Idea Lab

Moving on After the Knight News Challenge

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2008, the Open Media Foundation (then Deproduction) received a $380,000 Knight News Challenge award, and it was a major turning-point for our organization. We added staff, formed new partnerships, and maintained a level of growth that had us approximately double in size each year over our first five years after forming in 2004. The Open Media Project grant is for a four-part effort that began with a re-building of the software we developed to automate an unprecedented approach to user-generated and community-powered TV in Denver. The second phase saw our team implement this re-built Drupal software and business model...

• February 5, 2010
• 1 comment

What Are the Universal Principles that Guide Journalism?

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Defining principles of journalism is difficult. Rewarding, but difficult. Back in 2005 it took the Los Angeles Times a year of internal discussions to settle on its ethical guidelines for journalists. The Committee for Concerned Journalists took four years, did oodles of research and held 20 public forums, in order to come up with a Statement of Shared Purpose with nine principles (which was subsequently fleshed out in the excellent "The Elements of Journalism" by Kovach and Rosenstiel). Time spent thinking can then translate into a lot of principles. The BBC's editorial guidelines -- which include guidance about more than...

• February 2, 2010
• 2 comments

Printcasting 1.5 Boosts Design for On-Demand Publishing

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A funny thing happens when you win a contest like the Knight News Challenge. Suddenly, what was once just a wacky idea that you threw into a web form becomes a long list of things you have to do. And those of you who are lucky enough to be filling out a full Knight News Challenge proposal this week for the second phase of the competition should take note: If you win, you have to do all of it. If you haven't seen the list of features we originally promised to build into Printcasting, let's just say it was pretty...

• February 1, 2010
• No comments

Truly Serving the Public -- With Web Tools

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We journalists are fond of saying that journalism is constitutionally protected because of our critical role in providing information that people need to be citizens in a democracy. Which makes it all the more shameful that most newspapers -- in print and online -- have historically done such a lousy job of helping people navigate the core functionality of democracy: elections. The Chicago Tribune's Election Center, developed by the team that includes the first two programmer-journalists (whose journalism educations were financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships), is a great example of what's possible. The site provides an essential guide to...

• February 1, 2010
• 1 comment

Video Volunteers Gets some Boost from Bollywood

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers had a great moment a couple weeks ago - we got our first celebrity ambassador for the organization, a very popular Indian film actor named Abhay Deol, who has acted in some of the best "art" films of the last few years. We organized a screening in one of the bastis (slums) in Mumbai where two of our Community Video Units in our Knight-funded project have been working for the last few years. Slum residents from all over the area turned up, as well as all the major Bombay TV stations and of course our community producers. They...

• February 1, 2010
• No comments

Steady Driving for Community Radio

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It has been quite a while since we wrote updates, but a lot has been going on. For one, we were winners in the Indian national Manthan Awards for 2009 for technological innovation for development! Then we did a second release of our broadcast system for community radio integrated with telephony, and deployed it at our pilot location. We are set for two more pilots in the next two weeks, and we will start professional deployments very soon! The community radio movement in India has also been picking up pace steadily, there are now almost fifty community radio stations, and...

• January 31, 2010
• 1 comment

Creating Community Video Entrepreneurs in Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Late last year, Stalin K., my partner in the Knight-funded project Video Volunteers, and I were seated in the video laboratory of VCU.br in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We were joined by nine of VV's new Brazilian Video Fellows. We were there to conduct a workshop about entrepreneurship in the creative field of video. The purpose of our recently-launched program in Sao Paulo is to create "video entrepreneurs," and this post is a snapshot of one of the exercises we did while we were there. The nine young people were all from favela/periphery areas of Sao Paulo, and on that day...

• January 29, 2010
• No comments

An Overview of Community Media in Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Almost undoubtedly, Brazil is the country with the largest public investment in community arts and culture. There are dozens of groups teaching video, hip-hop, graffiti, circus arts, carnival-related arts and digital media to youth from the favelas. In Rio alone, we visited five groups doing community arts, and between them we calculated there were roughly 500 kids from favelas this year alone learning video up to a semi-professional level. By contrast, when we started Video Volunteers in India, there were only two other groups in the country running permanent programs in community video. So the difference in Brazil, where we...

• January 27, 2010
• 1 comment

How Mobile Voices Developed a Citizen Media Platform

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the last eighteen months, three programmers have been working on Mobile Voices. I talked to Sasha Constanza-Chock, one of the developers of the project, about the process that went into building the Mobile Voices platform. I asked why Mobile Voices built a custom platform for the project, why they chose to use multimedia messaging for content delivery, and the lessons they have learned about using MMS.

• January 26, 2010
• 3 comments

The Great News Business Model Hunt is a Wild Goose Chase

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It may be impolitic to admit this, but I'm weary of the Great News Business Model Hunt. For those journalists who have just woken up to the changes in their industry, I know that this issue couldn't be more fascinating and pertinent. But if you worked in the news business on the web from the start, as I did at Salon.com beginning in 1995, this hunt has become an overly familiar routine and, at its worst, a rite of futility. Over the course of the decade I spent at Salon, we tried it all -- pay walls, partial and total;...

• January 25, 2010
• 4 comments