Daily Archives: July 18, 2009

Is Crowdfunding the Future of Journalism?

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Useful survey of different ways of searching for a sustainable business model.

Crowdfunding, or getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project, startup, or service, is nothing new. Think public radio or television pledge drives. Think political campaigns. Think tip jar. Now, as the media landscape changes and traditional revenue sources are beginning to disappear, some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs are starting to apply the crowdfunding concept to the news. A new crop of sites are combining crowdfunding with volunteer and professional contributions in order to source news that people want to read.

There are two issues with crowdfunded sites that also have volunteer journalists, however: who’s going to pay for it and who’s going to write it. These sites are experimenting with ways of answering these questions….

And that’s the way it is…

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… as Walter Cronkite used to say when signing off the nightly news.

Iconic anchorman Walter Cronkite, a pioneer in television broadcasting once dubbed The Most Trusted Man in America, died Friday, his family said. He was 92.

As anchorman of ‘CBS Evening News’ from 1962 to 1981, Mr. Cronkite elevated the role of television news presenter from a script reader to that arbiter of truth called an anchorman.

Noted broadcaster Walter Cronkite died Friday at the age of 92. Known as “Uncle Walter” and sometimes as the conscience of America, Cronkite covered World War II, Nuremberg, the moon landing, Vietnam and scores of other major historical events during his long and storied career.

The term originally signified his role as tether to a far-flung news crew, but Mr. Cronkite imbued it with new gravitas. His Middle-American warmth — he once likened himself to “a comfortable old shoe” — led to an equally popular nickname, Uncle Walter. He became famous for his nightly sign-off, “And that’s the way it is.”

[Source.]

Needless to say, his Wikipedia entry has already been updated.

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)

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Remarkable, thought-provoking post by Mark Pilgrim on the Orwellian overtones of the Amazon Kindle.

LATER: Right on cue comes this story from the New York Times:

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

This day…

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… in 1946 was a Thursday. How do I know this? Why, I asked WolframAlpha. It’s the kind of thing it knows.

It was also the day in 1936 when the Spanish Civil War began as General Franco led an uprising of army troops based in North Africa.