You won’t have heard this anytime during NBC’s TV coverage of last night’s closing ceremonies, although it is getting plenty of coverage in the news (MSNBC, NYT, WP, WSJ, BBC, LAT, CNN) but Brian’s wife Eowyn emailed us all yesterday with the happy news that our friend Brian Conley and seven other US citizens who were detained in Beijing last Tuesday have been released and were being deported back to the US, to arrive in Los Angeles this morning.

Brian and the others, including James Powderly, an artist who works with Eyebeam here in New York, had been in custody for several days without word before Eowyn heard that they would be held for ten days, until August 30, as punishment for being involved (in Brian’s case, simply documenting as a citizen journalist, like many of the accredited reporters on the scene, who were not arrested) in a protest by Students for a Free Tibet, but likely due to advocacy and pressure from their friends and family and the resulting media attention, they were released 6 days ahead of schedule.

I’m happy to hear they’ll be back with their friends and families soon after a scary week — and I can’t speak for anyone else here, but this has highlighted for me the freedoms we take for granted here: freedom to organize and demonstrate, to protest for a cause, to get due process (and a phone call) when arrested, and to film and document what’s happening in a public place (not to mention, to make silly videos about our presidential candidates) — all of which have had limits imposed in our own country in recent years in the name of security. With the elections heating up this month and both parties’ candidates staking out their platforms, I hope that doesn’t get lost as an issue. Freedom FTW in ‘08.

It was a great weekend for politics here at NNN. This weekend we were all over the moon to see our very own Amber Lee Ettinger aka Obama Girl make a cameo in the opening of Saturday Night Live’s return episode after the Writer’s Strike. To quote Barely Political’s creator Ben Relles it was ‘beyond exciting’. Great job Amber and Ben.

And as the icing on the cake Noam Cohen in the New York Times did a great piece on Josh Marshall today and his winning of a George Polk Award. As soon as bloggers are considered, we know Josh will be up for a Pulitzer.

Josh- Our Man of the Year

Veracifier’s star Josh Marshall and TPM won a George Polk journalism award yesterday for their reporting on the federal prosecutors firing scandal in 2007. Traditional journalism accolades such as the Polk underline that bloggers like Josh are proving the success of old fashioned gum shoe journalism through the medium of new media. A huge congratulations to TPM. We continue to be proud to be associated with them.

While the rest of the blogosphere is breathlessly covering CES, Jackson West over at NewTeeVee took some time to highlight the incredible work The Uptake and Veracifier are doing, along with other videobloggers like Steve Garfield and Debate Porridge, covering the primary election season, something we wrote about here last week. Our own Marc Boxser is quoted:

“We are probably, for video coverage, in 2008 … what 2004 was for blogs,” Next New Network’s (NNN) Mark Boxser told me over the phone. Boxser, who manages Veracifier for NNN, further pointed out that the site had the second most-viewed channel on YouTube yesterday, with hundreds of thousands of views spread over multiple updates, beating CBS.

A screenshot of Veracifier early Wednesday morning, already the third-most viewed channel on YouTube.

The great angle in the article is the way everyone is partnering to cover the stories, highlighting an example where Steve Garfield wandered around with a Nokia cellphone, streamed stories live, then Chuck Olsen edited Steve’s footage into a story that was both broadcast live on TheUptake’s Mogulus feed and released as a Veracifier “Ground Hounds” report. Jackson quotes Mary Matthews from Debate Porridge: “It’s not a competition with us,” she said. “[Not] yet, anyway… If [online media makers] go the way of television and the advertisers, and be beholden to the money, then it’s just going to be television on the Internet.”

I think it’s a long way off before things get competitive in the way anyone might fear. If the growth of blogs as news media says anything, it’s that featuring the best reporting and commentary, wherever it comes from, and serving your audience above everything else is the way to win online. And many, including the gang here at Next New Networks, would argue that’s the trick to programming good news content in any medium.

The sweet scent of victory. Yesterday’s Iowa Caucus was a huge one for the NNN political team. Our boy Obama won the Iowa caucus- and with her video gaining a million views in just over 24 hours, the Obama Girl herself gave her victory address this morning:

We’ll be watching out for our invitation to the inauguration. Meanwhile Veracifier had an unprecedented number of people reporting on the ground in Iowa- surely an internet first. Through our ground hounds partnership with the Uptake we posted multiple reports throughout the day, including most of the major candidate’s pre Caucus rallies:

and stories from across the state, like Hound Chuck Tomlinson’s take on the media blitz itself:

The Uptake itself streamed live video throughout the Caucus, and it was all done by the seat of our pants, with everyone surprised by both the quality and amount of reporting we were getting in from all of Iowa. Bring on New Hampshire!

[originally posted by Marc Boxser on the Veracifier blog]

We at Veracifier.com are excited to announce that we are launching a strategic partnership with TheUpTake.org to recruit, train, and showcase independent video journalists from around the country during the 2008 election year.

Community driven journalism, whether through tips, comments or independent reports, has always been a permanent part of Veracifier’s programming. (more…)

With so much going on, it’s hard to take a minute to stop and blog the moments along the way. However, we’ve got to congratulate Josh Marshall, TPM, and our team here at Veracifier, who are having their best week ever.

It all started when an eagle eyed member of the TPMtv team posted some video of John McCain not exactly chastising a questioner who called our possible next President an unflattering world. That video’s here, if you didn’t happen to catch it.

By that afternoon, the video was the top story on the front page of AOL and our channel had racked up about a million extra views — in one day — on both YouTube and our site. To date, there are now over 1600 comments on YouTube, over 15,000 comments on AOL, and the story keeps rolling.

Oh, and especially fun for all of us — all the attention made Veracifier the #1 most viewed channel on YouTube for the day:

What’s especially interesting is that this was video footage the entire media corps had access to; our lean operation with TPM pays a modest fee to get clean access to video footage such as this from some of the same providers who provide to C-SPAN. As we noticed once before with the Rose Garden Long Shot incident, often the key to good TV online is just about finding the right stuff at the right time, and making it more available than anyone else. Great job, Josh, Ben, Marc, and everyone else on Veracifier. (And thanks to David Levin at Brainstorm for the heads-up.)