Sir Tim Berners-Lee reckons he's glimpsed the future of journalism – and given he's the person who invented the world wide web, you might not want to bet against him.

"The responsibility needs to be with the press," Berners-Lee responded firmly. "Journalists need to be data-savvy. It used to be that you would get stories by chatting to people in bars, and it still might be that you'll do it that way some times.

"But now it's also going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse it and picking out what's interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it all fits together, and what's going on in the country."
"Most of the innovation is happening outside news organisations," Bradshaw says. "Sites like Openly Local, Charities Direct, Who's Lobbying?, Where Does My Money Go? and Scraperwiki. They're all hiding their light under a bushel. All doing great things."

WaPo to integrate crowd-sourcing–starting with Stewart-Colbert Rally.

"The Story Lab team will be filing stories throughout Saturday's events on the Mall via Intersect, a new site designed to collect and present stories live and from the scene. Here on washingtonpost.com and on Intersect's site, we'll be documenting the scene and asking those in attendance and those watching at home to weigh in on the politics vs. entertainment question."

The former design director for the New York Times has written a blog post giving his thoughts on magazine apps for the iPad (something he clearly gets asked about a lot). The bottom line? He hates them. With a passion. Why? Because, Khoi Vinh says, they are “bloated [and] user-unfriendly” and because they are largely a result of a “tired pattern of mass-media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms, without really understanding the platforms at all.”

…Vinh doesn’t just blame publishers though — he blames Adobe as well (which recently took over production of all of Conde Nast’s magazine apps) for “doing a tremendous disservice to the publishing industry by encouraging these ineptly literal translations of print publications into iPad apps.” And who comes in for praise in Vinh’s review? It’s a short list, including one of the few apps to take a creative tack on the iPad magazine: Gourmet Live, which has turned the magazine into an interactive game of sorts.

I think this says it all.

"Democrats were early adopters of social media, user-generated content and blogging, but it appears that Republican supporters have caught up with, and in some ways surpassed, their rivals online."

Info on how the Sunday Times paywalls are doing… (not so well…)

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT__Last Monday, the Campaign Finance Institute — along with the Miller Center of Public Affairs — hosted a panel where a group of eight scholars, journalists, and lawyers sounded off on the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United and its consequences for the campaign-finance system. Representatives from the CFI noted that election-related spending by political committees and nonprofits is up 40 percent from 2008. And while some of this is expected as part of the steady increase of campaign spending — "The big surge in nonprofit money began in 2008," says Michael Malbin, executive director of the CFI — a significant part of it comes as a result of Citizens United.

GRITTV__"What we are seeing is a dagger directed at the heart of our democracy, with this money," says Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, of the ongoing influx of corporate cash on election spending this cycle. She notes that this has been a $5 billion–with a B–election, with $1 billion spent just on the House, and no matter what Karl Rove tries to say, there is nowhere close to parity with spending from left-wing causes.

Katrina and Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker join Laura in studio for a discussion of the money flooding the election cycle, and to consider ways to counter the corrupting influence of cash on our political system. Is there a way to save the 2010 elections?