A lot of people will have a go at TBD.com for its defining joke: the promise of Washington’s highly touted news-and-culture site is to be determined. With its launch today, TBD lives up to its mushy ambition.

Those expecting “God’s work” — a reference that editor Erik Wemple spins in his opening post — will long for divine inspiration. The Lord works in mysterious ways. TBD is, to be kind (TBK), a work in progress. For now, TBD’s founders are content to celebrate getting the sucker up. The celebration goes something like this: “We’re TBD, a site whose development is always uncertain, forever under construction.”

TBD is not your typical, uncertain startup. If you live and work in or around Washington, D.C., as I do, you’ve heard for a year that Robert Albritton, the Washington media magnate, and Jim Brady, a friend who is the former executive editor of washingtonpost,com, planned to revolutionize local news. Everyone wants a piece of The Washington Post, which is under assault on all fronts. With TBD, Albritton and Brady have the beast in their sights.

In its debut TBD shows off an updated version of convergence — that mind-numbing, inward-looking, mid-90s strategy from control freaks who thought they could combine media assets and control a local market. TBD merges Albritton’s two area TV station sites, WJLA-ABC News 7 and News8.net, with an online staff of 50.

Bringing the project into the decade, it adds a network of community blogs and websites. Social media tools — today’s requisite, must-have connections such as Twitter, Facebook, RSS and mobile apps– complete an otherwise familiar formula for news display and access. More shrewd than informative, TBD’s social media are networks for promotion and distribution rather than platforms for compelling news produced by the most talented experts who blog in and around Washington.

Can TBD provide the elusive model for local news in the digital age by competing with The Post’s failed, hyperlocal strategy?

“TBD has all the parts,” Steve Klein, who runs the electronic journalism program at George Mason University, told me at our meetup this weekend with the Online News Association. As such, TBD will likely be the darling of the online news set, the Mainstream Media survivors who are trying to keep outmoded institutions afloat.

But parts is parts, says the huckster who sells chicken pieces. TBD presumes to revolutionize without innovating. There’s nothing that changes your experience, your point of view, your relationship with local news, or the metaphor for storytelling. It doesn’t engage digital audiences in a fresh way or enable them to fully participate in the diverse, exciting flow of content in the nation’s capital.

The revolution is still coming, yet to be determined.

Today we’re announcing Tabula Rasa DC, our second event in just a few weeks at a moment of change for personal computing and communications.

Tabula Rasa

What’s your app?

We’ll help you answer that question. Check out the program. Read our agenda.

We’ve been waiting for this moment since we bought our first Mac II back in the Dark Ages.

A scant four weeks after iApple introduced the iPad, we played in NYC’s Digital Sandbox by staging the first throwdown on tablet computing. First-movers showed a stunning array of mobile applications for connected citizens and consumers. A talented group of innovators, developers, entrepreneurs and visionaries helped us flash-forward to a new marketplace for mobile engagement.

Beyond exuberance, one million iPads have been sold in a month. This is just the beginning, not just for the iPad but for personal computing on a stunning array of high-concept, high-touch devices heading our way.

Advantage goes to those who move first. As with other moments missed, slackers and laggards are left to compete for scraps, then complain.

Suddenly, everyone has an iPad or e-reader conference to show struggling vintners how to pour old wine into new bottles. Which may be fine for winemakers whose vineyards have gone fallow. Learn how to squeeze more juice out of fermented grapes, then charge more for the stuff. Even if it leaves a bad aftertaste.

We’re vintners of another kind. Plant anew. Cultivate. The terroir is rich, bold and complex. Join connoisseurs of creativity for a tasting from 1-4:30 pm on June 14. The vintage may be inexpensive, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption. Drink up.

Online registration here.

Charlton Heston channels Moses. Steve Jobs assumes a higher authority. Crazy guys throw down an iPad at batting practice. All this and more in The Throwdown Video, a preview of Tabula Rasa. Check it out on the program page and on YouTube.

I am excited to announce the launch of a new project that we are calling WeThink.

What is it? WeThink is a conversation about innovation and the future — an effort to explore new ideas and promote solutions to the challenges that our society is facing.

What’s the big deal? If you follow our work here at all, you’ll know that We Media is a movement – a concept – that helps explain how we know what we know, who we trust, and how we learn. It’s about power of the community. We Media is part of the infinite quest to harness the power of media, communication and human ingenuity for common good. And, well, We Media changes everything.  We Media changes the way we innovate.  We Media changes how we create, sustain, and grow successful ventures. We Media enhances the structures, models and economies that support human communication, interaction and achievement.  And through that, We Media challenges us to review our existing ways of operating, break apart our established structures, and re-build our approach to the future.  These changes impact all of us, and they are forcing each of us to find new ways of thinking about… well, everything.

What are you talking about? I have this crazy idea that we need to re-think the way we create, support, and sustain ventures.  We need to re-think how we innovate.  What we are doing isn’t working anymore – not as well as it should – and we need to try something different.  That means re-considering what kinds of companies and organizations are needed today, in response to the massive changes we are seeing in our society as a result of the influence that technology and the internet are having on our culture.  That means re-structuring how ventures, both for-profit and social in nature, are funded and managed.  That means re-assessing what success looks like for new companies and organizations, as well as re-considering how we measure progress of existing organizations against our needs in society.  And that means re-building the whole infrastructure of innovation… from how we teach it, promote it, cover it in the media, what skills we value, who gets to serve as gatekeepers, and more.

How will it work? Over the next year we will collect and share new ideas, highlight different approaches, ask tough questions, and propose solutions. We will lead a new and different kind of discussion about innovation. Everywhere we go we will be looking for new issues to discuss and new ideas to consider.  Everyone we talk to or encounter is invited to contribute their experience or perspective to help power this effort.  And all those ideas and suggestions, approaches and solutions will be shared.  They’ll be posted online.  They’ll be open to feedback.  They’ll be mashed up with other thoughts.  At the end of a year, our plan is to pull together a ‘solutions book’ that helps to support, and sustain, a vibrant and game-changing discussion going forward.  The rest we will figure out as we go.

The first few ideas and questions will be posted in the next several days.  So, stay tuned — the fun is just beginning.

Demand Media is one of the few media companies that has a research-and-development department, Byron Reese, the company’s chief innovation officer, doesn’t hesitate to point out. The reason, he said, “is that we view content production as a manufacturing process, not a creative process.”

That perspective surely challenges the assumptions of a few traditional media companies, which in the olden days considered writing to be a craft, not a widget or “workflow process.” But the companies that focused on hand-crafted narratives are now being rivaled by more disciplined firms that can leverage the scale of the Internet to find efficiencies in every step of the editorial process, from choosing topics to write about to editing to headline writing and compensation.

The company has grown tremendously rapidly using this new model. Four years ago it didn’t exist. Now the company has 500 employees in Santa Monica, Calif.; Austin, Texas; Bellevue, Washington; New York and London. After $355 million in investment, the company has produced more than 1 million text articles and 200,000 videos — mostly in the how-to genre. Last month its 500 employees and 7,000 freelancers generated 101 million users, according to some measures.

Most of what Demand Media does most closely resembles reference materials, not journalism. That’s a wide-open business that few are doing well, Reese said.

“We are really trying to put the world’s information on the Internet in an exhaustive fashion,” he said. “We are trying to fill up every question people ask with an appropriate answer. The Internet overproduces certain kinds of content and underproduces other types. It overproduces Britney Spears. But it doesn’t have so much about how to unclog your toilet. People are kind of left on their own to find the right answers.”

For now, all the content Demand Media produces — on a range of sites including eHow, Livestrong.com and Golflink — is in English. But the company, which has done pilot projects in half a dozen languages, intends to go international in 2011.

Asked what content the company produced has made a difference in readers’ lives, Wadooah Wali, senior director of communications for the company, said most of it was extremely practical. She sent along this tweet as an example: “THANK YOU @EHOW my dog swallowed meds & your ‘How to induce vomiting’ http://tinyurl.com/y8eld9r saved hm.”

The company has come under criticism from some journalists, saying Demand Media cannot possibly produce quality content for the low prices it pays freelance writers. David Carr’s takedown in the New York Times particularly got under the company executives’ skins.

In response to the flurry of critiques, the company has set up an editorial advisory board that includes Kevin Smith, the president of the Society of Professional Journalists. The company also produced a “manifesto” explaining why quality and quantity are not in conflict in what it calls a “disruptive content model.”

“It isn’t as if we’re coming in somehow, and undercutting other people’s work,” Reese said. “What we’re doing is coming in and adding assignments. There’s no one who’s not getting an assignment from GQ. I would like to meet the person who says their rate has fallen because we exist.”

Demand Media has partnered with newspapers, such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on things like travel writing.

“It’s journalism with a little J, not a big J,” Wali said. “We know we can monetize that. We know that it’s the traditional news that people want but that is hard to support in the current economic conditions.”

There’s a story going around that touts the Internet as a perpetual money machine. It goes something like this: many pieces of old content on the digital-now network have aggregate residual value that, over time, exceed present value of fresh content, which spikes and subsides quickly. The story is called the Long Tail. It is part economic theory, part myth, part common sense, and one good chapter in a popular book.

Download the report (PDF)

If Ashton Kutcher’s 4.5 million Twitter followers make you feel inadequate, I’ve got good news: scientists investigating social networks have punked the “influentials” theory that drives celebrities to the top of the charts.

Aplusk, who boasts that he’s bigger than CNN, is apparently overrated. A new study finds that the importance of most influential spreaders in a social network does not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people. Which means well connected celebrities and organizations may have less influence over the spread of valuable information than we give them credit.

Exploring the impact of network science on the spread of information as well as the spread of viruses, Maksim Kitsak at Boston University and a cross-disciplinary team of scientists dismiss e-fluentials, viral marketers run amok, and tipping points. Marketers have spent billions promoting these concepts, including Influentials Theory, which spins the notion that influential people matter more than others. It is also the premise behind Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, The Tipping Point.

Compare the illustrations below. We used to think that networks worked like the one on the left. The new research suggests they look more like the one on the right: more random, more distributed.

Duncan Watts, one of the pioneers of network science and now the principal research scientist at Yahoo!’s Human Social Dynamics Group, has long been skeptical of the marketers and the pop sociologists. Watts, the author of Six Degrees: The Science of the Connceted Age, has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people and ignoring influentials altogether.

Less-connected people who are less strategically placed can have a significant effect of the dissemination of information, Kitsak’s research team now finds. They discovered that the location of an individual within at a hub of a network can make them more central to the flow of information. The finding seems to support both the random nature of communications networks as well as the value of geography or local knowledge in disseminating information.

Incumbents with historic ties to geographic communities might see an advantage in this ecosystem. More likely it could further disintermediate the flow of information from traditional hubs. Look at the connections from Luis Perez, who posted his Facebook connections on Flickr. Now consider there are more than 70 million Facebook users like Luis.

Amra Tareen, the savvy and ebullient founder of AllVoices, has
just closed a $3 million funding round for the innovative, citizen journalism site. That brings funding to $9 million for the two-year-old start-up. Not bad. TechCrunch has a good take on the AllVoices funding.

How does she do it? Amra returns to We Media Miami this year
for Amra’s Great Adventure, a workshop on how a Harvard MBA, electrical engineer, and Muslim mother of two rose to partner at an investment fund to capture opportunities in communications, managed info-tech and telecom businesses, set up micro-credit programs for women and orphans of the Pakistan earthquake to rebuild their lives, and raised millions to start a global news company with local context provided by anyone. Is there funding to extend the AllVoices model into the future of news?”

You can meet the amazing Ms. Tareen and discover great insights on the successes, struggles and experiences of launching a good idea at We Media on March 9-11. Register here.

The biggest surprise from yesterday’s unveiling of Apple’s iPad was that print publishers and journos weren’t terribly excited. “Waiting to be surprised. That hasn’t happened yet,” said Jim Roberts, the only New York Times wonk who didn’t confuse Steve Jobs with Moses. Valleywag has a good take on Print Media’s Big Tablet Letdown.

Our enthusiasm for the tablet comes from both sides of the brain, the creative as well as the practical (we’re talking about business). The Creative Class sees the possibilities: read Nick Carr, Pentagram, Joe Zeff and my post yesterday on experiential news design.

Our take is that smart publishers can reap rewards by investing in new channels for storytelling, advertising and, dare we say, content you can charge for. But few have expressed either understanding, leadership or the required commitment to fill the blank slate of content that the expanding flood of tablets and other mobile devices afford. The creative class is apt to beat them to the future.

Magazine and newspaper publishers have fantasized, for more than a decade, about the day when portable digital display technologies render paper, ink, printing, trucks, postage and home delivery obsolete. In this soft-focus digital nirvana, unspeakable riches will flow from new business models that eliminate most production and distribution expenses while producing revenue – and profits – far greater than what magazines and newspapers have been able to extract from their ad-supported web and mobile offerings. Hearst, for instance, invested in 1998 in E-Ink, one of the companies that makes high-resolution displays like those found in Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s E-Reader and the new Nook from Barnes & Noble in the U.S.

As rumors swirl and geek saliva oozes around an Apple tablet said to be in the works for 2010, the fantasy of next-gen tech salvation for print publishers is gaining momentum, at least in the U.S., where a coalition of magazine publishers has announced a “digital storefront” to sell digital magazines.

Can’t you imagine how warm and fuzzy it must make a media baron feel, or even a down-sized editor, to imagine cash raining down, delivered not only willingly but joyously by loving readers and advertisers who see, once again, as in ye olde times, that big media companies offer something wonderful, unique and valuable. People will pay for it. Again and again and again. With stogies in mouths, champagne in flutes, and order, control, superiority and dominance restored, the vision fades to credits. Publishers, stock holders and all that trickles down from them live happily ever after.

Only (sound record scratch): In a hyper-competitive market of ever-expanding choice, atomized content, social distribution and open networks, the business fantasy will turn to bitter disappointment when the love and riches flow widely, not narrowly, to many sources. The pie may grow, but the slices will be slimmer and slimmer.

The flaw, of course, is expecting too much from technology – the next big thing. Even the mockup reflects ideas, techniques and design concepts that are, like the technology itself, more than a decade old.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t lovely. It’s good enough to touch. Truly. Imagine a giant iPhone, with a touch screen, processor and broadband connections vastly faster and more responsive than a real iPhone, and some nicely-imagined packaging of text, photos, videos, sharing and discussion. Of course, you might stick with fantasy mode and imagine all of that in all your favorite web sites. Maybe tablets will spark advances in design and user experience that should have become commonplace by now. Maybe lovely visions like this will replace the mind-numbing scroll of links found on, say, Sports Illustrated The Web Site, where the publisher’s business goals clearly take precedence over the reader’s, where lust for ad impressions reveals a service built for clicks, not for the joy or love of anything or anyone, where readers are just that, voiceless, even when someone dies.

This is much nicer:

We couldn’t get to Hyderabad for this year’s group hug of the world’s newspaper publishers, but it sounds like the old boys are getting feisty in their dotage. Forced once to postpone because of bad economics and waning interest, the reconvened World Newspaper Congress, organized by the merged World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, launched a surge against geeks and Google. Seems like publishers don’t much like this world. Read about it on Paid Content, here and here.

Can’t we all just get along? Ah, no. Not as long there is control, copyright and lots of money at stake. Paid Content’s Rafat Ali reacts and shares perspectives from the warlords. Fredic Filloux, the Paris-based editor who writes the Monday Note blog, attempts a diplomatic solution. Does anyone believe this will end well?

Dear Mr. Murdoch:

We’re so fortunate that we can entrust you with the future of the news business in the U.S. Such a shrewd business leader, too. Can you help a confused citizen understand your plan to save the news?

1. You’re going to charge people to read a story online that they won’t read, and won’t buy, in print.

2. You’re going to remove the coding that enables Google to index and distribute the story to those who might want to find it through the Google search engine.

3. You’re going forfeit an estimated $15 million in advertising based on the traffic Google sends you.

4. You’re going to get Microsoft to pay you for exclusive rights to search your stories through Bing, which captures less than 10 percent of the search market, even though most people will be able to find them them by other means if they want.

5. You’re going to force the really motivated to go to other sources and accounts of the same story.

6. You’re going to force those who are directed to your version of the story to navigate a pay wall, pay to access a link to your site, then click through.

7. You’re going take the rest of the newspaper industry with you.

Did I get all that right? For a while you had me thinking that you just wanted to extract more money from Google.

SeeClickFix has been sitting in the cross-hairs of two very hot buzzwords recently: Gov20 and HyperLocal.

Both movements are being brought on by the great disruptor that is the Interwebs and both movements are faced with similar questions: What does it mean to have more participants? What value do those participants have and is the value of the original participant (journalist and public official) compromised by greater participation?

At the intersection of Gov and Media is Media’s responsibility to hold government accountable.  The way that responsibility is enacted shifts as Media is forced to be more resourceful and Gov is forced to be more transparent.  As the organism of traditional media is weekend financially by the growth of on-line news one of Journalism’s key functions, being a check on government,  faces a disruption as well. When more and more reporters are losing their jobs how can media properties maintain their function as a 4th branch of government?  Less Journalists means less people doing the investigation and collecting the news. This means that if media wants to continue to hold gov accountable they have to stay resourceful.

Below is a case study of how SeeClickFix is being used by Hyper Local Journalists to maintain their role in a Gov20 world.

Our Partner Doug Hardy, at the Journal Inquirer, has been using a SeeClickFix Pro account to acknowledge and track issues like speeding, downed power lines and unsafe pedestrian areas in the Hartford, CT region. Not only does the Journal Inquirer embed the SeeClickFix map, but Doug also follows up on issues himself and makes sure that they are being listened to by officials.

The Journal Inquirer introduced SeeClickFix to much of the Hartford region adding a layer of accountability to local gov that previously did not exist. Doug now uses the citizen reports to scoop stories on issues like traffic safety and other community concerns.

This kind of accountability has more back-up than a pen and a delivery route though. Doug’s new posse is a crowd of users that can speak and vote publicly on the issues he is reporting. Doug can not only report on the issue but he can display the raw data of citizen voices on SeeClickFix.

In East Hartford, CT it appears that this new form of accountability is quite effective at creating fixes. Doug was kind enough to let me post his article(The Journal Inquirer is participating in another experiment: a Paywall) on East Hartford and SeeClickFix below.

SEECLICKFIX: Problems getting solved in East Hartford
By Doug Hardy
Journal Inquirer
Published: Monday, October 26, 2009 11:52 AM EDT
Some good things have been happening as a result of your reports on the SeeClickFix portion of the Journal Inquirer’s Web site. Three issues have been solved recently in East Hartford, where Mayor Melody A. Currey and public works personnel have taken an active approach and decided to monitor SeeClickFix for your reports. This is a good thing for everyone, as you’ll see below.

“EH Citizen” reported that there has been a deer crossing sign covered in graffiti for more than five years on Oak Street near Farnham Drive.

“It’s an eyesore and you can’t even see the photo on the sign in an area where deer often cross to access Porter Brook. Is this fixable?” EH Citizen wrote, adding that the town had been notified years ago but the sign had yet to be scrubbed clean or replaced.

Fortunately, the East Hartford Public Works Department has built its own watch area on SeeClickFix — which you also can do for free if you want to get involved in solving problems in your community. Within 15 days of reporting the graffiti online, EH Citizen returned and posted this message: “Thanks so much this issue has been fixed. The sign was replaced and looks great now! Thank you!”

You can thank East Hartford for being on the ball. We didn’t need to ask on your behalf. Meanwhile, across town at Main Street and Silver Lane, the pedestrian crossing signal was reported to be too fast, leaving slow-moving folks at risk.

“For pedestrians and bicyclists crossing Main Street at Silver Lane, the time from when the icon turns white and the audible beep starts is barely 10 seconds,” ROC wrote. “This is a wide street, and even on a bike you barely make it. This traffic light should be lengthened so people can cross without fearing for their lives. It’s called a crosswalk for a reason, should favor the crosser.”

After suggesting that the state Department of Transportation be contacted directly, within about a month ROC reported that the signal time had been lengthened appropriately. Kudos for your effort, ROC.

A third issue that was closed in East Hartford was reported by Bob Hobbs — a dead tree was menacing the power lines on Bodwell Road near Burnside Avenue. He provided a photo. Hobbs posted the issue directly on East Hartford’s Web site — which is always advisable if you want anything to get done — and got a response from Public Works Director Billy G. Taylor:

“The tree is privately owned,” Taylor wrote. “Consequently, the town cannot simply lawfully remove it. Under authority given to me by town ordinances, I sent a letter to the owner of record ordering the tree’s removal. The letter has just been returned by the USPS marked ‘undeliverable.’ Having never removed a tree on private property without delivering the owner the notice required by ordinance, I do not know what authority I have to remove it. In any case, the Public Works budget is insufficient to allow removal of trees on private property and I do not have the authority under the town charter to overexpend the budget.”

So no progress there. Town records list three names on the property card, but I was told all three were renters.

Then we got some help from Jon Searles, an East Hartford resident whose brainflation.wordpress.com blog describes him as both a concerned citizen and chairman of the 6th District Committee of the East Hartford Republican Town Committee. He also is a Town Council candidate in the municipal election.

Searles either reported the tree directly to Connecticut Light & Power himself or he found an existing report. He provided a report number for CL&P’s Web site, and we then found that the utility company visited in September and noted that the tree was “overhanging the lines,” But the report then said, “RESOLUTION — No Trouble Found.”

Based on that, it didn’t look like CL&P was going to take action.

But about two weeks ago — and after more than 20 comments and e-mails between residents, town officials, and myself — Hobbs reported that the tree had been cut back and the lines were no longer threatened.

Somone had taken it upon themselves to chop off the top of the dead tree. Whoever you are, thanks for helping to improve the community.

Doug Hardy is an associate editor of the Journal Inquirer. He can be reached at dhardy (at)journalinquirer.com or 860-646-0500, ext. 305.
This is a true testimony to the magic of a system that allows for open communication and collaborative problem solving around public concerns. You can really see how media, industry, government and private citizens can work together to improve their communities:

Today at Noon ET on the Naked Media show: Avner Ronen, CEO of media aggregation startup Boxee, and Betsy Morgan, former CEO of Huffington Post. Details here.

Each day brings another story that publishers are lurching to the business model that will save newspapers: charging for online content. Yet, each day brings news of additional buyouts and layoffs in newsrooms. Sometime soon, the publishers are going to figure out the next problem: they neither have enough good content that’s worth selling nor sufficient talent to produce it.

Over the past three years, newspapers have shed 27,000 jobs, many in newsrooms, including more than 9,000 jobs so far this year. Consider the assets they’ve jettisoned: the very people who are accomplished at producing high-value content that could be monetized under pay-for-content plans. What other industry would reduce the one asset, the one investment, that differentiates them?

Let’s do the new math in the new world of paid content. Say each of 27,000 laid-off newsies was capable of producing just one story of value per week. That’s 1.4 million stories. Now let’s iTunes those stories, just the way the publishers would like, selling them for a one dollar. If just one person would buy a story for a buck, then publishers lose $1.4 million in potential revenue from those stories. But a market of one doesn’t make a newspaper, nor does it reflect the really big, Google-like numbers that publishers think they’ll get on the Web. Jack the market to only 2,000 paying customers for one story a week, and you’re looking at $2.8 billion in lost revenue from the people you just laid off. At only 10,000 customers — the size of a small weekly newspaper — that’s $14 billion in lost, potential revenue if you take the formula forward. And at Google-like numbers in the hundreds of thousands or millions, then, well, you’re talking about real money that you’ve let get away.

Once again, publishers are about to learn new realities from the Internet. The first is that you can’t produce enough content to supply it. The second is that the content you do produce probably isn’t worth what you think. The third is that the competition is fierce: many of those 27,000 journalists you trained, then fired, are now working against you on their own sites.