm not being facetious. I really believe that. And I really believe that Rupert Murdoch is the nastiest, most dangerous piece of excrement we have the misfortune to have living on our planet today. He has indirectly caused the deaths of more people than Hitler and Stalin, together, could imagine in their wildest dreams, and if people really, one day, understand how the world works, generations of our descendants will curse his name.

Must-listen Rebooting the News with Dave Winer and Jay Rosen. Rosen comes out with some killer points.

Worth reading Michael Moore on liberal complicity in the Iraq War.

Who exactly is responsible for promoting BNP views in the UK?

Talented Friend Watch #14 : Mar Muriana's publishing house Zimerman Ediciones.

Hacker Newspaper is a clever new UI for Hacker News

Chris Dillow :

It seems that newspapers - aided of course by Brown - believe the fate of the economy hangs upon the actions of policy-makers, but are ignoring evidence of whether it might recover anyway, even if fiscal or monetary policy do little to help.

Via today's twitter, two interesting journalism stories :

Guardian's Open Content Platform.

Which looks bold and interesting. It's not what Winer has been calling for (ie. that newspapers start opening their authority to the crowd) but it looks to be taking the syndicated content model about as far as it can. Good experiment.

And the next-gen Hackney Post.

About a year ago I was thinking of doing a decent (ie. clear, easy to scan) cinema listings guide site.

Today I found this. I wonder if it's well known. Certainly puts the advertising-heavy, awkward to use, "what's on" guides to shame.

Scribe :

How about, instead of getting people not to do bad stuff, realising for a change that we could get people to do good stuff by, well, doing it ourselves?

In other (person's) words, "We must become the change we want to see in the world." Rather than focusing on the censorship of alcohol adverts, why not show more examples of people we respect doing things we wouldn't otherwise do?

Glyn Moody :

Problem, meet solution: newspapers should fund Wikileaks.

After sleeping on it, I'm still quite enthused by my suggestion for a ruthlessly scoopish news feed that I commented over at Scripting News yesterday.

In answer to the question "how will we get our news if journalism dies" :

Maybe a site *only* for "scoops", ie. breaking news stories which haven't been seen anywhere else online.

You have some Digg-style voting. Then, after giving readers 24 hours to challenge the *originality* of the story (by finding earlier references), the highest voted (most important, sorta) story of the day wins a cash-prize. If someone finds it elsewhere online, then you don't give the prize. (But you do give something to the guy who found out it wasn't original.)

Basically you do the opposite of Wikipedia's "no original research" policy. You ruthlessly reward "scoopness".

Pay for the prize by charging subscribers a few dollars for a feed which has the stories an hour earlier than they appear on the site. For real news junkies, an hour early may be worth a subscription of 10 dollars a month. (A hundred thousand subscribers gives you a million dollars a month from which you get your prize-money and your costs.)

Sell further analysis services around that feed. Could be automatically generated statistics, could be expert opinion, could be classification, could be ad-supported blog commentary, could be print-on-demand hard copy.

Update :

Here's some more brainstorming.

You can offer, each year, grants to those investigative journalists who have scored highly, in the past year.

Prizes could be allocated in different ways ... maybe one big and a lot of small ones. Or a 1st, 2nd, 3rd big prizes. Or you could have two prizes for pure originality / importantness and one for originality / well-writtenness. Whatever virtues you want to encourage in your submissions, offer some feedback and reward for it.

To make it super-easy to contribute, allow anyone to just email or IM a story in.

There might be some issues with, say, a very early but short SMS-type message : "Bomb at King's Cross" vs. a more measured three paragraph mail about the same thing, arriving 5 minutes later. Who deserves the prize? Perhaps segment into different "pools" of different sized text : Micro (the twitter-size), Article, Feature etc. with separate prizes for each. And, sure, that means someone might get inspired by the Micro post to chase and write up an Article-sized one. But that's fine. That's what should be happening.

Similarly you can segment by locality.

What about the big problem of people deliberately feeding *false* information into the system and then it getting voted up (maybe due to political prejudice)? Well, that's not a problem that we have to eliminate altogether. This happens (too much) with the current system we have today. (Ie. newspapers printing false things that suit their biases.) What we can work towards is that a) we obviously won't give a prize to a story which is found to be false, b) those who consistently contribute or vote for false stories can be punished in some way. (Their votes are discounted.)

Update 2 : Of course, the big problem with the above is that you can't simultaneously rely on the mass of reader / voters to debug and add value to your news feed AND sell early access to it. Paying subscribers are least likely to be interested in working on prioritizing and identifying novelty. They're paying for a finished product. So the business model needs to be different.

Blogs printed on newspaper.

The influence of Robert Peston (BBC's financial guy) in the market.