Idea Lab

Pop Up Archive Makes Audio Searchable, Findable, Reusable

by Anne Wootton
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

After an insane and memorable week at SXSW Interactive in Austin in March, we came away with our work cut out for us: improving Pop Up Archive so that it's a reliable place to make all kinds of audio searchable, findable and reusable. Thanks in no small part to the brilliant development team at PRX, we've come leaps and bounds since then. what it can do Pop Up Archive can: Generate automatic transcripts and keywords so that audio is both searchable and easy to organize. Provide access to an archive of sound from around the world. Save time and money...

• May 22, 2013
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Former Facebook ME Dan Fletcher: 'It's a Great Time to Launch a New Publication'

by Ryan Graff

This post was written by Ryan Graff of the Northwestern University Knight Lab and originally appeared on the Lab's blog as part of a series of Q&As with highly impressive makers and strategists from media and its fringes, each with unique perspectives on journalism, publishing and communications technology. Catch up and/or follow the series here. Dan Fletcher, the recently departed managing editor at Facebook, seems to be always ahead of the curve. In 2010, at age 22, Fletcher became the youngest person ever to write a cover story for Time magazine. He also created and launched Time.com's NewsFeed feature and...

• May 21, 2013
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New Poderopedia Features Let You Reuse Content, Find Power in Community

by Miguel Paz

The Poderopedia platform helps show the relationships among the elite in a country or region, especially in places where power is concentrated in the hands of a few people. After winning the Knight News Challenge in 2011, we launched Poderopedia in Chile last fall, with the goal of mapping who's who in business and politics in our country. We also wanted to offer an open-source version of our platform that would let anyone map relationships in their own communities. Since then, the platform has received a lot of international press coverage, and many Chilean news websites have used Poderopedia...

• May 17, 2013
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4 Lessons for Journalism Students from the Digital Edge

by Brian Moritz

This past semester, I flew a drone. I helped set up a virtual reality environment. And I helped print a cup out of thin air. Nice work if you can get it. Working as a research assistant to Dan Pacheco at the Peter A. Horvitz Endowed Chair for Journalism Innovation at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, I helped run the Digital Edge Journalism Series in the spring semester. We held a series of four programs that highlighted the cutting edge of journalism technology. Pacheco ran a session about drones in media; we had Dan Schultz...

• May 15, 2013
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How FrontlineSMS Helped an Indonesian Community Clean Up a River

by Een Irawan Putra

FrontlineSMS has had a strong connection with environmental issues since our founder had the initial spark of an idea while working on an anti-poaching project in South Africa. We're delighted to share how Een Irawan Putra of KPC Bogor and the Indonesia Nature Film Society used FrontlineSMS in Indonesia to invite the community to help clean up the garbage clogging the Ciliwung River. Community Care Ciliwung Bogor, known locally as KPC Bogor, was founded in March 2009 in West Java, Indonesia to harness the growing community concern for the sustainability of the Ciliwung River in the city of Bogor. We...

• May 14, 2013
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OpenNews: Two New Code Sprints Help Newsrooms Tackle Data

by Dan Sinker

Data is a buzzword nowadays. Whether it’s sifting Big Data to influence business, or the promise of Open Data to transform government, or Data Analytics winning elections, data is constantly in the news. But one thing that gets glossed over in all the buzz is that data is hard. Really, really hard. One of the hardest parts is cleaning, standardizing, and formatting data in a way that journalists and others can start to work with. These are real challenges faced by newsrooms, and we’re hoping to make some of that a little easier with two new Code Sprints we’re...

• May 13, 2013
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Can Citizen Journalism Move Beyond Crisis Reporting?

by Trevor Knoblich
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings demonstrated yet another significant marker for citizen journalism. Felix Salmon, in an excellent post on the Reuters blog, wrote that the manhunt for a suspect in the bombings "in many ways represented the first fully interactive news story." The crisis again demonstrated the value -- and risks -- of citizen reporting via social media. Citizen reporters broke much of the news, though they still needed broadcast media to help spread it. In some cases, citizens were able to capture iconic photos of events. Others were able to tell compelling stories about how the...

• May 9, 2013
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Why Big City #OpenGov Solutions Don't Always Work for Small Towns

by Caitria O’Neill
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

I work for a civic technology startup in San Francisco, but I'm a small-town native who works daily with small to midsized communities. As such, when I read or hear about the latest "answer" to civic problems, created by a team of geniuses and piloted in one of the largest cities in the country, I'm a little wary. While shining examples of city use of technology like San Francisco and New York City are well worth profiling and learning from, if their solutions don't fit a town of 9,000, the problem has not yet been truly solved. Small communities need...

• May 8, 2013
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Lessons from the School of Data Journalism

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Another busy year has passed since the first School of Data Journalism at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. Last year, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the European Journalism Centre launched the Data Journalism Handbook, and this year, the two organizations were back organizing the festival within a festival. Here are a few highlights. The School of Data Journalism, Europe's biggest data journalism event, brought together around 20 panelists and instructors from Reuters, The New York Times, Spiegel, Guardian, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and others, in a mix of discussions and hands-on sessions focusing on everything from...

• May 7, 2013
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How Washington D.C.'s Laws Were Set Free for Web Viewing

by Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

On Greater Greater Washington, Tom MacWright recently wrote a blog entry highlighting the problems of access to the Washington, D.C. Code. There is, first, a legal obstacle: Washington D.C. claims copyright over their laws, which is to say that it is illegal to reproduce them without permission of the city. Then, second, what is perhaps a more significant obstacle: They outsource the maintenance of their legal code. The city of Washington, D.C. long ago started paying WestLaw -- and now LexisNexis -- to turn the D.C. Council's bills into laws. As a result, they now have neither the knowledge nor...

• May 6, 2013
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