And the award goes to . . .

A George Polk Award for reporting went last week to one of my favorite blogs, one of the very, very few I read on a frequent and regular basis — Talking Points Memo. That’s right, a blog.

We in Intro to Digital Communication have been discussing in what circumstances blogging is journalism and what the medium or format brings to the enterprise of reporting that previous to blogging did not exist (for example, an individual voice and perspective, shorter posts or dispatches, rich hyperlinks, transparency, comments/feedback). But for a blog not tied to or an extension of any mainstream news organization, a blog like TPM, to win a Polk? It is a watershed moment for the blogosphere, for bloggers who do journalism.

TPM’s chief blogger and founder, Josh Micah Marshall, is proud to be a blogger. He told the New York Times, “I think of us (the dozen TPM reporters) as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging.” This is an echo of something said in class this week and discussed a bit this morning. A blog is simply a medium or, more precisely, a medium format (the Web here is the medium; the blog the format). It can be used for good, like TPM’s investigative reporting on the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, for which it received the Polk and because of which Alberto Gonzales ultimately had to step down as U.S. Attorney General, or it can be used for ill, like Matt Drudge revealing that Prince Harry is/was fighting in Afghanistan.

Josh Micah Marshall

Important for us is TPM’s use of crowdsourcing. In the case of the U.S. attorneys, TPM pursued tips from readers, synthesized the work of other news outlets, provided its own original reporting and solicited and received the help of thousands of readers in sifting through piles of documents released by the Bush administration, piles not unlike all those JFK files we saw at the Dallas Morning Herald earlier this week.

“There are thousands who have contributed some information over the last year,” Marshall said of this crowdsourced U.S. attorney coverage.

We asked this morning, in a Long Tail world, a Long Tail Internet economy, what is the future of the news business? I read the quote from Anderson’s book: “This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require and reward investigation.” The Marshall Plan (hee-hee) seems to fulfill something of Anderson’s prediction.

So, my questions for our deliberation, for some wisdom of the crowd:

What do you think the future of the news business looks like? What role will broadcast TV news play, if any? We talked a bit about the importance of filters, recommendation systems and error-correction systems. Do these priorities lead us to something like Yahoo’s Buzz? Or something more like TPM? And what of the aggregators?

Clearly, on-demand news for free 24×7 is a part of our answer. Users are in control.

And does this future look like a water cooler-less rainbow of microcultures and tribes of interest, with little in common and less that truly binds us together? Or will we always have “hits” and, if so, what kinds?

{note: I tried to track down the electronic version of the Times article, but the Times’s search is acting up; I’ll post it later if I can.}

Two quick notes to close. An update on Kluster at TED: The startup attempted a repeat of its earlier MacWorld success, announcing that it would entertain product ideas, select, then produce and sell the winning product by the end of the event. It’s promising a new product in 72 hours. I’m posting the call here:

And one other update, on crowdsourcing customer service complaints and responses from Corporate America. You’ll recall we looked at GetHuman.com.

The new one, called Get Satisfaction, at GetSatisfaction.com, is a San Francisco startup aims to mobilize people to voice their customer service complaints and elicit responses from the companies causing the problems. I wonder if Target will participate ;->