“Now … we see why ‘who’s a journalist?’ is so wrong-headed,” tweets Jay Rosen in response to the news. Clay Shirky chimes in: “Bloggers have no right to speech unless they’re part of the ‘official media establishment’? Ethiopia,Belarus &…Oregon.”

I can’t tell from those tweets if they read the actual ruling, but I did — and it actually doesn’t seem that bad. Rather than representing a luddite judge’s ignorant dismissal of a new medium, the ruling seems to lay the groundwork for a fairly expansive legal definition of journalism.

In the ruling, Judge Marco A. Hernandez upholds a defamation claim against blogger Crystal Cox, rejecting Cox’s seven defense arguments. The initial journosphere reactions have focused on Hernandez’s rejection of two of those arguments: that Cox shouldn’t have to reveal the source of this column because she is protected by Oregon’s media shield law; and that Cox should be protected from damages claims because she is “media.” In both cases, Hernandez rejects the arguments on the grounds that Cox is not “media.”

Hernandez’s rejection of Cox’s shield law defense seems to rest on a literal reading of Oregon’s shield law, which applies to people affiliated with a “newspaper, magazine or other periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.”

Hernandez says, correctly, that Cox is not affiliated with any of the above; therefore she is not “media” according to Oregon’s law. It seems reasonable that the judge applied the law as written rather than expanding the interpretation of the law to include online media. If Oregon had updated its shield law to cover the Internet, as Washington state has done, perhaps Hernandez would have ruled differently.

But it’s Hernandez’s rejection of Cox’s second media defense that, to my mind, actually gives hope for future expanded legal definitions of “media” and “journalist”:

Defendant fails to bring forth any evidence suggestive of her status as a journalist. For example, there is no evidence of (1) any education in journalism; (2) any credentials or proof of any affiliation with any recognized news entity; (3) proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest; (4) keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted; (5) mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources; (6) creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others; or (7) contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story.

If Hernandez believed that you need to have a Columbia J-school degree or work at the New York Times to be considered a journalist, he would have stopped at No. 2. But he doesn’t stop there — instead, he offers five additional criteria that could define someone as a journalist. These criteria aren’t based on a credential or business card — or a particular medium — but on practices, values, and standards.

By doing this, the ruling smartly avoids saying “bloggers aren’t journalists.” It merely says “this blogger is not a journalist.” By listing criteria 3-7 and avoiding any mention of specific media, Hernandez is basically saying: “Bloggers may be journalists — but to be considered as such, they have to do something that could fit a standards/practices-based, medium-agnostic definition of journalism.”

It’s easy to quibble with Hernandez’s choice of canonized practices and standards (I can see some in the journosphere taking issue with No. 6 in particular) or say his criteria aren’t expansive enough. But to the extent that “journalist” and “media” need to be defined in the law, Hernandez’s approach seems like the right one. And his criteria seem as hopeful a starting point* as any.

—–

* Note: I’m not up to speed on other definition-of-journalist case law. I’m sure there have been other rulings that offer their own criteria for such definitions.

The Rising is a failure. It purports to document a nation’s rupture and guide us toward salvation—”here the poet, not unlike the priest and community during Mass, opens a window in space and time for communion with the dead themselves: the dead who alone, perhaps, can transform the rage of the living and awaken in us a vision of something more than more of the same,” is how one Catholic critic recently put it. You can almost feel the weight of Springsteen’s duty on the record—these are his people, these firefighters. This is his backyard. A nation turned its weary eyes to the Boss, and he keenly felt the need to answer. But the answer was overwrought, grandiose, bombastic. He went big. We didn’t need anymore big things.

Cook’s right that The Rising is a failure, but he doesn’t quite get at the reasons why. The Rising isn’t just big and overwrought. It’s lyrically vague to the point of being a 9/11 album in name only. Absent the marketing push that announced the album as Springsteen’s big 9/11 statement, The Rising could be interpreted as being about pretty much anything (or nothing at all).

I wrote about the Boss’s 9/11 dodge in a 2003 piece for the Valley News in New Hampshire. (It’s actually a section from a larger essay about that year’s Grammy Awards.) I think it holds up pretty well.

*****

From “Pop Go the Grammy Awards”; the Valley News, Feb. 20, 2003

When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band released The Rising last summer, it was greeted as the first response to Sept. 11, 2001, by a major artist. Kurt Loder, writing in Rolling Stone, took the lead in praising Springsteen for his approach to the attacks:

“The small miracle of his accomplishment is that at no point does he give vent to the anger felt by so many Americans: the hunger for revenge. The music is often fierce in its execution, but in essence it is a requiem for those who perished in that sudden inferno, and those who died trying to save them.”

But Loder ignores, as did many, that The Rising barely mentions Sept. 11 directly at all. By my count, there are two specific references: “The sky was falling and streaked with blood/I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into dust/Up the stairs, into the fire” (Into the Fire); “I never thought I’d live/To read about myself in my hometown paper/How my brave young life was forever changed/In a misty cloud of pink vapor” (Nothing Man). One song is about a suicide bomber, but doesn’t refer to Sept. 11 itself.

Otherwise, the album is one rousing, generic chorus after another, with alternating images of doom and perseverance — “Blood on the streets/Blood flowin’ down,” “With these hands, with these hands,/I pray for your faith, Lord” — that could apply to just about anything. The lyrics are often so banal that they don’t even support the album’s ostensible theme of hope in the face of unimaginable tragedy: “I’m waitin’, waitin’ on a sunny day/Gonna chase the clouds away/Waitin’ on a sunny day”; “I’m countin’ on a miracle/Baby I’m countin’ on a miracle/Darlin’ I’m countin’ on a miracle/To come through”; “Empty sky, empty sky/I woke up this morning to an empty sky”; “Come on, rise up! (8x)”

Of course, as a friend pointed out, it wouldn’t have worked had Springsteen written songs with lyrics like, “And when those planes crashed into the two towers, I remember how I felt.” That’s the approach Alan Jackson took with Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning), with predictably syrupy results. But, however clumsy, Jackson at least approached Sept. 11 straight on.

Jim Dwyer, a New York Times reporter, wrote about the aftermath of the attacks by focusing on specific details and letting them speak for themselves. A man finds a photograph in the rubble belonging to someone he knew but hadn’t seen in a decade, who had escaped the falling towers. A woman who walked home through clouds of pulverized-glass dust finds, later that night, “a plastic cup that had been full of water when someone — a stranger, she doesn’t know who — handed it to her as she passed the restaurant supply district along the Bowery.”

Such specificity is nowhere to be found on The Rising. Likewise missing are more general issues of religious fundamentalism, root causes of support for international terrorism or the nature of revenge.

Springsteen, instead, wants to have it both ways: seeming to respond in a mature, nonjingoistic manner while not actually addressing anything at all. His words, in their lack of detail — and, in the case of several party/love songs, their randomness — ultimately refer to nothing. Meanwhile, the music is unabashedly rousing, catchy and anthemic, like Springstenn’s Born in the U.S.A. — but, Ronald Reagan’s misunderstanding notwithstanding, lacking that song’s sense of anger and despair.

Far from being the clear-eyed Sept. 11 album it’s made out to be, The Rising is just a hummable, feel-good arena-rock record.

The overriding impression I carried away from my … visit was that, although it all comes back to taste at PepsiCo, the physical sensation of tasting has been so thoroughly mediated by advertising and packaging that no one knows anymore where the physiologoical experience ends and the aspirational experience begins. It’s hard to guarantee the “same great taste” in a scientifically advantaged product when no one is sure just what that taste is.

– John Seabrook, on PepsiCo’s attempts to reduce salt and sugar levels in its snacks without changing the taste. (The article is available online for subscribers only.)

Natalie Portman did the Black Swan dancing :: Tom Cruise did his own stunts :: Avril Lavigne wrote her own songs

One of my favorite show-business lies is the “[big star X] did [obviously untrue feat Y]” claim, used to establish a star’s talent, grit, or authenticity.

Via EW, I see that we have a new entry in this storied marketing approach: the “Natalie Portman did basically all the dancing in Black Swan” claim. Apparently Portman’s body double Sarah Lane is causing problems for this strategy, pointing out that Lane — a professional ballet dancer rather than a dilettante actor — did the dancing:

“Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie,” says Sarah Lane, 27, an American Ballet Theatre soloist who performed many of the film’s complicated dance sequences, allowing Portman’s face to be digitally grafted onto her body. “All the other shots are me.” …

“They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” says Lane.

I haven’t seen Black Swan and don’t really care whether Portman did the dancing. But despite Darren Aronofsky’s defense of Portman, I would bet a lot of money that Lane is telling the truth. This is just how the entertainment hype machine works.

My favorite example of the phenomenon was the mid-aughts hyping of then-teenager Avril Lavigne as a totally real pop star who totally wrote her own songs!!! (Even though professional songwriting teams and session musicians clearly wrote the songs and played the music.) Edward Jay Epstein describes another example in The Big Picture, his terrific 2005 book detailing the marketing-and-publicist-driven reality of today’s Hollywood. It’s worth quoting at length:

The studio begins its marketing effort as soon as a project receives a green light. … The principal awareness instrument that the publicists have at their disposal, obviously, is the public reputation of the film’s stars. As part of their arrangement with the studios, the stars effectively allow the studios to use their reputations to publicize their films. To this end, the studios script “back stories” that merge the stars’ activities, real or invented, with those of the characters they play in the films. …

Consider Mission: Impossible II. … A back story was … scripted in which [Tom] Cruise was seen to be indistinguishable from Ethan Hunt, the acrobatic hero he played, via the claim that he, and not a stunt double, had done the free falls, fire walks, motorcycle leaps, and other perilous stunts that Hunt did in the movie.

This back story was keynoted in a publicity short, Mission Incredible, shown on MTV and other cable channels owned by Paramount’s corporate parent. Made in the style of a documentary in which the crew and cast of Mission Impossible are interviewed, it has the director, John Woo, expressing great fear that Tom Cruise would plunge to his death in leaps across mountaintops or be incinerated in fire scenes. Woo states, at one point, “Tom has no fear. I prayed for him.” In another publicity short, Woo says, “Tom Cruise does most of his own stunts, so we did not need a stunt double.”

In the actual production, there were at least six stunt doubles for Tom Cruise’s part. Even if Cruise had possessed the skills and training to the stunts himself, and even if the studio was not to object to the delays in shooting this conceit might cause, the insurance company, which insured Cruise as an “essential element” of the production, would not have allowed him to risk so much as an ankle sprain, much less his life. As far as this publicity script diverged from reality, however, it served its purpose by providing a plausible story for the entertainment meda — “Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt,” and a tag line, “Expect the impossible again.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Surefire Comic Book Hit!!!

The Black Swan tale doesn’t reflect on EW as a publication. Alas, their cover-story exclusive on Arnold Schwarzenneger’s post-governor plans is a bit more embarrassing.

The big news is that Schwarzenegger is teaming up with comics legend Stan Lee to develop the Governator, “a sunglasses-wearing superhero with an Austrian accent who’ll be at the center of an ambitious, kid-friendly multimedia comic-book and animated TV series codeveloped by no less a hero maker than Stan Lee.”

If this story were more than a publicist-hatched marketing plan, it might have pointed out that:

• Stan Lee’s main contributions to comics and pop culture came in the 1960s and ’70s. His later career does not inspire breathless fandom.
• The pinup drawing of the Governator — featured on a fold-out cover — is straight out of the Rob Liefeld school of bad ’90s comics art:

• This photo of Schwarzenegger and Lee couldn’t be more staged:

• The idea is terrible! Here’s Stan Lee: “We’re using all the personal elements of Arnold’s life. We’re using his wife [Maria Shriver]. We’re using his kids. We’re using the fact that he used to be governor. Only after he leaves the governor’s office, Arnold decides to become a crime fighter and builds a secret high-tech crimefighting control center under his house in Brentwood.” Um, have they focus-grouped this? Do they really think Maria Shriver and gubernatorial experience resonate with kids?

I’m happy to be proven wrong; kids have made successes out of far worse artwork and concepts. But Schwarzenegger’s publicist deserves a huge bonus for getting an EW cover out of this lame plan.

[David] Miscavige’s official title is chairman of the board of the Religious Technology Center, but he dominates the entire organization. His word is absolute, and he imposes his will even on some of the people closest to him. According to Rinder and Brousseau, in June, 2006, while Miscavige was away from the Gold Base, his wife, Shelly, filled several job vacancies without her husband’s permission. Soon afterward, she disappeared. Her current status is unknown. [Scientology spokesman] Tommy Davis told me, “I definitely know where she is,” but he won’t disclose where that is.

– Lawrence Wright, “The Apostate.” (Emphasis added. See also this previous post on Scientology’s Dear Leader complex.)

I thought of Ironhead last month as well, while standing in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel, where a special meeting of the league’s Head, Neck, and Spine Injury committee was convening in one of the function rooms. Bert Straus, an industrial designer with a background in bathroom fixtures, dental-office equipment, and light-rail vehicles, was showing off a prototype of a new helmet called the Gladiator, whose primary selling point is that it has a soft exterior.

– Ben McGrath, “Does Football Have a Future?”  Emphasis mine: I love that there are industrial designers who specialize in bathroom fixtures, dental-office equipment, and light-rail vehicles. This guy must be pretty unique to know about all three. (Also — interesting article.)

On February 11, 2004, he made a presentation to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the Army’s premier laboratory for biodefense research. Hours later, a researcher at Fort Detrick accidentally stuck herself in the thumb with a needle while injecting mice with the Ebola virus. Ebola has gruesome symptoms that often cause the victim to bleed to death; there is no licensed vaccine or therapeutic drug to stop it.

– David E. Hoffman, “Going Viral” (subscriber-only). Emphasis mine: How can you work with live Ebola virus and not a) wear mithril gloves, or b) be extra careful so you don’t inject yourself with Ebola??? (Another interesting article.)

Chris O’Brien of the San Jose Mercury News has launched NewsTopiaville, an interesting project that will “explore how game mechanics can be applied to reinvent the way we produce, consume and interact with news.” The project is ambitious, interesting, and worthwhile.

But I want to clarify something about the term “game mechanics,” which I think is being misused — or at least oversimplified — in the gamification discussion. Without understanding the term’s fuller context, there’s a risk of masking the challenges of gamifying the news.

In the gamification discussion, “game mechanics” typically refers to (in O’Brien’s words) “features like leaderboards, progress bars, rewards, badges, and virtual goods.”

These are indeed game mechanics; I would categorize them as “motivational” or “psychological” mechanics.* (UPDATE: See footnote for another definition.) They can be a big part of what makes people keep playing a video game — what makes us want to play for just five more minutes (which inevitably turns into two hours) to reach the next goal.

But motivational mechanics are not the only kind of game mechanics.

The other major bucket of game mechanics is what is typically referred to as “gameplay.”* In the recent Grand Theft Auto games, for example, gameplay mechanics include:

• Players can explore a large area in a somewhat unordered fashion, rather than being confined to a small space and a prescribed, linear set of tasks.
• Players can drive cars or walk around the game world.
• Players view the game world from a “third-person” point of view, with the camera showing the player’s avatar from a vantage point above and behind the avatar (as opposed to the “first-person” point of view of the Call of Duty games, where the camera shows what the player’s avatar sees).
• Players can punch enemies, pick up knives/bats and swing them at enemies, or pick up guns and shoot enemies.

Gameplay mechanics define a game. They are the game, the play: how you move, what you see, what you do. And while games may be fun or successful partially because of leaderboards or badges,  they’re also — I would say primarily — fun because they are games. Because of the gameplay mechanics.

Wii Sports, for example, is awesome not because of avatars, progress tracking after each game, and the like. It’s awesome at base because of the central gameplay mechanics: You bowl by making a bowling motion rather than by pressing a series of buttons! The gameplay is what makes the game fun.**

But — back to NewsTopiaville — news does not have gameplay mechanics. For most people, consuming news is not fun.

Now, the subjects, activities, and behaviors that have been targeted for gamification — personal health, online profile completion, personal energy use, local-business marketing, personal finance — generally aren’t fun, either. Like news, they lack gameplay mechanics. So the gamification discussion necessarily focuses on how motivational mechanics can be applied to these areas.

There’s clearly huge potential in applying motivational mechanics to not-fun activities. And while smart journo-folks may be able to do for news what Opower is doing for home energy use or what Foursquare is doing for patronizing local businesses, the discussion should start by fully understanding the challenges ahead.

So here’s the challenge, restated more bluntly:

For most people, consuming news is not fun. And news does not have inherent gameplay game mechanics — the core type of game mechanics that make video games fun. Given this, how can motivational game mechanics be used to make news consumption more engaging and/or to get people to consume more news?

Now I wish Chris O’Brien and everyone else in this game the best of luck, and hope I can add some useful ideas along the way.

——

* I’m not sure if there are formal terms for what I call motivational and gameplay game mechanics. I’d be interested to see if/how the nomenclature is formalized in Byron Reeves’ “Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete,” for example, which O’Brien cites as an ur-text on gamification.

UPDATE: This terrific Slideshare by Sebastian Deterding, “Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents,” makes the case that what I call motivational game mechanics  aren’t game mechanics so much as just “gamy patterns of feedback design.” I think I might agree, but without doing a deep dive into other gamification writings, I’m not going to update my main post to reflect this just yet. In any case, this Slideshare is a must-read if you’re interested in gamification. (Found via Marcus Bosch’s excellent gamification primer.)

** Motivational and gameplay mechanics have always been blended to varying degrees. In the original Super Mario Bros., for example, it’s fun to hit “question mark” blocks and otherwise find coins (gameplay mechanic); it’s addicting to try to collect 100 coins to get a 1-Up (motivational mechanic). In the God of War games, it’s fun to use different button combinations to kill enemies in different ways (gameplay); it’s addicting to see the number of strung-together hits displayed on-screen and try to top your last number (motivational).

While I haven’t played Zynga’s Facebook games (FarmVille, CityVille, etc.) my understanding of their genius/deviousness is that they’ve used Facebook’s social aspects to blur the line between motivational and gameplay mechanics to an unprecedented degree. Or maybe they’ve discovered that Facebook’s social aspects represent a kind of hypermotivational game mechanic.

Either way, the underlying gameplay mechanics still have to be compelling enough in order for the social-motivational mechanics to work.

Figuring out how to better serve local businesses and connect those businesses to readers is a big part of local news organizations’ hopes and ideas for making money online.

Facebook’s Deals platform, announced in November, was a blow to these hopes. Now Groupon has piled on with its Groupon Stores platform.

Here’s what Groupon Stores offers:

Businesses can now create and launch their own deals whenever they want. Think of it as the online equivalent of a merchant’s physical storefront. Merchants can now:

• Setup a permanent (and free!) e-commerce presence on Groupon for promoting their business.
• Create their own offers to run deals whenever they want.
• Submit deals to be promoted to Groupon subscribers through email and the Deal Feed (explained below).
• Get customers to follow their Groupon Store, and stay in touch by sending messages through the daily email and deal feed.

Groupon takes a 10 percent cut of deals sold through this platform without its promotional help, and a 30 percent cut of such deals that it promotes. (Groupon takes a 50 percent cut of its bread-and-butter deals-of-the-day.)

Facebook Deals, meanwhile, is free.

What can a news organization offer a local business to top these platforms? It’s not like businesses will be lacking an audience through the platforms, since the entire universe uses Facebook and a growing number of desireable-demographic folks use Groupon.

If Groupon adds aggregation of restaurant reviews, Better Business Bureau rankings, and the like, it’ll have local-business content that equals or is better than that of most news orgs.

No wonder Google is willing to spend $6 billion to get in on that.

Journalists should read and heed everything Bradshaw writes. But it’s important to make sure the discussion of data doesn’t get too narrowly confined to external data, without considering how journalism itself fits holistically into the data-centric future.

The big challenge for news organizations isn’t just how to better ingest, analyze, and present extant external (if sometimes hard-to-access) data sets. Inculcating a new skill set industrywide may be non-trivial as a matter of scale and institutional-cultural inertia, but at least that skill set is pretty well defined.

Rather, the trickier and less-addressed challenge for news organizations is how to turn the raw materials and finished products of non-database journalism into data.

While Bradshaw begins by defining data broadly as “information that can be processed by computers,” he mostly talks about one specific type of data: spreadsheets and databases containing digitized government and organizational information.

Emphases mine:

The growth of the spreadsheet and the database from the 1960s onwards kicked things off by making it much easier for organisations — including governments –to digitise information, from what they spent our money on to how many people were being treated for which diseases, and where. …

The open data movement campaigns for important information — such as government spending, scientific information and maps — to be made publicly available. …

That means, for instance, a computer can see that the director of a company named in a particular government contract is the same person who was paid as a consultant on a related government policy document. …

Concrete results of both movements can be seen in the US and UK — most visibly with the launch of government data repositories Data.gov and Data.gov.uk in 2009 and 2010 respectively — but also less publicised experiments such as “Where Does My Money Go?“, which uses data to show how public expenditure is distributed, and “Mapumen-tal,” which combines travel data, property prices and public ratings of ‘scenicness’ to help show at a glance which areas of a city might be the best place to live based on individual requirements. …

While government and organizational stats and data sets will be a huge part of journalism’s future, they very likely won’t be the only part — particularly for local news organizations. What Bradshaw refers to as the “base metals” of traditional journalism — “eyewitness accounts and interviews … official reports, research papers” — aren’t going away.

Neither are news organizations’ ever-growing repositories of information about local businesses and people, sports, recreation, travel, entertainment, things to do, etc.

News organizations will best set themselves up for the future if journalists become more skilled at handling external data AND if traditional narrative journalism itself is data-fied (along with the non-narrative information mentioned above).

This isn’t a new idea; Adrian Holovaty, Dan Conover, and Stijn Debrouwere, among others, have been fleshing out this line of thinking for several years. But (generalization alert!) somewhere along the way, the journalism-as-structured-data discussion seems to have been overtaken by the journalists-as-processors-of-external-data one.

I thought about this divergent discussion while reading Mindy McAdams’ recent lament about lack of innovation in mobile/iPad news apps (emphases hers):

I have yet to see an app from any news organization — for a phone or the iPad — that spells innovation. Steve [Yelvington] refers to “completely new information experiences that don’t even vaguely resemble old products,” but whatever these are, I have not seen them.

I agree with McAdams as far as that goes, just as I agree with Bradshaw. But there’s an obvious reason why we haven’t seen “completely new information experiences” in news apps: there’s currently little “completely new information” being created that could power such apps.

After all, there’s a limit to how innovative front-end wizardry can be on its own. There are only so many ways to present largely unstructured stories, blog posts, photos, and videos  – still the vast majority of content produced by news organizations.

Getting to a point where news orgs routinely produce structured (or semi-structured) data — what Conover calls the Informatics Scenario — will require new tools, CMSes, processes, culture, knowledge. You know, no big whoop.

But we shouldn’t let this scenario’s difficulty/unlikelihood turn into a blind spot.

It gave me visions of political news stories that provide context not just about the issue at hand, but also context about the people at hand.

(Also, it gave me the vapors. But mostly just visions.)

Here’s one vision:

On TV, political debates display a fact-check tally for each candidate (how many true, truthy, lying-liar, etc. statements each candidate has made). Fact-check details about a particular statement are displayed as soon as they’re available.

No more useless meters showing allegedly uncommitted voters’ emotional reactions:

Instead, imagine if the debate screen looked like this (well, imagine a non-crappy-mockup version that looked vaguely like this):

Here’s another vision:

Online, any streamed speech, debate, or hearing displays a combination of fact-checking material, aggregated contextual material, real-time commentary and public reaction. Any story or video that mentions politicians displays some combination of:

• Fact-checking details for that person’s recent statements (any of their statements and/or recent statements related to the story being viewed)
• Campaign contributions to that person from individuals/organizations related to the story’s subject.
• The candidate’s biggest contributors (individuals/organizations and industries).
• Lobbying information for the person and/or their staffers
• If in office, recent votes the person has taken related to the story’s subject.
• Biographical information about the person.

Now here’s the great thing about these visions: The Sunlight Foundation and PolitiFact have pretty much already fulfilled them!

Start with televised/streaming video of political events. The Sunlight Foundation won the top Knight-Batten award for its awesome Sunlight Live platform, which combines on a single page a live video feed, a live blog, a Twitter stream, curated resources, and rotating, contextually relevant premade data sets — for example, listing the campaign contributions of the person speaking. (Here’s a brief demo of Sunlight Live, and a recap of Sunlight Live’s coverage of the February bipartisan health summit.)

Sunlight’s executive director, Ellen Miller, announced in her acceptance speech that Sunlight Live will be open-sourced — so any and every news site should try to use it for national, state, and/or local political coverage. It seems that an open-source Sunlight Live could also be used by the networks for their TV coverage, but if not they should be able to come up with their own stripped-down versions.

Meanwhile, PolitiFact won a Knight-Batten Special Distinction award for its Obameter, which tracks how well President Obama has lived up to his campaign promises. The Obameter and PolitiFact’s bread-and-butter Truth-O-Meter fact-checking model (which won a previous Knight-Batten award, not to mention a Pulitzer Prize) should become the standard for routine political coverage across the country. Indeed, newspapers in eight states have licensed PolitiFact for their own coverage.

Combining Sunlight Live with the PolitiFact approach would make live coverage of speeches, debates, and hearings infinitely more useful. Much of what’s said in these events has already been said elsewhere, so previous fact-check items could be pumped in in real time. New statements that can be preliminarily fact-checked in near-real-time could be displayed on-screen as soon as they’re checked. And a tally of the veracity of any speaker’s statements to that point would help viewers judge the debate on more than style points.

One of the TV networks should take a chance and try this out. ABC News already has PolitiFact fact-checking This Week, so maybe they’d be up for it.

Now consider how the Sunlight Foundation’s and PolitiFact’s tools and/or approaches could improve online political coverage.

Sunlight offers a cool tool called Poligraft that parses a text story and automatically generates information on contributions and lobbying for the politicians and political groups mentioned. Poligraft has an API, so it seems that any news organization could use the tool to parse its own stories and add the Poligraft-generated information to a story’s page.

Sunlight has another awesome tool called Politiwidgets — 10 javascript widgets, each detailing various information about members of Congress, that anyone can embed on their site. There’s already an impressive array of info available in these widgets — contact info, voting record, top contributors, earmark info — with more on the way.

PolitiFact also offers embeddable widgets, which display Truth-O-Meter or Obameter rulings and link back to the full PolitiFact item. As PolitiFact’s national operation covers more and more politicians’ statements, and as the state PolitiFacts add state and local politicians to the growing fact-checking database, the widgets could become even more useful. At some point, there should be enough location- and person-specific items for PolitiFact to offer more granular widgets, for example a Truth-O-Meter widget for only Georgia’s governor or for only Florida’s senators.

All of these tools are great ways to add a particular kind of context to political stories. We often talk about context in terms of policy — for example, providing readers with more explainers about the health care system. This is very important and worthwhile, but it’s also important to provide context and details about the politicians who shape these policies.

Every news organization should think about incorporating the Sunlight Foundation and PolitiFact widgets and data into their political coverage. Every TV network should think about incorporating the organizations’ tools and approach into their coverage of live political events.

And the potential for better political coverage all around should give journalists and civic-minded people everywhere the vapors.

Disclosures and notes: My employer, Publish2, received a 2010 Knight-Batten Special Distinction award. I used to work at the St. Petersburg Times, which created and runs PolitiFact, and I wrote two PF items while I was there. In the CNN mockup: the background has been manipulated for mockup purposes; the fact check text is lifted from this PF item; and I chose names for truthiness levels that are an homage to but slightly different from PF’s to show that this can be done without licensing PF (though I think it would be great if all news organizations licensed PF).