February 25 2010
February 25 2010
This week it was announced that a George Polk Award in Journalism was given to a group of anonymous videographers. The video was that of the violent death of an Iranian woman (Neda Agha-Soltan) during the protests last year.
Perhaps many of you have seen the film. It is disturbing, but viewing it feels somehow necessary.
The video was first uploaded by a 36 year old native of Iran living in the Netherlands. He received the film from an anonymous doctor who sent the video clip by email with the message “please let the world know.”
After that, the video was “pretty instantly fragmented into hundreds of other re-uploads” according to YouTube. Within hours, the video was viewed by millions of people.
Some of the biggest and most respected names in journalism have won George Polk Awards–Christiane Amanpour, Walter Cronkite, Gloria Emerson, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Charles Kuralt, Edward R. Murrow, Jack Newfield, Morley Safer, Oliver Sacks, and Nina Totenberg just to name a few.
So giving the Polk Award to “ordinary citizens” for the first time in the award’s 61-year old history is no minor shift. But like viewing the video, this shift too feels somehow necessary.
February 6 2010
A few of us from Plaid attended Mashable’s “The New Journalist” event at the 92YTribeca this week. It was a great talk about how social media is changing the way journalists work–most notably shifting the role of ‘reputation branding’ from the media (i.e., I work for The New York Times and therefore my work is validated) to the individual (i.e. I am John or Jane Doe and I am asking you, the public, to validate my work by following me on Twitter, etc).
What got my attention the most, however, was the opening act: Pepsi Refresh. We have written about the Pepsi Refresh in our blog before, as fans. Essentially, it is an ideas marketplace, whereby Pepsi is giving away up to $1.3 million dollars a month to people, organizations and non-profits with ideas that will have a positive impact.
The new twist, however, is learning where the money is coming from to fund this effort: its Super Bowl budget. That means that instead of investing $3million dollars for every 30 second spot, Pepsi has decided instead to invest in things like urban farming, building schools, creating new art spaces, etc.
In the first 15 days of launching its Refresh social media campaign, Pepsi received more than 1,000 ideas like this, many if which will be funded (the first set of winners will be announced in early March).
Pepsi has been a standing Super Bowl advertiser for 23 years, so this is no small departure for the company. The Super Bowl has been the grand stage for the ongoing dual between Pepsi and “the real thing” Coke.
Personally, I think Pepsi’s project feels like ‘the real’ real thing. That’s refreshing.
