What doesn’t usually happen is how Politico dealt with its inadequate journalism. And the case brought back memories of another, more significant mess: the “Rathergate” affair of 2004; more on that below.

It’s obvious, if you read the non mea culpa posted by Political’s White House editor, Craig Gordon, that his organization didn’t check the memo’s authenticity before putting it online, and only pulled it down after Democrats complained. But instead simply apologizing forthrightly, he basically said a) Politico now couldn’t verify anything about the memo’s authenticity; b) but it seemed real (as if that’s an excuse; c) and besides, the Democrats were probably doing what the memo said they were doing anyway.

Then comes his conclusion, a howler for a journalist:

“In the end, POLITICO followed an old rule-of-thumb in journalism in taking down the memo: when in doubt, leave it out. By day’s end, it was still impossible to tell exactly what’s the real story behind the memo. But in the next few months, when Democrats try to pass a multi-billion-dollar ‘doc fix,’ maybe that will shed a little light on the Democrats’ real intentions.”

Except that “leave it out” is not synonymous with “publish it and then take it down if we learn later that we can’t verify its authenticity” — or is this the news standard for news organizations boasting a co-founder who serves on the Pulitzer Prize governing board?

The standard Politico has applied here, is, of course, “truthiness”: Because they want it to be true, it’s close enough.

To be more fair to Politico than the publication may deserve, the memo seemed to many others like something some Democratic aide, somewhere in Washington, might have written, perhaps as a draft. This helps explain why so many journalists took the bait and became part of the vast spin machine that so defines our nation’s political press.

As Talking Points Memo’s Christina Bellantoni reports, the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder had the honor to apologize for posting without checking. The Hill, a publication with apparently more traditional principles, got the memo but decided not to run it at all.

Remember, just a few years ago the journalism and political worlds went appropriately berserk when CBS’ 60 Minutes II team ran a story about George W. Bush’s “service” in the Air National Guard. The report was based, in part on memoranda that CBS not only couldn’t prove were authentic but which were at best highly questionable as to their authenticity. The journalism was awful; CBS and its people took a deserved hit to their reputations. Sadly — and I use that word partly because the journalists involved had long and outstanding records for doing great work — the people who made the mistakes held fast to the notion that they’d done nothing wrong.

It’s obvious, based on the verifiable record, that Bush got strings pulled to avoid Vietnam service and then all but ducked out on his duty. And it may turn out that some Democrat’s fingerprints are on the health care memo. In both cases, the journalism was lacking, and the journalists’ response even more so.

Politico is widely considered a new gold standard of political reporting. That worries me.

Serious Games Summit
Several interesting things came up at the Serious Games Summit, which is the session track for examining games used for purposes other than entertainment (not that entertainment isn’t a worthy goal itself). Here are the highlights:

• Soren Johnson contrasted game theme with mechanic in a talk titled “Theme is not meaning.” This is an important breakdown when it comes to games literacy as game mechanics tend to deliver the real meaning in a game. Johnson’s thesis was that a game’s window dressing was just that unless the mechanic matched. The Redistricting Game was offered of a solid example of matching theme with mechanic as the player is tasked with literally drawing new voting district lines to win needed votes. The discussion goes much deeper and Chris Dahlen writes more about the talk here.
• Borut Pfeifer has been working on a game about crowds in the Iranian Election. Named The Unconcerned, the game pulls the player through the streets of the Iranian election by putting her in the shoes of parents looking for their daughter. Pfeifer’s talk covered prototyping and the many iterations along the way to figuring out what played well. The biggest takeaway here concerns creation. Traditionally, creating media involved getting one’s ducks in a neat row before creation began. However, games and other digital media find success in testing and getting feedback on many rough drafts along the way. I’m going to hunt down some links for the best practices for iterative design for the Mediactive Tools section.
• While the talk strayed more into digital entrepreneurship, Jelena Godjevac presented a case study of Blossom, a game that places the player in the role of a small business owner. Blossom came out of Micro Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I) as a game-based way of furthering local micro-business. They’re looking for new ideas for games that teach entrepreneurship and are teaming up with HP in a design contest. I’d love to see submissions related to digital media entrepreneurs, like starting a local news site or training citizen journalists.

Game Writers’ Roundtable
Several worthwhile tips came out of a roundtable of both professional and amateur game writers. Here are the ones that apply well to digital media creation.

• Show don’t tell – In an interactive environment, show a story before using words. Figure out what you can say with other forms of media. This applies to even something like blogs. Can you set your stage with a good photo or video? Does a link or a podcast say it better than you can?
• If you can’t tweet it, you shouldn’t write it – This came up in the context of dialogue and text in midst of play. The same could be applied to captions, explanations of mashups and even one’s YouTube video descriptions. There are excellent uses for long form, but if your creation is multimedia, don’t burden it with text. Err on the side of brevity.

Farmville
Social games were a hot topic at the GDC this year, both for the massive jump in people playing these games and for their lucrative nature. I sat in on a session with Mark Skaggs of Farmville where he explained the game’s development process. Farmville itself has been a bit of a phenomenon and a rather controversial one.

Most interesting for Mediactive’s purposes are the rapid creation and development of Farmville. According to Skaggs, the initial team was composed of less than ten people and was developed in five weeks. From the point of release, the game acquired about 1,000,000 new users per week, an above-expectations rate. This critical mass gave the team lots of data, which informed the design going forward. Skaggs explained “fun” as something hard to measure, while behavior could be tracked by clicks. When strawberries received a large number of clicks, the team created “Super Berries” and the resulting popularity nearly crashed the server. This is just one example, but every game action and click was evaluated for new direction in content.

I see a couple lessons here that apply to digital media:

1. Release quickly and design based on data and user feedback.
2. Data-driven design requires greater discussion when it comes to news. Lots of clicks can tell you if a story is popular, but a click can’t tell you if the reader was informed. As well, a click may tell a creator if people enjoy content, but not the impact of that content. For example, a reader may spend more clicks in a day on what celebrities are wearing, but one click given to a long form political story may have the greatest impact on a future vote.

Beyond what I’ve covered here. I ran into some interesting tools for media creation, which I’ll be testing and posting to the Tools page. Games and interactive environments are ripe for experimentation when it comes to new media and I’m excited to see what emerges over time.

You can see the conference’s schedule here. Hot topics this year are social games, geolocation, smartphone applications and augmented reality. As well, something like the Serious Games summit examines the use of games for not purely entertainment reasons. So, if the GDC interests you, add suggestions for sessions or topics you’d like me to cover to the comments section.

Which media companies, business and delivery models and platforms do you consider to be sustainable and which ones will go to the wall?

I’m not nearly smart enough to tell you which companies will survive. As a (very) small shareholder in the New York Times Co., and an angel investor in several online startups, I certainly hope they’ll be among the ones that last.

But some early outlines — emphasis on “early” — are beginning to emerge.

Media companies that persist in the industrial model of media, especially those reliant on advertising subsidies for content that has no basic relationship to what advertisers are trying to sell, are in the most jeopardy. Apart from the simple fact that advertising is being separated from content for excellent reasons, the industrial-age notion of distribution has been upended. Rather than creating content, and then publishing it on paper and putting it in trucks (or broadcasting via expensive towers or satellites), what we do now is create content and make it available; people come and get it. Only those media creators who understand the new dynamic have a chance at surviving the upheaval.

In the journalism sphere, I have no doubt whatever that we will replace the monopolies and oligopolies with a much more diverse and therefore more sustainable ecosystem. The enterprises will include for-profit and not-for-profit companies; and sole proprietorships and large businesses. The business models will range widely, and will be the winners from among the thousands of experiments now under way.

Those who can turn themselves into ecosystems in their own right — think Google, Twitter, etc. — will be major winners if they can become the center of ecosystems in which others innovate. When the Guardian and New York Times offer APIs to their media, they show they understand this imperative.

What does the global media industry ten years from now look like?

This will depend, in part, on how governments respond to the media and technology changes. If governments (urged on by law enforcement, big traditional media and especially back-facing copyright interests) restrict the ways we can use technology, we could easily see the Internet turned into a newer and only slightly more useful version of television.

If, on the other hand, governments allow technology and innovation to flower, we will see a media industry that dwarfs the current one in size, at least in terms of the number of people who are participating. All media will be social to one degree or another. Since information is increasingly a core feature of all products and services, media will be an even larger global industry.

What projects are you currently engaged in on a day to day basis and how are these helping to change the face of the media and technology industries?

I am spending my time on a variety of projects. The main one has been creating a digital media entrepreneurship program at Arizona State University in America, a project aimed at bringing an appreciation of the startup culture into the journalism curriculum. We believe students will be inventing many of their own jobs, and want to help them do so.

I’m also continuing my long-term work on citizen media and citizen journalism. In addition, I’ve invested in or co-founded several consumer Web companies, and have new projects in the wings. Finally, I’m finishing a new book called Mediactive, a challenge to those who create and consume media to take more responsibility for what they — and we — know.

Who do you admire in this space? Who’s inspiring you? Who’s pushing the boundaries and how?

I’m inspired by so many people that I have trouble naming just a few. But I’ll start with my students, and the students I’ve met at other campuses in America and around the world. I tell them I’m jealous of their opportunities, because they will invent the future of media and journalism.

Allow me to offer a tip of the hat to the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger. He is a leader of exceptional talent and vision.

And what can we expect from you at the Changing Media Summit 2010?

You can expect me to listen much more than I talk, though of course I’ll discuss the things I know best. I see this summit as a wonderful learning opportunity and aim to take full advantage.

Note: After the Deadline is also available as a FireFox add-on.

The guides, aimed at high school and college-level students, are broken down between news and opinion. The teacher guide is broken down into a 45-minute lesson plan, while the student guide offers an example story and questions that zero in on qualities like facts and fairness. Additional activities are offered as well.

If you like the guides and want to go more in depth, NewsTrust offers an additional page of external educational resources geared toward news literacy.

Audacity is the old steady when you don’t have GarageBand and you need a free audio editor. It has the backing of an enthusiastic open-source community, which keeps it regularly updated. It’s also popular with the public radio crowd as its simplicity is great for editing interviews (as opposed to remixing music). However, you must download and install it as well as download the LAME codec for the ability to export to mp3 format. This is a simple process, but a significant barrier if your current machine doesn’t offer you install privileges.

That’s where Myna comes in. Part of the Aviary suite, Myna is a fully web-based audio editing tool. The features are robust and include nice editing touches like fades, control points and effects. Aviary as whole offers a community for sharing creations publicly and connecting with friends on the site. This video gives an excellent overview:

Indaba Music also offers an online audio editor, but the site’s strength is its fixation on community. The vision is to enable musicians to collaborate on music from afar. In this Colbert interview, Indaba’s co-founder shares an example of producing music with a friend and then bringing in vocals from a singer in Nigeria. The same scenario could easily be applied to journalism.

Indaba allows the user to create a Session and invite other users. Session members can then upload audio tracks to that session (adding audio via phone call is another interesting feature). When the user opens the web-based audio editor, all the tracks from that session are automatically added to the track list. Session members then see file and editing updates on their dashboard or they can subscribe to session updates via RSS. This has a lot of potential for journalists working remotely on a radio or podcasting project. Of note, is the 100mb limit for free accounts. This may not go far when dealing with long interviews. An upgrade to a 500mb account is $50/year, while unlimited storage is $250/year. Another note, the editor is java-based and in Chrome and on Mac, one must open the session file manually in Java.

Finally, I want to offer mp3cut as the ultra-simple tool for crude audio chopping in a hurry. It’s advertised as a platform for cutting clips from songs for ringtones, but could easily be used to reduce the file size of large interview when one only has one clip to worry about and only wants a small part of that clip.

If you have other free and easily-accessed audio tools, please share them in the comments.

Many sites now allow for quickly building your own maps and their feature sets are fairly predictable. With that in mind, I want showcase several unique features I’ve run across in mapping tools.

VidMap has journalistic potential. The site lets you sync video with a map, showing the aerial course of the video’s content. For example, I added this video of a trip along the Phoenix light rail and then clicked its course out on the map. When finished the video plays while a marker moves along the train’s route. This example is a bit mundane, but this would be excellent for displaying the movement of a roaming protest or showing the blocks of a neighborhood in a related story.

UMapper offers several distinctive features and one of them lets you make games out of your maps. It’s similar in style to the classic Geosense and its derivatives like Globetrotter XL. This would be useful for either helping the user master locations or saying something about the relationship distance plays in a story (as distance is part of scoring). This video gives an overview:

As well, UMapper recently made it possible to create maps with Twitter results. This adds thumbnails of tweeters to a map which show the corresponding tweet if clicked. Tweet results are drawn from Twitter automatically, so the map builder doensn’t have any input in filtering results. It’s also worth noting that tweeter location can be an inexact science as only a small selection of users enable GeoTagging and results from the Location field can be all over the place. However, there may still be potential uses for building a map where tweets alongside annotated map notes creates something interesting.

Micello is an application that shows maps of indoor environments. It’s relegated to just the iPhone for the moment, but this an extremely useful and untapped mapping realm. While the Micello feature set doesn’t mention shared maps at the moment, many stories happen within buildings and the potential to easily annotate floor plans with story details is an interesting one. For now, the content is primarily retail, but I’m enthusiastic about the potential.

What other interesting mapping tool features have you run across?

In the weeks since Apple announced the iPad tablet computer, the news industry and the people who watch it have been talking breathlessly about the device’s potential to help restore happier financial times to struggling journalism organizations, particularly newspapers and magazines. Perhaps the best example is a NY Times story entitled “With Apple Tablet, Print Media Hope for a Payday,” with this quote (from an anonymous source, of course):

Steve (Jobs) believes in old media companies and wants them to do well,” said a person who has seen the device and is familiar with Apple’s marketing plan for it, but who did not want to be named because talking about it might alienate him from the company. “He believes democracy is hinged on a free press and that depends on there being a professional press.”

This is laugh-out-loud stuff, for all kinds of reasons, not least the hilarious notion that Steve Jobs believes in a free press. This is the CEO of a company that practically defines the words “secretive” and “paranoid” — a company that took bloggers to court for daring to report on what sources from inside Apple have told them about upcoming products; the threat to business journalism from that case, which thankfully Apple lost, was real and scary.

Steve Jobs believes in old media, all right, as long as he can absolutely dictate the terms under which old media sells (or, to be more precise, rents) its material through the Apple orifice called the iTunes Store. The music industry discovered to its dismay that Apple’s one-price-fits-all model — not to mention Apple’s control over customer information (including addresses and credit-card numbers) — was good mainly for Apple. (To be fair, the Times story did note, amid the fawning over the iPad’s media potential, that Jobs is, as the story said, a bully.)

The App Store, through which Apple requires iPhone application developers to sell their offerings, has its own restrictions. Apple doesn’t regulate prices, though it still disintermediates developers from their customers. The bigger issue is that Apple insists on approving every app that can be sold through the store, in an approval process that is always opaque and sometimes capricious.

In recent days, Apple took its control-freakery to a new level. It unilaterally banned some iPhone apps that, in Apple’s view, were too risque for its customers, including several that depicted skimpily dressed women. The company’s excuse was that some customers found the material “objectionable,” and of course Apple wanted to make its customers comfortable and happy.

Never mind that Apple still sells pretty much the same kinds of items through big publishers like Time Warner and Playboy. That’s mere hypocrisy, however blatant.

News organizations often produce material that people find objectionable. Photographs and videos of dead people in war zones and disaster aftermaths are vital to understand the scope of such events, and they are deeply upsetting to view. Publishers and broadcasters and, more recently, digital-media providers have put them out anyway. They have every right to do so, and often an journalistic obligation.

Apple, in the role of distributor, has every right to decide what people can sell via its online store. This is not the issue.

Now, journalism organizations obviously don’t have to create apps for the iPad or iPhone. They can make their material available via Web browsers.

But Apple won’t let Flash run on the iPhone or, it says, the iPad. While HTML5 will solve some of these issues, that new standard is early in its evolution. Meanwhile, it’s clear, news organizations believe (with some experience selling apps for the iPhone) that the user experience will be better with an app, not to mention the possibility of charging money for what they produce (though they’ll be giving Apple a cut of every transaction).

Ultimately, I believe, the most important issue is whether news organizations should get in bed with a company that makes unilateral and non-transparent decisions like the ones Apple has been making about content in all kinds of ways. I say they should think hard about it, and answer either in the negative or insist on iron-clad contracts with Apple that prohibit the hardware company from any kind of interference with the journalism, ever. (As Dave Winer asked in a Twitter posting today, “Thought experiment: What happens to the Engadget app when they run a leaked Apple announcement?”)

Understand, this is not about whether tablet computers are a good thing. They are. They will be a wonderful addition to the way we consumer and create media (more so the former, I’d guess), and I have no doubt that the iPad, like other Apple products, will set a new standard for ease of use and, in some ways, utility. (I’m a happy user of a Mac computer, for which Apple doesn’t restrict application developers’ ability to write software.)

But I watch with amazement as newspaper people drool over the iPad as some kind of industry savior. They’re putting far too much trust in a company that doesn’t deserve it.