Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Center for Public Integrity Wins Polk Award Long Island University has named the Center for Public Integrity winner of the first George Polk Award for Internet Reporting for Windfalls of War, a six-month excavation of American postwar contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The Polk awards are among the top prizes in American journalism, named for a CBS slain in the line of duty.) The Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit, non-partisan institute dedicated to investigative reporting, filed 73 Freedom of Information Act requests in pursuit of its study and put a staff of 20 to work on the project. It's not over yet: Charles Lewis, executive director, said the center is still in federal court suing the State Department and the Army Corps of Engineers. Among the "Windfalls" findings: More than 70 American companies and individuals had won up to $8 billion in federal contracts Those companies had donated over $500,000 to the Bush presidential campaign, more than they gave to any other politician over the last dozen years Nearly every one of the 10 largest contracts went to companies employing former high-ranking government officials or individuals with close ties to those agencies or Congress. The Online Journalism Review has an interview with Lewis, including much more about the Center's history and projects. See the Center's own site, publicintegrity.org, for the latest news and its book-length reports, including Lewis's The Buying of the President 2004, already looking at Sen. John Kerry's financial contributors. 8:56:33 PM    comment [] Building Better Blogging Tools Both Dave Winer of Scripting News and Howard Rheingold at SmartMobs have launched great discussions of blogging tools this week, inviting suggestions for improvements to the software bloggers and blog readers use. Winer posted his request as part of the buildup for Bloggercon at Harvard on April 17 and collected more than 100 reader comments in a day. Rheingold's question was timely, "Why are all blog commenting tools braindead?" A veteran of message boards and weblogs, he would like to see blog comment systems with more discussion-board features, to "enable many people to discuss many topics with many other people over many days, weeks, and months," including subscribing to comment threads no matter how old they are. In Howard's discussion, Dave posted a link to an alternate view of his own discussion thread to show some of the flexibility that's already possible, including comments on comments. That's one thing I'd like to see more of -- opening channels back and forth between healthy discussions. In fact, that alternate view of the comment database comes close to another improvement I mentioned in the discussion. The Poynter Institute made a valiant attempt when it set up a blog for its Narrative Journalism conference at Harvard couple of months ago. The sponsors were open to suggestions (I made some); the staff built a category-oriented commenting system, participants were hundreds of articulate writers, and the formal presenters were brilliant. BUT an online conversation that could have gone on for months faded in a week or two. Among things to blame: difficulty getting started as a contributor, and a snowstorm that probably gave folks other things to deal with immediately after the conference weekend. By then it was end-of-semester panic for any academic participants. 8:26:01 PM    comment [] Paint By Issues. VoteByIssue.org, a collaboration between WBUR and PBS, has retooled its quiz to reflect the much-downsized Democratic candidate pool. You go through fourteen issues and choose which quotes appeal to you the most, and at the end, the site tells you... [STUMP: media and politics] 6:44:13 PM    comment []

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