If launching the project via Kickstarter was a gamble — and one that apparently took a certain amount of convincing before Planet Money’s corporate masters would sign off on it, according to Blumberg — it certainly seems to have paid off: the campaign hit its goal in a single day, and has since raised about $300,000 or six times as much as it was originally looking for (the audio of my interview with Blumberg is on SoundCloud and also embedded below).

Crowdfunding and public radio both go direct

Blumberg, who works for This American Life and created the Planet Money show in 2008 along with NPR economics reporter Adam Davidson, said that when the show decided to set up the T-shirt project — an idea that stemmed from a book by Pietra Rivoli called “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy” — he thought Kickstarter was the most obvious way of allowing listeners to not only follow the experiment, but to become participants in it as well.

“We wanted to try and figure out a way to do the project, to do the journalism, but also to sell the T-shirts to people who wanted them, as a way of involving them in the project — so you can either guess about how many you need and borrow the money or sort of get it pre-funded, or you could just go on Kickstarter and find out exactly.”

One of the reasons why it seemed like such a good fit, Blumberg said, is that public radio and the NPR model already involve reaching out to listeners and supporters directly, so it seemed natural to blend the two (a public radio podcast called 99% Invisible took a similar route last year and raised more than $180,000).

“The other part about Kickstarter is that it’s just a great way of sort of involving folks in the project as you go along, and… it felt like with our audience there’d be some interesting overlap there between Kickstarter and public radio — it felt like they would sort of feed on each other. The public radio audience and the Kickstarter model are so close anyway, so why not combine them — it’s sort of surprising that it hasn’t happened before.”

The internet turns everything into public radio

In fact, Blumberg said, it feels like “the internet is driving the entire world towards a public-radio model” in a way, as more media companies — and even individuals such as Daily Dish blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is relying on direct reader funding for support — try to find a way of surviving when advertising revenue is declining and other business models are not obvious.

“You can get lots of stuff for free now, and so the trick is to get people to pay for stuff they can get for free. It’s a trick that public radio has gotten pretty good at, but now other people are sort of eclipsing us — Kickstarter is very ingenious in the way you can involve people in the story, you can build all sorts of different levels, and it’s very very easy. So part of it is about learning what we can from our Kickstarter experience and then feeding that back into the public-radio world.”

Blumberg said that he was pleasantly surprised at the amount of money the project has been able to raise, and that he originally expected it would take most of the campaign’s time limit to even get to the $50,000 goal. The majority of the money raised will go towards travel and production costs, as well as the cost of buying and making the shirts, he said — and anything left over will be used to create a development fund for NPR member stations and put on a series of workshops about the kind of reporting Planet Money does.

A chance for a public-funding revolution

And will evangelizing Kickstarter be part of that program? Blumberg said that the project seems to be doing its own evangelizing, just because of the overwhelming response, which he says executives at NPR and throughout the public-media world are watching closely and are “very excited about.” The American Life producer said he also hopes the project will spark more discussion about the ways in which public radio can use crowdfunding platforms.

“Public radio has been a little insulated from some of the ways the internet has changed other media organizations, but the internet is upending radio as well, in a way that I think can be very advantageous, it just depends on how you do it. I think there’s always been a realization within the public radio system that there’s revolutionary potential, and I think this will add to that conversation and hopefully move it forward.”

Blumberg said that he believes public radio can learn a lot from seeing how crowdfunding works in practice with a focused project like the T-shirt campaign, and that the connection between fans and creators that Kickstarter and other platforms help to create is very much like what public media has been doing for some time without the internet. “I feel like we’ve been out ahead of this whole thing for a long time,” he says, “and we didn’t even know it.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz and Shutterstock / Wilson Rosa and Shutterstock / higyu

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

By now, many people are becoming used to Twitter as a source of breaking news, whether it’s a report about the death of Osama bin Laden or details about the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt. But it’s still fascinating to come across new examples of how the real-time information network can be used to report on a breaking news story, whether by professional journalists or those committing what Andy Carvin of NPR has called “random acts of journalism.” In one recent case, a member of Reddit pulled together a news report about a shooting in Toronto, including the tweets of those who attended and later became victims of the incident — another sign of how social media is changing both the way we consume and the way we produce journalism.

According to a number of news reports, the shooting took place late Monday night in a suburb of Toronto called Scarborough, at a house party attended by an estimated 250 people. By the end of the incident, two people were dead and more than 20 others were wounded. Within a matter of hours, a user at Reddit who goes by the handle “BitchSlappedByLogic” had posted a description of the events leading up to the party as well as the aftermath — and even some information about the background of those involved and their apparent gang affiliations.

The Twitter-sourced report is easier to verify

The entire report was compiled via Twitter, with links to individual tweets by someone who said he was the host of the party, as well as a teenaged girl who was one of those killed in the shooting:

Apparently, it was this guy’s party, as he says here. He’d been planning this party since July 7th. This guy apparently anticipated that problems might happen at the party. This girl, too. This guy too. So this could be the result of a pretty well-known beef. This person was shot. As was this person. This person was also shot — twice. This person was also shot, according to this tweet. This may be her in recovery, though I can’t be sure.

It’s interesting to look at the Reddit report, and then compare that to a traditional news report from the CBC (the publicly-funded broadcaster in Canada). The one on Reddit doesn’t look or read anything like a normal news story — instead of names, it has links to tweets and individual Twitter accounts, and there isn’t much of a story at all, just a recitation of facts or alleged facts. The CBC story has the names and ages of the victims, as well as some quotes from the police about gang violence, a quote from a friend of one of the deceased, and some eyewitness reports from the scene.

That said, however, the Reddit version also has a lot of things the CBC version doesn’t: for example, it has some tweets from people attending the party about the potential for violence — before the shooting even occurs. It also uses messages posted by those involved to talk about the shooting being part of a possible gang war, including links to individual tweets from people threatening more violence, as well as tweets and YouTube videos posted by members of a gang that one of the victims was apparently associated with.

While the format of the Reddit story may be more difficult to read, it also makes the story a lot easier to fact-check while you are reading, since any reader can simply click on a link and see the message or user profile that the author is basing their statement on (in one case, the Reddit post has a link to a screen-capture of a tweet that has since been removed). The CBC story has no links whatsoever. And while the traditional news story simply makes statements without providing any evidence other than an interview with police, the Redditor uses words like “apparently” and “I can’t be sure.”

Twitter isn’t a newswire, it’s a newsroom

The approach that Reddit took in this case reminded me of the way that Andy Carvin used his Twitter account as a kind of live-streaming news channel during the uprising in Egypt. In an interview with me at the Mesh conference in Toronto earlier this year, Carvin talked about how he saw his Twitter followers as his newsroom — in the sense that they helped him filter through and verify information from a number of different sources within that country, disproving or verifying videos, photos and other news. As he put it:

I get uncomfortable when people refer my twitter feed as a newswire. It’s not a newswire. It’s a newsroom. It’s where I’m trying to separate fact from fiction, interacting with people. That’s a newsroom.

While the Reddit report doesn’t do this (although commenters do fact check comments from the police), it’s easy to see how it could be the foundation of exactly that kind of process — one in which anyone, journalist or not, can contribute information that can then be verified or pulled together into a story. Imagine how much better the CBC story could have been if it had made use of some of the background and linking practices that you see in the Reddit post, or if the two had worked together, and you get some idea of what the newsroom of the future looks like.

Mark Little of Storyful, which works with mainstream media outlets to do exactly that kind of thing, has written about how journalists need to stop seeing themselves as gatekeepers of information and start to look at journalism as a collaborative effort involving all kinds of different sources. Twitter is clearly one of these sources, as the Toronto shooting shows — and so is Reddit, which has already proven in the past that it can be a crowdsourced fact-checking engine. And those who learn how to make use of all these tools will wind up producing better journalism.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Juerg Vollmer and See-ming Lee

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How Media Companies Can Compete Online
• Report: NoSQL Databases – Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility
• The 2013 task management tools market

Esposito wonders whether DRM is more effective in preventing “casual copying” than large-scale infringement:

It will be argued that the promotional value of free copies outweighs the lost sales due to sharing. I don’t think so; the NPR example is telling us something about the propensity for people to pay for things that they don’t have to. And NPR has to work hard even to get 10% compliance, with relentless pledge drives and appeals to civic-mindedness, supplemented with salving premiums (an NPR T-shirt, etc.). Promotional friction can take many forms (providing excerpts, civic appeals, special features), but it’s an important element of this economy.

So moving publishing away from DRM “requires a great deal of thought and contingency planning.”

Can we afford to lose our course adoption sales? How do we monetize reading groups? And what about the used-book market, from which we currently derive no revenue? Can we come up with new ways to monetize books so that we can recapture some of that lost revenue? The issue concerning DRM is falsely thought to be a technological one. It is not; it is a marketing issue.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
• DRM doesn’t have to be all bad
• E-books, innovation and antitrust

It’s not just iPad apps and paywalls that are confounding traditional media — there’s plenty of evidence that many don’t really get Facebook or Twitter much either, despite the fact that both have been around for years now, and there are plenty of examples of how to use them well. One of those examples is National Public Radio, which has over 1.4 million Facebook fans and recently talked about how it uses the social network to build its community of listeners as well as to do reporting.

NPR’s digital strategist, Andy Carvin, told an Online News Association event that the organization doesn’t look at its Facebook page as a place where it can push the news, but more as a place where listeners (and potential listeners) can talk with each other about things that interest them. The pieces that the broadcaster posts aren’t usually breaking news or even the top story; instead, Carvin says they are items that get picked based on the question: “Will our friends want to talk about this?” And they don’t just talk — the Facebook page also drives 4.5 million pageviews a month to the NPR website. And as the Nieman Journalism Lab notes, according to survey of its listeners that the broadcaster did last year:

Facebook fans are also some of NPR’s most devoted listeners, with 70 percent of them tuning into their local NPR station — and averaging 2 hours of NPR consumption a day. Fifty-five percent also visit NPR’s website on a regular basis.

Of course, NPR doesn’t have to rely on advertising, so you could argue that how it approaches Facebook is different from the way other traditional ad-supported media might, or should. But I don’t think that’s the case. What NPR is doing is building a community around its content — and not just by posting links that people can comment on or click “like” on, but by asking people to help shape stories as well. In other words, using social media as a tool for real interaction, not just for broadcasting a message (pun intended). And the result is more engaged readers/listeners, and more traffic to the broadcaster’s website — which matters just as much to NPR as a traditional media outlet, because the broadcaster relies on public donations and awareness.

It’s also worth noting that the public broadcaster doesn’t keep too tight a rein on its community, which some media outlets try to do. “We feel like it’s as much theirs as it is ours,” Carvin said at the ONA event. “If they want to swear like sailors, [they can]. We don’t block comments just because there’s swearing, or even if they’re being snarky.” NPR staffers delete offensive comments or hate speech, but criticism is fine. And here’s the best part: their Facebook fans often take care of the moderation themselves, by reporting obvious fake accounts or offensive comments. That’s one sign of a strong community (NPR also makes great use of its Tumblr blog and of YouTube).

One issue for media companies is that approaching things the way that NPR has means giving up the community aspect to Facebook, or at least some of it. Many readers will click through to NPR’s site, but others will not — they will click “like” or comment, but that’s all. For a media entity, this is going to feel like giving away the store. There are other issues as well: the social network is still a fairly walled garden in many ways, and it can change its terms of use quickly and with little warning. That could put a media company in a difficult spot, since Facebook is ultimately the one that controls what happens to that community and the interaction that takes place there.

That said, however, the reality is that media in the web era is a distributed thing, and that includes the community aspect. Conversations about your content are going to occur on Facebook because 600 million people use it, and they are going to occur on Twitter because 200 million people or so use that. If you want to build a relationship with your users — which is about the only thing you have left, since scarcity of information and control over the distribution channel is no longer working — then you have to be there too. And not just shoving ads or content at them, but talking to them.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
• Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners
• What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform

Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Florian Boyd

The websites will launch automatically whenever someone navigates to either NPR.org or WSJ.com, and will replace the standard sites, both of which feature pretty significant quantities of Flash content. Peter Kafka at MediaMemo also notes that this workaround ensures that iPad owners will be able to access content from the two news sources without the organizations having to rush out a dedicated iPad application.

According to Kafka, NPR is in the process of developing such an application, but it won’t necessarily be ready in time for the iPad’s launch. Also, having two options available for iPad owners means that no matter what a customer’s preference, they should be able to access all of NPR’s content. Just after the device hits the streets, consumer frenzy will probably be at its most heady, so anyone ready to go on day one stands to benefit the most by way of picking up new readers and/or customers.

The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is doing something along the same lines, although it will be more sound and fury than substance. While NPR’s site is getting a complete overhaul, the WSJ will have a Flash-free front page, but if you start delving deeper into content, you’ll run into those annoying little mystery Lego icons. The WSJ and other sites using this tactic will likely wait and see how popular the iPad actually becomes before devoting many resources to a full-scale conversion.

Related Research from GigaOM Pro:

• Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits the Right Notes
• How AT&T Will Deal with iPad Data Traffic
• 5 Tips for Developers Targeting the iPad
• With the iPad, Apple Take Google to the Mat

But why not buy an iPhone, or a Palm Pre, which I’d had my eye on for several months? The Pre seems to be a good phone, but it doesn’t yet have the apps that the iPhone does. And the monthly fees for Pre service are considerably higher than what I’m paying now. The iPhone’s monthly fees are even higher, and many folks I’ve talked to don’t find it to be a very good phone.

So, keeping my current phone and buying an iPod touch seemed like a good compromise. I can get good Wi-Fi coverage in most areas where I live, so I’ll be able to go online, even without the phone function.

Many of my WWD colleagues already have iPhones. Aliza has recently written about good apps for web workers. Dawn’s shared her favorites, too. But with the holidays coming up, here are some of my ideas for apps to put on that brand-new iPhone or iPod touch:

Communication

• eBuddy. A multi-service instant message client for MSN/Windows Live, AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk, ICQ, Facebook Chat and MySpace Chat. Supports multiple accounts on the same service. Versions for web, Android and other platforms also available. Free.
• Facebook. A well-designed way for Facebook users to keep up with their friends while on the road. The app has had its issues, but they are apparently fixed now. Free.
• Gist. Scott and I have both found Gist useful, and the Gist iPhone app does a pretty good job of presenting a lot of information in a small space. Free.
• LinkedIn. This app keeps LinkedIn users, er, “linked in” from their iPhones and iPod touches. The latest upgrade adds some nice features, including an inbox for LinkedIn messages. Free.
• Nimbuzz. You can use this app to make inexpensive international calls over Wi-Fi. The app also includes a chat function, but it’s pretty rudimentary compared to eBuddy. Free app; rates for calls vary.
• RingCentral. If you’re a RingCentral user, you can use this app to manage your phone messages and more. Free for RingCentral users.
• Tweetie. There are lots of Twitter apps, but so far, I like Tweetie the best. It has a clean interface, and supports multiple Twitter accounts. Thanks for the tip, Darrell! $2.99.
• Waveboard. Mobile access to Google Wave. Will hopes for better access soon; I imagine that this app will become more sophisticated as Wave does. $0.99.

File and Idea Management

• Dropbox. This app is another reason to love Dropbox, which many of us at WWD do. As one would expect from Dropbox, it just works. Free.
• Evernote. My colleagues at WWD like Evernote, too, and I’ve finally seen the light. It’s a great replacement for PhatNotes, which I used to use with various Palm products. (The Palm versions are apparently no longer available.) Free.

News

• Reeder. A very nice and elegant RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. $0.99.

Just about every news source also has its own iPhone/iPod touch app these days. So far, I’ve been impressed with the ones from NPR and from some news outlets that have used the PodCurry platform.

Password Management

• 1Password. Manage and sync passwords. I’ve been playing with the brand-new version 3, and it’s good enough that I’ve moved from SplashID after many years. Use Dropbox with 1Password to make your password data available on multiple machines. $7.99.
• LastPass. Manage and sync passwords across multiple machines. The Firefox add-on for this service was included in WWD’s Add-Ons Collection. Apps for iPhones and other mobile devices available with premium membership, $12/year.

I’ve barely begun finding fun stuff, but I think I’m off to a good start with the Google Earth app, and TriPeaks Lite. I’m sure that I’ll find more, but I really need to get back to work now. Happy holidays!

What iPhone or iPod touch apps would you recommend for new users?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• Hey, traditional media: You may not need an app for that
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Photo by Reid Beels

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is put a kettle of water on the stove to make tea. Unlike Captain Picard’s preference for Earl Grey, I stick mostly to green tea to keep me caffeinated. I suspect that most of you have a similar ritual whether you reach for your morning Mt. Dew, tea, coffee, espresso, or a tall, skinny, half-caf, no whip, caramel machiatto from the local coffee shop.

The western obsession with caffeine has some interesting roots. On the NPR Science Friday podcast this week, Steven Johnson talked about how Age of Enlightenment in England coincides with the arrival of caffeine and the growing popularity of coffee shops as places where people with different backgrounds, like Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley, came together over coffee and tea to talk about issues and new ideas. The coffee houses also introduced caffeine as a daily habit in people’s lives. At the time, one of the only other safe beverages was alcohol, since the water quality was poor, so some people went from being drunk by mid-morning every day to being caffeinated and alert throughout the day.

The collaborative history of coffee and tea is also interesting, particularly to web workers. Many of us spend our days working in home offices and other places with few people, but the local coffee shop can provide an alternative where we can meet people with diverse interests and different backgrounds. I have a couple of local coffee shops where other web workers tend to gather during the day, and I’ve found myself in interesting conversations with people who work in areas very different from my own. For example, earlier this week, I had an interesting discussion about podcasting with a couple of friends where we were sharing ideas and tips for hosting our video podcasts. I recently had a discussion with another friend about consuming RSS feeds within location based tracking applications.

In many ways, applications like Twitter and FriendFeed are allowing us to have similar cross-discipline discussions with interesting people online acting as at least a partial replacement for the coffee shop. I run across so many links and new technologies as a result of friends posting about them that I would have most likely missed without these applications.

These cross-discipline discussions can inspire new ideas and innovation, just like a science podcast about the invention of air inspired me to write this blog post for web workers.

What are your thoughts on coffee shops as a shared space for interesting discussions? What role does caffeine play in your life as a web worker? What would society be like if caffeine ceased to exist tomorrow?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space

I was listening to a story on NPR by Laura Sydell called Computing in the Cloud: Who Owns Your Files? The story brought back all of the fears I’ve had about working in the clouds but have suppressed because:

A. I want the convenience that cloud computing offers;

B. I recently experienced the Computer Crash of Doom and want to know I have reliable backups;

C. I want to get more work use out of my iPod Touch and cloud work is the way.

So what was the bottom line of the NPR piece?

Read the User Agreement. Yes, the gist of the story was that none of us are reading the user agreement with Google or Yahoo or any other company that is housing our emails, documents and files. We actually covered that subject last month, but hey, I’m one of those who never, ever reads the user agreement. Who has the time? Who has the brain capacity? Who likes sifting through pages and pages of legalese?

This is a problem, according to Harry Lewis, a computer science professor at Harvard. All someone has to do is accuse you of something – unproven – and the company hosting your files can simply cut you off, close your account, no questions asked, rather than entering into a legal battle.

There are no rules and more importantly – no laws – when it comes to hosting your files.

Ever since I went to Gmail in the clouds from Apple’s Mail on my computer, I’ve wondered “what would happen if Gmail went down…forever?” The entire record of my work over the last three years would be gone. I tried backing up all of my historical Gmails onto my computer once but it was a major undertaking and never became a habit.

If we aren’t reading the user agreements, how can we protect ourselves from major loss in the clouds?

1. Backups of backups? Does it make sense to have the copy on your harddrive along with the copy online? Lately, I’ve been composing my documents in Google Docs and only saving them back on my harddrive as needed. Should I do it as a rule?

2. Backups of backups of backups? Once I save my docs on my computer, my Time Capsule captures them every hour on the hour. But is there a way to get my Time Capsule to pull my cloud work into a backup drive? Or is that an app that is on the way because it is a critical process that is missing from cloud computing?

3. Distributed files. Does it make sense not to have all of your work and files on one system? Sure it seems convenient and integrated to use all of Google’s cloud working solutions, but should we put some of our work – or back up some of our work – on other sites? Like using Dropbox file storage as a repository for anything and everything from everywhere?

4. Being selective. Do we need to be more selective about what we are willing to put online, keep online, and work on in the clouds? Are we getting a little too careless and thoughtless about the ease of cloud computing or rushing to it without a security plan in place because it seems like the place we need to be?

No technology is failsafe or foolproof. When we are using technology for “convenience,” but have to back up that technology “just in case,” are we losing some of that convenience that we are craving? It seems that, as usual, nothing is ultimately free and everything comes with a price.

How much are you willing to spend – and risk – on cloud computing and how are you backing up your work?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• From car to cloud: the future of the in-vehicle app landscape
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space