March 18, 2011

SXSW: 5 Great Sites for Progressive Media Types

Yes, I got my photo taken with the penguin.

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I took the nerd bird out of Austin with my fellow SXSW Interactive geeks this week just as a clutch of tattooed, guitar-toting rock stars swaggered into town for the Music portion of South by Southwest. The Texas tri-part festival (Film, Interactive, and Music) overlaps slightly in schedule and demographics, but frankly the attendees aren’t hard to tell apart in an elevator. Real rock stars, it turns out, are generally better dressed than Internet rock stars; their pallor looks more midnight partyin’ than Minecraft in the den. (I’m still not sure about that 6th Street evening parade of cheering men wearing wedding dresses, though. Start-up guerrilla marketers? Typical Austin Saturday night? The SXSW trade show featured a giant penguin, a Michael Jackson impersonator, cotton candy, and QR codes on anything not nailed down—so really, who can tell?)

Anyway, Monika Bauerlein and I did a SXSWi panel this year on how Mother Jones uses Twitter in reporting (thank you to everyone who made it such a fun panel). Also fun: Hanging out with other SXSWi media folk and hearing what sites caught their fancy lately. Below, 5 digital bon bons and what makes them so sweet:

1. Storify.

Tagline: “Storify is a way to tell stories using social media such as Tweets, photos and videos. You search multiple social networks from one place, and then drag individual elements into your story. You can re-order the elements and also add text to give context to your readers.”

Sweet spot: Via Nieman Storyboard, this example of how local DC news site TBD used Storify to unspool a real life murder mystery.

2. Tumblr.

Tagline: “Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be.”

Sweet spot: Mother Jones‘ Tumblr, natch.

3. Readability.

Tagline: “Readability is a web & mobile app that zaps online clutter and saves web articles in a comfortable reading view…Readability offers a new way to compensate writers and publishers without punishing readers. 70% of all membership fees go directly to the people who make the content.”

Sweet spot: The New York Review of Books online. A Readability button on each article gives the option to read it now or read it later.

4. DocumentCloud.

Tagline: “DocumentCloud runs every document you upload through OpenCalais, giving you access to extensive information about the people, places and organizations mentioned in each. Once you decide to publish, your documents join thousands of other primary source documents in our public catalog. Use our document viewer to embed documents on your own website and introduce your audience to the larger paper trail behind your story.”

Sweet spot: The world’s largest searchable reporters’ notebook, uploaded to the cloud.

5. MuckRock.

Tagline: “MuckRock is an open governent tool powered by state and federal Freedom of Information laws…You are free to embed, share and write about any of the verified government documents hosted here.”

Sweet spot: Got a FOIA request? Want someone to submit it and follow up? There’s an app for that.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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