Most of you perhaps don’t know that I am writing my dissertation about Global Voices. But this is an incredible group of people who make sure that parts of the world that otherwise gets ignored in the mainstream media get their voices heard.

They are currently looking for donations that will help them sustain the incredible valuable and good work they do. I ended up donating $77 dollar - why $77? It’s my birth year. It’s a small sum with a symbolic value that I hope will encourage others to chip in as well.

Why should you donate?

Donating to Global Voices helps tell them that they are doing a good job. The value here is symbolic, rather than material. This is not unimportant - they would never have gotten so big if most of their work was not ‘free’, free as in volunteer labor. Getting appreciation for the volunteer work you do is incredibly important. Viviana Zelizer has called this the crowding-in effect of money on volunteer work.

Donating to Global Voices helps them stay a bit more independent from big donors. And allow them to write about topics they think are important, as opposed to topics that will attract the biggest crowd. The question of how media organizations get funded is not a trivial one. Global Voices get funded through a combination of support from foundations, corporations and individual donations. Political economy, particularly work by scholars like Robert McChesney and Oscar Gandy to name a few, has pointed out how money shapes what media writes about, and what not. In a perfect world, media organizations would all be funded by many individual donations, so that they can maintain independence and write about topics without constraint. In reality, media organizations will often not write about topics that might offend their owners or advertisers. Also, they will write especially about topics that will get the attention of a lot of audiences in order to attract more advertisers. These are topics people might want, but not necessarily what they need. Consider how much words are devoted to Britney Spears and the iPhone, which are great topics, but they tend to drown out other regions, areas and topics.

To sum up, giving a donation is a good idea because they are great people that do important work nobody else is doing - we want to make sure they can continue to do this work as well as let them know we appreciate the work they do. Please consider making a donation.

Besides donating, there is another way to help and show your appreciation: by spreading the word. They have made some cool - and cute - badges you can use to put on your blog.

cross-posted from global voices, one world

Last night, a friend of mine claimed that blogs have no redeeming value. (He’d had a few beers, so the claim was a bit less, um, polite and articulate; he didn’t know I’m a blogger, so it may have been a good thing I was sober.)

While I’ll grant that many blogs do not have much to say, a good many do, and the very exceptional blogs break news stories by original reporting. Some bloggers actually go out into the field and conduct interviews, take pictures, and make observations. Others break stories by sifting through mountains of data (government documents, corporate reports, congressional hearings, etc.) for otherwise unseen patterns or unexpected tidbits.

FiveThirtyEight.com is the best campaign blog of the season, and it’s because they’ve done an outstanding job of both sifting through mountains of data (polls and demographic variables) and hitting the road to do original reporting. While the statistical analysis is what brought most of the readers to fivethirtyeight, the original reporting from the field is perhaps even more valuable.

Nate Silver, the number-crunching genius who built his reputation on inventive work with Baseball Prospectus, got millions of political junkies hooked with his superior statistical analysis–complete with “win percentages” based on ten thousand daily election simulations. While most news outlets will report their own episodic or tracking poll results, or cherry pick results based on their news value (often placing undue emphasis on outliers), Silver’s steady hand combines demographic data with a thoughtful, detailed poll of polls, at both the state and the national level, to give readers a solid understanding of the state of the election.

The addition of demographic data to the soup has made the site somewhat more sophisticated than simple poll-of-polls sites like Pollster and RealClearPolitics. The “win percentage” numbers are also quite helpful, providing a realistic understanding of what it really means to have an average polling lead of, say, 1.4% in North Carolina (Obama wins 65% of simulations), or a 4.9% lead in Georgia (McCain wins 91%). Silver also deserves much credit for total transparency as to his methods.

While Silver’s number-crunching has been the very best of the season, perhaps the site’s most important contribution has come in the site’s original on-the-ground reporting of both presidential campaigns’ ground games. It doesn’t take a statistical genius–indeed, it takes no genius at all–to know that the ground games make all the difference in close elections.

Here, 538’s On the Road series has been just about the only game in town. Reporter Sean Quinn and photographer Brett Marty simply got in a car and drove across the country, hitting swing state after swing state.

The result? Well, they’ve reported on explosive excitement and volunteer efforts at every Obama field office across the country. And in contrast:

But the other story, the story on which we’ve had a running eight-week exclusive in 36 separate On the Road pieces and counting, is that John McCain’s ground campaign is just not happening. It hasn’t been happening, without Sarah Palin there might be four or five volunteers across the entire nation left, and now, per Mosk’s piece at WaPo, it looks like it will be happening even less.

That a 3-person blog that didn’t exist until this March has this exclusive is amazing–and outrageous. It’s amazing that such a small operation can provide such important insights into what may be the story of the presidential election–the complete reversal of the major parties’ abilities to mobilize supporters on the ground. And it’s outrageous that not a single mainstream news outlet has covered this story, even when it’s been handed to them on a Silver platter. (Wokka.)

If that doesn’t illustrate the power of blogging–the awesome reporting and analysis that occasionally sprouts forth from motivated outsiders–then I don’t know what could.

What is the role of citizen journalism in crisis situations? Some quick thoughts and anecdotal evidence suggests that the role citizens can play in crisis situations is becoming significant. Consider the example of citizens taking snapshots with their cameraphones during the London subway attack. Or think about how the Sichuan earthquake first ‘broke’ on Twitter, a micro-blogging tool. If you think about how journalists cannot be everywhere, but ‘citizen journalists’ certainly are *potentially* everywhere - it will be interesting to see how this further develops.

I had the great pleasure to have lunch with Patrick Meier and Kate Brodock the other day. In tackling the question what role citizen journalism plays in crisis situations, they worked on analyzing and mapping the crisis responses of citizen journalists, mainstream news organizations and Ushahidi reports over time and space during the Kenya post-election violence. They used that information to create a Google Earth map that shows visually how citizen journalists are becoming an important factor in crisis reporting. Check out their fascinating study.