Looking for an interesting use of the grass-roots internet? Well, look no further than Spot.Us, a project of the nonprofit Center for Media Change that allows an individual or group to take control of news by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists. Spot Us is made possible by the Knight Foundation.

How does it work?

April 30-May 3 The Journalism That Matters Collaborative, Media Giraffe Project, Northern California Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and Yahoo! Inc will host NewsTools2008, a concept/design mashup for journalists, technologists and entrepreneurs.

For more information check out their wiki,  blog and NetSquared Blog post.

Join us at NewsTools2008, April 30-May 3, at Yahoo! Sunnyvale, a three-day conceptual mashup where journalists will work with technologists to create new tools for journalism that matters. The U.S. news media is changing fast. Strip away the legacy platforms, and what remains of journalism that is needed to support participatory democracy and community? At NewsTools2008, we'll ground you on the way news has been manufacturered until now, we'll overview how technology is disrupting the old ways; then we'll ask you to work for up to two days with journalists to build new systems that engage with all the best tools avaiable. The result we seek: The launch of at least a half-dozen new machine-based systems that move journalism outside of the traditional boxes and into our participatory, crowdsource culture.

See: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-sv
or: http://www.newstools2008.org

Registration discounts and stipends availble for day-trippers . . . email for details: Bill Densmore, the media giraffe project at umass amherst
413-458-8001 / densmore@mediagiraffe.org

Shortly after posting about the Pizzigati Prize, ZeroDivide Fellowship and Rising Voices Micro-Grants, David Sasaki of Global Voices Online suggested I tell all you citizen journalists about the 2007 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism's Citizen Media Award :

Entries due June 13

I found Britt's interview with Rosalyn Lemieux to be truly informative, and so submitted it to NewsTrust. If y’all could go over there and rate the story, I think it will be good for Britt & Netsquared. (I don’t work for Net2 or anything, but this community’s been very good to me – and Britt’s extraordinary – so if there’s anything we can do to raise their profiles, I think we should try to help). Never heard of NewsTrust? I posted about it here.

In a 50-minute interview, Commons contributor Paul Lamb gets up close and personal with Jed Emerson, rock star of a new breed of innovators in the fields of investment and philanthropy. While going into eye-glazing detail about such things as blended value, social returns on investment, and econometric externalities, Paul noses into Jed’s personal life --  discovering, for instance, that while Jed may have been dropped on his head as a kid, that’s not the main reason why he’s dedicated his life to social work. Follow this link to listen to the podcast, and to improve this story by editing the wiki. 

If you’re a news junkie, and you haven’t tried NewsTrust, don’t. It’s addictive and should be banned. But if I can’t stop you, there a few things you should know: (1) it’s a news rating service, (2) it allows ordinary people to judge the quality of sources and stories, (3) it provides structure within which to make such judgments, so you don’t have to make stuff up, (4) the process reveals a lot about what good journalism is and isn't, (5) it will tell you things you did not know about yourself, (6) if you’re already suffering from too much information, you can read just the highly-rated stories, or just those which were given high ratings by raters you trust, (7) it’s a community of some pretty smart people who care about the truth, (8) it’s run and backed by some very very good people, (9) I’m the volunteer host for its National Public Radio section, so am completely biased and not credible (if you want to draw more attention to an outlet that you trust, you too can sign up to be its host). If after all this you still click this link and get hooked, don’t say I didn’t warn you.