New models of journalism and how they apply to the Geosign story

It's been almost six months since I started looking into this story and I still haven't got an authoritative source willing to go on the record about the details of the American Capital and Geosign deal. Quite frankly, I'm amazed that no one will talk given that this is hardly Watergate or even the Karl Heinz Shreiber affair. Loosen up, folks.

From my perspective this is most interesting as a story about bubbles, and fools and their money being easily parted. It's also a tale of supposed experts being paid (and paying) way too much, and, of course a story about the emporer having no clothes. If you're not into the details of SEO-dom and internet ad arbitrage, the only way you're likely to read about the Geosign story is if it's presented as a good scam narrative. Something along the lines of "fast talker tells the big guys what they want to hear and they fall for it."

I'm trying to get more information on this story by putting what I know out there in an approach Cory Doctorow has described as "publish, then select."

Media scholar Clay Shirky calls the pre-internet era the "select, then publish" epoch. It was a time when industrialists hired editors to choose from among the pool of available accounts of the world and its workings and publish those that suited their taste best.

Now we're in the era of "publish, then select." Gone is the era of a few news outlets who divide the pool of advertising dollars into substantial chunks and use those chunks to staff a newsroom full of investigative reporters.

Good riddance. We've got something better in "publish, then select" land. Investigative bloggers like Kathryn Cramer — whose hobby is tracking the movements and deeds of mercenary armies — post their initial impressions of a story, with whatever details they've gleaned. A horde of readers converges on the post and sends her corrections, argument, accord, evidence, and opinion. Cramer sifts through this to find what she considers credible and coherent, and adds new posts. In this incremental fashion, a truth emerges. Not the only truth (lots of the subjects of Cramer's posts strenuously object to them and tell her so on her site and on their own), but a truth nevertheless.

If you've followed the story on this blog, you know there's been no shortage of contradictory opinions and some of you have let it be known you found this whole exercise rather half-baked, which it is indeed as I'll let Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine explain:

(Gawker's Nick Denton offers a) formula for what we’ve called half-baked items, which he explained at the Murdoch newspaper confab we both attended as a blogging reporter saying to his audience, “Here’s what I know. Here’s what I don’t know. What do you know?”

At its most elevated, the new Gawker hire may experiment with a new form of reporting, unique to online, in which ideas are floated, appeals made to the readers, and the story assembled over the course of several items, from speculation, and tips from users.

I’ll take all the fun out of that, as perfessors do, and label that networked journalism.

So how about it? Anyone with some real info. and leads to get this story cooking? For example, who got SWI -- American Capital no doubt? And who can give me the real inside scoop on Nye? Does American Capital have someone running Geosign now? Or are they going to ditch it and , presuming they got SWI, move all operations to Florida? Why did they keep Hastings around? Just to save face? Who was the dupe at American Capital?

Let's do some networked journalism.