Idea Lab

Knight-Mozilla Partnership Morphs into Knight-Mozilla OpenNews

by Dan Sinker

Change is awesome -- it's a necessary component to anything remaining vital and a required ingredient to facilitate organic growth. And so it's with real excitement that today I'm announcing changes to the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. Before we get to the changes, some quick background: Conversations around the original partnership began in 2010, with the program launching at the start of 2011. That means that the program design, by necessity, reflected 2010's problem sets. Two years is an eternity on the Internet -- it was time to rethink and retool for today. The community around code in journalism is...

• February 8, 2012
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A Deep Dive into the Boston Globe Online and the Future of Print

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A version of this post first appeared on MIT's Center for Civic Media blog. Updated: Our recent Civic Media lunch at MIT featured the digital team from the Boston Globe, led by Jeff Moriarty, vice president of Digital Products. He was joined by Chris Marstall, Marck Chang, and Grace Woo. They've just launched a new standalone site for the Globe, spinning off from the Boston.com portal and its ubiquitous pop-up ads. It's not a redesign -- they got to design a newspaper site from scratch in the year 2011, and the benefits of having a blank slate are evident in...

• February 7, 2012
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OpenRural Takes Public Records Out of the Attic and Onto the Web

by Eliza Kern
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Storing paper records in the attic of a police station might sound like a practice from the distant past, but that's what I learned happens in at least one rural North Carolina county. In fact, good old-fashioned paper copies of public records are still common in rural parts of North Carolina. Part of our job here at the OpenRural project at UNC is to somehow get that paper out of the attic and onto the web, and do it in a way that's financially sustainable for the staff of small papers. To find out just how often records are stored...

• February 6, 2012
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Video Volunteers Makes an Impact in India with Incentives for Media Makers

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As part of a 4-part series, Video Volunteers is sharing what we've done over the last year, our experiences, and what we've learned. Part 1, which you can read here, was a basic introduction to IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. Part 2 outlines new ideas we implemented into our training programs in 2011. For instance, we set incentives for our community correspondents in India. This triggered a series of valuable positive changes for the communities concerned. Incentives work In October, we held an advanced training session for our strongest community correspondents which focused on activism and getting "impact." (To...

• February 3, 2012
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The Other Side of Entrepreneurial Journalism

by David Cohn

A version of this post first appeared here. It is yet another Carnival of Journalism (our one-year anniversary). The Carnival is a network of bloggers I reinvigorated who all write a response to a different question every month. This month's question comes from Michael Rosenblum: "Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?" A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak at the Cronkite School of Journalism in Arizona by my friend and mentor Dan Gillmor. It was a gathering of journalism professors from around the country who are going to build their own curriculum to teach entrepreneurial...

• February 2, 2012
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How Video Volunteers Created a Network of Community Correspondents in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The state of technology today means that nearly every village in the developing world could have someone -- a local changemaker -- who broadcasts his or her issues to the world. It's commonplace today to hear people say the world is flooded with content and that "everyone" can now be a producer. At every community video training that Video Volunteers conducts for people from marginalized communities in India, more and more people are showing up with $15 Chinese-made video-enabled cell phones. It's now possible for rural people without data connections to send tweets via SMS. In India, the government has...

• February 1, 2012
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TileMill Now Lets You Design Maps for the Web on Windows

by Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

TileMill, the free and open-source design studio for creating beautiful web maps, is now available for download on Windows. With the latest release, the map-making tool is fully operational on the three leading operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux. With Windows still dominating the marketplace, this is a huge development that will open the door to many more users being able to use TileMill to make custom maps. This was possible because Node.js, the blazingly fast open-source software that's at the core of TileMill, recently gained Windows support. Quick Start To get started making custom maps with Tilemill, download the...

• January 31, 2012
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After Crystal Cox Verdict, It's Time to Define Who Is a Journalist

by CJ Cornell
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last month, the Crystal Cox verdict re-energized a debate among journalism's most passionate and articulate thought leaders and professionals by begging the question: Who is a journalist? Just about anyone with a laptop or cell phone can use free technology to create quality media and reach audiences larger than any newspaper or television network. Indeed, we are all publishers now. But are we all journalists now, too? Never has technology unraveled an industry so fast that its professionals no longer agree on what it is that they do. It's not surprising; the sharp line between journalist and non-journalist is so faded that few...

• January 31, 2012
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5 Keys to a Killer Presentation

by Tom Grasty
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two and a half years ago, I co-founded Stroome, a collaborative online video editing and publishing platform and 2010 Knight News Challenge winner. There are a lot of uncertainties in the startup game. But one thing is for sure: When it comes to presenting your product to potential investors, customers and partners, you're always on stage. We first unveiled our platform at USC Annenberg's pioneering Program for Online Communities in the fall of 2009. Nearly three years -- and probably a hundred presentations later -- we're still showing off our wares. Recently, I was asked by Jason Nazar, founder of...

• January 30, 2012
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The Front Line of the U.S. Censorship Battle Is Behind Bars

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A longer version of this post first appeared on MIT's Center for Civic Media blog. In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, editor and co-founder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN. PLN operates in a unique media environment, where the very act of distributing a magazine to their customers might first require winning a lawsuit. You see, their primary audience is made up of prisoners themselves. Prison Legal...

• January 27, 2012
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