The Information Diet

I Just finished watching Kirby Ferguson's beautiful and well done "Everything is a Remix". It reminded me: the concept of an information diet isn't my own -- it's nobody's. I'm just the first guy to write a book and call it that. Instead, I think there are lots of people talking about this idea that industrialized media, and our desire for cheap information is having strange undesirably long-term effects on society.

There are a few interesting projects bubbling up worthy of your attention:

1. Ferguson's next film, This is not a Conspiracy Theory. I think a lot of what he'll have to say echoes a lot of what is in The Information Diet.
2. Matter - Matter is a new project from some great journalists seeking to create a new model of long-form journalism: journalism that you pay for rather than journalism supported by advertisements. (as a side-note, I wish Kickstarter had a separate journalism category. Though I suppose that's what Spot.us is supposed to do.
3. The Chicago News Coop shuts down its contributions to the New York Times because "unlike similar start-up efforts like the Texas Tribune in Austin, the Bay Citizen inSan Francisco and ProPublica in New York, we never recruited the kind of seven figure donations from people of means concerned about the declining quality of news coverage around the country." Bummer. (via @dansinker.
4. The Knight News Challenge -- the thing that gave birth to GoodThings(tm) like EveryBlock and Spot.us opens for applications again on Monday.
5. Marshall Kilpatrick's new firm PlexusEngine created a list of top people in investigative journalism on twitter. Useful. If this is the kind of stuff Plexus Engine makes, I'm excited for it.
6. Readability, mentioned a few times in The Information Diet comes out for iOS on March 1st.