Sound familiar? You may have read about the Networked Journalism Summit here last year, a similarly ambitious techie-meets-newsie experiment in New York. In fact, NJS organizer and former OJR Q&A subject David Cohn has a ticket to Atlanta this weekend.

But if that conference’s roots were steeped in journalism, this one bats from the other side of the plate. Founders Brad Stenger and Nick Diakopoulos have backgrounds in Human-Computer Interaction, and the roster they’ve compiled boasts an impressive digital constituent.

To say nothing of the journalistic participants. The panelists’ collective resumé lists CNN, The New York Times and Yahoo! News, and founding Gawker Elizabeth Spiers will deliver the closing keynote.

So just what should they all expect to take away from the weekend? And what about those of us who long to be a fly on the wall?

Stenger was happy to fill in the blanks over e-mail.

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OJR: First off, could you give me a brief rundown on the genesis of this meeting? How did the idea form and what is your purpose?

Brad Stenger: Nick Diakopoulos and I first talked about it at CHI, an annual technical meeting for academic & industrial researchers working in the area of Human-Computer Interaction. That initial conversation was in San Jose in early May 2007. Nick’s Ph.D. advisor, Irfan Essa, gave it his blessing shortly afterward. The three of us jointly started serious planning last fall.

The purpose has always been to fill a big room with journalists interested in developing technology and technology developers interested in journalism. We felt if we could get the technologists to say why their work mattered to journalists, and if journalists could tell about their experiments with technology, there’d be a doorway into each other’s world, and some good knowledge and technology transfer would result.

OJR: How did you go about selecting the media attendees, and why did you choose the people you did?

Stenger: It’s always been about diversity. We started with the subjects we wanted to cover, and knew that we wanted the subjects covered from a range of perspectives—technical, entrepreneurial, journalistic, design, etc. We came up with long lists of people that were candidates to cover the subject material, and kept asking people from our lists until we’d gotten the diversity we felt we needed. I think our participants selected us.

OJR: You’re setting aside half of the seats for students and young professionals. How will they be phased into the meeting agenda, and what do you hope they can add to the conversation?

Stenger: We’ve set out to cover lots of ground. Technology and journalism together is a nearly inexhaustible subject, and we won’t exhaust any of the subjects in any of our panel discussions or talks. It might be a rationalization, but we think that this sets the stage for in-depth hallway discussions that bring home the subjects of greatest interest to individual attendees. To aid these hallway conversations we put in place a conference-only social network (a mini-Facebook) so that people can more easily connect names, faces, interests and areas of expertise. Ultimately it’ll be buy-in from students and early-careerists that spell the difference between hosting a conference and creating a community. We’re glad to be doing the former, but we’re also taking our best shot at doing the latter.

OJR: What about those of us who can’t make it but want to be in the loop? Where can attendees and outsiders alike go to stay informed and involved after the meeting?

Stenger: Some universities are known for webcasting everything but that’s not Georgia Tech. I’d recommend signing on to the RSS feed for ongoing details, and links to related news items and blog posts.

OJR: What, if any, are the follow-up plans for the project?

Stenger: Interest has been strong and we’re expecting a capacity crowd. We naturally have an eye toward doing this again in 2009. But for 2008, hopefully we’ll have brought people together who wouldn’t have otherwise connected, and there’ll be some things that get built which everyone benefits from. I think that given the talent and ambition in the crowd we have assembled, if we succeed in fostering these new connections, results will be easy to spot.

OJR: Finally, what specifically do you hope individuals will take away from the conference? Or is the goal to simply get all these minds in the same room with hopes that they will network and stay in touch?

Stenger: The goal for the meeting is knowledge, technology and innovation transfer between computing professionals and journalists; things that we believe will have lasting impact on both fields. Will it, though? We’re about to find out. As far as we know, no one’s ever attempted a meeting this size about journalism where the technical discussion is this substantial.

Non-profit news startups are similarly testing the waters, but without all that ink, paper and, er, personnel to worry about. The model evolves with each new project, but the formula for success looks to be a healthy balance of guerilla and traditional; loose and tight. Launched in January, D.C.-based The Washington Independent is the new kid on the block.

With a collective editorial resume that lists The New Republic, Talking Points Memo and Financial Times, The Independent reigns in the ground-up-meets-top-down model that Marc Cooper talked to us about a few months ago with HuffPo’s Off The Bus project.

A Center for Independent Media site, its siblings include non-profit news staples The Iowa Independent, The Minnesota Monitor and The Colorado Confidential. And what The Washington Independent lacks in alliteration it makes up for with a hearty balance of investigative features, well-researched commentary and bloggy news analysis. It’s a versatile news trough for those who take their in-depth clean coal reports with a side of quick-hit caucus commentary.

We swapped emails with Washington Independent Editor Allison Silver to learn more about the new endeavor and its meaning for non-profit journalism.

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OJR: So, you just launched a few weeks ago. How is traffic looking so far? Where are the readers coming from and how are you getting your name out there?

Allison Silver: I am delighted to have this opportunity to talk with you about my brand-new site, The Washington Independent. And it is brand new. We had a semi-hard launch on Jan. 28, and we are still in Beta as we work out some of the kinks. For less than two weeks, I think we are doing quite well. We are currently listed on both The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall had a nice post about us on TPM, and now MetaFilter has posted an item about us. We are planning some other things as we go about raising our profile, and the quality of our content should also draw some attention.

OJR: Can you talk a bit about your relationship with the Center for Independent Media?

AS: The Center for Independent is our umbrella organization, our parent. David Bennahum, our president and CEO, had four state sites up and running—in Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan and Iowa. He hired Jefferson Morley from The Washington Post, as the center’s editorial director and they decided to launch a Washington site, covering national issues. Jeff contacted me, since he felt this was something I would be interested in. He was right.

OJR: If I get one thing from your mission statement, it’s “in-depth, accurate and, most importantly, fast.” What sort of staff does it take to pull that off, and to what extent do you accept freelance submissions?

AS: We have an extremely nimble and saavy young staff, including Spencer Ackerman, covering national security (who was at The New Republic and TPM), Holly Yeager, covering the presidential campaign (who was at Financial Times) and Mike Lillis, covering Congress (who was at Inside Washington).

I am also featuring a robust commentary element. The pieces are written by well-known scholars and experts. For example, we had Robert Dallek, the historian who has examined the lives of Johnson and Kennedy and FDR, write about the role of a former president, pegged to Bill Clinton’s travels on the campaign trail for his wife.

We would be interested in seeing freelance submissions. We are looking for smart reported pieces or strong commentary.

OJR: Your sister sites feel a little more bloggy than yours. How did the professional/citizen journalism balance you hope to achieve factor into your page design?

AS: We are still in the process of working out our page design. But one way of looking at your question is that the Net is about democracy and we want our users to be fully engaged in the writing we post. Already, one informed reader contacted Spencer after his waterboarding piece was posted, and now Spencer is working on a piece involving that comment.

OJR: We talked to The Huffington Post about an election spinoff project that strives for the same balance; ground-up content steeped in the values of traditional journalism. What other similar sites have you seen, and how do you think yours is different?

AS: There are many other strong sites out there like The Huffington Post—including TPM and Slate and Salon. But I think the Net is not about competition, or limitations. It’s indeed like democracy—because it’s about making the pie bigger.

I think our mix of reported longer pieces and reported blog, to tell a longer narrative, and our extremely informed commentary is the next step for the Net. Well, we should say, one next step. The Net is many, many things.

OJR: Can you talk a bit about working for a non-profit versus an advertising-based news publication? How do you compare and contrast the two from an editorial standpoint?

AS: As for working on a non-profit, I am sure you know that part of all informed discussion about the future of journalism involves the non-profit model. This is one reason why so many people are interested in what happens with Poynter and the St. Petersberg paper.

OJR: It must be tough to veer from politics these days, but what other types of reports can we expect to see at the Independent in the near future?

AS: Politics is so exciting right now. This campaign is all those hyphenated words—jaw-dropping, breath-taking.

But there is so much else going on. As I said earlier, Spencer Ackerman is reporting on national security issues, and we have already had commentary on this subject from James Bamford, who wrote two important books on the NSA, and Milt Bearden, the former director of clandestine services at the CIA. We have strong economic and financial coverage. Mary Kane, who was formerly with Newhouse papers, is doing great work about the brick-and-mortar reality of the subprime crisis.

And we have solid environmental coverage—look at our current piece that examines just how green an airline could be—and science reporting.

“But wait, isn’t that what the Web is?” you ask aloud. “Isn’t this whole thing just a digital farm of ‘ideas?’” Fair enough. But to Big Think’s credit, there is quite a difference between the ideas they are peddling—or inviting others to peddle—and, say, this.

Nor is it simply “YouTube for intellectuals,” as some like to call it. Says co-founder Victoria Brow: “We are trying to catalyze a global dialogue. YouTube is a wonderful site but that is not its mission.”

Big Think taps a gamut of experts to wax spontaneous on a range of topics—from atheism to Iraq to the greatest rock bands of all time—and invites users to comment via text, audio or video.

Users are also encouraged to start the conversation with experts, not just react to it. Throw up an idea about vegans, for example, and Moby could come forth with some thoughts. The two-party system? Denny Kucinich may have a few things to say.

And come to think of it, maybe some OJR readers are Big Thinking already.

We swapped e-mails with Brown to find out more about the mission, its future and just how the hell they lured all those experts.

–

OJR: So how exactly does Big Think work?

VB: Big Think is a forum for ideas on the Internet. We catalyze the conversation with the thoughts and words of thought leaders and influencers from many many pursuits (with many more to come) and then we open the conversation to users. Ideas are rated and popular ideas surface to the top.
There are experts on the site (designated by the purple background) and there are users (green background) but both appear on the home page. The top window is an editorial window that Big Think staff puts together each day—it highlights content on the site, usually around a specific question or theme. We have four features in the window at any one time. Each category also has a feature window. People can create ideas with audio, video, text or slideshow. They can comment on others’ ideas. Users can also compare how different people have responded to the same question.

OJR: And how do you plan to keep them coming back? What are you doing for marketing and publicity?

VB: We are greatly enhancing our social networking capabilities. In the next few months, users will be able to find like minded thinkers on the site, see recent activity on the site, see what others have looked at or commented upon, create playlists of their favorite clips, receive updates about content that may be of interest to them, e-mail other users on the site, etc.

We also have an interview platform that we will use to interview guests in remote locations. It is a specific platform created for Big Think that functions with webcams. Transcripts are being added currently to all interviews, so students and others interested in the content can use them as a research resource. We will also be greatly adding to our experts, getting experts in more specific categories so that they may not appear on the home page, but will be searchable in our expert network and will provide users with specific information on specific topics. The broader interviews will continue as well.

OJR: I’ve seen the mission statement, but could you please talk a little about where the idea came from in the first place? Did you see a particular void to fill?

VB: There is a void to fill. There is not an awful lot of thoughtful content on the Internet, and there is nothing that puts the value of user participation in terms of addressing global issues at the fore as our site does. There are a lot of conversations that go on behind closed doors with elite participants, and we wanted to catalyze a global conversation with some of these individuals, then open it up to everybody so they could participate at the same level. Change comes when people feel they have a place at the table.

OJR: Can you talk a bit about your recruitment tactics? What are you doing to get your name out there and attract “experts” to comment on these topics?

VB: We explain the purpose of Big Think, and most people that we are able to reach, really like the idea of expanding the conversation. Also, once several notable individuals had participated, it has become easier to have others accept to participate. We are now receiving requests for people to become experts.

OJR: And once you do attract them, how does the production process work? Where do you shoot them?

VB: We shoot them mostly in our studio in New York, however this will change as we have more and more remote participants, using their own webcams. We shoot on a white background, edit out the interviewer and cut the interview into specific clips on specific subjects. The entire interview will become available in the future. Our effort is to make the viewing experience as useable for Big Think users as possible—i.e. they can watch clips on precisely the topics they want, rather than having to watch the whole interview.

OJR: How about the user-submitted content? I’m reading a particularly heated thread on atheism right now. How is that different from a discussion board on a faith site? In other words, what’s to draw an atheist away from those sites to instead share his thoughts on Big Think?

VB: The user submitted content is growing well. Why come to Big Think? Well, it offers a platform with many types of thinkers, not just ones already committed to a specific view point—so it’s an opportunity to reach many people from many different backgrounds and parts of the word.

OJR: So I imagine you get some pretty outrageous video posts. Has that been an issue? Do you have much of a hand in screening that content?

VB: So far, not an issue. But we are prepared. Inappropriate videos are flagged by users and reported, and we also look through the site. We do want engaging converstations and won’t take things down that are serious arguments so long as they are not illegal or offensive.

OJR: Finally, what’s the allure for advertisers? How do you plan to segment the ad space?

VB: We have a three-tiered strategy:

1. Regular sponsorship and advertising–banners, pre roll, post roll
2. Category sponsorship opportuniites
3. Conversation sponsorship opportunities–a conversation can be sponsored and a corporate entity or foundation or other can submit a request on a specific topic and people to speak to it, and if it falls within our purvue, we will accept and gather other experts on the topic to round out the converation and invite users to weigh in. Very good for corporations who have specific areas of focus that they want attention brought to—and a good market research tool.

OJR: Finally, which topics are emerging as the most popular so far? And which aren’t getting much love?

VB: Business and economy, technology, faith and beliefs, truth and justice getting a lot of attention

Some categories we have are not full of content yet, but they will be in the coming weeks.

The Huffington Post has spawned just that with a new election-season special, Off The Bus, a mash-up digest of feature articles, opinion pieces, polls and videos solicited from a gamut of trad-pub newsies, grassroots bloggers and distributive data journalists. Since its September launch, Off The Bus has been among the most comprehensive pools of election fodder available on the Web, sifting hundreds of daily submissions for insightful “ground-level coverage,” as they describe it, of the 2008 campaign season.

It’s much more than an aggregator, and this side project has a few notable spin-offs of its own. The Polling Project digs behind the numbers blindly guiding our spoon-fed MSM election coverage, encouraging pollees to spill the beans on that dinnertime courtesy call. Also on deck: an interactive map plotting campaign contributions by race and zip code, and an insider exit-poll forum hoping to woo staffers of losing campaigns.

We sat down with Off The Bus editorial coordinator and USC Annenberg professor Marc Cooper to learn more about those projects, and how the offshoot has panned out since its launch.

OJR: How did you envision Off The Bus and these side projects working when they started out a few months ago?

Marc Cooper: Well, it was originally envisioned by Jay Rosen at New York University. He formed a partnership with Ariana Huffington to create Off The Bus. So Off The Bus is hosted at Huffington Post, and it’s called HuffPost’s Off The Bus, but it’s actually a non-profit organization, newassignment.net, that’s legally based at NYU. It started in September, and I think the idea of it was to see what kind of ideas you could have. That is, it didn’t have a rigid and dogmatic formula. The idea was, how could you use the net and what’s been learned so far about online journalism to further the notion of citizen journalism as applied to campaign ’08.

And that meant a couple things: We knew that we wanted to create a publishing platform that would be, in a sense, an online journal of reporting about the campaign, in which there would be space for individual voices to emerge; reporting done by people who weren’t on the campaign bus. Which is a very broad category, because only a few people are on the bus. So it’s almost everybody else available. And that also meant to explore to what degree we could utilize these emerging methods of distributive reporting, or as some people like to call it, posse journalism. And those of us who are on staff really went into this with an open mind to see what that meant. We still don’t know. We’re still experimenting every day. And we’re learning a lot.

OJR: What have you learned so far?

MC: What we’ve learned is that in order to create this new type of citizen journalism, to make it work, you really have to combine the best of the old and new media. They overlap. At Off The Bus, unlike certain blogs, we believe in the traditional standards of journalism that are taught, for example, at Annenberg. But we also believe in the empowerment of individuals and select groups that the Net provides. So I think, modestly, we’ve been fairly successful in our first couple months in achieving some of that balance.

OJR: But it’s not an open forum.

MC: No, it is absolutely not an open forum.

OJR: How do you get the word out there about Off The Bus and encourage people to submit?

MC: Well that’s easy, because we’re connected to the Huffington Post. So whenever we want, Arianna can put a call out on the front page of the Huffington Post and hundreds of thousands of people will read it. So when the first call was put out, we got something like 1500 people who said “I want to do something.”

Now, what happens is implicit in your question. A lot of people assume, “well, you can just blog.” Well, you can go to Blogger.com if you just want to start a blog. Starting a blog is something you can do in 10 minutes. So we’re not an open forum. We are a hybrid of the the traditional editorial hierarchies with the bottom-up element of the new media.

OJR: So how do you screen the submissions?

MC: There’s really a few categories of people. There’s individuals who emerge from that initial stew of 15 hundred people who are either undiscovered; they’re just people who do not make their living from writing but who have always kind of wanted to be journalists, and are out doing journalism, simply put. Not many. Because journalism is a lot harder than it looks. So a lot of people would like to do it, but they don’t know how. And they can’t learn.

The most common submission we get are kind of bloggy opinion pieces. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just not what we do. I mean, we do run pieces that are opinionated, and we do run some pieces that are really kind of opinion pieces, but high quality. But the most common reflex among most people is, “oh yeah, I know how to do this. I’ll just sit down and write a long screed about why I love this candidate or hate another.”

OJR: And those, by and large, are from the people who have no professional journalistic affiliations?

MC: No, they’re not professional writers. Those are not of great interest to us. But there’s a handful of individuals who have emerged out of nowhere who have turned out to be great citizen reporters. I’ll refer you to one you can look up: Mayhill Fowler. I don’t know Mayhill personally. I believe she has aspirations of being a fiction writer, but she’s not a journalist. But she’s a good citizen journalist. Her individual reporting has been great.

Then there’s a sub-category of folks who know how to write, but they’re not journalists. They may be professors or lawyers, and they’re kind of experts in their fields and have been able to apply their expertise as kind of analysts of what’s happening politically, with some reporting.

The next category of people that we’ve recruited as individuals comes from the realization that while we’re a project of citizen journalism, we didn’t invent that. Citizen journalism in some form has been around for about 10 years now, along with the Internet. So we learned early on that it would be good to recruit people who were already doing this, but weren’t getting much notice. So we’ve had some success in that realm. Very specific cases out of Iowa and New Hampshire; people who already have their own websites.

They come from diverse backgrounds. One of them is actually a former journalist. Some of them I have no idea what they do, but they do these political blogs, and we’ve kind of adopted them. And we’re either cross-posting with them or they’re writing for us. That’s the second category, and that’s been very interesting.

The third category is real, live distributive journalism, where we have found that while a lot of people can’t really be reporters — they don’t have the time or the skill — distributive research does work. So for the last two months, we’ve done maybe six or eight pieces that were very complicated to do in which 30 or 40 people participated. A couple of those pieces we did in collaboration with WNYC in New York, who helped us put out the call and recruit people out of their audience. We did a story that was kind of a snapshot of the Obama campaign from across the country on one weekend. Twenty-four people participated in it. We did another one that was an analysis of the ground organizing capacity of the Edwards campaign. We did another piece last week that tried to answer whether the fatigue of George Bush would lead to a big wave of voter turnout of Democrats in the caucuses in Iowa. So sometimes we have these teams of people who are analyzing data, and sometimes they’re actually being reporters. They make phone calls and compile their 50 interviews.

Then our process is that the grassroots people, if you will, do the initial work, then it goes to a second level; to people on our staff or contracted individuals who have some higher level of expertise. The kind of collate and edit the material. And then that’s handed off to a writer who has more experience. And those writers are still kind of citizen journalists. In one case, we had a piece written by a young guy who runs a website called the Iowa Independent who’s on some sort of stipend from a foundation to learn this stuff. So he’s doing this kind of daily journalism, even though it’s at a citizen level. We had another piece that was written by a grad journalism student at Yale who is the editor of some publication there.

OJR: And do you recruit those people as well, or do they kind of come forward on their own?

MC: It comes both ways. We’ve had both.

And then for the Polling Project, there’s about a dozen major co-sponsors who are cross-ideological. Some are conservatives, some are liberals. We have the Concord Monitor, we have InstaPundit, which is on the right, Talking Points Memo, which is on the liberal side, et cetera. With their help we put out a coordinated call out into the ether, asking as many people as possible to click on the common form.

OJR: Is that the form that’s on the site now?

MC: Yep. And ask them a half-dozen questions about polling. And I think we had 300,000 hits on the page. We didn’t have 300,000 responses, but I think we got a couple hundred responses. And we’re in the middle of that. We’re going to put out another call in the next week, and then see how much data comes back. On this second call, I think we’re going to look for people who have had specific contact with push polling. We’ve gotten some responses from people who have been push-polled. Now we’re going to try to take it to another level and see if we get more on push polling. And as part of our partnerships with these co-sponsors, we’ve agreed to share the data with them.

OJR: And what do you do with that data once it’s compiled?

MC: To be perfectly frank with you, we haven’t even crossed the bridge yet of what we’re gonna do with the data. I don’t know that Off The Bus will do anything with the data. We may share it with other folks and let them use it the way they want. Or we may turn some stories out of it. We’ll have to see what’s there first. We don’t know what kind of end product we’re gonna end up with; that’s what makes this fun.

OJR: What have you learned so far?

MC: What we’ve learned is that both sides of the debate over old and new media have been right, and you have to find the right hybrid. Anybody who believe that this is just a platform that can be used like any other platform is wrong, because it has its own characteristics. And the distributive aspect works. We’ve seen it. So we know that you can multiply, or amplify, your resources and amplify your power of reporting and researching through the use of the internet in a way that was not possible before it was invented. On the other hand, it is true that you cannot produce good journalism without people who understand reporting and writing and news judgment and editing and all that kid of stuff. So it’s a very interesting

OJR: For the Polling Project, are you going in with some sort of hypothesis?

MC: No. I will tell you straight-up that we have no hypothesis, and we’ve had no preconceptions. We just know that people are being polled, and we assume there are some stories there. We don’t know. We don’t have an agenda.

OJR: So the outcome will determine what you do with the data.

MC: Absolutely. Like when the Federal Contribution Reports came out, we didn’t know what we were gonna find. We put these data teams on it and we found all kinds of things.

OJR: You mentioned that some other Off The Bus projects are in the works?

MC: Yeah, right now we’re working on a story that we’ll call The Color Of Money, which is going to be an ongoing project. We haven’t even built the page for it yet, but we want to do an interactive map that will break down fundraising or contributions by zip code and by race. So you can see really kind of the racial breakdown; from where money is raised and from what zip codes. And that will be an Off The Bus project.

So we have the Polling Project, we have that one, and then there’s actually three stories that are being worked on by distributive teams right now about Iowa. We don’t want to say what they are, but we’re working on them. But at any one moment we have a core group of 25 or 30 people who are always ready. People like it, because it only requires an hour to an hour and a half of their time during the week, and they feel like they’re really contributing something. And they are. Everybody’s putting together a little piece of the puzzle, and it’s kind of fun to see the picture come together.

OJR: When you put the calls out for the Polling Project, are you noticing significant traffic spikes right away?

MC: Yeah, the traffic spiked pretty quickly. Let’s see, it’s been 21 days since we launched it. We got about 100,000 hits in the first week, I think. And it’s still running at about 5 to 8,000 a day.

OJR: Any idea where those hits are coming from?

MC: No, it’s pretty viral. It’s on several sites, so I can’t tell you the number of referrals from each site. But it’s coming from everywhere.

OJR: So you said this next phase of the Polling Project will focus on push polling. Will you alter the survey that’s currently up?

MC: We might. We’re going to figure that out in the next couple days. We might alter the survey a little bit, and the call will also ask for that. We’ll probably have Arianna do the call. She has a big audience. We’re going to do the Polling Project for another week or two. We intended it to run about a month, so it will run until about the middle of January, and then we’ll see where we’re at. But we don’t know, you know? One thing leads to another.

For future projects, we’re also thinking about an “exit page” for next year. Not too long from now—probably about February—we’ll know who the two candidates are. So all the other campaigns will have shut down. So there’s gonna be a lot of laid-off campaign workers. We want to start collecting those stories. We want to give them a place to give the pillow-talk, inside stories.

And we’re also thinking of doing a big national project—like the Polling Project, one with lots of partners—on, whoever the candidates turn out to be, kind of a “did-you-go-to-school-with?” And it will be a little harder to do that, of course. But did you go to school with Hillary Clinton, or whoever the candidate is? You know, “do you know this person, and what can you tell us?” So we’re thinking of doing that, as well.

Copyright infringement? Sure. But an awful lot of those freebie files come directly from the infringees themselves.

This is no Napster. Music blogs are the new Rolling Stone; the new top-40 radio; the new MTV; on crack (or more likely microbrews and potweed). In about the time it takes the Chili Peppers to put out a new record, this audioblogosphere has become the undisputed industry think tank.

A counterculture of laptop-toting aural misanthropes has successfully (if not accidentally) managed to turn the music industry on its head. Suddenly indie is not so “indie,” and the counterculture—like it or not—is not so “counter.” Ironically, the citizen journalism cult built on P2P file sharing and hipster snarkiness is driving the music business, not draining it.

“The pleasure, from the side of the people who aren’t in love with the record industry, is the scramble factor,” said music critic and regular New York Times and Los Angeles Times contributor Josh Kun. “Now it’s the labels that are trying to keep up with bloggers.”

That’s because as soon as one of those free audio seeds becomes a trend, it can spread like a struck match in Malibu. Right now The Music Slut is posting an iBook-tracked MP3 that could propel a Toledo basement band to multi-platinum stardom this time next year. All it takes is the right buzz in the right places.

Such is the tale of so-called “blog bands” like The Arctic Monkeys and Tapes N’ Tapes. And though the blogosphere’s indie-rock tastes have been accused, accurately so, of being somewhat homogenous (good luck finding a popular jazz blog) its impact on the business is undeniable. In fact, the very growth of indie rock music itself in recent years speaks volumes to that end.

Alan Freed – dot – com?

But where there is money, there are ethical lapses. And one would expect the lines of communication between record labels and these trendsetting scribes to be muddled with them. Indeed, some form of payola, said Kun, be it monetary or moral, has traditionally been cost of entry in music criticism. The prevalence of so-called “sponsored posts” is hotly discussed in blogger arenas, but so long as there is money to be made off music, that payola dynamic is not going anywhere.

For the Spin staff critic, becoming entangled in that corruption carries career-mangling consequences. For the dorm-room blogger posting reviews from his futon, perhaps not so much; and you can be sure the publicists are keen to that. With the latter rapidly climbing to the top of the PR monkey’s contact list, just how susceptible is this new breed of taste influencers to record-label charm? What are the suits doing to influence the influencers? Is there some sort of ethical filter at play? Mark Willett, co-founding editor of Music (For Robots), an audioblog forefather, said self-regulation has thus far maintained a reasonably pure playing field.

“Ya know, in the very early days, a few of us first sites like Fluxblog and Said The Gramophone talked over ethics and guidelines,” he said. “But ultimately we all decided on common sense.”

“People expect blogs to be something done independently,” added Oliver Wang, founding editor of this writer’s fave, Soul Sides. “If it was revealed that certain blogs were getting kickbacks from record labels or whatever, I think the reputation of those blogs would take a hit; at least in the short run.”

Willett and Wang built devout followings the old-fashioned way: on democratic tastes, solid writing and a commitment to consistency and frequency. Reputation and reliability keep their blogs atop the charts at Elbo.ws, Hype Machine and TasteStalkr. But a brand-new blog may find itself up there with them on any given day.

It’s as easy as picking an artist in high reader demand (a sidebar on Hype Machine tells you the day’s hottest searches) and whipping up an MP3 post, maybe even a sentence or two of commentary. Presto. Here come the hits. And with advertisers increasingly resting their heads on music blogs—and the ease with which bloggers can now lure them—it has become a common tactic; and frankly not a totally inexcusable one. So to the chagrin of the purist—and the delight of the publicist—the arena is not completely immune to outside influences, after all. Just what influences might those be?

“I get all kinds of fun shit in the mail,” said Willett. “Free cell phones, MP3 players, etc. I even got a free laptop for Christmas last night from Vista.”

A certain level of traffic may be necessary to attract advertising dollars, but even the youngest of music blogs will face the PR onslaught almost immediately. It begins in the form of press releases, promotional CDs and, more commonly, MP3 email attachments. Then come the concert guest lists and, though Willett’s case is rare, gifts. (For the record, he says he “never, ever, ever” lets money or gifts sway his opinion.)

Flood filters

On the receiving end, the reactions vary. Some bloggers take the time to read and listen to everything that comes their way. Some just listen to the music and discard all accompanying literature. Still others stick to their pride and laud only their own first-hand discoveries. But whatever their sifting methods, the writers are adamant that publicist venom does not soak the opinions put forth on music blogs.

“One thing that has been clear to anyone reading my site from day one is that I only write about bands and music I like or am curious about,” said Kyle Gustafson of Information Leafblower. “I don’t post random videos and MP3 from random bands under the guise that I like and endorse them. Anything that is straight-up promo that I post on my site is labeled as linkage.”

Adds Matt Gross of The Music Slut, “I could be offered the world, but if I don’t like the band, I simply will not post about them. I feel very strongly about that. I never post about an artist I’m not into musically, unless it’s for a cheap jab or to incite my readers. But that’s very rare.”

But bloggers are human, and the labels are well aware their opinions are not completely impenetrable. In the early goings of his blog, Bag of Songs, Tom Szwech concedes it was at times difficult not to post about a band for no other reason than that they sent him a free CD.

“It felt like turning down free candy, but I had to back off a bit. I felt I was losing some integrity,” he said. “Now I only ask them to send a CD if I feel I want to post about it. It’s a fine line to walk; the allure of reposting the press releases for free stuff is pretty powerful.”

And Zeke from Indie Surfer Blog admits to at times planting one foot on either side of that line. But he claims to do it for the readers; not to appease publicists.

“Often I receive the emails direct from the musicians asking to be featured on the page, so I post about them even if I don’t like their music,” he concedes. “I’m also trying to feature different music genres, so I often post some music I’m not really into, but I think some readers may like it.”

So the publicist’s job is not totally thankless. After all, whatever they’re pushing is bound to resonate with someone, and you never know whose ear they may catch. Hence the mass-MP3-e-mail approach.

The savvy poacher will spend some time actually reading the blogs, perhaps taking note of a site’s musical leanings before firing off a plea for coverage. John Funari, online publicist for roots-rockers Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, favors the more personal approach.

“From the beginning I was always vehemently opposed to sending to mass email lists with generic press releases. It can definitely save a lot of time, but I don’t personally think it is a recipe for any kind of success,” he said. “To me, the whole idea of ‘blog marketing’ is a souped-up version of spreading info by word-of-mouth. It depends greatly on personal communication.”

That should ring familiar to any music blogger, big or small. They will also tell you that it’s predominantly small record labels—and label-seeking bands, even—flooding their inboxes with promo materials. And why not? Blog placement is gentle on small budgets and enormously cost-effective if your band blows up. But if you think the major labels are above the fray, think again.

Blogging the bigs

The New York Times Magazine reports industry giant Columbia Records—now under the co-watch of legendary sound caresser Rick Rubin—recently instilled a “word-of-mouth” department: a collection of 20-somethings charged solely with spreading buzz on the Web and through “old-fashioned human interaction.”

But let’s face it: it’s 100-percent Web. Let’s call it blog-jacking. Pragmatic and benign on paper; a spring-loaded backlash in practice.

Just ask Warner Music. In 2004 they leaked an MP3 from comments-section praise was traced back to Warner’s own blog beagles. Readers were of course quick to cry “hijack,” leaving the label (as well as the unsuspecting blog and band) humiliated.

Out of ethical lapses come natural safeguards, and the arena has grown up a bit in the last couple years. Bloggers agree that the Warner hiccup could not repeat itself today. Whatever Columbia’s new foot soldiers have in mind, they had better be a whole lot smarter about it.

“The readers are f–ing sharp. You can’t pull the wool over their eyes,” said Gustafson. “They call you on every typo and broken link, so they’re going to be on top of that, too.”

Even so, there’s no denying that the majors are trolling in some capacity, and sketchy plugs will inevitably slip through the cracks. But the labels know it doesn’t take much to ignite the irreversible buzz storm. If breaking their next cash cow comes at the expense of a retroactive slap on the wrist in a comments section, Columbia is just fine with that.

Incidentally, says Wang of Soul Sides, so are the readers.

“Not to be cynical, but in the long run, I don’t know how many people would really care,” he said. “In the end, it’s about the content, not necessarily the ethics of the content provider.”

But unwritten (and written) ethical codes in the audioblogosphere have and will continue to develop organically. Bloggers recognize what their role has become, and they take it very seriously. They prefer to act as professionals—even if it is just a hobby—and are in turn discovering what it means to be treated like one in the music industry.

“If music critics think they’re not involved in the business, they’re kidding themselves,” said Kun. “The challenge of the music critic is to be aware of how they’re being used within the industry, and to somehow be conscious of that and write within it and write against it. If you’re worth your salt.”

It’s music criticism 2.0, and as Shane from The Torture Garden writes, it’s incumbent on the bloggers themselves to define it:

“I think we need to decide what MP3 blogs should be, and try to model our own accordingly. At its best it can almost be art; a connection to the endless enjoyment of music, inspiring writing [review] and a focus for the intensity of shared feeling. At its worst it’s nothing more than mere content. We should be careful of that, because content is easily fitted into the designs of those who would exploit the good intentions of writers and their readers to make money. Art rarely is.”