Meta-journalism Experiment Day One (or, Day One at my new startup: Netscape)

It’s been an amazing day here at the New Netscape, and just as we suspected the DIGGfans came to the site and voted up a bunch of stories to test us. The first story was that AOL Copied DIGG and the second was the horrific experience one of our AOL members had trying to cancel their account.

As I said in the all the press I take journalism (mainstream or citizen) very seriously–I’ve based my career on it. The point of the New Netscape is to do “meta-journalism” (or social journalism) on the stories that our users vote into the top 10.

So, I encourage you all to go check out the follow-up stories we’ve done on the two stories:

http://tech.beta.netscape.com/story/2006/06/15/aol-copies-digg/
http://news.beta.netscape.com/story/2006/06/15/mp3-recording-trying-to-cancel-aol/

Great stuff. We actually just interviewed the person who tried to cancel their account and we’re searching for the AOL operator who was fired. This is the kind of followup I think that social bookmarking sites like DIGG, delicious, and reddit need. I’m not saying those sites are not great–I love them all and check them daily. However, I think the opportunity here is to do a layer of journalistic work beyond on the top 10 list. The folks at Delicious and DIGG are never going to hire journalist to followup on their top 10 list, and that’s fine–that’s why we started Netscape. We thought there was a need… time will tell if we were right.