Martin is one of the better reporters in town; you can see his grim piece on the third serial shooter in the most recent issue of Phoenix Magazine. Screen_shot_2009-10-01_at_8.11.08_a.m.


He was an EVT staffer let go in one of the recent rounds of layoffs, but his blog, Heat City, lets him follow a few of his reportorial hobbyhorses.

His latest posting is a proposal for a variant on some of the new thinking of how traditional journalism can take advantage of some of the power of the web.

The trouble to this point has been that traditional journalism has had a hard time letting go of the control it’s used to having in reporting and telling stories. Martin’s proposal:

This could be done by creating a new web application to make it all possible. Here’s how the app would work:

  • A journalist writes a story and posts it online in “beta” form. The public can then log in to suggest extra sources, point out typos, critique for bias and upload media. The journalist or editor makes or approves changes, verifies facts and posts a final draft sometime later (maybe hours or days). The names of the people who helped in the process are included at the bottom of the story as named contributors, giving them ownership of the piece.

Beta Journalism (working title) would be that open-source application. The idea relies heavily on the concept of crowdsourcing. It embraces the knowledge of the community. It tells readers: This is a work in progress – please help us improve it.

You can read his complete idea here.