Earlier this month, I talked about three enterprising Kickstarter campaigns — Outer Voices Podcast, Radio Ambulante, and The Independent Voice Project. Recently, another great journalism-focused project has started making news, and it’s called MATTER.

MATTER is the brain child of Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson, two experienced reporters with a passion for making journalism better. Giles and Johnson have lined up a team of writers and editors to help push this vision forward, and according to the Kickstarter project page, MATTER will be for readers, not advertisers.

The “return to long-form journalism” is a phrase that has been bandied about for a few years now, and several websites currently exist around this premise (Longreads, The Atavist, Byliner, Longform, etc.) MATTER won’t be a curation service; rather, it will include original investigative reporting from their team of writers, some of which have contributed to publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times, National Geographic, Nature and Wired.

“The thing about long-form, in-depth journalism is that it’s expensive. There used to be many more newspapers and magazines that produced that sort of content, but journalism is in financial trouble and those outlets have cut back,” said Giles.

The Kickstarter campaign will help raise funds for MATTER to produce their first three pieces. By pledging at the $25 level, you can join their editorial board (powered by All Our Ideas) and lend your voice to the kind of reporting MATTER covers.

As of this article, the project is over 60% funded, but you can pledge until the campaign ends on March 24, 2012. For more information about MATTER, you can visit their website at readmatter.com. You can also follow the progress of MATTER on Facebook and Twitter.

Taking a cue from media properties like The Awl and Gawker, Wired has taken its first official foray into conversational media advertising with Cloudline, a blog sponsored by IBM. If you’re unfamiliar with conversational media, it’s a technique employed by advertising companies that seeks to mix brand messages more seamlessly into a blog’s content: think Sponsored Posts instead of typical sidebar ads.

But blogs like Cloudline take this idea a step further–instead of creating dedicated Sponsored Posts to run on a regular blog, Cloudline is a sponsored property in itself, with a logo reading “Wired Cloudline: Sponsored by IBM.” This means that independent posts by editor Jon Stokes mingle with posts by IBM employees, like Nick Coleman, a Global Cloud Security Leader at IBM. The posts are differentiated by an “IBM” tag appended to IBM-penned posts.

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Buried in the headlines following this week’s untimely passing of Steve Jobs is the news that Apple will release iOS 5 next Wednesday, Oct. 12. It’s an exciting (and free) upgrade for users of the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The Notification Center, iMessage, Reminders and the integration of Twitter are all exciting new features.

Most exciting for journalists, however, is Newsstand.

Newsstand manages your subscriptions to iOS versions of newspapers and magazines. It will alert you when there’s a new issue available. It even displays the covers on a rack — like a real newsstand. It’s like a dynamic version of iBooks. Read more

Part two in an ongoing series. Click here for part one.

Waiting for me on Thursday after I got home from work was my new iPad 2. I was quite excited – the (relatively long) wait was over and I could start exploring what all the hype over the revolutionary gadget was about!

And, let me say, so far, the device is more than lived up to its hype. Here are some of the relevant news/journalism apps I’ve downloaded to my iPad so far: Read more