Is Flipboard the social magazine we’ve been waiting for?

Can design hubs and templates can actually stir creativity at newspapers?

Did Steve Jobs steal my old idea for the tablet?

Opinions or insights? Let’s talk and share. We’ll share ours at a salon on current issues of creativity at our meetup on Saturday at world headquarters at Lake Anne Village, Reston.

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already here. I recently learned that left and right shoes were thought up a little more than a century ago.

Consider what else you might discover over a Dale’s Pale Ale. Bring both feet — appetite and brains, too — to the meetup with the DC Area Online News Association Meetup Group from 3:30 to 6 pm Saturday at Lake Anne Village, Reston.

DC/ONA members can register here.

Friends of We Media can register here.

At first flip, Flipboard is stunning (you have to download the app; the website is a brochure). The free app renders links from top tech and social media sites into a well-designed, magazine-style layout. Flip through content with a flick of the finger. The content-at-your-fingertips interface is intuitive, functional and fun — yet another incremental advance in haptic, information design based on human gestures. Touch screens, the iPad and trackpads move us closer to Minority Report.

But Flipboard is off to a shaky start. The app exhausted capacity within a few hours of launch. Flipboard’s big idea — creating sections for the news that my networks and friends are sharing — fizzled at the start.

I couldn’t add either my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Rather, I was instructed to email Flipboard for an invitation to add content. The shortcomings of the launch made me and other customers cynical.

Without personalized feeds, Flipboard is just elegant aggregator. It’s a leap forward from Internet sites that look as if they’ve been assembled by computer, which they are, or shoveled by news organizations from an old ditch into a new one. Flipboard feeds display-content into images and extended briefs that link to original content. It leaves the impression that content is personal and that on Flipboard it has been curated, redesigned or re-edited with a personal touch.

Incumbents see the threat and are staking out traditional ground. After its impulsive tech writer praised the Pulse News Reader, a visual browsing app, The New York Times forced Apple last month to remove Pulse from the App Stores for infringing on its rights. The app, a $4 download, was reinstated after Times feeds were removed.

The impressive part about Flipboard, as well as Pulse, is that it applies visual, nteractive and social metaphors to news access. The interface is far more appealing than the existing metaphor, the old syndication standby, RSS. RSS pulls original content and formatting from simple, authorized feeds. Traditional providers embrace RSS because they believe it extends distribution of content prepared for another medium by sending users to their destination sites — which happens only some of the time. Flipboard is just one of a new breed of “feed readers” that ditch the visible plumbing of RSS for their own content scrapers. Those scrapers translate content into visual nuggets that fill the nutritional needs of most news consumers on the Internet. The issue is whether they’re fair.

“Fair Use” — the principal that guides usage and linking to original content — remains the force majeure of the Internet. Aggregators and indexers such as Yahoo! and Google have stretched the limits of fair use on one of the fronts of the unholy war with content providers. It’s a war the aggregators winning. The weakened providers have settled for a truce that grants them pageviews from links and RSS feeds. But where traditional news providers have largely capitulated in the interests of survival, the new breed of Internet-only news providers are beginning to take exception. One of them, the technology weblog Gizmodo, even questions whether Flipboard is legal: “Flipboard … has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.”

You can read that sentence in the digital version of Wired, which licenses content from Gizmodo, which supplies content to Flipboard. Presumably, you’ll soon be able to add feeds from your Twitter and Facebook friends linking to the Gizmodo story that appeared in Wired that was picked up by The New York Times and distributed through its RSS feed.

Flip to the next page. It looks better.

So, there I was on a sun-soaked Miami street back in March, mildly hung-over and hailing a taxi to the airport while juggling my suitcase with a billboard-sized check for $25,000. No problem finding a taxi. Or crowds of passersby who wanted to pose for pictures with our winnings.

We’d won the WeMedia PitchIt! Challenge for what we now call ‘Report It’ – an innovative ‘crowd sourcing’ mobile and web app that will turn thousands of citizens into investigative journalists in local communities across the U.S. and beyond, ‘mashing up’ social networks with professional newsrooms and assuring high-quality, high-impact user generated content simply not available anywhere else.

Back in Washington, it was time to turn ideas into action, plans into reality. There were tasks to prioritize, milestones to meet.

We’ve been toiling in offices of Capitol News Connection on workflows, wireframes, user interfaces, algorithms, user reward and recognition for several months now, as we scramble to raise enough funding to build and launch Report It, drive participation and ensure its success and sustainability.

Now we lift the curtain on our progress, ideas and challenges, as we work toward unveiling a 1.0 iteration of Report It this fall. We’re building a user-generated content platform that involves users in every step of the content creation, curation, and distribution process – so we want and value your input as we build and iterate our apps over the coming year.

This summer we’ll be looking for your feedback on everything from the type of assignments you would sign up to complete, how to ensure our user interfaces are elegantly intuitive and fun, how best to recognize and reward users for their contributions, and what would make you shout from rooftops to all your friends about why they must (must!!!) join your assignments and ‘Report It.’

It may be that you are in Louisiana documenting with photos and video the sickening spread of oil into wetlands and beaches. You may want to be one of 2,793 people standing on 2,793 bridges documenting crumbling concrete and corroded steel. It may be that you want to collect conflict of interest statements from local officials in your area, ‘find the pork’ in the financial reform bill, or follow incumbents and challengers on the campaign trail during the Midterm election campaign. You may want push alerts on your iPhone so you can volunteer for breaking news assignments in your area. And of course you will want to provide tips and story ideas for Report It assignments!

Right now we are putting a lot of thought into what sort of assignments Report It users will want to tackle. We want to make sure there’s something for everyone, so we’re matching assignments to interests, expertise, time commitment, user ideas and demand. Not everyone is going to be a Pulitzer or Peabody Award winner, so we want to make sure there’s an assignment for folks at all levels – and that users can improve their contributions, reliability and community ratings, and progress over time.

Broadly speaking, we think quality begins … at the beginning, with highly-focused assignments that limit the chance of failure by pairing users with the right assignments, and by being there to help with real-time advice of award-winning journalists and online tutorials. Quality is also assured by the community, who will rate and rank each others’ submissions, by Report It algorithms, which will help establish user accuracy and impact over time, and by a professional newsroom – our own and those of our content partners.

We’re putting a lot of thought right now into the best way to define and incentivize user success. We’ve started by asking a simple question: What is success? We want users to be accurate. We want them to find out things no one else knows. We want them to help ‘connect the dots’ by discerning patterns or trends. We want them to produce quality video, audio and photos. We want them to create high-impact ‘viral’ content. We want them to bring their friends into assignments. We want them to make waves, change things and improve their communities. In the coming weeks we are working on front-end and back-end solutions that will translate into success – and soon we’ll be running ideas past you as we progress in this ‘bootstrap’ period.

That’s the fun stuff. And, man is it fun! But fun it won’t be if we don’t raise enough money to actually develop and launch the app. So you can imagine, that’s what’s occupying a huge amount of our time right now. We’ve assembled a talented team of developers to get this done, but we have to find a way to pay them – from the mathematicians who will make the algorithms work to the designers and UX experts who will make the app intuitive and fun to use, from the information architecture to the CMS, from iPhone and iPad to Droid, WAP and desktop – it adds up. And we haven’t even talked about the editorial, engagement, sales or marketing teams needed to drive participation, content partnerships and monetization strategies. So we’re all ears about ideas, prospects and introductions for fundraising and investment.

And finally, as we build the 1.0 app, we plan – parallel to our development efforts – outreach to journalism schools, media content partners, local community and interest groups and others to drive early participation. We want to launch with an active user base.

Did I mention we’ve been busy? Did I mention I am also launching an app to increase the hours in the day to 36? Please send your thoughts, comments and ideas to us. We’re all ears! Comment here or catch us at reportit@cncnews.org

Photo by Dierken.

Roger is regarded by many as the father of tablet computing. A seminal figure in electronic publishing and newspaper design, he envisioned digital newspapers and mobile reading devices nearly three decades ago. That predated personal computers and the digital ecosystem by years. Read his prescient essay from 1981. As Director of New Media for Knight-Ridder Inc. in the 1990s, he pursued his vision at the company’s Information Design Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. In 1994, his team at the lab produced a video titled “The Tablet Newspaper: A Vision for the Future” that demonstrated how people might one day read newspapers and magazines on tablets. The video has gone viral on the Web since the announcement of the Apple iPad.

Twice a finalist for the prestigious World Technology Award in Media and Journalism, Roger is a World Technology Network Fellow. Currently he serves as program director for digital publishing at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI), where he coordinates digital publishing research projects and the Digital Publishing Alliance, a member-supported initiative that includes The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. Matt Mansfield, the former SND prez who is facilitating the Developer’s throwdown at Tabula Rasa, wrote a gem of a profile for the Society of News Design, of which Roger was a founding member.

At Tabula Rasa, Roger will also demo the app for Newsy, the multi-source online video news service.

All this and Jeff Jarvis, too. What more is there to say about the human app called Jarvis? Author, journalist, pundit, blogger, professor, mentor, advisor, entrepreneur and provocateur extraordinaire, Jeff orbits around one of the most popular and prolific blogs on the Internet, BuzzMachine. If you haven’t read Jeff, then you you’ve never gotten the signal. You may want to read Jeff’s post and video why he reboxed and returned his iPad.

Roger and Jeff join a group of expert analysts who’ll assess a creative moment and the products that have been developed for them. They are joined by an equally insightful and provocative group: user-engagement strategist Chrys Wu of Matchstrike; celebrated designer and publishing expert Roger Black; and mobile expert Rick Robinson, a former AOL exec and founder of SonicGleek productions.

Join them at the Feedbag Forum, our lunchtime forum among participants, at Tabula Rasa.

Only a few seats remain, so register today to join the conversation, throwdown the most innovative ideas on the Internet, and participate in the creative future.

Audimated is close to launching our platform thanks to the support of We Media and readers like you. If you haven’t done so already please check out www.audimated.com and add your email address so we can invite you when we launch. Make sure to tell your musician friends as well!

One of the key challenges we’re currently dealing with is our outsourced web development company. Most entrepreneurship experts will tell you that outsourcing your web development in the beginning can be a great way to keep costs down, but it can also cause some problems down the line with scalability. We are facing some of these problems now.

If I could offer some advice to other tech based startups, I would suggest securing a LONG TERM FINANCIALLY INCENTIVIED equity partner who can develop your web service. This is usually the best option because this individual is aligned with giving you the best product for the future instead of doing just the minimum work required to fulfill a web development contract. Out sourced contract web development will likely build your website in the cheapest and fastest possible way while making sure to meet your minimum requirements. It is in your best interest to find your team early. The more that the internal founders can do themselves without looking to outside professionals or service providers the better.

Look forward to the next post where I will be discussing the launch process for Audimated.

Thanks,

Lucas

Susan Szenasy, the Editor in Chief of Metropolis, the award-winning New York City-based magazine of architecture and design thinks designers can save the world.  She writes:

We need designers’ help desperately. They think differently from the rest of us. Unlike linear learners like me, they are more intuitive, they watch people, interact with place, space, and object.

And she should know, Susan and her team regularly ask designers to “solve real problems as only designers can — showing us what a better world would look and feel like.”  Susan has proven it can work.  The question remains, however — are the rest of us ready to embrace that opportunity.

What do you think?  Read the full article and let us know…

The Newsosaur affirms his namesake in a blog post that “non-profits can’t possibly save the news.”

“An amazing number of smart and sophisticated people continue to harbor the fantasy that philanthropic contributions can take over funding journalism from the media companies that traditionally have supported the press.”

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it creates a problem where none exists. Just who are the “amazing number of smart and sophisticated people” (none of whom are named) who fantasize about throwing good money at a bad business? They’d neither be smart nor sophisticated if they did.

Or this: What exactly is the problem with nonprofits, public citizens and informed sources investing in journalism at a time when newspapers and other media companies are disinvesting in it?

The Sunlight Foundation creates real-time news and tools about transparency in government. The American Red Cross continues to provide unvarnished news from Haiti while raising millions in relief funds through multi-platform tools. Kaiser’s editorially independent health site provides news and information about health-care reforms, health policy, and state-by-state insurance programs for children at a time when most newspapers have dropped health beats. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has committed hundreds of millions to projects that fill the void in communities and journalism, while at the same time leading change in public policy impacting journalism and democracy. The Ethics and Excellence Foundation grants millions by investing in the future of journalism by “building the ethics, skills and opportunities needed to advance principle, probing news and information.” The MacArthur Foundation supports the production and distribution of news and documentary programs for television, radio, and the web that help inform the American public about important domestic and international current affairs and policy issues. The list goes on and on and on. And now private citizens are putting up their own money to fund and stimulate a new era for journalism and investigative reporting.

Down with this sort of thing, says the Newsosaur: “Let’s stop dreaming about a visit from the Non-Profit News Bunny.”

That’s Jurassic Age thinking. No one is suggesting that a few non-profits will fund newsgathering the way newspapers used to. But the overall investment in journalistic capital, entrepreneurship and news-providing access through technology far exceeds the shrinking investment by Tyrannosaurus Rex.

There’s no turning back. You can hop with the bunnies or die with the newsosaurs. I’ve got a spot in my courtyard.

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Rich Polt, who has spent more than fourteen years in the public relations business, thinks that PR needs to change – in a big way.  No argument there.  So we asked Rich to share some ideas on how to re-imagine the business of generating media coverage for issues and organizations.  And what did he do?  Rich looked back into his past and explained that the future of public relations is back in high school.

He writes:

Like the contemporary PR practitioner, hoping to influence audiences in a shifting cultural and technological landscape, high school students are thrust into a new world of social connections where opinions are formed virally and affecting one’s own reputation can be a Herculean labor. Is it surprising that the early adopters of social media were teenagers? It’s a medium that maps perfectly to the complex social dynamics already at play during that stage of life; a dynamic in which gossip, sensationalism, “cool” factors, and popularity are the laws of the land.

There is much, much more in the full article.  Take a look and let us know what you think.

AP CEO Tom Curley Talks with Dorian Benkoil at We Media 2010 from Dorian Benkoil on Vimeo.

Fifty years ago, the memo that launched the space program and put man on the moon contained just a few, clear paragraphs. The FCC’s plan is 376 pages – and that’s just the beta. There’s a story here about how the adoption of public policy hasn’t kept pace with a global, always-on world. American cities lag far behind their counterparts in Asia, Scandanavia – even eastern Slovakia – places where broadband is faster, cheaper and more widely accessible. Many of the FCC’s recommendations will require Congressional action — and beyond politics and murky matters of jurisdiction — would likely take years to put in place, if at all.

At We Media Miami last week, FCC Managing Director Steve VanRoekel gave us a glimpse of a government that is moving toward eDemocracy and wired capitalism. Accordingly, the FCC plan acknowledges that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium for government, business and life in the U.S. The plan broadly seeks a 90 percent broadband adoption rate in the United States by 2020, up from roughly 65 percent.

One way to react to the plan: consider how the companies that control broadband in the U.S. respond. So far, big Internet providers have been receptive, but they warn (of course) that government regulation could impede their abilities to expand their networks. Many of the plans will benefit wireless carriers, including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile USA. The FCC said it wants 500 MHz of spectrum to be available in 10 years with 300 MHz coming within five. Proposals will probably face resistance from other telecom giants, which over time will face new competition for customers. The broadcast television industry is already resisting efforts to auction off some of its spectrum so that it can be redirected toward mobile Internet technologies.

It’s hard to imagine that the companies that currently own spectrum would willingly give it up to stimulate competition for an asset they think they already own. Let the games begin.

Welcome to We Media from KnightCenter on Vimeo.

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PitchIt! Award Winners Melinda Whittstock and Lucas Sommer with presenter Bob Ross, President and CEO Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. Photo by Chelsea Matiash

We Media: Pitch It! Awards Presentation from KnightCenter on Vimeo.

AssignIt and Audimated won We Media’s 2010 PitchIt! Challenge March 11 in Miami, beating six other commercial and non-profit groups vying for the $25,000 prizes.

AssignIt CEO and founder Melinda Wittstock said the money “will allow us to do the prototype we need to do to get the support and network we need to make this a real success.”

Wittstock, a former ABC News and BBC staffer and founder of Capitol News Connection, said AssignIt’s aim is to marry technology with the oversight of journalists. Users will set the agenda for journalists who will produce a variety of news, including investigative work. Wittstock plans to launch AssignIt’s first mobile device app in six months, with a goal of operating in cities nationwide within five years.

Lucas Sommer’s Audimated, a late entrant in the competition, will connect musicians and fans, giving both of them opportunity to make money. Sommer is a 2007 graduate of the University of Miami business school – where the eight finalists made their pitches and the winners were announced at the end of We Media’s annual conference there.

Sommer said the prize will “have a tangible effect on everyone in this room, especially myself and the independent artists.”

He won support from many in the audience during his pitch with his description of “Poster Boy,” who can’t effectively monetize his music, and “Fan Tastic,” a music connoisseur who can’t effectively support independent artists.

The other six finalists who made seven-minute pitches Thursday were: Blitz Bazaar, Rate My Water Quality, MiCAST, Stractor, LoudSauce and Citizens Market.

PitchIt!, which started four years ago on a whim as a way to help small entrepreneurs connect with influential attendees of the globally recognized conference and community, expanded this year to include another sponsor, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The competition’s other major partners are the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and Ashoka Changemakers. Another first this year: a boot camp for projects not quite ready for the finals.

“We think the future is built on the visions of social and commercial entrepreneurs who are imaging the future for us,” said We Media co-founder Andrew Nachison.

Before the pitching began, last year’s winners reflected on what’s happened since they took home their oversized check.

Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix shared some of the things he struggled with a year ago he still struggles with, like getting government to respond.  He’s learned to “really focus your message” and that “the message will shift depending on who your audience is.”

He said he values even getting the chance to make a pitch last year.  “Eight minutes is going to feel really quick; over the next year, you’ll probably never be given eight minutes again.”

Allie joined the Case Foundation from AOL’s communications team, where she did a little bit of everything – from serving as a company spokesperson for consumer advocacy and public policy, managing international communications initiatives to leading PR efforts for MapQuest and AOL’s commerce and marketplace sites. Prior to AOL, she spent time at Boston and DC-based communications firms leading a range of public relations initiatives for technology companies.

She holds an MBA from Thunderbird School of International Management and a B.S. in Communications from Boston University.

When not at the office, Allie is often trying out a new restaurant, cheering on the Red Sox, walking her two rambunctious dogs or contemplating her next big travel adventure. An Arizona native, you can often find her outdoors (when the weather is warm enough!), cautiously navigating the W&OD and Mt. Vernon trails on her trusty bike or training for a half marathon.