Experiments

Who said there are no jobs left in media anymore? The Washington Post has joined the reality-programming game by offering a column to the winner of its "America's Next Great Pundit" competition.

Finalists will compete in categories such as writing on deadline, performing on video and interacting with readers. According to the contest entry form they'll be judged by "Post personalities" who will "offer kudos and catcalls," similar, apparently, to the judgment delivered by the American Idol panel, which will be augmented by reader votes.

Sounds like they're putting a lot of faith in an audience that favors market reports and George Will columns.

The winner will really feel what its like to be a journalist when he or she walks with the chance to write a weekly column for 13 weeks, at all of $200 per.

Want to sign up? The entry's here.

The New York Times has a piece on how San Francisco-based Fwix, a self-described local newswire, is releasing an iPhone app this week in the hopes of driving more user contributions.

The year-old Fwix, which the Times says operates in 85 markets, creates its wire out of links to stories on local news sites and blogs and updates from regular folks. It's more relevant that something like Twitter, for example, because it adds a layer of filtering: algorithms rank submissions based on whether other users submit similar items and on whether the submitter was at the scene (which it can figure out using the GPS module in the submitter's iPhone).

The Times says Fwix "hopes to fill the growing void in professionally reported local news by recruiting citizens armed with iPhones as reporters."

Here's our take: Fwix is a great tool. Anything that expedites the process of enabling the folks out there to funnel in news and information is a worthy endeavor.

But on its own, Fwix.com is not likely to become a great news desitination. It's one thing to have a tool. It's another thing to make folks want to use it.

Readers sent Talking Points Memo random items that, combined, painted the picture that led to the attorneys general scandal because they respected TPM's editor Josh Marshall and trusted that if they sent him interesting tidbits, TPM would go to work on them. People submit reviews to Yelp because it's already a great destination. People send tips to Michael Arrington and crew at TechCrunch because they know it's one of the most closely watched tech blogs.

A tool on its own does not engender the desire to use it. And as such, does not a news organization make. Unless the Fwix team works at making their site a great destination, Fwix will ultimately become a tool that other news organizations license and embed, rather than a standalone news operation.

Current TV's new media strategist Robin Sloan has created two tools to help folks follow the news from Iran.

One of the worries surrounding the demise of newspapers concerns what will happen to investigative journalism. ProPublica is kicking off a project that could lay that question to rest once and for all.

It's asking regular folks to "adopt" a stimulus project—a bridge or road repair project that's getting stimulus money, to be exact—and monitor it as part of a massive investigative journalism project to start keeping an eye on how the $787 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is being used.

"The questions we must answer, as investigative journalists, are 1) is the stimulus working? and 2) is it being enacted responsibly—without abuse of public trust?" Amanda Michel writes on the ProPublica Web site.

"We'll start by breaking down these questions into manageable pieces. Take, for example, the $27 billion to be spent on repairing roads and bridges. What exactly is getting repaired? Are we entrusting public money to the right companies? Are the companies that profit from the stimulus following environmental and labor laws? Are projects generating the jobs projected?"

Could be interesting. Michel, after all, was in charge of the Huffington Post's "Off the Bus" pro-am project which broke the Obama bitter-gate scandal.