DocumentCloud is a new service being developed with startup funding from the James L. Knight Foundation. It sounds like an excellent service. It will be software, a Web site, and a set of open standards that will make original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on, anywhere on the Web."

I cannot help but wonder why libraries are not at the forefront of projects like this.

Started by reporters at the New York Times and ProPublica, this service will give individuals and organizations involved in original reporting mechanisms for sharing the documents they obtain and discover and making those documents available to other for new reporting and new uses.

Over two dozen organizations are working on the development of DocumentCloud, including traditional publications and news organizations such as The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Seattle Times, Thomson Reuters, Washington Post, and WNYC Radio, as well as organizations that collect and publish documents, such as The National Security Archive, ACLU National Security Project, OpenCRS, and the Sunlight Foundation,

Users will be able to search for documents by date, topic, person, location, etc. and will be able to do "document dives," collaboratively examining large sets of documents. Think of it as a card catalog for primary source documents. DocumentCloud is not meant to be a general document hosting service, like Scribd, Docstoc or Google Docs. Our goal is to build a service that makes source documents easier to find and share regardless of where they are hosted. It is a complement to these services, and not a competitor. the goal is to make documents even easier to find on search engines. DocumentCloud will have information about documents and relations between them, for example what locations, people, or organizations a group of documents have in common. Conceived of by journalists working at ProPublica and The New York Times, DocumentCloud will be managed as an independent nonprofit.

Their FAQ notes: "Will there be an API? Hell yes."

See also: Coming soon: Data mining made easier, By Alex Byers, Nieman Watchdog (July 11, 2009).

Project Censored, a media research project from Sonoma State University in California every year puts out a list of "news that didn't make the news." They've just released their 2010 edition (see below). I hope lots of people will go out and get a copy for themselves and their local libraries because this is what journalism is all about. It is the flip side of govt transparency as more available govt information makes for better and more thorough journalism.

• 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
• 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
• 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
• 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
• 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
• 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
• 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
• 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
• 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
• 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
• 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
• 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
• 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
• 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
• 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
• 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
• 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
• 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
• 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
• 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
• 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
• 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
• 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
• 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
• 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

[Thanks for the tip Crooks and Liars!]

An interesting new white paper contrasts "Public Media 1.0" (public broadcasting, cable access, nonprofit satellite set-asides) with "Public Media 2.0" (multiplatform, participatory, centered around informing and mobilizing networks of engaged users). It says that "the individual user has moved from being an anonymous part of a mass to being the center of the media picture."

• Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics, by Jessica Clark and Pat Aufderheide, Center for Social Media, School of Communication, American University, Feb 2009. [pdf] (also available in an html version.)

Public broadcasting and other "public media" are facing challenges similar to those that newspapers and libraries are facing in the digital information age. This white paper attempts to re-envision public media, just as many people are trying to re-envision newspapers/journalism and libraries.

The paper focuses more on "content" creation and user-collaboration than on preservation of information, but it does acknowledge the need for funding for what it calls "curation" and archiving. It says that "Commercial platforms do not have the same incentives to preserve historically relevant content that public media outlets do."

The terms "curation" and "stewardship" are often used in discussion of long-term preservation and access to information, but different writers use the terms differently, even interchangeably. This leads to vague, conflicting, and confusing arguments. This white paper defines "curation" more as presentation and commentary than as preservation. In doing so, they miss an opportunity to address the issues of long-term, free, usable, public access to information.

Curation: Users are aggregating, sharing, ranking, tagging, reposting, juxtaposing, and critiquing content on a variety of platforms—from personal blogs to open video-sharing sites to social network profile pages. Reviews and media critique are popular genres for online contributors, displacing or augmenting genres, such as consumer reports and travel writing, and feeding a widespread culture of critical assessment.

Clark and Aufderheide do include libraries as one of the potential partners for public media projects along with other institutions in the nonprofit sector such as universities, museums, and issue-focused educational and social organizations. They note that these institutions have "assets" that "include archives and databases, issue expertise, legitimacy, and trusted brands."

This vision certainly fits in with what John Shuler has been describing in his series on libraries as centers for education and civic engagement. I think libraries looking for service ideas could get some good ones from this report.

But I also think that libraries will need to read beyond this report to find their unique role in society and in facilitating and participating in "Public Media 2.0." Libraries can fill the long-term preservation-and-use gap in the report. Specifically, civic participation needs trusted institutions to select, acquire, organize, and preserve information and provide that information in usable formats in an environment that encourages re-use and the kind of participation described in the white paper. Libraries need to concentrate on those "assets" -- not in the economic sense of private property that is owned and controlled for the benefit of the owners, but as valuable community property, managed and maintained for the community by information professionals.

For Public Media 2.0 to succeed and flourish, for citizens to be able to reliably "aggregate, share, rank, tag, and critique," society needs more than content creators (journalists, broadcasters, writers, analysts, etc.); it also needs institutions that guarantee access and usability of information. It needs libraries.

Thanks to Kevin Taglang, Editor, Communications-related Headlines, Benton Foundation for the pointer to this report!

Here is another non-government site about the economic bailout/recovery. This one is put together by investigative journalists. They are citing the stories they have done on the largest domestic spending bill in U.S. history and highlighting the best reporting from around the Web on the stimulus.

ShovelWatch.org

ShovelWatch is a joint project of the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica, the morning news program The Takeaway and WNYC, New York’s flagship public radio station.

With investigative reporting, interactive features, and (not least) help from you, we’ll be tracking the stimulus bill dollars as they travel from Congress to your neighborhood. With your help, we’ll make sure that one of the biggest, fastest appropriations ever has a big, fast army to track whether it is well spent.

For those of you who follow international news, there is a new source of international journalism to check out, GlobalPost. It has a mission to "redefine international news for the digital age" (mission statement). It "will try to fill a void left by newspapers and network television, which collectively have pulled back sharply in deploying journalists abroad. If it's successful, GlobalPost will be one of the most spectacular against-the-grain stories since news companies began their accelerating revenue slide almost two years ago" (GlobalPost: A startup treads where big media retreat, By David Westphal, OJR, Jan. 8, 2009).

For more background, see the Executive Editor's blog and his links to news coverage of yesterday's launch of the GlobalPost.

I am often struck by the parallels between libraries and newspapers, librarians and journalists and how technology is affecting these institutions and professions. As I reflect on John Shuler's comments on Government Information Liberation, the following article caught my attention:

• 12 Questions about the future of journalism by Bill Kovach, The American Scholar.

Bill Kovach is a senior counselor to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a founder of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, a former Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, a former editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and a former curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

In reflecting on the future of journalism and our democracy, Kovach asks twelve provocative questions, which, I think, parallel some of those that John is asking.

I am still catching up after a brief vacation offline, but I will rejoin John's discussion soon and try to examine both the profession of librarianship and the institution of libraries.

Here is a good summary of a program sponsored by GODORT and the SLA Government Information Division at the recent Federal Depository Library conference.

• How Do Journalists Use Government Information? By Peggy Garvin, Government Information Division, Special Libraries Association.

New York Times reporter Scott Shane and Washington Post research editor Alice Crites educated and entertained the crowd at a joint meeting of the SLA Government Information Division (DGI) and the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) in Arlington, VA on October 15, 2007.

After negotiating with judicial officials, the Media Bloggers Association succeeded in gaining 2 seats for bloggers at Lewis "Scooter" Libbey trial next week. This is the first time bloggers have received press seats in a federal court . Washington Post (Jan 11, 2007) reports:

bloggers can bring a depth of reporting that some traditional media organizations aren't able to achieve because of space and time limitations," said Sheldon Snook, administrative assistant to Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan. Snook added that some bloggers also bring expertise that is welcome in court