Oh Behave, Baby

In my best Austin Powers voice, have you seen the mojo? No, not Austin's Swedish-ly enhanced mojo, the brand-spankin' new label for mobile journalists touted by one chain in particular.

Hmm, I thought anyone who wasn't working on the desk was a journalist capable of being moving, but I digress -- don't let thinking get in the way of pimping, oops, I mean marketing, nope that's so 20th century, rebranding (yeah, that's the ticket) this revolutionary concept.

Give a reporter a laptop, a cell card, a digital camera, maybe even a digital video recorder and send them out in the field to send back stories. They will work from their vehicles! Equally stunning news -- they may not come into a desk in the office!!!

When they come to a regular reporter and tell him he's about to become a mojo, is the replicant already coming out of the basement pod?

Fort Myers News-Press is one of the Gannett properties hyping its mojo. They're also adding in those other new-wave terms of "crowdsourcing" (interestingly, now one word so I guess there's a little branding going on there) and "audience building".

The story in the Washington Post about these nifty hyper-local micro-site journalism innovations carried what has become the standard Michael Maness, Gannett VP for strategery, line on crowdsourcing. However, I do think the Dr. Evil twist in this quote is worth mentioning:

Crowdsourcing will "enable people to do digging themselves and maybe find conclusions we won't. It's having thousands of investigative reporters instead of three."

Perhaps I should provide a more serious analogy: Robespierre didn't imagine the Committee of Public Safety getting out of hand either.