Via Steve Yelvington…”Mayhill Fowler, the non-journalist who has broken at least two major campaign stories this season by simply not playing the usual game by the usual rules, reflects on an interview with an Al-Jazeera reporter”

She writes: For the first time I realized what is most obvious about the work other OffTheBus correspondents and I do. We are citizens, first. As Americans, moreover, we have the right any time any day any year to step out of our homes to inquire and to investigate. The inclination to do so, which Meena found fascinating, is certainly not exclusively American; but it is quintessentially American. Sitting in the Reuters studio on Times Square, I was proud, most proud, to be a citizen journalist.

Read more: Mayhill Fowler: On The Road Again, With Begging Bowl And Stick - Off The Bus on The Huffington Post

Via OffTheBus.Net: It’s the electoral race of the century. Political maps are being redrawn, and rules are getting rewritten across the board. Fundraising record have been broken. The candidates are even comparing the size of their email lists.

The mainstream media is tripping over itself to report on every last press release and campaign announcement. But do any of us REALLY know what’s going on?

With your help from the frontlines, HuffPost’s OffTheBus can change campaign coverage.

CAN YOU HELP US? Join OffTheBus’ Special Ops team, and report back to us on what’s happening in your town and state.

Via J.D. Lasica and Steve Outing.

Boss Rosen on the Mayhill events. J.D. has a thoughtful writeup on his blog.

How citizen journalism is changing campaign coverage from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

“We’ve completely rebuilt every single page on NowPublic for your enhanced viewing pleasure. Yes, a site re-design that preserves all the site’s current functionality but makes the content more readable, the news more relevant and the tools more usable.”

More.

I still believe NowPublic is positioned to be the “OhMyNews” of North America. But positioning isn’t everything. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.

More coverage from Mashable.

Via Mathew Ingram

There’s a great piece in the Los Angeles Times about Mayhill Fowler, the 61-year-old “citizen journalist” who has become a lightning rod for critics of the practice, after not one but two somewhat embarrassing scoops from the U.S. campaign trail, the first of which involved Barack Obama and the second of which — just last week — involved former president Bill Clinton. Fowler is one of dozens of amateur reporters covering the campaign as part of the Off The Bus project, a joint venture between Huffington Post and Jay Rosen’s New Assignment venture.

Jeff Jarvis comments here.

OffTheBus has gotten quite a bit of attention for the work of its citizen journalist contributors. This past week we expanded the definition of the term, at least for us here at OffTheBus, by including among our staff eight citizen-journalism editors! Nearly all of the OpEd posts on OffTheBus this week and last have been edited and proofed by this team, taking turns working day and night shifts from their spots around the country.

The team is diverse and includes filmmakers, journalists, teachers, university students, a former film-industry flack and at least one Army reporter. They have written short posts introducing themselves that we’ll be including tonight in a feature on OffTheBus. All of them to various degrees have been contributors to the OTB project and are interested in seeing the evolution of a new kind of more responsive journalism. As Editor Beth Morrissey put it in her introduction: “I have followed the candidates through battleground states … and what surprised me most was how traditional media chose to cover the exact same stories [about the candidates and the campaigns] in the exact same ways… Some of the most exciting stories this election story have been broken by citizen journalists.”

Via Romenesko “The other day I suggested to my senior team that every Saturday we turn our entire home page over to user-generated content,” says BusinessWeek.com editor-in-chief John Byrne. “People looked at me as if I was the devil. They thought we shouldn’t surrender our real estate to our readers. …But the point is we need to keep trying new things that deepen our relationship with our readers.”

Read More

Check it for yourself.

Props to The UpTake which gets a special shoutout from the YouTube video.

Note: I am not disappearing from NewAssignment.net, Beat Blogging, NewsTrust or Broowaha, but I am taking a serious step back to work on a new project: Spot Us, which will be a nonprofit that enables community funded reporting. I will use the lessons I have learned from the above sites and my personal blog to build something unique and empowering for journalism.

THE NEWS: I have won a Knight News Challenge grant to build a site that will support community funded reporting. For those who just want the news via the Knight Foundation go here. If you want to see for yourself what I hope to build, go check it out: Spot Us!

If you want to know my more organized thoughts, keep reading. Also note: my next post (which will be at my personal blog and Spot Us will be a video explaining the idea of Spot.us in more detail and how I see the organization growing…with your input. So stay tuned.

Below you’ll find.

• A small polemic on the state of journalism as I see it and how I got here.
• Where the idea for Spot Us came from.
• What Spot Us is in a nutshell.
• How you can help…. more coming soon.

The journalism blogosphere has matured over the years. We are no longer in a state of pure panic. Surely the news industry has issues it needs to figure out, but I like to think we are self-aware and moving forward. There is a strong community of people who are ready to push forward at all costs. I believe that is the very community the Knight Foundation wants to find and support with the Knight News Challenge grants.

Yet, so much of our conversation is directed towards those who lay outside our echo chamber.

We’ve become a choir of sorts. We all agree things need to change, but so much of our time and our course of action towards this end has continually been to look backwards to convince more people to essentially ‘get on board with the following basic principles.’ Those principles being varied - but they live on the web in some form or other.

I propose a new course of action, if only to myself. ‘To geek out on journalism.’

What do I mean to ‘geek out’?

The Urban Dictionary: "To engage in a conversation of a highly technical nature, typically with some other members of the party you are with, completely (and usually inadvertently) alienating others in the process."

Geeking out doesn’t mean you are talking about computers. To geek out, as I understand it, is to be passionate something, in this case a craft and dedicated to developing your skills and knowledge.

You can geek out about Star Wars, computers…. why not journalism? Where’s the social space to geek out about news in your community?

The road lay ahead of me. I’m tired of repeating "my readers know more than I do." It is a sage piece of wisdom, without a doubt. The community of bloggers I referred to as the ‘choir’ above wouldn’t be as developed and sharp without that motto. But I want to know what’s beyond it. Specifically I want to know how dedicated journalists can sustain themselves while serving readers.

I’ve been incredibly lucky in my young career having worked on many interesting journalism projects. NewAssignment.net has been, without a doubt, the largest platform from which I could jump beyond myself into the void of what journalism could become in the future. I don’t know what journalism looks like in the future - but I am certain it is participatory in some form or other.

As Jay Rosen said (not a direct quote) from the beginning of NewAssignment.net: We aren’t sure what the answers are, but we know we can learn by trying. Even if in failing we can post up a skull and crossbones sign saying "don’t go this way" - we have contributed to the future of journalism.

It was through NewAssignment.net that I met Jeff Jarvis who let me co-organize the Networked Journalism Summit. If NewAssignment.net was a ladder I climbed, organizing that event was the fun jump into a cannonball splash. At the end of it, I felt I had a better understanding of the journalism community, industry and social media in general.

If I am a ‘journalism’ geek’ I’m also a bit of a tech-geek as well. I’m no hacker - but I love technology. It was through that interest in technology that I believe, and as Amy Gahran eloquently put it once to me, I escaped the event horizon of traditional journalism. I am a journalist born on the web. My first real writing gig was for Wired.com. While working at Seed Magazine I dove in further - using Web 2.0 tools to aid and abed my reporting. It started with Digg (which turned into working for Propeller and NewsTrust.net) and other social news sites. After finishing at Columbia’s J-school I was more interested in donating time to a citizen journalism network, Broowaha, than working for a newspaper. The pay would have been better at a newspaper - but I feared that at an organization I wouldn’t be able to push forward.

That’s where I’ve been. So what’s next? Spot Us will be a nonprofit to test a new business model - community funded journalism.

After Assignment Zero, Jeff Howe hired me as his research assistant for the upcoming book "Crowdsourcing." One area that I researched in-depth and became fascinated with was the chapter on ‘crowdfunding.’

I learned the narratives of Kiva.org, Prosper, Chip-in, DonorsChoose, Fundable, SellaBand and more. It was in the thick of this research that I began to wonder how this revolutionary business model could be applied to journalism.

It could be a form of participatory journalism that got around what Jeff Howe described as one of the main barriers to citizen journalism: "getting citizen journalists to write long-form articles was like asking them to re-do their college mid-term papers." Point is - not everyone has the time to contribute to the process of enterprise reporting - but perhaps they can contribute towards its production by donating money instead. This isn’t a knock on citizen journalism. I do believe "my readers know more than I do" and I’ve dedicated the last few years of my life towards exploring it. But I also recognize that some stories require LOTS of time to report and write. Citizen journalists are such because they have other jobs. Their day jobs give them expertise that I don’t have - including the ability to recognize stories that fall through the cracks.

The technology couldn’t be THAT hard, I thought to myself. I wouldn’t be creating a NEW type of technology - I would just be utilizing the power of the web, to aggregate like-minded people (and their pocketbooks), and apply it towards journalism - or more precisely, towards the processes of journalism.

What I’m going to build will be a marketplace for journalism. News organizations (old or new media) can use the space to support their most enterprise projects. Community and civic organizations can come together, take a stand and let the media know what is being under-reported. Independent journalists can get paid to do what they do best - report on local stories, all while building up their portfolio.

It’s often said that blogs lowered the barrier to opine on anything. What we need to do is lower the barrier that lets people direct reporters towards issues that need more than opining - but real in-depth reporting. Currently the barrier to entry is very high - you have to be an editor with a budget. Very few people have that luxury.

Other options to fund journalism are starting to bubble-up including nonprofit models such as ProPublica, which I support. But, if the Sandler family can donate $25 million to create a news organization, then the Smith family should be able to donate $25 towards an independent journalist. And if enough Smith families all put down $25 - that should say something to us!

Now, I already know the internal idealistic journalist in your head, reading this post along with you, is getting nervous. Mine is too. There are certain practices and principles which I think need to be preserved. But having journalism appear in print with advertising or subscription based business models aren’t any of them. Ask yourself - ‘do we NEED any of those three things to make journalism happen’? What we do need are reporters going out and reporting!!!

What I want to keep are the principles of journalism that make it a public service. It is what we often call "enterprise reporting." Journalism that makes a difference by informing, connecting and exposing. The type of journalism that keeps our communities strong and democratic.

I will not turn my back on what I believe makes journalism unique from other types of content on the web. My aim is to see if we can support this type of content with a new business model - based on a gift economy.

I’m currently working on the details, which as you can imagine are many and varied. I hope to make the process through which I make decisions as open as possible. I built this as a nonprofit for several reasons -  one was just to ensure the wider journalism community that I am not in this for money - I earnestly want to build something that will empower journalism.

How you can help at this stage.

• Sign up for an email update when we launch our public beta. Or subscribe to the blog. Do both at Spot Us.
• Spread the word
• Contact me. Like I said - I want this to be as open as possible. I might not be able to respond to every email but I will read them and I will try.

For now. I intend to geek out on: the principles, business and process of journalism in an open and distributed world.

ONWARD!!!!

Via Jeff Howe at Crowdsourcing.com.

As you may know, I’m writing a book about crowdsourcing and also operate the blog, Crowdsourcing.com. I’ve been publishing the lion’s share of this book on the Website with the goal of eliciting critical comments that can be collected together and published in an appendix to the book proper. The idea, obviously, is that a book on crowdsourcing would also embody some degree of crowdsourcing. But further, I’m hoping to help pioneer a model of book publishing in which the book can serve as a dialogue as much as a monologue. The comments from readers in the appendix will be used to show that crowdsourcing touches on many issues that can be viewed from multiple perspectives.

I’ve been very happy with the quality of comments, but unfortunately the quantity and diversity among commenters is lacking. In other words, too few people are taking the time to read my work and disagree with me! So I’m appealing to all of you to stop by crowdsourcing.com in the next three weeks and contribute your insights, your experience and your wit. I’d really like to make this little experiment work, but naturally, I can’t do it without the crowd.

I’ve been Jeff’s research assistant for a reason - I’ve studied and talked about Crowdsourcing on this blog as well, which means perhaps some of you are interested in the topic as well. If so - check out Jeff’s blog and see if you have a critique. You just might end up in the footnote to his book.