As more than one person noted while the discussion was going on, however, the former spy (who is now reportedly in hiding in Hong Kong) left a number of significant questions unanswered — perhaps in part because the newspaper is holding that information back for future stories, which Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald has promised will contain further revelations.

Some unanswered questions remain

In the Q&A session, Snowden talked about why he chose to reveal certain information to journalists in Hong Kong about hacking attempts against Chinese targets, discussed alleged discrepancies related to his reported salary, and argued that “being called a traitor by (former vice-president) Dick Cheney is the highest honor that you can give an American.” But the former CIA staffer also avoided certain questions or talked around them without giving specific responses. Here are a few things he didn’t say:

Why he chose to go to Hong Kong: Asked by Greenwald why he chose Hong Kong as a place to hide, Snowden said that the U.S. government had “destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason” — but he didn’t really answer the question. There have been conspiracy theories about alleged collusion with the Chinese goverment (which Snowden denied later in the discussion) and also some theories about the upside of choosing Hong Kong.

Whether he made copies of the documents: Greenwald also asked whether Snowden had made any copies of the NSA documents he provided to the Guardian, and if so whether he gave them to a number of different people for safekeeping, or stored them somewhere else — so that they would be available if something happened to him. But Snowden didn’t answer the question.

What exactly “direct access” means: Circa editor-in-chief and former Reuters social-media editor Anthony De Rosa asked Snowden to define what “direct access” means — a term that is used in the NSA documents describing the PRISM program, and something that technology companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo have repeatedly denied they provide. Snowden would only say that “more detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming.”

Whether agents can listen to phone calls: De Rosa also asked whether NSA agents could listen to the content of domestic phone calls without a warrant — as opposed to simply collecting and filtering the “metadata” around those calls, such as the location and length of time they take to complete. There have been allegations that the NSA is able to listen to specific phone calls without a warrant, but Snowden didn’t say whether this is true or not.

What will happen to him next: Snowden didn’t talk much about what he plans to do now, except to say that he had no plans to reveal secret information to the Chinese government in return for political asylum. He talked about looking towards Iceland as a potential destination before he leaked the information, but said that country was far too susceptible to U.S. government pressure to hand him over to the authorities. And he said the U.S. was “worth dying for.”

Was the Q&A too heavily mediated?

Snowden’s discussion was criticized by some for being more of a PR exercise than anything that actually provided much information: ProPublica editor Scott Klein said that the Q&A was “handled like a Russian gymnast’s press conference,” while journalism professor Jeff Jarvis said he felt the discussion was “heavy on rhetoric and light on specifics.” Journalist Tom Watson said that the Q&A was a “journalistic farce” and accused the Guardian of “selling a story rather than telling a story.”

I've seen scripted Presidential "town halls" that were less Potemkin Village-like than this so-called #askSnowden "chat" – c'mon @Guardian!—
Tom Watson (@tomwatson) June 17, 2013

There’s no question that the Snowden Q&A seemed a little rehearsed, and his answers appeared to have been edited in some places (Guardian US editor Janine Gibson said there were “some very old skool processes happening to make this readable”). I think the discussion would have been more interesting if it had been completely unmediated — the way Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” features are — but despite the lapses, it’s still remarkable that someone like Snowden is talking at all.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring

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One of the most tangible signs of this apathy (if that’s what it is) came from a Pew study that was released Tuesday of people’s attitudes towards the monitoring of their activity by the government. As described by my colleague Barb Darrow, over half of the Americans surveyed believed that the NSA’s behavior was “an acceptable price to pay to stop terrorism.” And almost half of those who participated agreed the NSA should be able to “monitor everyone’s email and other online activities if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks.”

A collective shrug of the shoulders

I confess that the Pew survey didn’t surprise me at all. Within hours of the Guardian and Post stories, there were responses flying through my Twitter stream and on other social platforms that amounted to a collective shrug of the shoulders: We knew this was happening, at least in general terms, most said — so why make such a big deal out of it? After all, the Patriot Act has been around since shortly after September 11 of 2001, and it authorizes a fairly wide variety of surveillance under certain conditions (although even the author of that Act says the NSA’s recent behavior over-reaches what was intended).

Another possible cause of the somewhat apathetic response is that so little is known about what the NSA is doing exactly. The initial reports said that the spy agency was provided with “direct access” to the servers of companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo and could get whatever data it wanted — but then the qualifications started, and pretty soon it wasn’t clear what exactly “direct access” meant, or what kinds of data the NSA was permitted to get.

One thing PRISM makes clear is that all of those tin-foil hat wearing people knew what they were talking about.—
James Kendrick (@jkendrick) June 11, 2013

After some follow-up reporting from the Post, the New York Times and the Guardian, it appeared that the term “direct access” could refer to a system set up by the tech companies in question that would essentially automate official requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, providing a kind of secure area or “lock-box” to which only the NSA would have the keys. In other words, something that amounts to direct access by another name.

So one popular response boils down to: “Well, this is all legal and above-board then, so who cares?” — even though others pointed out that the court that approves the FISA orders is secret and has reportedly approved 99.9 percent of all requests made to it (according to other reports, the NSA and others can surveill wide ranges of data for weeks before they even need to get a court order, and other kinds of data such as chats may not even require an order).

Don't be distracted. The big story isn't Edward Snowden nor intelligence leaks. It's government's disregard for privacy and civil liberties.—
Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 11, 2013

We’re used to being snooped on

Part of the problem could be that, while leaker Edward Snowden’s dramatic revelations have gotten a lot of attention, there have been plenty of previous reports about similar activity over the past decade and very few of those have prompted much outrage at all. Former AT&T employee Mark Klein provided some pretty damning evidence in 2007 about how the NSA had set up a “secret room” filled with equipment that the spy agency could use to duplicate whatever data it wanted (using prisms, coincidentally enough) and that story eventually died.

Have views about personal privacy changed so dramatically? And if they have, are Google and Facebook and other “cloud” services part of the problem — or at least part of the reason — for those changes? It’s possible that we’ve become so used to the idea that our online lives are an open book, whether we like it or not, that there’s no longer any point in fighting it. If Google and Facebook are tracking all of our data and metadata in order to serve us ads, what difference does it make whether the National Security Agency is also doing it?

David Sirota at Salon makes a persuasive case for why the NSA’s actions aren’t even remotely the same as what Google and Facebook do — primarily because one is at least notionally voluntary. But that may not make a big difference to many users once the heat of the recent headlines has dissipated.

@mathewi I think it's that our networks already keep everyone informed by the second. We're all being "spied" on by Facebook, Twitter, et al—
Jack Narcotta (@JackN_TBR) June 11, 2013

What is there to be done?

The other complicating aspect is that, even if we were to get outraged about the NSA surveillance, it’s not clear what anyone could do about it. As more than one person has pointed out, it’s difficult to have the kind of “open debate” that President Obama said he wants to have about privacy and security when all of the actions of the NSA and PRISM are classified top secret, as are the court orders they use, and the secret court that produces them. Google isn’t even allowed to say that it gets FISA orders, although it is now trying to get approval to at least mention them.

There are some efforts aimed at pushing the debate forward, including a project called StopWatching.us, which is backed by a coalition of companies and entities — including the open-source Mozilla project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But all it plans to do is send a letter to Congress asking for changes to the Patriot Act and FISA (which some members of Congress are also asking for). There’s no real chance of a “Stop SOPA” type of movement because Google and Yahoo and Facebook are all involved in what is being protested about.

And the final death knell for broader interest in such matters is that the news cycle inevitably moves on. The NSA story is complicated, information about it is fragmented and contradictory, and most of the answers are top-secret and therefore unlikely to ever be confirmed. Not a great recipe for something that’s going to hold the attention of the average reader.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Leuthard

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Snowden said that there wasn’t one specific moment where he decided that he was going to reveal top-secret information (if you’re just coming to this story, check out our omnibus post about what we know so far, which is being updated regularly). He said it just built up over time as he watched the agency collect more information via phone calls, emails, credit-card transactions, etc. He said he thought President Obama might change what was happening, but decided to leak the documents after the president “continued the policies of his predecessors.”

“The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

NSA “routinely lies” to Congress

Snowden, who has since fled to Hong Kong and says even his family doesn’t know that he is involved in the leak, told the Guardian that he decided the NSA had overstepped its bounds and on top of that the agency “routinely lies” to Congress about the scope of its activities.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under… I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

The former CIA technical assistant, who worked for contractor Booz Allen, said that the ability the National Security Agency has to pull in personal information about American citizens, track their location and even bug their computers is more far-reaching than many people know.

“You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.”

Since the original story broke on Friday, there has been much debate about how the PRISM program works, and whether it allows the NSA to have “direct access” to the servers of companies such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook, as alleged in the slide presentation leaked by Snowden. The CEOs of those companies have denied any knowledge of such activity, but sources have told the Guardian, the Post and the New York Times that the NSA did in fact have direct access to their systems.

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The new “Explore” section of Readmill’s app lets users download free ebooks from directly within the app. For now, a lot of those books are in the public domain, but Readmill is also working with publishers and independent bookstores to run limited-time promotions through the “Explore” section. At launch, Emily Books, The Atavist, The Pragmatic Bookshelf, Five Simple Steps, Rosenfeld Media and a few others are giving away ebooks through Readmill’s app.

In addition, Readmill has partnered with The Guardian, The Atavaist and Livrada. The Guardian and Atavist are using Readmill’s technology to enable direct sales through their websites; once a user has bought a Guardian Short or Atavist e-single, he or she can use the “Send to Readmill” button to read it from Readmill’s app. And Livrada, which enables users and organizations to gift ebooks, will use “Send to Readmill” for delivery of EPUB files.

The Berlin-based Readmill is growing fast. Over 75 independent publishers and retailers, reaching a million readers, have now enabled the “Send to Readmill” button on their sites, up from 22 in February. “We’re adding new partners almost every week,” CEO Henrik Berggren told me. “We started out trying to convince everyone it was valuable. Now we’re basically only handling inbound requests.”

Moving forward, Berggren said that Readmill wants to expand beyond iOS to more platforms, and also wants to support more types of ebook files (right now, it only works with EPUB and PDF). The company’s launch of support for Adobe DRM last October means users can now read books from Kobo, Nook and Google Play through Readmill, but Kindle books still aren’t supported. “It’s very important that we support as many formats as possible to make it easier for the readers,” Berggren told me. “You should be able to open any file.”

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

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“It wasn’t us waking up one morning saying, ‘let’s impose The Guardian on these Americans,’” Rusbridger told GigaOM/paidContent senior writer Mathew Ingram. The Guardian’s U.S. traffic grew at around 37 percent last year, Rusbridger noted, while the site’s traffic as a whole grew by 25 percent. But before the decision to expand to the U.S., “we spent no money marketing to America at all.”

Now the monetization has begun, but Rusbridger says that probably won’t include a paywall, though the paper is “open-minded” on the idea. “I think it’s great that people are trying,” he said. “It would be even greater if people would share all the data so we could tell whether they’re working or not…it would be a big statement, in the U.K., to go and charge for what the BBC is giving away for free.”

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.
Session Name: The Guardian and Open Journalism
A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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• What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s New Open Platform

(Note: We will be talking about paywalls and other alternative monetization methods for content at our paidContent Live media conference in New York on April 18, including an interview with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger about the paper’s strategy)

Andrew Miller, who took over as CEO of Guardian Media in 2010, is intimately familiar with the impact that falling ad revenue — particularly classified revenue — has had on newspaper publishers: before taking the top job at the paper’s parent company (which also owns The Observer), he was Guardian Media’s chief financial officer. In the most recent fiscal year, the company lost $70 million on revenues of about $300 million. And while it is owned by the non-profit Scott Trust, the newspaper is still under pressure to pare its losses and has been making cutbacks for the past year in an attempt to do that.

In the Economist piece — which is mostly about The Guardian expanding into Australia through a partnership with internet entrepreneur Graeme Wood — Miller says that paywalls may work for some publishers, such as the Economist and the Times, but they aren’t likely to work for everyone:

“Newspapers have always used a blend of different funding mechanisms to extract revenues for their ‘product’. That’s why I am unconvinced by those who say that the only model that works is to build paywalls. This is not an area where one size fits all.”

Paywalls work if you want to monetize rather than expand

As Miller describes it, paywalls work well in markets where a publisher has a large existing base of subscribers that it can monetize via subscriptions, and in particular when a newspaper or media entity serves a specific niche like business or finance:

“In some news organisations where growth in readership may not be so important and in particular where there is a strong existing print subscriber base to build on, a pure paywall may make excellent business sense. The Economist and perhaps the Times spring to mind here. On the other hand, if the news organisation is about growing reach and access, then a paywall is not – for the moment, at least – the answer.”

This is fundamentally the same argument that has been used by Don Graham, CEO of the Washington Post, and his publisher Katharine Weymouth to defend that paper’s dislike of paywalls. As Graham has described it, the subscription solution is less appealing for a newspaper whose readership comes primarily from outside its actual geographic market — something that is also the case with The Guardian (although there are reports that the Post may launch some kind of metered paywall this year.

Miller says that Guardian Media is continuing to explore paywalls or subscription models for some of its content (the paper charges for its mobile apps, for example). But it seems clear that for the British publisher, reaching new readers around the globe is still seen as more important at this point than monetizing its existing readership.

Disclosure: Guardian News and Media Ltd., the parent company of the Guardian newspaper, is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media

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The Guardian’s traffic by hour

The Guardian’s Anthony Sullivan, group product manager for Guardian Core products at Guardian News & Media, said Monday that mobile — both smartphones and tablets — now contributes about 35 percent of traffic overall. That’s up from 10 percent at the start of 2011, when it was primarily smartphone traffic. (See disclosure below)

But at 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. in the morning local time, the Guardian gets more traffic from mobile devices. It also sees more mobile visitors than desktop visitors on Saturdays at 3 p.m. when the Premier League is under way.

Meanwhile, online design store Fab.com said late last month that on Saturdays between 12:00 a.m. and 6 a.m. local time, it sees 53 percent of its sales from mobile devices. On recent weekends, sales from mobile devices are now up to 40 percent, with weekend mornings before noon leading the way. Saturday evenings are also very popular with mobile users, with 44 percent of users buying on mobile devices between 6 p.m. and midnight.

The numbers are still early and these two properties are pretty popular with mobile users. Sullivan said in a Guardian story that the tipping point in favor of mobile might still be two years away. Fab’s CEO and co-founder Jason Goldberg, however, said based on the fast growth of mobile sales, he believes that Fab will see more parts of the day in which traffic from mobile devices goes over 50 percent in the coming months. And he said mobile will contribute more sales than desktop on certain days “soon.” Currently, 33 percent of Fab’s sales come from mobile devices.

The numbers underscore why mobile is so powerful. And it highlights the continuous nature of computing these days. The reality is today we are constantly on some type of computer throughout the day, moving back and forth between devices for different tasks and different settings. Mobile devices fill in the times when reaching for a laptop or desktop is more difficult, including early mornings, during lunch, as we settle in for the night and during the weekends.

Fab’s sales broken down by day parts

That’s the case with me. My first 15-30 minutes in the morning are spent looking at tweets, emails and websites from bed on my smartphone before heading over to my laptop. My day is largely spent on my laptop except during lunch. And then at night I switch back over to mobile devices primarily. On the weekends, I’m on my iPad and smartphone unless work arises.

Flurry recently found that mobile app usage peaked at 9 p.m. at night and was strongest overall between 7 and 11 p.m. But it apps had higher usage throughout the day compared to Internet usage and TV viewing except in primetime, when TV viewing was greater.

The traditional computer will still have a place but we’re increasingly fulfilling the picture Steve Jobs painted a couple years ago. PCs, he said, are going to be more like trucks, taking on bigger computing tasks while we get more and more done on nimble car-like mobile devices. We’ll still need a decent computer for work, heavier research and content creation. But the rest of our expanding computing time is going to be filled with mobile devices.

Disclosure: Guardian News and Media Ltd., the parent company of the Guardian newspaper, is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ben Dodson. 

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In the not-so-distant past, CNN would have been the first place most people went for information about an event like Sandy, since it more or less invented real-time news for the television age. But if Twitter was criticized for distributing fake news reports, CNN didn’t get away scot free on that front either: the news channel reported Monday night that the New York Stock Exchange was under three feet of water, but later had to retract that information when video evidence from the NYSE showed no water at all. It turned out that CNN had reported something that was mentioned in a National Weather Service discussion forum, without checking to see whether it was actually true.

A half hour of CNN watching provides less information than reading a good set of Twitter feeds for 5 minutes.

—
  (@tedfrank) October 30, 2012

In many cases, coverage from CNN and other news channels amounted to reading reports from Twitter, and interviewing their own news reporters standing hip-deep in the water in places like Atlantic City or Battery Park. Meanwhile, Instagram was providing a much more effective real-time visual feed of the damage caused by the hurricane — thanks in part to some innovative tools like Instacane, which pulled in photos of the storm automatically (the site was originally created to do the same thing during Hurricane Irene last year). Within minutes of a power substation exploding in Manhattan, the video was available on YouTube and was circulating through Twitter, as were other compelling scenes.

Real-time verification of news via social networks

Not surprisingly, many of the photos being shared the most were fakes — some of which, like the shark swimming down what someone claimed was a street in New Jersey, were just being re-used from the last hurricane with a different name. But at the same time, Twitter users and journalists at several news outlets were busy sorting out what was real and what wasn’t, using their social networks as a crowdsourcing tool.

Alexis Madrigal and his team at The Atlantic, for example, quickly set up a blog Monday night to try and separate fact from fiction as far as the photos of Sandy’s damage were concerned — a blog that Madrigal called a “Insta-Snopes,” as a tribute to the veteran rumor-debunking site Snopes.com. For each photo, the team tried to find the original source, or at least enough information about the shot to determine whether it was real or fake. In some cases, like the stranded carousel in Dumbo, the picture seemed almost too good to be true and yet turned out to be real. And the site put large “real” and “fake” logos on each, so that if they were shared it would be obvious what they were.

Meanwhile, others were doing fundamentally the same thing in different ways: Katie Rogers and a team from The Guardian — which has built a big part of its business on the concept of “open journalism” — were using Storify to aggregate and curate photos and debunk fakes, and a Tumblr blog called “Is Twitter Wrong?” was also working hard to separate fact from fiction.

Twitter as self-healing reporting? Lots of rumours, unfounded reports and bogus images, but quick fact-checks, corrections and updates.

—
Mark_Hamilton (@gmarkham) October 30, 2012

As John Hermann of BuzzFeed pointed out in a post on his Tumblr blog (since BuzzFeed was still down due to the power outage), it’s easy to focus on the fake news that gets circulated on Twitter during such events, but there is just as much reason to be optimistic about the speed with which it gets corrected. Some of those who saw the original fake report may not see the correction — and Craig Silverman of Regret The Error has noted that the original tweet often travels much farther than any subsequent update — but the fact is that it occurs, and often faster than mainstream news gets corrected.

Twitter as a “self-cleaning oven”

New Yorker writer Sasha Frere-Jones has described Twitter as a “self-cleaning oven” because of the way that it self-corrects when there is bad information, something media writer David Carr referred to during a recent debate in Toronto about the value of digital media compared to traditional media. And there is a whole new process of real-time verification that is being developed to handle these kinds of events, one that is a great example of what Jeff Jarvis has called “networked journalism.”

In some cases, that involves individuals like Andy Carvin of NPR, who pioneered the use of Twitter as a kind of crowdsourced newsroom during the Arab Spring; it also involves new services like Storyful, which does real-time verification of videos for both mainstream media outlets and news consumers in general. And then there are players like The Atlantic and The Guardian, which make use of their skills to do their own real-time fact-checking — and hybrid services like the BBC’s “user-generated content” desk, which tries to verify photos and reports from social media.

As I’ve tried to argue before, the point is not that Twitter or Facebook or social networks in general are replacing mainstream media or mainstream journalism, but that the ecosystem of news is expanding to include a wide range of other sources — including “citizen” journalism. Smart news outlets are trying to make use of these new tools to expand what they do, and events like Hurricane Sandy are a great example of what can happen when that process starts to work in real-time.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen and Instagram user andjelicaaa

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The presidential debates are a perfect example of how Tumblr handles a news event: as described by The Verge in a recent post, the blogging platform partnered with Livestream for something it called “Live GIFing the 2012 Debates,” which involved half a dozen digital artists and Tumblr bloggers watching the debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, and creating animated GIF images of what they felt were key moments. By the end of the event — which took place in the middle of a party in Livestream’s office in New York’s West Village — more than 80 GIFs had been created.

The animated GIF is a shortcut to going “viral”

This wasn’t just a nerd-off involving a few Tumblr bloggers and similar “meme-driven” sites like BuzzFeed: More mainstream sites such as The Guardian and The Atlantic have also spent a considerable amount of time during the presidential debates generating animated GIFs (which are like tiny video clips) of the participants. In some cases it’s a gesture such as Joe Biden’s repetitive smile, and in others it’s what viewers might have seen as a key turning point, such as Obama’s line about the military not needing more horses and bayonets during his debate with Mitt Romney.

The drive to capture these moments is powered by a desire to spot the next “meme,” the viral photo or phrase or snapshot in time that will reverberate long after the debate is over — and for media companies, the desire to capture some of the pageviews and traffic that they generate. And this adoption of the animated GIF as a story-telling element for major news events is just one offshoot of the ongoing socialization of media and the news industry, something that has been driven by Twitter and other social tools.

One of the reasons why Tumblr is at the core of this phenomenon is that the platform is almost perfectly positioned between traditional blogging and the real-time distribution of content offered by Twitter: the “reblog” button that Tumblr offers is a lot like Twitter’s retweet function, and it can send a new animated GIF or other meme rocketing through the blogosphere within minutes, which has helped Tumblr generate a massive 15 billion pageviews monthly (the social element of Tumblr’s design is one of the things I’ll be talking with founder David Karp about at the RoadMap conference on November 5th).

As more than one person has pointed out, this process has telescoped the political news cycle (and arguably every other news cycle) to the point where stories about a newsworthy moment or event emerge within minutes of it occurring, as it sweeps through Twitter and then becomes the fuel for real-time commentary by news pundits and mainstream channels like CNN. The news cycle — which used to last for days or even weeks in some cases — now has a half-life of about an hour.

Does shareable also have to mean shallow?

Is this kind of thing good or bad for journalism about politics and other serious topics? There are plenty who argue that it is bad, because it focuses on the ephemeral or the trivial — like the obsession with Mitt Romney’s attack on Big Bird during the second debate, which produced lots of hilarious parody Twitter accounts and GIFs but not a lot of political commentary worth reading, or the similar profusion of memes around Romney’s more recent “binders full of women” comment. The potential problem this raises was highlighted by one Tumblr blogger’s comments during the last debate, as described by The Verge:

“This debate was more serious, so it was harder to find GIF-able moments,” said Dianna McDougall, a designer and social media consultant who served as one of the featured Tumblr GIF artists. Her career in live GIF-making started with the VMAs, when she discovered that instant GIFs tended to get instant traction. She also GIF-ed the last two debates. “People were picking it up, saying ‘wow, I don’t even have to watch,’” she said.

The alternative view of this digital version of the sound-bite is that it allows non-important stories to burn themselves out more quickly, rather than taking days or even weeks to be debunked, as Vivian Schiller of NBC News pointed out at the paidContent conference earlier this year, while on a panel with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. The risk is that people — including journalists themselves, as a Mother Jones writer noted in a recent post — become consumed with the ephemera on Twitter instead of paying attention to the important issues in the election campaign or any other news event.

And Tumblr is also only part of a larger trend that includes other sites such as BuzzFeed, which added a political channel earlier this year and hired Ben Smith from Politico to run it. That has raised the question of whether it’s even possible to cover politics and other serious issues in the same way BuzzFeed does a celebrity rehab stint or some other news story. Are animated GIFs and slideshows enough to get across an important political topic? Or is politics just another form of entertainment now?

Smith has argued that these tools that BuzzFeed and others like Tumblr use are simply part of the way media operates now, and any news category — whether politics or anything else — is going to have to figure out how to take advantage of it and make use of it. As the father of two teenaged daughters, I can vouch for the fact that the vast majority of the content they consume comes via Twitter and Tumblr and similar sites, through mashups and parody accounts and animated GIFs. Whether we like it or not, that is a large and growing part of the future of content.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Nils Geylen and See-ming Lee and The Atlantic

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The site, which is run by founder Mike Masnick through a company called Floor 64 (Full disclosure: I consider Masnick a friend) has had an online store for some time now where readers and fans could come and buy the usual type of swag many publishers offer, including e-books based on the site’s coverage. But the store has now been updated with some new features, including the ability to buy lunch with Masnick (for $250) and to do a Google Hangout with him.

There’s also a couple of humorous offerings aimed at critics of the site — including one that allows the buyer to shut the site down completely for 24 hours, for only $1 million (shutting it for a year will cost you $100 million).

Techdirt has also expanded an interesting offering called Crystal Ball: originally launched in 2009, it gives readers who sign up for a specific level of membership access to blog posts before they are published. The new version expands the amount of time they have to read — and even comment on — these posts, to two hours instead of one. And readers who pay can now see posts that are in draft mode, before they even reach the stage where they are ready to be published. Do many readers sign up for this feature? Masnick says there have been about a thousand since it was first offered, which isn’t huge but is still noteworthy.

I criticized a similar idea that Felix Salmon of Reuters came up with earlier this year, which was that the New York Times should charge hedge funds for early access to market-moving news stories — but the crucial difference is that Techdirt provides almost exclusively commentary and analysis, not breaking news. So why couldn’t the NYT take a page from Techdirt’s playbook and offer expanded access to things from writers like Nick Kristof or Paul Krugman? I think there could be a pretty big market for membership-level access to that kind of thing, and the NYT has already moved in that direction by offering enhanced commenting features to members.

Members get credits for voting on comments

Techdirt also launched a new commenting feature for paying members: called “First Word/Last Word,” it allows members to acquire credits with which they can vote up comments that they think are worthwhile and vote down those they don’t. Reinventing comments is something plenty of publishers are trying to do, including Gawker publisher Nick Denton — who tried a membership-based voting model and then more recently abandoned it for something he hopes will turn the site upside down and make comments the most important part of the content, as opposed to the posts from writers and editors.

As Masnick notes in a blog post announcing the new offerings, the site is trying to follow the advice that it often gives to musicians and other artists (copyright and the death of traditional content business models being one of the site’s favorite topics). That advice is to connect with fans, and then give them a reason to buy — so instead of relying on CD sales or record deals, Masnick advises artists to take an approach like independent musician Amanda Palmer did recently, in which she Kickstarter-funded a new album and tour with a campaign that raised over $1 million in a matter of days.

In a lot of ways, what Masnick is offering readers is a similar kind of model, but without the help of Kickstarter. It’s the complete opposite of the approach most traditional media companies take, which is to charge their readers a blanket fee for their content, regardless of what that reader might be interested in. Some publications take a membership-style approach, including magazines like the Economist, and The Guardian — which is adamantly opposed to paywalls — has been experimenting with offering certain features for pay, such as a new “freemium” approach to photos as my paidContent colleague Robert Andrews described in a recent post.

The new CEO of the New York Times may not want to offer Google Hangouts to readers any time soon, but I think there is a lot of value in treating your readers like members of a fan club rather than just a homogenized sea of faceless readers whose only option is to pay a monthly fee. Offerings like Techdirt’s may not generate billions in revenue, but they help to cement the bond between a content producer and his or her fan base — and that can be a very valuable thing indeed.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Montecruz Foto and Giuseppe Bognanni

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