If launching the project via Kickstarter was a gamble — and one that apparently took a certain amount of convincing before Planet Money’s corporate masters would sign off on it, according to Blumberg — it certainly seems to have paid off: the campaign hit its goal in a single day, and has since raised about $300,000 or six times as much as it was originally looking for (the audio of my interview with Blumberg is on SoundCloud and also embedded below).

Crowdfunding and public radio both go direct

Blumberg, who works for This American Life and created the Planet Money show in 2008 along with NPR economics reporter Adam Davidson, said that when the show decided to set up the T-shirt project — an idea that stemmed from a book by Pietra Rivoli called “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy” — he thought Kickstarter was the most obvious way of allowing listeners to not only follow the experiment, but to become participants in it as well.

“We wanted to try and figure out a way to do the project, to do the journalism, but also to sell the T-shirts to people who wanted them, as a way of involving them in the project — so you can either guess about how many you need and borrow the money or sort of get it pre-funded, or you could just go on Kickstarter and find out exactly.”

One of the reasons why it seemed like such a good fit, Blumberg said, is that public radio and the NPR model already involve reaching out to listeners and supporters directly, so it seemed natural to blend the two (a public radio podcast called 99% Invisible took a similar route last year and raised more than $180,000).

“The other part about Kickstarter is that it’s just a great way of sort of involving folks in the project as you go along, and… it felt like with our audience there’d be some interesting overlap there between Kickstarter and public radio — it felt like they would sort of feed on each other. The public radio audience and the Kickstarter model are so close anyway, so why not combine them — it’s sort of surprising that it hasn’t happened before.”

The internet turns everything into public radio

In fact, Blumberg said, it feels like “the internet is driving the entire world towards a public-radio model” in a way, as more media companies — and even individuals such as Daily Dish blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is relying on direct reader funding for support — try to find a way of surviving when advertising revenue is declining and other business models are not obvious.

“You can get lots of stuff for free now, and so the trick is to get people to pay for stuff they can get for free. It’s a trick that public radio has gotten pretty good at, but now other people are sort of eclipsing us — Kickstarter is very ingenious in the way you can involve people in the story, you can build all sorts of different levels, and it’s very very easy. So part of it is about learning what we can from our Kickstarter experience and then feeding that back into the public-radio world.”

Blumberg said that he was pleasantly surprised at the amount of money the project has been able to raise, and that he originally expected it would take most of the campaign’s time limit to even get to the $50,000 goal. The majority of the money raised will go towards travel and production costs, as well as the cost of buying and making the shirts, he said — and anything left over will be used to create a development fund for NPR member stations and put on a series of workshops about the kind of reporting Planet Money does.

A chance for a public-funding revolution

And will evangelizing Kickstarter be part of that program? Blumberg said that the project seems to be doing its own evangelizing, just because of the overwhelming response, which he says executives at NPR and throughout the public-media world are watching closely and are “very excited about.” The American Life producer said he also hopes the project will spark more discussion about the ways in which public radio can use crowdfunding platforms.

“Public radio has been a little insulated from some of the ways the internet has changed other media organizations, but the internet is upending radio as well, in a way that I think can be very advantageous, it just depends on how you do it. I think there’s always been a realization within the public radio system that there’s revolutionary potential, and I think this will add to that conversation and hopefully move it forward.”

Blumberg said that he believes public radio can learn a lot from seeing how crowdfunding works in practice with a focused project like the T-shirt campaign, and that the connection between fans and creators that Kickstarter and other platforms help to create is very much like what public media has been doing for some time without the internet. “I feel like we’ve been out ahead of this whole thing for a long time,” he says, “and we didn’t even know it.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz and Shutterstock / Wilson Rosa and Shutterstock / higyu

By now, many people are becoming used to Twitter as a source of breaking news, whether it’s a report about the death of Osama bin Laden or details about the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt. But it’s still fascinating to come across new examples of how the real-time information network can be used to report on a breaking news story, whether by professional journalists or those committing what Andy Carvin of NPR has called “random acts of journalism.” In one recent case, a member of Reddit pulled together a news report about a shooting in Toronto, including the tweets of those who attended and later became victims of the incident — another sign of how social media is changing both the way we consume and the way we produce journalism.

According to a number of news reports, the shooting took place late Monday night in a suburb of Toronto called Scarborough, at a house party attended by an estimated 250 people. By the end of the incident, two people were dead and more than 20 others were wounded. Within a matter of hours, a user at Reddit who goes by the handle “BitchSlappedByLogic” had posted a description of the events leading up to the party as well as the aftermath — and even some information about the background of those involved and their apparent gang affiliations.

The Twitter-sourced report is easier to verify

The entire report was compiled via Twitter, with links to individual tweets by someone who said he was the host of the party, as well as a teenaged girl who was one of those killed in the shooting:

Apparently, it was this guy’s party, as he says here. He’d been planning this party since July 7th. This guy apparently anticipated that problems might happen at the party. This girl, too. This guy too. So this could be the result of a pretty well-known beef. This person was shot. As was this person. This person was also shot — twice. This person was also shot, according to this tweet. This may be her in recovery, though I can’t be sure.

It’s interesting to look at the Reddit report, and then compare that to a traditional news report from the CBC (the publicly-funded broadcaster in Canada). The one on Reddit doesn’t look or read anything like a normal news story — instead of names, it has links to tweets and individual Twitter accounts, and there isn’t much of a story at all, just a recitation of facts or alleged facts. The CBC story has the names and ages of the victims, as well as some quotes from the police about gang violence, a quote from a friend of one of the deceased, and some eyewitness reports from the scene.

That said, however, the Reddit version also has a lot of things the CBC version doesn’t: for example, it has some tweets from people attending the party about the potential for violence — before the shooting even occurs. It also uses messages posted by those involved to talk about the shooting being part of a possible gang war, including links to individual tweets from people threatening more violence, as well as tweets and YouTube videos posted by members of a gang that one of the victims was apparently associated with.

While the format of the Reddit story may be more difficult to read, it also makes the story a lot easier to fact-check while you are reading, since any reader can simply click on a link and see the message or user profile that the author is basing their statement on (in one case, the Reddit post has a link to a screen-capture of a tweet that has since been removed). The CBC story has no links whatsoever. And while the traditional news story simply makes statements without providing any evidence other than an interview with police, the Redditor uses words like “apparently” and “I can’t be sure.”

Twitter isn’t a newswire, it’s a newsroom

The approach that Reddit took in this case reminded me of the way that Andy Carvin used his Twitter account as a kind of live-streaming news channel during the uprising in Egypt. In an interview with me at the Mesh conference in Toronto earlier this year, Carvin talked about how he saw his Twitter followers as his newsroom — in the sense that they helped him filter through and verify information from a number of different sources within that country, disproving or verifying videos, photos and other news. As he put it:

I get uncomfortable when people refer my twitter feed as a newswire. It’s not a newswire. It’s a newsroom. It’s where I’m trying to separate fact from fiction, interacting with people. That’s a newsroom.

While the Reddit report doesn’t do this (although commenters do fact check comments from the police), it’s easy to see how it could be the foundation of exactly that kind of process — one in which anyone, journalist or not, can contribute information that can then be verified or pulled together into a story. Imagine how much better the CBC story could have been if it had made use of some of the background and linking practices that you see in the Reddit post, or if the two had worked together, and you get some idea of what the newsroom of the future looks like.

Mark Little of Storyful, which works with mainstream media outlets to do exactly that kind of thing, has written about how journalists need to stop seeing themselves as gatekeepers of information and start to look at journalism as a collaborative effort involving all kinds of different sources. Twitter is clearly one of these sources, as the Toronto shooting shows — and so is Reddit, which has already proven in the past that it can be a crowdsourced fact-checking engine. And those who learn how to make use of all these tools will wind up producing better journalism.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Juerg Vollmer and See-ming Lee

Esposito wonders whether DRM is more effective in preventing “casual copying” than large-scale infringement:

It will be argued that the promotional value of free copies outweighs the lost sales due to sharing. I don’t think so; the NPR example is telling us something about the propensity for people to pay for things that they don’t have to. And NPR has to work hard even to get 10% compliance, with relentless pledge drives and appeals to civic-mindedness, supplemented with salving premiums (an NPR T-shirt, etc.). Promotional friction can take many forms (providing excerpts, civic appeals, special features), but it’s an important element of this economy.

So moving publishing away from DRM “requires a great deal of thought and contingency planning.”

Can we afford to lose our course adoption sales? How do we monetize reading groups? And what about the used-book market, from which we currently derive no revenue? Can we come up with new ways to monetize books so that we can recapture some of that lost revenue? The issue concerning DRM is falsely thought to be a technological one. It is not; it is a marketing issue.

The new Facebook app launching today is called I <3 NPR, which means I Heart NPR to the uninitiated. Once installed, Facebook users can assign themselves to a home station in their part of the country and see fellow friends on Facebook who are also NPR fans. There will also be a series of games, starting with NPR Trivia Quiz and Name That Theme Song, and others will be released as more and more people install the app, NPR said. The winners get “virtual tote bags,” believe it or not.

NPR launched an iPad app right around this time last year and just passed the 1 million download mark, which isn’t bad considering Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) sold about 15 million iPads worldwide in 2010 and several million more in the first quarter of this year amid the iPad 2 launch. Apple will likely announce first-quarter iPad numbers during its earnings call in a few weeks.

The NPR board announced Schiller’s resignation this morning, a day after a video “sting” of chief fundraiser Ron Schiller (no relation) hit. In the surreptitious video of him talking to two purported Muslim donors, who were fakes, Ron Schiller said federal funding shouldn’t be needed for public radio and called some Tea Party supporters “seriously racist, racist people.” Ron Schiller also admitted the importance of federal funding and refused a (fake) $5 million donation from the pair. He had already announced that he was leaving NPR for another job in May; his resignation was made effective immediately.

Vivian Schiller hung on with just the loss of a bonus after the board inquiry of how Juan Williams was fired; top news exec Ellen Weiss resigned following the review. But the aftereffects of the Williams’ firing lingered. Monday, after a speech with stirring examples of NOR news coverage, Schiller was peppered with questions about Williams — and conservative political activist/video con man (or sting “artist”, as some like to call him), James O’Keefe has said he went after NPR because of Williams. The commentator has been at Fox News with a higher salary since the firing.

From the NPR board: Board Chairman Dave Edwards said, “The Board accepted Vivian’s resignation with understanding, genuine regret and great respect for her leadership of NPR these past two years.”

According to a CEO succession plan in place since 2009, Joyce Slocum, SVP of Legal Affairs and General Counsel, will be Interim CEO during the search process.

Update: Vivian Schiller offered her resignation last night and the board accepted. She told the NYT , “I’m hopeful that my departure from NPR will have the intended effect of easing the defunding pressure on public broadcasting.” Edwards described the decision as difficult both for her and the board, noting her leadership during tough economic times and in reframing NPR for today’s media landscape. She also wasn’t personally responsible for many of the mistakes — but, as Edwards and Schiller both note, being a CEO means taking responsibility.

Will her departure lessen the pressure on federal funding – a relatively small but significant (vital in some cases) contribution to NPR and its member stations — or change any attitudes towards “liberal” NPR? To use a favorite quote from Elaine May, “Information cannot argue with a closed mind.” The people who didn’t like NPR yesterday won’t like it any better post-Vivian Schiller. She didn’t create the aura of NPR as an ideological counterweight to Fox — although she did emphasize it as an intellectual counterweight to shallow coverage by any news organization — and those who see it as diametrically opposed to conservatives won’t change their minds because she’s gone.

But if Edwards and the NPR board aren’t careful, her departure could well derail many of the efforts either started or championed by Vivian Schiller — multi-platform growth and access, NPR-supported increased local, state and regional coverage, international coverage, the emphasis on multiple revenue streams, and more. NPR made some great strides over the past two years; its future shouldn’t be hobbled by missteps.

Disclosure: Over years of coverage during her tenure at the NYT and then at NPR, I’ve grown to know and like Vivian Schiller. I’ve also covered NPR for years, been a listener for longer and occasionally appear on shows that it syndicates. Personally, I wish this had turned out differently for all.

Times project leader Julia Kennard, in the NPR report: : “When you frame it within a free Internet world, you obviously go, you know, initially, you kind of why are you asking me to pay for this. But when you frame it within the debate of you’ve always paid for it when you read the newspaper, then they start to work that out then they really do change very quickly.”

Meanwhile, Brand Republic reports: “Telegraph Media Group is set to announce details of a metered website in the spring, with the launch pencilled in for September.” That’s despite TMG, just like back in November, telling it: “Absolutely no decisions have been made on the introduction of a paid-content model.”

The result is a 24/7 mix of all of those tracks. The “most recently played” list when I checked in just now was typically eclectic: Tord Gustavsen Trio, Broken Bells, and Hem next to Rufus Wainwright, Nirvana, Bob Dylan and The Flaming Lips. Neil Young is singing Broken Arrow as I write.) A “coming up” list would be a nice addition.

The music is all free but NPR doesn’t shy away from commercial potential. Songs can be purchased on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) or iTunes through the site. And, of course, there’s the “donate” reminder at the top of each page, including all the artist pages. The channel is an effective example of the ways NPR.org can make use of elements like the artist pages throughout the site to connect into and feed off of new and existing content. The channel is also included in the NPR Music app for iPhone.

NPR wants to show that with the right resources, stations can create beats of value to the community and in turn increase their own audience and value by using the internet as a platform for original content. Those resources include the funding to hire dedicated reporter-bloggers who come at the topic from an internet-first, not radio-first direction and the technology to support the sites. Put another way, it’s about helping members find a digital strategy beyond having a companion website for a radio station.

Stations may not be able to afford a team of reporters dedicated to a topic but can support one beat that is tightly focused, said Project Director Joel Sucherman. “Our mission is in proving out the theory. In order to gain traffic we feel there has to be a certain dedication to that site.” The stations selected to take part in the first Argo wave agreed to mainstream their new hires, not to carve out space away from the action. That’s not just to keep the blogger from being isolated; it’s to give the stations a chance to learn from how the blogger approaches writing and news.

At first glance, the small NPR logo tucked in the top right hand corner of new Philly music blog The Key might just be a reminder that parent station WXPN is an affiliate. But the logo with the words “Argo Network” is a subtle badge connecting the new site with the 11 other sites at NPR stations across the country, one of the few outward signs for most users that the network launching today even exists. No front-page mention of the role NPR had in launching The Key or the $3 million from the Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Much of what connects the Argo Network is below the surface — for now.

Go deeper to an article page and an NPR Network module appears on the lower right rail with links to stories across the network. The interlinking I envisioned when I first heard about Project Argo isn’t there, though. Each site has its own taxonomy; there isn’t a shared tagging system that automatically links topics or threads. It’s more of a federation then a shared knowledge base. That’s because the real emphasis now is on the sites, not the network. “The thing we concentrated on most was making the site work for the audience for that site,” explains Matt Thompson, Argo editorial product manager. “We imagined natural points of overlap but each site’s taxonomy is geared to its audience.”

Unlike the core station sites, which run on a variety of platforms, the Argo sites all use Word Press because of the familiarity and ease for bloggers, with a structure that let’s each one design its own look. They hang off of station domains but their server is in the Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) cloud, not with each station. Says Sucherman, “You’ll be able to recognize them as being part of a broader NPR effort even while they have distinctive identity.”

Tools being produced by the Argo team include a way to use Twitter to bubble up shared links instead of a litany of RTs or off-topic tweets. Each blogger builds a tightly focused group of people they follow on Twitter; the script returns the links that are repeated the most, not the tweets, to create what Sucherman calls a much better list of related content. The bloggers have full control and can pull links or add their own. They’ve also integrated the sites with Delicious so they can bookmark links and use tags that make relevant links show up around the site.

“The Argo team is dedicated to adding new features, functionality — we’re maybe about 33 percent to where we want to go,” says Sucherman. “We’ll be continuing to build this out for the next year and a half.” Eventually, whatever they develop will be released publicly as part of the Knight Foundation requirements. “One of the important pieces of what we are charged with doing is building site technology that can be used by anybody whether or not you’re part of public media.” But that doesn’t mean it has to be contemporaneous. “We won

Despite the fact that more NPR users are reading and listening, as well as watching some video, Schiller doesn’t want anyone to get the idea that NPR is aiming its sites toward magazines or TV. “Those are two things you won’t see us doing,” she said, noting the videos tend to be tied to music or other sorts of performances. “Radio is where our distinctiveness lies,” Schiller said. “There’s a certain quality, it’s hard to describe it. But you could be visiting another city and turn the radio dial and even if you don’t necessarily hear [Weekend Edition host] Scott Simon’s voice, you just know you’re on an NPR station.”

Schiller added that “over 35 million unduplicated consumers” listen to NPR on one platform or another. “We’re not the first place that will tell you when a plane crashes,” she said. “But we’ve got our niche and we want to expand it in areas where other journalism outlets are stepping away, such as investigations.”