If you want to know what it's like pitching a new media project, just go to the experts:

This South Park clip, a classic in its own right, is a favorite around the MIT Center for Future Civic Media because every single new media project -- ours and those from our Knight News Challenge colleagues -- inevitably hits a wall at "Phase 2."

For South Park's Underpants Gnomes, "Phase 1: Collect underpants" is like every great idea we've all had: It doesn't quite make sense to everyone else yet, but we know it's gold. We also know it totally will lead to reinventing the news industry for the better. It will use technology in a new way, it will draw upon existing competencies in communities, and it will be financially sustainable. Totally. It therefore leads to "Phase 3: Profit."

Okay, enough people have (re)berated poor Clifford Stoll, whose 1995 essay The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana resurfaced and, yes, is still so curmudgeony that it makes Dennis the Menace's Mr. Wilson sound like Pangloss. To wit:

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them--one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later."

(Update: Adam Klawonn responds below. Post has been updated with his noted correction.)

The Zonie Report, a project by Adam Klawonn, has decided to shut its virtual doors, for now. Klawonn writes:

I learned some hard lessons in my idealistic crusade to bring better, more innovative journalism to the expectant masses. I’m leaving a lot out, but I’d like to share of them with you now and hear more about your own observations. Feel free to share.

First, the Internet audience is incredibly fickle, so the expectant Zonie Report masses weren’t there. (It turns out there were only about 8,000 of them in a state of 6 million-plus residents.)

Second, the way we consume media online does not lend itself to a deep-reading format, so short stories and truncated video (from car accidents to Britney Spears sightings to bar fights in Scottsdale) proliferate. This says something about the format, about us and about news outlets in general.

Chris Csikszentmihályi in the Columbia Journalism Review on Looking for Haiti’s Lost, Online:

A blog or BBS (bulletin board system) is great for chronologically ordering stories or conversations, but the serial format leaves much to desire for exhaustive searches, and two blogs are more than twice as bad. If a cousin of “Jean Deaux” posts that she is looking for news of Jean on one site, and Jean’s friend posts that he is safe on a different site, the cousin might never see it. The greater the number of sites posting lost or found information, the less chance there is that the right people can connect. According to Reed’s Law, the value of a network grows exponentially with the number of its members. Silos, while great for grain, are terrible for information. What is called for is open, interchangeable data.

From Andrew Slack of the Harry Potter Alliance:

Yesterday's Boston Globe featured an article by Farah Stockman explaining how "under siege at home, Iran’s dissidents draw comfort and ideas from some visionary thinkers based here."

In the wake of widespread protests in Iran after a disputed presidential election, a mass indictment accused more than 100 Iranian politicians and activists of following the instructions of Sharp, as well as spying for several other US academics, among other charges. So far, about 80 of the accused have received prison sentences, while at least one has been sentenced to death.

Just came over the wire:

We've Extended the Call for Presentations for Gov 2.0 Expo to January 6, so there's a little more time for you to submit a proposal. If you're passionate about the power of the Web and how it can be leveraged to create greater transparency, participation, and collaboration between government and citizenry, we want to hear from you.

Whether you're submitting a 50-minute session or panel discussion, 90-minute workshop or a 5-minute rapid fire presentation (as demonstrated at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in September 2009), please choose the track which best fits your submission from the choices below.

Learning through Interactive Journalism, one of our projects led by Mitch Resnick and using his Scratch programming language, is having great success in a National Science Foundation-funded program in New Jersey.

Ron Steinman, NBC's Saigon bureau chief during the Vietnam War, the author of two books on the war, and now executive editor of The Digital Journalist, takes an unusually strong--some might say aggressively dismissive--stand against the rise of citizen journalism, particularly as use of volunteer reporters displaces professionals. "It is important that we defeat what appears to be a land grab by citizen journalists and blind accountants," Steinman writes, "or what they really are: untutored amateurs, the almost journalists of our modern age."

The gathering and presentation of news cannot live on desire alone. It cannot go forward without money and lots of it. It takes time and dedication to keep people informed. Journalists need training to succeed. Without training, and the high standards that training brings, something that the supporters of citizen journalism decry as hoary, there would be no journalism at all. In the end, someone has to pay the professionals for the work they do.

[...]

For all the hype, using citizen journalists is an excuse by the bean counters at publications to lower costs. By putting costs over content, the accountants lower standards. This saves an enormous amount of money it would have to spend on those who normally collect news. In reality, accountants really do not know better.

Read and comment on the full post at The Digital Journalist.