From Aron Pilhofer on December 9, 2008 at 7:21 AM

Totally with you in concept, that news organizations should be looking for any and all ways to support their operations -- whether the revenue comes from news or not. But on this specific concept, there's already a lot out there in this space, and it's free.

For one, OpenID seems to finally be starting to take hold just a little bit. At least I'm noticing more and more sites that support the standard, which cuts down significantly on the constant login/logout hassle.

Second, there's a number of companies in the identity field, including Dick Hardt's Sxip, which, among other things, provides a free browser extension (Sxipper) that handles registration forms for you securely on a site-by-site basis.

That said, I think the inclination to innovate outside the traditional news realm is spot on, even if this particular product might be tough to sell when so much is available for free.

Be interesting to put a bunch of news/techie types in a room for a week or with one requirement: Come up with an innovative, potentially money-making venture NOT related to news. (Alan Mutter thinks it's worth a try, anyway -- http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2007/11/ventilating-chinese-wall.html).

From Tom Grubisich on December 9, 2008 at 12:00 PM

David’s article spotlights gathering efforts to keep information flowing as the lubricant of American democracy. I hope Information Valet’s conscientious, documented work will become more – much more – than a "white paper that doesn't get read,” to use the words of Paul Tash, chairman, CEO and editor of the St. Petersburg Times. Speaking at the recent Poynter Institute "Who Will Pay for the News?” conference, Tash said “journalism is shifting more from a business to a social mission,” according to a report on the meeting by Bill Densmore, the chief force behind Information Valet.

Tash is right about the shifting mission of journalism, but do newspapers understand that, and do they know how to meet the challenges of this new social mission? I see little evidence that the answer is yes to either question. Go to the websites that newspapers have created, and compare them on social stickiness to non-newspaper sites like Facebook.

The Internet revolution of the 21st century (“Web 2.0,” etc.) has given newspapers a wonderful opportunity to modernize and expand their 20th-century print-legacy communities. But beyond adopting some interactive bells and whistles, newspapers have not exploited that opportunity.

Newspaper websites could be mobilizing communities to make them, in a variety of ways, better places to live. If newspapers did that, they would be in a far better negotiating position to charge for their information-gathering services. But newspapers aren't doing that kind of mobilizing, even as communities everywhere are struggling with infrastructure needs and fragmented human resources.

Let me use one specific example. The Detroit Free Press recently published a special report on the plight of parent-less young boys in institutional foster care -- http://www.freep.com/section/SPECIAL0101. The Freep’s website was the perfect place to mobilize action to develop community solutions to find healthy, loving homes for these marooned boys. But, so far as I can see, that’s not happening. There have been (so far) 51 user comments on the special report, but only one official, from a nonprofit – the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform – participated. As a result, the dots between words and action go unconnected. The Free Press has failed to create a site that’s representative of the Detroit community.

I don’t want to beat up on the Freep. Other newspaper websites have also failed to create real communities, ceding their opportunities to pure-play social-networking sites that go from scratch to multi-million-dollar valuations in a few years. I’m not suggesting these pure-play sites are selflessly pursuing great social missions. They aren’t. But most of them understand how to create social stickiness, and some of them are producing admirable results. If newspapers continue to be non-players in building 21st-century communities, the pure plays will simply extend their reach, filling vacuums that newspapers not only ignore but don’t even seem to realize exist. We’ll achieve Paul Tash’s vision of journalism shifting to a social mission – but newspapers may not be part of the journalism or the vision.

From David Westphal on December 9, 2008 at 1:05 PM

As is his custom, Tom has hit the bulls-eye on one of the crucial issues facing newspapering. Will newspapers get with it, both in terms of technology and ideology, and create communities of interest and action that are unmatched in their hometowns? And I'm not so sure ideology isn't the biggest challenge. We mainstreamers are so tethered to the objectivity model in which we just tell the facts and then move on, that we're skittish about taking any further steps that look like advocacy.

In Tom's example, though, it's not really much of a step from reporting the facts to facilitating community solutions. The Freep story could stand for tens of thousands of newspaper investigations whose underlying premise was that we've uncovered an untenable situation that cries out for a remedy. How many more of them could have avoided the standard fate of oblivion had newspapers been able, and willing, to use modern networking tools to take further steps toward eliminating the problem? I wrote about this objectivity question in a somewhat different context for USC's Center on Communication Leadership.

As I indicated there, I have qualms about moving away from this model, but I have bigger ones about not taking the advice Tom offers to create robust communities of interest and action. The old framework of newsrooms reporting the facts and then washing hands needs some work.

From 12.205.120.48 on December 9, 2008 at 6:45 PM

How about Google News? It's free, too.

1)An Internet interface that would be a one-stop shop for all registrations on the Web (no more endless filling out of user-registration forms);

check

a trustworthy, safe and secure place where privacy worries would disappear;

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and a news and information site that would provide local news obtainable nowhere else.

check

From Aron Pilhofer on December 10, 2008 at 7:13 AM

Agreed, especially with more organizations providing full-text RSS feeds.

It sounds like he's trying to create something like a Facebook for news but with a subscriber model. Might work, but, again, lots of free options in this space -- including Facebook, which has a splendid API.

You should also check out Newsmix (http://newsmixer.us/), which launched yesterday. This is a class project by Rich Gordon's developer/journalist students at Medill, which mixes Facebook like sharing and commentary/conversation with news. (It actually uses Facebook Connect, as a matter of fact.)

A little rough around the edges right now, and it needs a bit of IA love. But it's an interesting idea along the lines of IVP, with tons of potential. There are bits and pieces of it I'd like to steal right now.

From David Westphal on December 10, 2008 at 3:35 PM

I ran across something Elizabeth Osder said at the Mizzou conference I thought was worth repeating. It kind of captures the IVP idea.

1. Citizens are hemorrhaging personal information on the Web.
2. Others are profiting from it.
3. Citizens need to gain control of that information.
4. Maybe there's a role for media companies to help them take back that information and get a slight profit.

And Aron, Newsmixer is a cool development. The Cedar Rapids Gazette's Steve Buttry was live tweeting a demo of it today.