There’s been lots written about “citizen journalism” or “networked journalism” or “open-source journalism,” an idea that Jay Rosen is trying to turn into a business of sorts with NewAssignment.net, but it’s difficult to come up with concrete examples of it. Tom Evslin at Fractals of Change has a good one though.
As Tom mentions, “the subject wasn’t earth-shattering; no mighty will be toppled by these revelations; no regimes will change; but the process was interesting.” It involved a story by David Pogue at the New York Times about a company called Future Phone, which offers free calls to landline numbers in over 50 countries with no obvious revenue model.
David didn’t really look into how this was possible, so readers and bloggers did it for him. One of those bloggers was Tom Evslin (a fomer telecom exec who founded AT&T WorldNet), who posted some of the results of his investigation. Alec Saunders of iotum in Ottawa also wrote about it on his blog.
They, along with several commenters on their blogs with knowledge of the telecom business, confirmed that the service used an Iowa number, and that lots of free phone services do the same because telephone companies get paid abnormally high “termination fees” for calls into the state, much higher than the charges they pay for calls out of the state to overseas numbers. Therein lies a business.
Again — not an earth-shattering development, but interesting nonetheless. A newspaper columnist started the story, and bloggers and knowledgeable commenters advanced it. That’s networked journalism.
Update:
David Pogue updates his column, taking note of Alec Saunders’ blog and some of the speculation. Doesn’t mention Tom Evslin at all, surprisingly.