Yesterday Brain Pickings posted about News21, an organization exploring new forms of investigative journalism. Since 2006, they have sent teams of journalism students out to not only report on an issue, but to immerse themselves in the lives of the people they are reporting on. This year’s theme was war, so 10 young journalists were sent to live on a dude ranch in northeastern Washington state – an area with lots of veterans. What resulted is an informative series of beautifully produced vignettes on the lives of the people they met during their trip.

It’s interesting to consider this style of reporting versus the instant news we watch on TV. Rather than statistics and interviews with politicians, this series makes you feel a personal connection with those truly affected by war – which hits you a lot stronger. Check out the first video below and make sure you click here to watch the whole series.

“I very much want to be in the business of creating content, of doing stories all over the world, rather than figuring out what the business model is for Newsweek on the iPad, although that’s very important work as well.”

(via Media Decoder)

Check out the LinkTV ViewChange Film Contest, which aims to support videos that raise awareness and inspire action in the effort to eliminate global poverty.

Even Danny Glover is on board (literally, as a member of LinkTV’s board of directors).

“Let’s use Levi Strauss purely as an example.

Perhaps Levi’s provides survey questions:

• What is your favorite cut of jeans?
• What is a memorable Levi’s moment you’ve had?
• You buy Levi’s jeans because… (multiple choice answer).

Or it can be a branded survey simply to get the customer to think more about Levi’s

• What year was Levi’s invented? (Multiple choice)
• Guess how much of material X Levi’s produces a year?

Or a quick video that people have to watch Hulu-style.

Upon engaging with the advertisement the Spot.Us community member earns X credits, which represent real dollars, and they can direct those credits toward funding the story (or stories) of their choice.”

Pretty smart idea. I’m curious to see what kinds of brands really want to engage with sponsoring investigative journalism, and whether there are any sort of ethical considerations. But it’s still really cool.

“The reading business is not the same as the search-and-find business, and if you’re in the print version of the latter, on either a daily or a weekly basis, you have reason to be anxious… The fact is that people still want great, well-told tales. We see it on vanityfair.com, where our longer articles routinely top the Most Popular list. We see it in the fact that our print circulation (both newsstand and subscriptions) is emphatically up at a time when everyone tells us it is supposed to be down. You could argue that the magazine is as brilliant an invention as anything Apple will come up with. We take glorious stories, combine them with arresting photography, illustration and design, along with stunning advertising images, and bundle the whole thing into a package that is inexpensive, easy to use and available almost anywhere. (We’ll even deliver it to your door.) It can be passed on afterward or recycled. And you don’t need instructions or batteries.”

I’d love to hear his thoughts on how brands can engage in BOTH the storytelling business and the “search-and-find” business, which I think is the best way to build a future media brand.

via AdPulp

CJ, (as we used to call it at Current… *nostalgic sign*), is not going away.  Many websites are springing up that embrace the Citizen Journalism, and I won’t lie, we’re quite fascinated in the possibilities ourselves, here at UC.  But like advertising, we believe in the curator, just as much as the power of the collective.

I’m interested to hear what consumers think about iReport.  CNN claims it’s widely popular, but do viewers like the “UGC” element and packaging?  Or does the quality of the content and access trump all?

The key idea behind the site is that it breaks down investigations into different elements, which are called challenges. There are certain things that journalists will be good at, like writing up the story, or getting an official response, or finding particularly hard to find information, like company information or regulations. But there is a lot of specialist knowledge on the site. One particularly big user of the site works in a financial firm, analysing things forensically, so he’s got tremendously valuable data analysis skills which few journalists have, and he’s able to bring that to figures that we get from freedom of information requests. Then there are people who use the site who are particularly knowledgeable about property, or about law. We had an investigation into clamping, and we had a retired law lecturer who added a legal interpretation of the law surrounding clamping and what to do, so that’s been tremendously useful. It’s really about playing to people’s strengths.

(seen here)