The Internet Archive announced this week that it received a $1 million donation from the Knight Foundation to expand it’s TV News Search and Borrow archive of television news clips. As of now, the archive has just over 400,000 clips that the public can access, link to, or borrow a hard copy for a fee.

“We want to make all knowedge available to everyone, forever, and for free. So it’s an ambituous mission,” laughs Roger Macdonald, the archive’s television news project director. 

And it all comes down to closed captioning.

The San Francisco based non-profit records broadcasts, and teases out the news using closed captioning tags and other meta-data. Twenty-four hours after the first airing, the clip is available in the archive. It’s an invaluable resource for journalists, researchers, and documentarians to study what was said, when, where, and in what context. Want to play John Stewart? Go ahead and search clips of ‘Benghazi’ on Fox last week. It can also be used for more noble causes, like tracking political speech. Read more

Would you ever let a subject put your interview on Youtube for everyone to see? That’s what Chad Witacre, the founder of online gift exchange program Gittip requests for each and every one of his interviews — something he likes to call an “Open Interview.”

The philosophy behind an open interview, to Witacre, is supremely simple: as a transparent company with an accessible open source API and clear funding partners, it only makes sense to bring out discussions with the media to the general Internet community and ensure users that there’s literally nothing to hide.

“With journalists I’m much more comfortable requesting openness,” Witacre writes in his article on Medium. “They’re writing for the public record, and it benefits readers and keeps us both honest to have the raw material on record as well.”

Read more

Email me your questions and I’ll get back to you.

It’s the journalistic equivalent of “your source is just not that into you.”

It’s no secret that politicians, big shot business execs, or even the PTO presidents running a car wash fundraiser don’t want to sound silly in print. We all know that the current trend of quote approval is a slippery slope to selling out. But is conducting an email interview the same thing?

Poynter reported this week that many universities are  banning email interviews for campus newspapers. The rationale is that email interviews allow for implicit quote approval – the interviewee has full control of their answer, polishing their responses – and that the email format inhibits the search for truth, best found in face-to-face interviews, or at least over the phone.

It’s nice that universities are banning email interviews; it puts the value back into the act of journalism, something that’s nice to instill in journalism students. It also seems like they were finally fed up with their own universities’ public relations staff — something I can relate to. Have you ever tried to get an interview with a university president about their endowment? They’re worse than actual politicians.

I, however, am torn, because I have used email interviews to compose a story and I admit: I sort of liked it. 

Read more

Reddit, one of the main leaders in the anti-SOPA blackout, has become the go-to place for one lawmaker. Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia has turned to the Reddit community for input on how to create mobile privacy legislation. He announced his AppRights.us initiative on Reddit yesterday, saying, “It’s an open, bottom-up approach to drafting legislation that will protect the privacy of mobile device users.” Hoping to engage the technology community after the SOPA/PIPA debacle, Johnson is inviting netizens to share their thoughts on the AppRights website and through discussion on Reddit. Read more

Every Friday I post links to a few of the blog posts that I read during the week that I found interesting and insightful.

Included in this week’s round-up is discussion about researching how to reach new audiences; why Per Active Member is an important metric;  and best practice for socially-created content.

Read more