When it comes to gun control, the White House is murkier than ever. Senate Bill 649, which primarily deals with stricter background checks, bigger punishments for drug trafficking, and programs devoted to school safety, is facing mounting filibuster threats and complicated opinions from Senators. Not many are speaking out publicly on the issue — making it difficult to get a clear picture of how the bill will fare, or even if it will make it out of the Senate at all.

ProPublica is shining a light on the battle for gun control by reporting on every Senator’s position on the issue. Of course, individually tracking down 100 offices for comment is outside the resource capabilities for a typical newsroom, so ProPublica is relying on the power of the people to help them #TrackTheVote. Read more

Have a profound question that weighs on you day and night? Or even a trivial one? Enter the Twisdom Project. Created by TED Fellows Lucianne Walkowicz, David Gurman and developer Sundev Lohr, the project is a Twitter game/existential help line looking for some crowd-sourced wisdom. Anyone can ask a question or answer one with the hashtags #twisdom, #question or #answer. The creators encourage all types of answers from facts to quotes to pictures, especially if the answer helps the asker to “find the answer themselves.” Read more

It is a scene familiar to many reporters: There’s a news story breaking, but you can’t get on location and no one’s giving any official comments because the situation is still developing. How are you suppose to find and access sources?

Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and a plethora of smartphone apps, newsrooms now have an entirely new toolbox available to them in breaking news situations. And here’s another one to add to the kit: Banjo.  Read more

The State of Alaska will today release 24,199 of Sarah Palin’s emails from her tenure as governor. The Washington Post and The New York Times are crowdsourcing the task of sifting through that information to find the most noteworthy and interesting content.

Derek Willis wrote on the Times’ Caucus blog that their reporters will be in Alaska’s capitol, Juneau, to begin the process of reviewing the emails, which they will start posting on NYtimes.com today. He also asks this of readers:

We’re asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight. Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we’ll know who should get the credit. Join us here on Friday afternoon and into the weekend to participate. Read more

Instagram, the wildly popular photo sharing service (which got a lengthy write-up in Saturday’s New York Times) holds a lot of potential for news organizations. This is especially true, considering the service’s rapidly growing user base and the promise of bringing Instagram to the iPhone (and iPod touch/iPad)-only app to other platforms, like Android. In that spirit, here are four ways news organizations can use Instagram.
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