The Tor Project is one of the six organsations that recently won a big grant from Knight Foundation, as part of the Knight News Challenge. It’s easy to understand why it caught the eyes of the judges, and walked away with $320,000.

The project is a non-profit organisation that provides free, open-source software to allow users to act anonymously online. As the project’s website explains, Tor has created a series of “virtual tunnels,” which distribute users’ transactions to different locations around the Internet, so that they cannot be pinpointed to a single place. Tor hides users’ activity among that of other members of the network, so the more people using it, they more secure it becomes.

Tor was first developed in a US Navy lab, with the aim of securing government communications, as Nieman Lab explains. Now, however, the network has a wide range of uses for the general public, not least for journalists and whistleblowers.

Tor writes on its website that it is used by citizen journalists in regimes with limited press freedom, such as China, to write about social and political reform. The system is also used by bloggers, activists and whistleblowers to protect their activities, says Tor. Some concrete examples: the network was used in East Asia to anonymously reveal information about sweatshops that make goods used by Western companies, says the website. It has also been used by a non-profit health organisation in Africa to blow the whistle on government corruption.

However, “the vast majority” of people who use Tor want to prevent their Internet activity being tracked by advertisers, according to the organisation’s executive director Andrew Lewman, who is quoted by Nieman Lab. Lewman describes his frustration with companies who take user data and use it to boost profits. “They start out by saying we love you, we’ll cherish your data, but by page 16, paragraph five, it’s ‘We’ll sell your data to anybody possible, and you cannot opt out,” says Lewman, quoted in the article. Tor is a way to combat the problem.

If the Tor network ever became really widespread, this does represent a potential dilemma for news organisations online. Media organisations have been encouraged to look to targeted advertising as a new source of revenue. If a large chunk of users mask their identities, this revenue stream would be compromised.

Nevertheless, Tor data suggests that the total number of people around the globe who log in to the network per day is somewhere just above 400,000. In the US, the number is around 60,000. That’s nothing to be sniffed at, but it’s probably not enough to really compromise a single news organisation’s advertising strategy.

More importantly, looking at the tools the organisation is developing, it’s difficult to argue that Tor won’t provide a net benefit for journalism. One of the projects the organisation is working on allows users to take a live USB or DVD, and use it as an anonymous operating system, without leaving any evidence behind on the local network. As Lewman explains to Nieman Lab, the service could allow citizen journalists to anonymously post footage online at times of unrest, without feeling retribution from a repressive state. With WikiLeaks in limbo, other whistleblowing organisations like Open Leaks not really off the ground, and an apparent crackdown on whistleblowers is occurring in the US, the service could prove important.

Finally, the project has prestigious journalism and human rights organisations on its side. According to its website, Tor is supported by Reporters Without Borders and the US International Broadcasting Bureau, recommended by Global Voices, has consulted with Amnesty International’s corporate responsibility campaign and has received funding from Human Rights Watch.

With these backers in mind, maybe we can hope that Tor will help improve reporting, without giving publishers too much of a headache.

Sources: Nieman Lab, Tor (1) (2) (3) (4), Pew, Guardian, Editors Weblog

What if you could cross out tweets, asks Oliver Reichenstein, designer at the digital product company iA. He argues in a blog post that the new system could help users acknowledge their errors without looking as if they are trying to cover them up.

Reichenstein explains why he thinks a crossed-out tweet would be better than a deleted one: “A missing tweet also doesn’t explain why it’s missing. Excuses might be posted after the mistake happened — but they might also never be seen,” he writes.

“The only format that clearly states a mistake is a fat strike through. It is a strong answer to any interpretations and accusations that follow. It clearly says: “Don’t read this. This is all wrong. I take it back. I’m sorry.” Deleted tweets don’t say that — they smell like a cover-up and often make you look suspicious. And apologetic follow-up tweets don’t have the power to neutralize that screenshot of you screwing up,” he argues.

It would be easy to imagine how this could benefit journalism by helping to block the flow of misinformation. A few months ago, Poynter’s Craig Silverman wrote an article about data from Social Flow, which suggested that incorrect tweets travel both further and faster than corrections. Although Silverman has his own suggestions about how to correct false information on Twitter (actively contact people who have retweeted incorrect information, encourage them to retweet the correction to their followers), surely a strike-through function would be a valuable addition to his accuracy toolbox?

The feature would also imitate the correction policy of a number of publications, including the Columbia Journalism Review, which promote transparency by leaving their crossed-out errors on show, rather than deleting them (see the first sentence of this post, for example).

Journalism.co.uk has asked a few social media experts involved in the news business about the new idea, and all responded with cautious approval, while also suggesting potential problems with the new system,

Mark Jones, Thompson Reuters’ Global Communities Editor told Journalism.co.uk, “the ability to use strike-through won’t solve all the problems of errors amplifying around the web but it will certainly help."

The BBC’s Social Media Editor Chris Hamilton said “a strike-through could be a halfway option, allowing you to flag that you know the tweet is wrong, have some clarity in your timeline about why a follow-up tweet contradicts one already sent, while avoiding the charge of censorship or attempting to cover things up inherent with a deletion,” writes Journalism.co.uk. However, Hamilton expresses doubts about adding extra features, saying that part of Twitter’s strength is its simplicity, the article added.

Reichenstein also acknowledges the technical objections to the idea, as he reposts the reaction of Twitter’s creative director, Doug Bowman, to his suggestion.

“I struggle with the additional complexity that forking delete like this would bring,” tweeted Bowman. “Especially if it means needing to bury those features to prevent accidental discovery by those who’d be confused.” Bowman also tweeted “As you’ve noticed, it’s hard for Twitter to justify spending resources on features than would be used by a small relative base."

Sources: Journalism.co.uk, iA, The Verge, Poynter, CJR

Image via iA

One news app, three editions. This is the concept behind ABC’s News’ new app, which comes in three versions: morning, midday and evening.

Why the change? “We realized that people are using the app in different ways at different points of the day,” said ABC’s senior vice president of digital, Joe Ruffolo to Jeff Sonderman at Poynter. 

ABC News has had almost two years to observe how its audience is engaging with its content on the iPad, after launching its first iPad app in July 2010, as paidContent points out. The article says ABC News’ digital team found that iPad use peaks in the evening, between 7pm and 10pm, when users watched one and a half times more video, and read 20% more stories than at any other time of day. The team also found that half of all news stories consumed on the iPad were read in the morning and evening.

As a result, the new editions of ABC News’ app are adapted to the kind of information its audiences prefers to consume at different times of day. As Sonderman reports, the morning edition of the app focuses on top headlines and weather, the midday version incorporates a little more video content, lifestyle and feature stories, and the evening “prime time” edition will focus on longer video. Weekends will feature a mix of the three versions, says Sonderman.

ABC is by no means the first to notice changing levels of iPad consumption throughout the day, and to try to adapt to it. As Daniel Terdiman pointed out in an article for CNET last February, many new aggregators have responded to the same phenomenon by tweaking their iPhone strategy, to make sure it compliments what they offer on the iPad.

Terdiman wrote that several companies have found that users were consuming content in the daytime on their iPhones, then relaxing with their iPads after dinner. Social news-reader app Flipboard, which was originally only available on the iPad, launched an iPhone version, which was well adapted to news consumed in bite-sized chunks. Thanks to the release on the iPhone, Flipboard saw “usage flatten out from the peaks (in the morning and evening) to being more consistent throughout the day," said Flipboard spokesperson Marci McCue, quoted by Terdiman.

Whether the same concept will work with ABC News’s new morning/midday/evening editions is yet to be seen. If it is a success, Sonderman suggests that it could offer new advertising opportunities to ABC News, which could sell ad spots for the different versions at different rates.

Sources: Poynter, paidContent (1) (2), CNET

“Twitter is not a media company,” said CEO Dick Costolo at the beginning of this year. Yet a number of recent developments have been threatening to prove him wrong.

Last week Twitter announced the launch of a #NASCAR hashtag page, where users can “discover the best Tweets, photos and perspectives from NASCAR drivers and their families, crews, commentators, celebrities and fans – all in a single timeline.”

In some ways, the page acts like a normal #search, with Tweets featuring the same hashtag collected together. However, Twitter’s #NASCAR page is presented with more visual content and a branded top banner, which makes it look more like a web page in its own right than a search function.

What really sets this page apart, however, is the fact that the Tweets are gathered through “a combination of algorithms and curation”. In other words, although the page uses Twitter’s automated search function, there is an editorial hand at work which chooses which posts to highlight.

Mathew Ingram at GigaOm writes, “Twitter is doing is very similar to what a site like Huffington Post or even a newspaper or sports site might do with an event like NASCAR. A traditional media outlet might also have a columnist write some thoughts about the race as well or send a reporter down into the pits to interview drivers, but pulling together real-time reactions from those involved and from spectators has also become a big part of the media response to a major event.”

Ingram writes in a later article that it would be easy to imagine Twitter using a similar system not just for sponsored events, but for news stories too, for example the revolutions in the Middle East or the earthquake in Japan.

Reuters’ digital and social media strategist Ross Neumann imagines the same scenario in a Tumblr post, where he also writes, “with hashtag pages, Twitter is essentially cutting out the social media editor, the middle man in content discovery.” In other words, Twitter can be seen as taking over a job that used to belong to new organisations.

Twitter has perhaps taken another step towards becoming more like a media company by hiring the Washington Post’s social media editor Mark S Luckie to act “as a liaison between Twitter and the journalism community.” Luckie told Journalism.co.uk that his new role would involve "forging partnerships with media organisations" and "coming up with creative ways that they can use Twitter, moving beyond hashtags."

Some media organisations are already involved in content partnerships with Twitter. The company announced on its blog yesterday that it has teamed up with media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Der Spiegel Online to offer new “expanded Tweets”. This will mean that when users expand a Tweet linking to a story from one of these sites, they will be shown a preview of the headline and introduction, and sometimes the Twitter accounts of the publisher and author as well.

You can already expand and view content from YouTube and Instagram within the walls of Twitter. However, this new step puts Twitter’s expanded Tweets more on a par with Facebook’s social reader apps, which allow users to read articles entirely within Facebook’s own site. Twitter may be moving on from the place where you find news, to become the place where you read it as well.

With more direct cooperation with news organisations, more news content on its own site, staff members in editorial positions and curated content pages, there’s no doubt that the lines between Twitter and media outlets are becoming blurred. Mathew Ingram goes one step further: “it is showing signs of becoming a full-fledged editorial operation,” he says.

Sources: Mashable, GigaOm (1) (2) (3), Twitter (1) (2) (3), Ross Neumann, Journalism.co.uk