Here’s an overview of some of the first reactions to what we like to call P2X:

Publish2′s News Exchange Aims to Help News Outlets Cut Ties to AP
Poynter | June 1, 2010

“If his service does what he says it does,” said [Roger Plothow, editor and publisher of the Post-Register in Idaho Falls and one of the more vocal would-be AP dropouts], “I’ll be lining up for it and so will a lot of other people.”

While the AP may be the great white whale for new media enthusiasts, it will keep swimming around the ocean for some time to come. But credit Karp and company with a well-aimed harpoon.

Publish2′s Ryan Sholin: “We did not set out to kill the Associated Press”
Nieman Journalism Lab | May 28, 2010

What the News Exchange and its creators do want, Sholin said, is to broaden the ecosystem of access when it comes to the wire content available to newspapers.

Publish2 Wants To Disrupt The Associated Press With An Online News Exchange
TechCrunch | May 24, 2010

Publish2 is taking a swing at the newswire mammoth – they un-lovingly call it an inefficient monopoly – by launching a platform that allows newspaper publishers and other media organizations tap the vast amount of quality content already available for free on the Web (we don’t mean to brag, but TechCrunch was one of the examples cited by the startup on stage).

Publish2 takes a swing at the AP with News Exchange
Romenesko | May 25, 2010

Publish2 is launching a platform that allows newspaper publishers and media organizations tap the vast amount of quality content already available for free on the Web.

Publish2′s News Exchange offers great promise for journalists
LoganMolen.com | May 24, 2010

After using News Exchange for a few days — and quite a bit today — I can safely say it brings a whole new mindset to how media organizations can share, pursue and purchase content. I’ve worked with Associated Press content and tools since I was a college student in the 1980s and my first impressions of News Exchange last week were, “Wow, this is a game changer.”

Publish2 News Exchange launches: Competition for AP’s market?
Knight Digital Media Center | May 27, 2010

If this technical integration actually performs well, that’s pretty important. Many news organizations face increasingly constrained options because they rely on entrenched, large, hard-to-update, print-focused content management systems. These systems are typically very picky about content formats. It often takes time and effort to integrate content produced by more modern CMSs into these systems—at least, if you want to run that content in print, rather than online only.

Buried in a local paper: a glimpse of the future of journalism
The Independent | June 12, 2010

Is this kind of exchange the key to reshaping the newspaper industry and putting it on a sounder footing? I think so.

Finally, A Smart Alternative to the AP
Breaking Media | June 8, 2010

In 2010, it’s pretty clear that the real associated press is comprised of thousands of strong credible voices breaking news and doing sharp analysis on any topic you can name.

Publish2 wants to take content distribution away from the AP
VentureBeat | May 24, 2010

Rather than purchasing content from the AP, the Publish2 News Exchange connects web publishers with print publishers to distribute content to anyone at anytime. The web publishers benefit by having their brand syndicated in print.

Publish2: Another Online Threat To AP
MediaPost | May 25, 2010

The News Exchange expedites the process by handling the logistics of file transfers, graphics and tailored story formatting. It can also automatically import syndicated digital content to the print editions of newspapers.

Publish2: pivoting, thinking big, and identifying the enemy
Darryl Siry’s posterous | May 25, 2010

I like this move for a couple of reasons. Publish2 is thinking really big. Of course thinking big comes with skeptics who will ridicule the ambitions of the startup, but that is the nature of startups that ultimately disrupt the big incumbents. They are never viewed as a threat when they are starting out.

ClaraJeffery: Congrats to our friends @publish2. They make good things happen.

jayrosen_nyu: You know what Publish2′s News Exchange is, really? An extension into print of “do what you do best and link to the rest.”http://jr.ly/3tvz

erikgable: Intrigued by @Publish2 News Exchange and its potential for making our content-sharing agreements more effective.

Publish2 Aims to Oust the Associated Press
Mashable | May 27, 2010

The News Exchange enables newspapers to replace AP content subscriptions with web content, and in exchange web producers are able to showcase their brands in print. As Karp points out, print publishing and distribution still drive newspaper operations, even its web production, which sometimes is nothing more than a dumping ground for stories from the day’s paper.

emilybell: More inventive than a paywall? @scottkarp on a new model AP http://bit.ly/bueqaD

Publish2 Takes on the Associated Press with News Sharing Service
Folio Magazine | May 25, 2010

According to CEO Scott Karp, News Exchange gives publishers a legitimate content sharing alternative to the AP, a cooperative he calls an “obsolete inefficient monopoly, ripe for disruption.”

stephromanski: Passing on Publish2′s newswire announcement to my publisher.

Publish2 News Exchange Takes Aim at AP
MediaBistro | May 24, 2010

OK, perhaps the new Web-content aggregator’s stated goal of “disrupting the Associated Press monopoly over content distribution to newspapers” is a bit lofty, but hey, might as well aim high, right?

Publish2 aims to supplant the Associated Press, reinvent the news exchange with ‘P2X’
BrianManzullo.com | May 25, 2010

The more I think about it, the more intrigued I am about this development. Why? Not necessarily because of how much money it could save news companies (although that’d be a huge plus, if P2X can develop a thriving web of news organizations and blogs). Instead, I’m thinking about how much more efficient content sharing can be between news organizations, and how much more vibrant their products can be because of that.

jdcoffman: @rbole the Publish2 release today looks to be absolutely perfect for #pubmedia public affairs needs — truly amazing.

Publish2 bids to disrupt content syndication with News Exchange service
eMedia Vitals | May 26, 2010

One feature of News Exchange that fell under the radar at TechCrunch is a story ideas database – basically an RFP for story assignments. Editors can post a request for coverage; other members can respond with an existing article or a commitment to write something.

catecorcoran: Add a payment system, and Publish2 could be a price discovery mechanism for original reporting #sm #media #tcdisrupt

mrosas: I absolutely adore what @publish2 is doing for news … disruption indeed http://tcrn.ch/cQb3PY

This Week in Review: Facebook’s privacy tweak, old and new media’s links, and the AP’s new challenger
Nieman Journalism Lab | May 28, 2010

It’s rare that we see such a bold, explicit attempt to take down such an established news organization, so this will doubtless be a project to keep a close eye on.

***

Thanks to everyone who has asked us great questions and offered their feedback so far.

We want to know what you think! Find us here, on Twitter, or at contact@publish2.com for more information, to send your feedback, or to fire off a few good questions.

New to Publish2? Register here to get started.

I recently led a session on this at BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly. It began with a brainstorming discussion on different types of thinking, which were mapped in the graphic below. My Publish2 colleague, Lauren Rabaino, also took extensive notes (there’s summary of coverage at the end of this post).

Mindmap by Aram Zucker-Scharff

My interest in different types of “thinking” came as I researched computational thinking, a concept outlined by Jeannette Wing, then a professor at Carnegie Mellon. This term “represents a universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use,” she says.

Wing, now at the National Science Foundation, said in her 2006 article:

“Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Computational thinking includes a range of mental tools that reflect the breadth of the field of computer science.”

Some “everyday examples” of computational thinking that she outlines include:

“When your daughter goes to school in the morning, she puts in her backpack the things she needs for the day; that’s prefetching and caching. When your son loses his mittens, you suggest he retrace his steps; that’s backtracking. At what point do you stop renting skis and buy yourself a pair?; that’s online algorithms. Which line do you stand in at the supermarket?; that’s performance modeling for multi-server systems. Why does your telephone still work during a power outage?; that’s independence of failure and redundancy in design…”

A few days after BCNI Philly, I came across a May 2009 piece by Kim Pearson that relates the concept to journalism. In it she articulates some insightful points, including that “computational thinking is more than digital literacy.” Also,

“I’m not saying that journalists need to become programmers. I’m saying that we need to be able to reason abstractly about what we do, understand the full palette of computational tools at our disposal, and collaborate to deploy those tools with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.”

This ties in to something I said at the session, in response to a comment about what it means to bring computational thinking to journalism: It’s not about turning the reporting process into a rigid, scientific formula — journalism incorporates both art and science. It’s about taking the concepts, ideas, practices, etc. from different areas of thinking — including computation — and applying them to do better journalism.

There’s so much more that could be done — and at a more fundamental level — to improve our journalism with this additional way of thinking. Though he doesn’t identify it specifically, computational thinking is very much at the heart of the ideas outlined by Stijn Debrouwere in  We’re in the information business and the rest of his series on information architecture for news):

“Let’s not kid ourselves. A new way of doing journalism requires new technology to support and foster that innovation. That technology should reach right into the core of our journalistic endeavors, not just touch the periphery…”

And a new way of doing journalism means incorporating new ways of thinking.

(To simplify things below, I use the titles “journalist” and “programmer” below to describe a primary role. Of course, a journalist can be a programmer and a programmer can be a journalist.)

In addition to computational thinking, another important point that came out of the BCNI session is that communication and collaboration between journalists and programmers needs to improve so we can build the necessary tools to do better journalism. Understanding computational thinking is one step, but it would also be beneficial for journalists to understand more specific programming concepts. Again, not all journalists necessarily need know how to program (though we do need more journalists who know code and I, as someone learning more coding skills, would highly recommend journalists learn as much as they can).

Put another way, it would help journalists to understand the similarities between programming and journalism. As a personal example, when I served as editor of The Miami Hurricane, one of our best copy editors — by chance — was the webmaster, Brian Schlansky. I eventually realized the reason: he was accustomed to staring at lines of code and searching for errors, akin to a copy editor.

Here some commonalities I’ve drawn between journalism and programming:

• Abstraction: My colleague Daniel Bachhuber verbalized this well: This means breaking something down into discrete elements. In the context of journalism, it means breaking things down into concrete questions and then finding the answers, which you can compose in some fashion.
• Defining your variables or functions: Programming involves defining variables and functions to quickly and efficiently reference something without redundancy (ideally). As the saying goes, “don’t repeat yourself” (usually abbreviated as DRY). This is just like journalism. For example, if you’re writing about a fire, you need to explain the who, what, when, where, why, how, etc. “variables” so people understand what you mean later on when you reference “the fire.” Also, when you mention something related to the subject matter and link to more background or context. The DRY (unnecessarily) principle also applies to journalism.
• Debugging: This process of locating and correcting errors in a code is similar to copyediting (think for the webmaster-copy editor example).
• Bug and error reporting: When my browser crashes, it gives me the option to send an error report. When someone catches a factual error, we ask them to let us know. These two concepts already intersect with Scott Rosenberg’s MediaBugs, which launched in beta last week and allows users to report and discuss errors.
• Commenting your code: Leaving a comment in your code is a way of adding information that doesn’t interfere with the code and, for example, helps to explain what something is and why it’s there. This is much like how a reporter would provide context for a quote, which you can’t change without “breaking it,” so to speak.
• Learning different programming languages: On the bus back from Philly, I listened to a tech podcast on which Kevlin Henney, author of 97 Things Every Programmer Should know, asserted that programmers should learn other languages to improve inform and improve how they write their primary language. Similarly, journalists are encouraged to read other forms of composition to become better writers and watch other styles of motion pictures to become better videographers. For example, I’ve heard recommendations to take a screenwriting class and learn about that style to my enhance journalistic work.
• Refactoring: This refers to changing internal code without effecting the external meaning or behavior. Another definition that correlates more to journalism says it’s a “form of editing whose goal is to improve readability while preserving meaning. It is a stronger term than copy editing.” This reminded me of the larger structural or organizational changes sometimes needed to improve a story while still maintaining the original focus.
• Algorithm: In general sense, this is a “precise rule (or set of rules) specifying how to solve some problem.” A cooking recipe could be considered an algorithm, as could  the reporting process — you start with some information or questions and then do research, interview people, draft and finalize a story as the result. That said, journalism includes elements of both art and science, not a rigid process as I explained before.
• Version control: When creating software, a core principle is keeping track of each iteration of the project. In the editing workflow of a news organization ideally keeps track of different revisions, either on a single document (for The Hurricane, that would be in the WordPress admin) with a history or by saving a new document and noting who last saw it (as The Hurricane did before switching to WordPress).
• Semantic: Another word for semantic is unambiguous, David Siegel says. More specifically, ”In the Semantic Web, we declare what we mean in precise, standardized terms. Data that is semantic means exactly the same thing to any system or person who uses it.” Do we not aim for the same thing in journalism?

So, really, you could say computational thinking has always been a part of journalism — we just hadn’t labeled it as such.

Many more parallels can be gleaned from works such as this Pragmatic Quick Reference (hat tip, Chrys Wu) and The Zen Python (hat tip, Christopher Groskopf). Read the latter — included below — and consider how many of these statements could work just as well for journalists as they do for Python coders:

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

Again, the point here is to show the similarities between journalists and programmers — to help overcome any perceived barriers.

But we can’t and shouldn’t wait for any magical bridge to appear. There are so many things we can do today, even as simple as rethinking our thinking. If we do, then we can more easily pick up one another’s skills and tools.

Overall, by integrating journalism, programmers and “computational thinking for everyone,” we will be better prepared to more effectively build the tools, practices and platforms we need. And, with those platforms, we will be able to further connect and innovate to do better journalism.

Other posts about BCNI Philly 2010

Where journalism gets reinvented
Random Mumblings | April 25, 2010

Peer News, emerging news hybrid in Hawaii
Daniel Bachhuber’s weblog | April 24, 2010

BCNI Philly: APM’s Public Insight Network
Daniel Bachhuber’s weblog | April 24, 2010

BCNI Notes: Howard Weaver on an emerging news biz model
Lauren Rabaino | April 24, 2010

BCNI notes from “The Insight Graph: CRM for Journalists”
Lauren Rabaino | April 24, 2010

A group of forward-thinking news organizations have joined forces to cover climate change, and we’re glad to see that Publish2 is one of the collaborative tools they’re using.

The project, The Climate Desk, launched Monday to explore “the impact—human, environmental, economic, political—of a changing climate.”

The long list of partner news organizations includes The Atlantic, The Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, Mother Jones, PBS’s Need to Know, Slate and Wired.

The Climate Desk newswire, powered by Publish2.

What we really like about this project — in addition to their use of Publish2, which powers a collaborative newswire you’ll spot across the site — is their practical approach. They identified a problem in the media and found a way to solve it. And better yet, they plan to solve it together.

There are gaps in mainstream news coverage about climate change and the Climate Desk ties that disconnect to the following drawbacks:

1) Climate change is slow-moving, vast, and overwhelming for news organizations to grapple with.

2) What coverage there is tends to be fractured and compartmentalized—science, technology, politics, and business aspects are covered by different teams, or “desks” of reporters, despite the intrinsic connections.

3) Coverage is too often fixated on imperiled wildlife, political gamesmanship, or the “debate” over the existence of climate change, all at the expense of advancing the bigger story—how we’re going to address, mitigate, or adapt to it.

4) Cuts to news organizations are making matters worse.

As individual news organizations trying to cover climate change, it would be harder for Grist or Slate or Wired could overcome the aforementioned shortcomings alone. But that’s the beauty of collaboration: as a team, they have different backgrounds — Wired’s reporters have something different to bring to the table than Slate, they each have different weaknesses and strengths, and resources and audiences — all of which can be shared.

This isn’t the first time they’ve used Publish2 to report on the climate. They first proved the power of collaboration in December, when Mother Jones, Grist, The Nation and The Uptake covered the Copenhagen climate summit with a Publish2 newswire. Jeffery said that because Publish2 was so easy to use the first time around, they wanted to use it again for The Climate Desk.

The crew explains in its FAQ why collaboration is so appropriate for their mission:

For one thing, more hands on deck and more outlets mean we can do more coverage, bringing our various strengths and audiences to bear. For another, given the transformation of the media business, collaboration seems to be part of the future of journalism. We want to test out a new kind of distributed journalism — bringing together a group of reporting shops to brainstorm, assign, and share coverage. Already, this process has enriched our own understanding of the issue, and that can only be a benefit to our readers.

We talked with Clara Jeffery, co-editor of Mother Jones and an organizer of The Climate Desk, by e-mail about plans and goals of the project. One of the key points she made about collaboration is the importance of trust:

“The first thing is you have to build trust. We had preexisting relationships with some folks at many of our partner organizations. When you’re sharing your strengths, weaknesses — and of course story ideas and assignments — trust is key.”

Instead of competing for an audience (as they likely would have in a traditional media setting), the Climate Desk partners are pooling their resources to reach a combined audience. The Columbia Journalism Review reports the size of that collective audience:

The partners command a combined online audience of more than 25 million monthly unique visitors, 1.5 million print readers, and an anticipated 1.5 million TV viewers, but there has been little talk of the effect The Climate Desk will have on each organization’s respective bottom line.

Over the next two weeks, the seven news organizations will publish dozens of stories, starting with a first batch about how businesses are adapting and planning for climate change. (We definitely recommend you give them a read.)

The articles will be published across all seven participating sites and The Climate Desk’s website. The site’s newswire feeds are powered by a Publish2 Newsgroup, which currently includes 17 contributing journalists.

For this first round of articles, Jeffery said their collaborative editorial process took place within Google Docs and other Google apps.

Jeffery explained how the collaborative editorial process works so far:

“Some pieces got group signoff to assign. Others were produced by the various shops with the knowledge of other shops as to what they were planning. We imagine trying these and other configurations of collaboration going forward, including perhaps pods of reporters or shared user engagement tools.”

We’ll be interested to watch how that process develops with the growth of The Climate Desk collaborative and its audience.

After the two-week publishing cycle for the first part of the series, the site will remain intact and actively updated.

“We’ll use [Publish2] to tag what relevant content partners are each producing as we build to the next concerted period of intense collaboration,” Jeffery said in an e-mail.

Looking ahead, she expects intense “bursts of collaboration” to follow this initial round of reporting as the ongoing project grows.

Although the overall goal isn’t something new to the news industry, it’s a concept in need of a fresh rethinking: to produce valuable journalism that people want to read.

“We hope to improve climate coverage, to learn from each other and test drive various forms of collaboration. We don’t have any hard metrics for success, mostly because nothing like this has exactly been tried before. But: producing great journalism and finding an audience and funding for it would be the overall goal.” – Jeffery

So far the project has been funded by the Surdna Foundation and the Park Foundation, but they plan to raise more money.

We’ll be watching closely to see how the project develops. If you’re interested in doing the same, you can connect with The Climate Desk on Twitter or Facebook.

Lauren Rabaino is a Product Designer at Publish2.

To build your own collaborative newswire, get started with Publish2 today.

In the context of the evolving news industry, one way to define collaboration is as something that happens among a group of people in a newsroom, or a group of news organizations pulling stories together around a topic or a geographic area.

Getting that job done efficiently requires a platform.

It takes a system that provides journalists with the means to work together, even if we’re only talking about the print publishing software that replaced razor blades and paste in newsrooms, making it exponentially easier to put out a paper every day.

But, as independent journalists, news organizations, freelancers, bloggers, and commenters all cross paths online and off, it’s clear that it takes more than a content management system to bring together the information your community needs.

Collaboration is evolving.

Here are a few examples of evolving platforms for collaboration in action:

One Type of Collaboration Spot.Us Enables
Spot.Us Blog | March 2, 2010
Important notes from David Cohn on what it takes to build a space for collaborative journalism.

“In both the Mehserle trial and the UC regent investigation Spot.Us has created a platform that allows these various partners to come together. We are an independent third party that is looking out for the interest of all parties. We create a transparent space where money is accounted for publicly. All these things enable this type of collaboration to happen smooth and fast. And that – pushes boundaries.”

Why it’s important: The bit about creating “a transparent space.” Building platforms where collaboration can happen in open spaces instead of conference rooms makes it easy to catalog the motivations of all the players and keep score. Is the collaborative effort equitable? Is it fair? If one party isn’t getting anything visible out of the effort, what’s their reason for participating? I’m reminded of the coworking movement, and of Dave Cohn’s own exploration of the Newsroom Cafe.

How I successfully turned my blog into a book: The Writing
10,000 Words | March 8, 2010
This is just Part 1 of Mark Luckie’s series about turning his running catalog of lists, tutorials, and commentary into a real live book you can pick up at Amazon. Mark’s process has always been an open dialogue with the online journalism community, and these posts continue it.

“When I began writing the book, I thought it would be easy to just take my blog and magically transform it into a book, but I can tell you that there is so much work that goes into creating a project of this magnitude. Blogging gives a writer freedom to write in whatever style they want, with little connection from one post to the other. A book, however, must have a flow and each paragraph, section, and chapter must connect to the next.”

Why it’s important: Mark’s radical transparency about his career path — a form of collaboration with his readers and the online journalism community — has left a breadcrumb trail for talented journalists motivated to make work for themselves as bloggers, consultants, and authors. As more independent operators take off on their own, new models for collaboration across networks of freelancers and consultants are popping up left and right. Speaking of which…

Kinda Sorta Media
Rex Sorgatz and friends have formed what sounds like a merry band of mercenary media types, roaming the streets of New York picking up gigs and staffing contracts with subsets of their network.

“We are a loosely affiliated cooperative of consultants, brand experts, designers, entrepreneurs, media professionals, and technologists.”

Why it’s important: With thousands of journalists leaving newspapers — by choice, buyout, or layoff — there’s a huge opportunity for groups of skilled professionals to transition to freelancing, consulting, and developing products for news organizations that find themselves, well, understaffed for certain purposes. Rex’s project should serve as an example for many groups headed down that road.

The Climate Desk
Reuters | March 9, 2010
Felix Salmon of Reuters announces a collaborative reporting project on the topic of climate change, featuring a group of news organizations you might recognize from last fall’s Copenhagen Collaborative.

“The Climate Desk is a journalistic collaboration dedicated to exploring the impact — human, environmental, economic, political — of a changing climate.”

Why it’s important: Nonprofit and commercial media coming together to work on improved reporting on a global issue? Not sure what could feel more important than that.

A Brief Inventory of “Competitor Collaborations” in the News
jcstearns.posterous.com | March 11, 2010
Josh Stearns notes the trend of inter-news-organization collaboration, most notably at newspapers in places like Ohio, Maine, Florida, and Texas, including mentions of a few projects powered by Publish2.

“Some of these efforts are resulting in exciting new kinds of news, pushing stories beyond what could have been done by any one person, and producing more local news for communities.”

Why it’s important: This is the long list of news organizations bootstrapping their own collaborative networks and figuring out the workflow that’s right for them. But they’re going to need technology to get the job done. A new platform for collaboration.

Want to build your own collaborative link newswire?  Check out how news organizations like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Spokane Spokesman Review, and The New York Times use Publish2 and get started today.

In particular, we aim to overcome what we believe is a limitation of many “citizen journalism” initiatives to date, i.e. viewing citizen journalism as an end in itself, where citizens are supposed to replace professional journalists, filling up community sites with reporting. We believe citizen journalism is part of a larger process where professional journalists still play the vital role they always have. The key is to enable dynamic and ongoing collaboration between citizens and professional journalists, where citizens can become a true practical extension of the newsroom.

It’s all about collaboration.

Collaboration has always been at the heart of the Publish2 vision, even before the crisis in the news industry made it clear that journalism would have to embrace the power of collaboration in order to survive and thrive in the digital age. Publish2 now has one of the largest communities of journalists practicing online journalism (i.e. link journalism). We have also witnessed some pioneering instances of collaboration among journalists and newsrooms using Publish2, all arising from big news events, e.g. floods in Washington state, Obama’s inauguration, the Blagojevich arrest.

With Digital Sunlight, we are realizing the full vision of a platform for collaborative journalism, which connects individual journalists, newsrooms, and citizens, and harnesses the web as a platform for enabling and distributing public service journalism.

We are fortunate at this inflection point to have the guidance of one of the great champions of public service journalism, Howard Weaver. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Howard was the VP of News for McClatchy through the end of last year. Howard shares our vision that the future of journalism will combine the power of digital and collaborative technologies with the enduring qualities of professional journalism.

Howard has been an informal advisor since Publish2 was just a proverbial scrawl on the back of a napkin. Here’s Digital Sunlight in Howard’s own words (from his blog):

Before long, hundreds of billions of dollars will flow out of Washington and wash across every community in the country. This stimulus spending represents an unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis, and defines one of the biggest stories of our generation.

How can today’s news organizations possibly cover it adequately? Even if news staffs were growing, they’d be hard-pressed to keep up with the dozens, perhaps hundreds of projects that will affect individual communities. Even knowing where to look will be bewildering.

I think the new web service for journalists called Publish2 can improve the coverage – and, in doing so, help journalism and the country.

Publish2 pioneered collaborative link journalism , and it’s rapidly being adapted to go a step farther: helping professional journalists enlist the eyes and ears of the audience in covering a huge story like this. The same system that now lets news organizations share links with with readers will soon enable them to ask readers to share tips, opinions and observations about how stimulus spending is working in their area.

Using Publish2′s free system, individual websites can easily let users submit information about projects. Some might be whistleblowers – imagine a Citibank secretary who didn’t think the company should be buying a new jet – while others will simply have questions they think should be asked. Sites can also solicit success stories, tales of stimulus spending that’s working.

Reporters will be able to search a sophisticated database of all the reader submissions – for instance, zeroing in on a particular region, or a certain company, or an individual government department. The system will let them query their readers to solicit feedback and information on specific stimulus topics.

Meanwhile, Publish2 will also provide an aggregated list of links to all the best stimulus journalism around the country, which can be used to augment and extend individual websites.

New features enabling broad collaboration among journalists and citizens will be available to Publish2 users very soon, and every newsroom ought to explore the system and consider participating. To me, the effort looks like a win-win from every angle, helping individual newsrooms cover a big, sprawling story in a time of declining resources, helping enable watchdog journalism on the biggest spending spree ever, and empowering citizens to help.

This could be a breakthrough project in the field of “citizen journalism” – more accurately, a way to let professionals tap into the power of the crowd to help inform and invigorate their reporting.

I’ve been an informal advisor at Publish2 since the idea emerged, and have watched with interest as it’s developed. I believe it’s poised to emerge as a powerful, essential tool for journalists, and its business model lets it do so without costing a dime. (By way of disclosure, I have been asked to think about joining Pub2′s board of directors and am considering that).

Journalists and technologists on the Publish2 team will stand behind this project to help news organizations participate as robustly as they want. I encourage you to explore the possibilities.

As to when the new Digital Sunlight functionality will be available on Publish2, we are baking as fast as we can and will have an update shortly.  In the meantime, check out our Stimulus Newswire — simply add the stimulus tag to links saved on Publish2 to collaborate on rounding up the best coverage of the stimulus act anywhere on the web.

Our goal for Digital Sunlight is to enable the largest collaborative reporting effort in history, and to demonstrate that collaboration is essential to the future of journalism.