Idea Lab

Funding and the Future of Video Volunteers

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the final post in a 4-part series in which Video Volunteers is sharing what we've done over the last year, our experiences, and what we've learned. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here. After five years of doing community media in India, we've come to understand what Video Volunteers is good at. We're great at training -- the people we work with keep doing this for a long time after they're trained. And we're great at getting impact in the villages. We know how to produce the content that people in rural...

• February 10, 2012
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Video Volunteers Looks to Mainstream Media for Growth

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is Part 3 in a 4-part series in which Video Volunteers is sharing what we've done over the last year, our experiences, and what we've learned. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. In August, the Video Volunteers staff attended an amazing program called the Global Social Business Incubator at Santa Clara University, where we developed a new business plan focused on income from the mainstream media. Our idea is to have one rural reporter in each of India's 645 districts, set up like a rural stringers network, to deliver a pipeline of high-quality, low-cost human...

• February 8, 2012
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Zeega + Localore = Innovative Local Storytelling for Public Media

by Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, I sat in a conference room in Dorchester, Mass., with some of the great minds of public media to recommend which 10 producers and public media stations should be supported for year-long projects to transform the industry. Localore is a new $2 million national competition produced by the Boston-based Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), with $1 million in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to catalyze producer-led innovation teams at local stations. Here at Zeega, this is particularly exciting because we'll be teaming up with several of the winners as creative technology partners. (For more info...

• January 26, 2012
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OpenCourt Coaxes Out More Data with Cooperative Coverage Day

by Joe Spurr
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

A version of this post first appeared on the OpenCourt blog. A man charged with selling drugs inside the courthouse. A woman said to have shoplifted $5 worth of barbeque chicken wings. A man charged with multiple counts of raping a child with force. A longtime Drug Court participant booted from the program for taking a non-narcotic pill (still against the rules). Everyone brought back to court owing fees or victim restitution in previously dismissed cases. A man on psychotropic medication charged with shoplifting a Stop and Shop cart full of meat and pulling a knife when confronted in the...

• January 18, 2012
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VIDEO: Civic Media Session Explores Civic Maps

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For those who may not know, we at the MIT Center for Civic Media have doubled down on our events schedule. In addition to co-hosting events with other groups around MIT as we have the last few years, we now have two major event series: Civic Media Sessions and Civic Lunches. The latter is an import from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, courtesy of Ethan Zuckerman, our director/Berkman researcher. They're informal and free, and full of food. The former -- the Civic Media Sessions -- are remarkable evening talks. Held at the MIT Media Lab, they bring together...

• November 1, 2011
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Lessons From the Entertainment Industry for the Digital Entrepreneur

by Tom Grasty
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

I worked for 10 years in the film and television business as a development executive. I've spent the last two and a half years as co-founder of Stroome, an online video editing and publishing platform and 2010 Knight News Challenge winner. You might think that these two things wouldn't be related. But, they're actually more closely connected than you'd suspect. Recently, I was asked by Jason Nazar, founder of Docstoc and a big supporter of the L.A. entrepreneurial community, what lessons from my entertainment background have been helpful as I've transitioned into the digital space. A link to that video...

• October 31, 2011
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At WFMU's Radiovision Festival, Zeega Hacks the Future of Radio

by Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

WFMU is putting on a festival Oct. 28-30 to celebrate and probe radio's future. This gathering of folks brings together the medium's fans, tinkerers, futurists and broadcasters to talk about what might happen next. The opening night of the WFMU Radiovision Festival, featuring radio legend Joe Frank, sold out in a matter of days, but there's still room during the bulk of the festival on Saturday and Sunday. Participants will hear from a day of talks featuring radio host Tom Scharpling, comedian Marc Maron, Ira Glass of "This American Life," poet Kenneth Goldsmith, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, DJ /rupture, journalist and...

• October 28, 2011
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No Internet? No Problem. Use SMS, Radio, Software, and Creativity

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Uganda, where many lack access to the Internet, people can engage with local radio stations to make informed choices and hold their leaders accountable. Using SMS and a new tool, TRAC FM, listeners can respond to poll questions such as: What service delivery should be a priority: health care, education, security, sanitation or transport? TRAC FM was the focus of a larger case study we did for the Mobile Media Toolkit. The Mobile Media Toolkit is a project of MobileActive.org. The Toolkit provides how-to guides, wireless tools, and case studies on how mobile phones can (and are) being used...

• October 21, 2011
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With Music Mine, PRX Aims to Reshape Public Media on the iPad

by Rekha Murthy
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Public Radio Exchange just announced the launch of KCRW Music Mine, an iPad app that gives you a unique, exciting way to discover new music. Music Mine is the product of a close partnership between PRX and KCRW, with design by Roundarch and music intelligence powered by The Echo Nest. Nearly a year in the making, the app developed from lengthy brainstorming sessions about what a next-generation station experience on the iPad should -- and could -- be. KCRW excels at a lot of things -- music, news, local Los Angeles culture, food, arts, film. But rather than attempt...

• September 15, 2011
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Sourcemap Crowdsources Product Supply Chains, Carbon Footprints

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was authored by Matthew Hockenberry, who co-created Sourcemap as a visiting scientist with the MIT Center for Civic Media. Knowing where things come from is a fundamental part of humanity. Things are very different when they come from different places. The provenance of a work tells us the importance of not only where something has come from, but when it was created and who it was that fashioned it. Ancient vessels in Pompeii bear the eternal mark of Vesuvinum, and shelves of China are still identified by their geographic namesake. With supply chains we talk about traceability, or...

• September 2, 2011
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Using Maps to Make Sense of the Unimaginable in the Horn of Africa

by Eric Gundersen
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Development Seed recently launched horn.wfp.org, a mapping tool that visualizes one of the worst famines in recent history that's unfolding in the Horn of Africa. We did this project in partnership with the World Food Programme (WFP), the food aid arm of the United Nations, to leverage data from the humanitarian community to better communicate about the story behind the crisis and relief efforts to the wider public. For many of us living comfortably on the other side of the planet, a famine is impossible to relate to. Putting the crisis on a map brings a sense of place to...

• August 29, 2011
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Zeega Enables Communities to Create Interactive Documentaries, New Forms of Storytelling

by Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at Zeega want to enable anyone to create interactive documentaries and invent new forms of storytelling. For inspiration, we've looked to a figure who challenged the documentary form right when radio and film were being invented a century ago: Dziga Vertov. Best known for the remarkable film "Man with a Movie Camera," Vertov also created the first newsreel program in Russia, each episode a new experiment. This was a time when people were thinking about displaying news and telling stories in totally new forms, like rolling out a camera on a horse and buggy in the town center and...

• August 24, 2011
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An Inside Look at Stroome's Metamorphosis in Three Iterations

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you've used Stroome, our collaborative video remixing site, in the last few weeks, you will have noticed, and hopefully enjoyed, a complete redesign of the site. User flow has now been streamlined, and the embedded community and collaborative elements make the process a lot more fun: Clips can be added to a bin using a quick click on any footage; new groups are offered through the recommendation engine; videos can be shared more easily across the web or friends can now be invited to remix together. This is our third iteration of the site, and while most quick definitions...

• August 16, 2011
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With The Tiziano Project, Citizen Media Evolves

by Jon Vidar
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2006, the phrase "community journalism" was exploding as a possible savior for the journalism industry (similar to the much-hyped hyper-local journalism today). Somewhere along the way, however, the concept got washed over by a sea of organizations simply distributing Flip Video cameras and expecting amazing content. Who needed a journalism degree? Promoting local voices is important, and it's easier than ever to have those views be heard. However, "community journalism" has another important word in the phrase -- journalism. The Tiziano Project provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to...

• August 15, 2011
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PRX Story Exchange Shows Power of Crowdfunding via Public Radio

by John Barth
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

PRX embarked on a local journalism experiment last fall with Louisville Public Media (LPM) and Spot.us with the support of the Knight News Challenge. We built a service that matches the pioneering crowdfunding work of Spot.us (itself a News Challenge grantee) with the public radio focus of PRX and LPM. The project is called Story Exchange, and it directs the power and reach of public radio to help drive listener support for ambitious local journalism. The early signs from Louisville, Ky., are encouraging. The news staff posted pitches for six different reporting projects starting in January. Each idea is more...

• August 3, 2011
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VIDEOS: Should the MIT-Knight Civic Media Confab Get Supersized?

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the things we at MIT are very quietly considering -- quietly in the same sense that I first considered getting a creative writing degree, as in, seduced by the prospect while overawed by the reality -- is holding a large, public civic media conference as part of, or in addition to, our invitation-only Civic Media Conference with the Knight Foundation. We last discussed it as videos from this year's Civic Media Conference came online, and I'd like to share those videos, not just for their own sake, but for you to ask yourself: Would you travel to Boston...

• July 21, 2011
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Dotspotting's 'Toner' Cartography Available for Download

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the central tenets of the Knight News Challenge grant for Citytracking was that the work would happen in public, and that we'd make the work public as we go. Citytracking presents digital data about cities that journalists and the public can easily grasp and use, and provides tools to let them distribute their own conclusions. Dotspotting is the first project Stamen released as part of Citytracking. The project has been downloadable on GitHub for some time now, and will continue to be so, and we're announcing today the availability of the source files for Toner, the online cartographic...

• June 29, 2011
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Highs and Lows of OpenCourt: Live-Streaming, Tweeting from Court

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Launches are by definition difficult. To get from zero to full speed ahead is always a bumpy process. The launch of OpenCourt was no different. Little did we know that in our first fortnight, we would be dealing with a D.A. that wanted to shut down our archive, sore backs from working out of a tiny witness box, and a week of multiple escape attempts that even veteran court staff told us was rare. The lesson for us is that when launching a pilot project, expect the unexpected and be sure to have a foundation in place to help...

• June 3, 2011
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Stroome Reels Filmmakers Into Online Collaborative Video Editing

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

While speaking in Tribeca a couple of months ago in front of a packed theater of New York independent fiction and documentary filmmakers, I introduced Stroome, a collaborative online video editing community, and was astonished to receive a standing ovation. One filmmaker explained to me that she had been sending clips back and forth with a collaborator in London, and having to take the time to re-edit a sequence to make slight changes or slowly upload finished segments was encumbering her entire filmmaking process. She, like many others in the room, envisioned how Stroome could vastly improve collaboration, and she...

• May 26, 2011
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Can Seattle Save the World? Project Argo Event Takes on Global Health

by Joel Sucherman

Last month, about 700 people packed an auditorium in Seattle, not for a Microsoft developer's conference, but to discuss whether the city's burgeoning global health movement can eradicate disease and poverty across the globe. It was a live forum sponsored by public radio station KPLU and its Project Argo blog, Humanosphere. The event was provocatively named, "Can Seattle Save the World? (Poverty, Health and Chocolate)." It's exactly the kind of event we had in mind when we began working with NPR member stations last year on Argo. We'd been hoping that the offline and online worlds could collide in a...

• May 25, 2011
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Why Isn't the Public Radio Player App on Android? Let Us Count the Ways

by Rekha Murthy
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

We know, we know. Android users want the Public Radio Player, too. We've received plenty of comments from our feedback page: "Patiently waiting for bliss..." -- Stephenmm "hurry up please. i love your app and i want it on my phone!" -- ryan "Enjoyed this on my wifes Iphone but was disappointed to find out it isnt on my new Android device. Ohh How will I survive without it? Please hurry up and release it." -- Ben " I cannot help but wonder if this project has actually been...gulp...abandoned!" -- Dan D Oh, the drama. Here's the deal. Public Radio...

• May 23, 2011
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MIT Sessions Address Prison Blogging, Networked Revolt in Arab World

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MIT's Center for Future Civic Media redoubled its public events efforts this past year, thanks to a push by its fellow Ethan Zuckerman. Zuckerman brings a unique perspective -- a civic one -- to media developments so often dominated by politics and business-model debates. This approach couldn't be more evident than in the case of two recent Civic Media Sessions, videos of which you'll see below. Our sessions, spread throughout the semester, are conversations around civic media topics we're just now defining, including the coalescing of the field itself around information needs, geographic communities, and replicable, sustainable technical innovation. "Design...

• May 19, 2011
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Win a Newsroom Fellowship by Rethinking Video Storytelling

by Mark Surman

Recently, we've seen a huge change in video online. The advent of web native video makes it possible to mash up moving images with social media, tie clips to data from across the web or, more simply, create simple transcript-based interfaces for navigating long pieces of video. Yet, despite these capabilities, we've seen almost nothing in the way of new kinds of storytelling. Telling stories with video online today looks pretty much the same as it did when I used to shoot local TV news 20 years ago.This is something we hope to change with the first Knight Mozilla news innovation...

• May 2, 2011
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R.I.P. Flip Cam: The Smartphone Did It (Not Cisco)

by Tom Grasty
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the last three years, I've attended all three TEDx conferences on the idyllic campus of my old alma mater, the University of Southern California. And it's been my experience that TEDxUSC is where you go to be inspired, not have your dreams relegated to the heap bin of "what if..." But for a brief, fleeting moment last Tuesday, I was certain that all the hard work done by myself and fellow Stroome co-founder, Nonny de la Pena, was about to go the way of...well, the Flip. There I was sitting in the audience along with my fellow 1,200 TEDxers...

• April 25, 2011
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DocumentCloud Enables Public Searches, Embeddable Sets

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We quietly opened DocumentCloud's catalog to public searches in January, and we've been working since to do more with the great documents that reporters have added to our catalog. When Vancouver Sun investigative reporter Chad Skelton asked if there was a way to automate display of the growing cache of documents he was retrieving from the city's ferry authority, the best answer we could offer was to point his readers to a search for the DocumentCloud project he was stashing them in. Our goal from the outset has been to help news organizations make their own substantive reporting more engaging...

• March 31, 2011
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How Project Argo Members Communicate Across Time Zones

by Matt Thompson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Project Argo is an ambitious undertaking. It involves networking NPR with 12 member stations spanning three time zones with a different mix of bloggers and editors at each station. The stations cover a variety of regionally focused, nationally resonant topics that range from climate change to local music. Communicating effectively within these parameters has required creativity and experimentation. And we're still learning. I'll break down our various approaches -- what we've tried, what's working, and what we're still working on -- using the three tiers of communication: One-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. One-to-one communication These exchanges with the stations have offered...

• March 29, 2011
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Inside Shelbyville Multimedia's Ambitious Immigration Project

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Shelbyville project kicks off with a series of "Welcoming" videos Chances are you haven't yet heard of Shelbyville, a small rural community in Tennessee. If not, then you're probably also unaware of the upcoming "Welcome to Shelbyville" documentary or the online project that is forging a pilot, or prototype, for communities to tell and share their own stories. So let me share my initial impressions of this remarkable, ambitious effort. Last Monday I was lucky enough to be a part of a "digital brain trust" of 20 progressive media and non-profit representatives at the Bay Area Video Coalition headquarters....

• March 21, 2011
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Mobile Citizen Journalists Determined to Stay 'Alive in Libya'

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Armed with a few Kodak Zi8 cameras, six HTC Wildfire mobile phones and expertise in training citizen journalists, Small World News is working to share stories from embattled Libya with the larger world. Small World News is on the ground in Benghazi training Libyans to capture and tell video stories of events in this volatile region. Along the way, the team has also captured footage that no other mainstream media outlet has been able to get, such as this video of opposition forces heading out to the front lines: MobileActive.org chatted late Wednesday night with Brian Conley, founder of Small...

• March 18, 2011
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How Dotspotting Began with Colored Dots on Drains in San Francisco

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In some ways you could say that the Dotspotting project started with San Francisco's sewage and drain system. A few years ago I started noticing some strange dot markings on the curbs of city sidewalks, directly above the storm drains like the one you see on the left But on closer inspection, it turned out they weren't just single dots. They seemed to be dots that had been applied, rubbed off a bit, and reapplied. Like Roman palimpsests, the curbs above drains looked like reusable canvasses -- but for dots, instead of edicts. The image below is one close-up example....

• March 15, 2011
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VoIP Drupal Kicks Off at Drupalcon

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Voip Drupal, a plugin that allow full interaction between Drupal CMS and phones.

• March 13, 2011
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Why We Won't Live-Stream Restraining Order Hearings

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the first questions people ask when I tell them about our project, Order in the Court 2.0, to live-stream court proceedings is, "Is there a way to turn the camera off?" They must imagine a camera bolted to the wall, gobbling up images of domestic violence victims and child sex offenders with no regard to how it affects justice being served. But I have the opposite fear too -- that the judges in those courtrooms will become so skittish that they'll keep turning the camera off and we'll lose the ideal of openness that is the purpose of...

• March 10, 2011
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Open Media Project's User-Driven, New Media Network One Step Closer to Reality

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

“The long-term vision of the Open Media Project focuses on establishing a true network of PEG stations that can share the top-rated content across thousands of community media stations across the globe,” explained Tony Shawcross, OMF’s Executive Director. “Each community media website can serve as a portal, not only to local content, but also to a second-tier of content from hundreds or perhaps thousands of Access stations. Thanks to this collaboration between Archive.org and OMF, this vision is now possible...

• March 2, 2011
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MIT's Civic Media Session Explores Data in Cities

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

With a redoubled focus on the community in the civic media community, the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched a new series last week. These relaxed, informal conversations about civic media featured ground-level practitioners, activists, hackers, and local leaders. The first session, "Bustling with Information: Cities, Code, and Civics," brought good friends Nick Grossman, Nigel Jacob, and Max Ogden to our Cambridge campus. As you can see from the video clips below, these sessions are unique opportunities to talk about the amazing work that goes on in this sphere, intriguingly out of earshot...

• February 18, 2011
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Will the Next Revolution be Stroomed?

by Tom Grasty
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

When you think of the recent unrest in the Middle East, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube immediately come to mind. Yet in an era where the revolution no longer need be televised -- now it's tweeted -- wouldn't a collaborative online video editing platform that allows producers, correspondents and reporters to create news reports in real time be a welcome addition to the insurgents' arsenal? Well, such a tool does exist. It's called Stroome. And in a time when the journalist's traditional role -- to build and curate an informed public -- is rapidly eroding as...

• February 15, 2011
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'Data and Cities' Conference Pushes Open Data, Visualizations

by Jordan Salinger
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I entered Stamen's offices in the Mission district of San Francisco, I saw four people gathered around a computer screen. What were they doing? Nothing less than "mapping the world" -- not as it appears in flat dimension, but how it reveals itself. And they weren't joking. Stamen, a data visualization firm, has always kept "place" central to many of their projects. They achieved this most famously through their crimespotting maps of Oakland and San Francisco, which give geographical context to the world of crime. This week they are taking on a world-sized challenge as they host a conference...

• February 9, 2011
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Lawyers Voice Concerns About Live-Streaming Court Cases

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the first things First Justice Mark Coven told us when we went down to the Quincy District Court to start talking about our project, Order in the Court 2.0, was that we had to hold an all-court meeting to introduce the project to everyone to get their input. This seemed like an excellent thing to do before waltzing into the complex world of the court with our video camera and high-speed Internet in hand. On the day of the meeting in December, the First Session of the courthouse was standing room only, and included the entire court staff,...

• February 4, 2011
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Video Volunteers Launches 'IndiaUnheard' for Rural Issues

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers recently launched IndiaUnheard, a new project (and website) attempting to create a bridge, through community media, between disconnected rural communities and web audiences who are interested in news on issues of human rights, development and corruption. You can see the result and watch the community videos here. As this is a relatively new venture -- it's only about 4 to 5 months old -- I'd love feedback from the highly knowledgeable Knight and MediaShift Idea Lab community. Here are some videos to show you what it's about: The village of Natpura, featured in this video below, in rural...

• December 7, 2010
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Dotspotting Launches to Make City Data Mappable

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dotspotting is the first project Stamen is releasing as part of Citytracking, a project funded by the Knight News Challenge. We're making tools to help people gather data about cities and make that data more legible. Our hope is to do this in a way that's simple enough for regular people to get involved, but robust enough for real research to happen along the way. There's currently a whole chain of elements involved in building digital civic infrastructure for the public, and these are represented by various Stamen projects and those of others. At the moment, the current hodgepodge...

• December 2, 2010
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How To Capture High Quality Video on Your Mobile Phone

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Prabhas Pokharel contributed research and writing to this article Many of today's mobile phones can capture video footage. This has enabled both trained journalists and citizen reporters to more easily capture footage and images that would have otherwise rarely been seen. The Polk Journalism Award in 2009, for example, was awarded to a video from Iran that was captured on a mobile phone. Today, more and more journalists are using mobile phones to record video and quickly transfer content to their newsrooms via mobile data connections. 

 The good news for all of us is that you don't need a...

• November 19, 2010
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Building a Successful Technology Venture for the Bottom of the Pyramid

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a long overdue update from our end! We were awarded a grant in the 2008 News Challenge for developing low-cost technologies for community radio stations in India. We have come a long way since then. Our systems are now in use in 9 stations in India, and growing steadily. But we have also realized that there is a lot more that needs to be done to push the community radio movement in India. Thankfully the Knight Foundation has given us considerable flexibility to tackle various problems as and when they arise. Let me first give you a context,...

• November 17, 2010
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Order In The Court 2.0 Adds Staff, Plans Live-Streams from Court

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the last few weeks Order in the Court 2.0 has made enormous strides in moving forward with our project. Most importantly we've brought on board two very talented individuals who are responsible for the day-to-day operation of this project. Below is the note that I put out to the staff of WBUR, which is the home-base of this Knight News Challenge initiative. New Staff Joe Spurr and Val Wang are joining WBUR to work on our new online initiative, Order in the Court 2.0. Order in the Court 2.0 is a Knight News Challenge funded initiative that will explore...

• November 17, 2010
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Remix Radio Re-Imagines Public Radio as Interactive Collage

by Jake Shapiro

While we continue to delve into code-level collaboration with Spot.Us to get our Story Exchange crowdfunding project launched later this year, I'll take the opportunity in my next couple posts to give updates on other emerging PRX services that are helping reshape public radio, and that ultimately will amplify the results of Story Exchange. First up is Remix Radio, an entirely new sound for public radio. Remix Radio The basic idea of Remix is to create a story-driven radio format that aggregates and curates remarkable audio -- short-form documentaries, features, podcasts, interviews, archives, "found sound" -- and rotates it through...

• November 12, 2010
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Citytracking Presents Data on Cities for Maps, Visualizations

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Citytracking, one of this year's Knight News Challenge winners, will present digital data about cities that journalists and the public can easily grasp and use, and provide tools to let them distribute their own conclusions. We will build a series of tools to map and visualize data that is truly Internet-native and useful. The project will be: Simple enough that a fairly technical reporter who understands Google Maps and basic HTML can embed something good in their article/report/blog posts. Beautiful enough that an interested amateur citizen will find it useful and interesting. Complex enough to catch the attention of developers...

• November 3, 2010
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How a Fish Story Inspired Collaborative Video Platform Stroome

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Like birds, most fish have something to say, especially when it comes to mating calls. You can read it about in a piece I wrote a couple of years ago for the New York Times' Science Times. But what does a talking fish sound like? Look like? In fact, it was exactly those questions that led to the creation of Stroome. Rush to Produce video for the Times The decision to publish the fish story happened in a hurry. On a Thursday afternoon, I received a phone call from one of my editors letting me know the piece would be...

• October 22, 2010
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OpenStreetMap's Audacious Goal: Free, Open Map of the World

by Robert Soden
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In our previous posts on TileMill, we’ve focused on how open data can be used to create custom mapsand tell unique stories. One question we run into a lot is, “Where does open data come from?” One exciting source is a global mapping project called OpenStreetMap (OSM). Founded in 2004 with the goal of creating a free and open map of the world, OSM now boasts over 300,000 contributors and has comparable or better data for many countries than the popular proprietary or closed datasets. The premise is simple and powerful: Anyone can use the data, and anyone can help...

• October 20, 2010
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Mixing Citizen Journalism and Live Radio in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In developing countries, and particularly in Africa, radio can be the key media channel in the local public sphere -- that is, of course, in public spheres are allowed to be local and public! Iindaba Ziyafika, our Knight News Challenge project in South Africa, has focused a great deal on training citizen journalists for print and digital media. The project is now branching out even more into community radio. We formalized a partnership with Radio Grahamstown, the local community radio station, to create about five hours of programming each week and to help the station stabilize itself. In South Africa,...

• October 7, 2010
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PRX Story Exchange, Spot.us Bring Crowdfunding to Public Radio

by Jake Shapiro

Story Exchange (formerly Story Market) is a way for local public radio stations, producers, and listeners to pitch, find and fund documentaries and stories on important local issues. We're also one of this year's winners of a Knight News Challenge grant. Here's how we envision it working: Let's say that in Kentucky the issue of mountaintop mining needs a deeper investigative look. On Story Exchange, the Louisville public radio WFPL station can invite producers to bid on reporting the story, ask listeners to contribute funds as well as ideas, and see the story through to completion for broadcast and digital...

• September 15, 2010
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Patchwork Nation Relaunches in Drupal with District Layer

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This year's primary election upsets in Alaska, Florida and Utah and the volatile Congressional campaigns currently underway -- all of which take place amid widespread voter discontent and the rise of the Tea Party movement -- illustrate the growing need for easily-accessible and easily-updated portals for political data and analysis. Election-season data visualization is traditionally cast in the form of public opinion polling data delivered through the red/blue/purple national maps of state and district races. Although that is a useful shortcut to inform the classic horse-race electoral narrative, it leaves us hungry for context. Dividing the U.S. into blue and...

• September 13, 2010
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Stroome Helps Journalists Collaborate via Online Video Remixing

by Tom Grasty
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was co-authored by Nonny de la Peña Stroome, a winner of the 2010 Knight News Challenge grant, fosters a social network that allows journalists to collaborate together by sharing content and stories that can be edited right in a browser and then pushed across the web. Prototyped at USC Annenberg's pioneering Online Program on Online Communities in the fall of 2008, the idea was strikingly simple: Create a place where journalists can efficiently work together to create a culture that offers accurate, contextual news in real-time. The result was Stroome, an online video editing platform crossed with a...

• August 20, 2010
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'Life in a Day' Collaborative Film Echoes in Hyper-Local Projects

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I think about my project, SochiReporter, I often recall the seminal 1961 book by Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." This book challenged the conventional wisdom of city planners of that era and celebrated the vibrancy of the urban streetscape. It also encouraged citizen involvement in the development of neighborhoods. I wonder if Jacobs ever looked at the cities and the changes they undergo to host the Olympics, as Sochi will in 2014? Life in a Day Along the lines of citizen participation, July 23 was the day when anyone worldwide could make a short...

• July 28, 2010
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The Need for Cultural Translation with Community Media

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The TED talk of Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the international blogging site Global Voices, provides amazing insight into the challenges of telling international stories online. It's told in the great TED way of painting lots of pictures and using a ton of anecdotes. Zuckerman said it's a big myth that the web is bringing us closer to other cultures or countries -- when we're on the web, we're basically in our own small islands of our social networks. Most of us who are building businesses/non-profits around non-traditional media content know this, but he has some great PowerPoint slides that...

• July 26, 2010
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Highlights and Pitfalls of Virtual Street Corners Project

by John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're just winding down my Knight News Challenge project, Virtual Street Corners, and haven't had time to sort through all the recorded materials and debrief the participants, but I wanted to share some initial thoughts and reactions. The most encouraging takeaway from the project was the enthusiastic response it received. It seems to have struck a nerve and could be well worthy of further investigation. The piece is widely accessible without being overly simplistic, with the potential for opening up complex social interactions. On the other hand, there were also various aspects that fell short of my expectations. The project...

• July 7, 2010
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Great Citizen Media Projects That Use Radio, Audio and Mobile

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over at the Mobile Media Toolkit, we recently have been looking at voice- and radio-based citizen media projects that incorporate mobile phones. In an Idea Lab post last fall, I collected a series of examples that primarily used the voice functionality of mobile phones; however, this new set of projects integrate voice and radio with data-based services like SMS and web. Below are some of the projects we think you should know about.Projects to WatchVoices of Youth in Nepal is a free text message channel that enables people to interact with a weekly radio program. The radio announcers pick a...

• July 6, 2010
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VIDI Toolkit Makes Data Visualization Easy

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

You will love our powerful, intuitive Knight-funded data visualization toolkit: VIDI. Go to the website and try it out! The site includes Drupal modules and a playground where you can work with pre-loaded data or upload your own data and generate embed code to place the visualizations you create on your blogs or websites. A "My VIDI" page shows the history of a user's visualizations so they can go back and edit at will. We had a bit of a challenge recently in balancing our workload and the visceral drive to watch the World Cup games, so we came up...

• July 2, 2010
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Freedom Fone Adopted by Bulawayo's Pioneering Voices

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had visions of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe being a sleepy little hollow, and perhaps in some ways it is. But last week, after arriving at Radio Dialogue offices in Pioneer House in Bulawayo's central business district, I was very pleasantly surprised. We were in the City of Skies to run a practical two-day workshop with six local organizations on using Freedom Fone. Pioneer House seemed to me to be pioneering the way! Radio Dialogue is a community radio station that opened nine years ago and resides on the ninth floor of Pioneer House. Like all community radio stations in Zimbabwe, it...

• June 7, 2010
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Virtual Street Corners Adds Journalists, Places Ads for Launch

by John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are just two weeks out from the install date of Virtual Street Corners and our publicity campaign is gaining momentum. The project will connect two neighborhoods in Boston via live video connection in public places. We've been picked up a lot on the blogosphere, on CBC radio in Canada, and The Atlantic magazine came out today with a feature that put Virtual Street Corners on the front page of its website. Within hours I had an email from Israel offering me money and assistance to set up the same project between Tel Aviv and the West Bank. That...

• May 18, 2010
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Meet 'India Unheard' Producer Zulekha Sayyed

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As Video Volunteers' second program, India Unheard is gathering steam, with some wonderful stories by our new community correspondents, we can't help but think about all the wonderful and dedicated community producers we have worked with in the past - and are still working with. As many of you know, it takes about a year and a half to train our community producers, all of who come from situations of dire poverty. What they have in common is their honesty, passion and intelligence. Our aim in training an individual with immense potential is not just to create a technically sound...

• May 17, 2010
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Freedom Fone Answers Questions on Zimbabwe Constitution

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two weeks ago the latest version of Freedom Fone, affectionately known to his handlers as "Fred," was set loose. Inspired by the cockney rhyming slang "dog and bone" (meaning phone), the Freedom Fone dog logo and quirky character of Fred was born a few years ago. Fred is still young, but after a few years of software development (and dog training!), and thanks to Knight News Challenge funds, he's now ready to go out into the world on his own. This is a report on his recent adventures since the launch of Freedom Fone version 1.5. To learn more about...

• May 4, 2010
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In Need of a DocumentCloud for Video, Data

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brainstorming the next brilliant News Challenge project? I've got two for you, and you've got until fall to noodle over them. As the program director for DocumentCloud I spend a lot of time talking to journalists, writers and researchers about what DocumentCloud is and, often, what it isn't. DocumentCloud is great for documents. It is a repository of primary source texts and a great set of semantic analysis tools for text. Whether you want to use our annotation tools for reporting jujitsu, as ProPublica did when the subject of an extensive report offered only "no comment" on nearly every question...

• April 30, 2010
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Community Journalists to Push Neglected Rural Stories in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A big question that we deal with when thinking about the future of locally produced media is how will it ever become financially sustainable? As of right now, Video Volunteers has been supporting local media units in India and Brazil whose basic job is to make video stories about their local issues and then screen them locally -- so locally that most videos are seen in between 25 and 50 neighboring villages. As is obvious by that sentence, geography has played an important part in the manner in which we have built these programs. We believe that national (and to...

• April 26, 2010
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Sourcemap Makes Data Visualizations Transparent

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday colleagues of mine at MIT were brainstorming plenaries for an upcoming media conference. Data visualization came up, but each of us grumbled. "Overdone," one of us said, to nodding heads. We'd done a session on that at every one of our conferences and forums, as had others at theirs. Data visualization had become tragically hip, as if we were in charge of a music festival and one of us had just proffered Coldplay. But as we teased out our reservations, we realized that it wasn't visualization that we had an issue with; yes, we agreed, it's an overdone topic,...

• March 31, 2010
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How Virtual Street Corners Fits with History of Art-Telecom Projects

by John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Below is a guest post from George Fifield, director and founder of Boston Cyberarts Inc., an organization that is a fiscal sponsor of Virtual Street Corners. He and I are working closely together on the project, and here he helps contextualize Virtual Street Corners from a curator's perspective. Fifield is a distinguished curator in new media, a writer about art and technology, and a teacher at Rhode Island School of Design and Massart. Read more about his work and view more of his writing here. Art and Telecommunication Throughout time, Artists have greeted new communications technologies with great enthusiasm. With...

• March 8, 2010
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Agriculture and Us

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I attended an Ashoka conference in New Delhi yesterday on rural innovation and farming. There were so many new things I realized about agriculture's deep rooted connections with culture, society and the economy that I decided to immediately write about it before the memories fade. Plus. I watched Avatar later in the evening, which was perfect icing on the cake! Agriculture and Women Agriculture can be looked upon from many perspectives. Food can be seen as a commodity, where farmers are considered akin to factory workers and we talk about increasing their productivity though machines, technology, etc. Or agriculture can...

• March 6, 2010
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New Tools for Mapping News

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Want to illustrate a story by displaying data on a map? Don't have a team of whiz kids at your fingertips? One good option has long been IBM's Many Eyes. Their maps, however, stop at the state level. Not especially helpful if you cover local politics! I haven't struggled too much with maps lately, but a tweet from Sunlight Labs' Clay Johnson caught my eye this morning, nonetheless. I think that what got my attention was that Clay directed his nudge to Nathan Yau, a bottomless well of great data visualization insights and tutorials if ever there was one. He...

• February 17, 2010
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What's Wrong with the Stringer System in Rural Areas?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

One area that has recently started occupying our attention at VV is the business of newspaper stringers in rural areas in the developing world. Another one is the way that news stories get out, and the difference between a journalism system where stories get "pushed out" and one where they need to be "pulled out." It seems to me that only when stories get pushed out - ie, when someone attracts media attention to some local event the news media wouldn't know about otherwise - is journalism increasing the quantity of events that are known. Below are some interesting things...

• February 11, 2010
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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
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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
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GRINS v0.2 is released

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are very pleased to announce the second release of GRINS, Gram Vaani's Knight-funded project to create low-cost systems for community radio stations in rural areas. This builds upon the v0.1 release we did in June by adding support for telephony, backup, and log-shipping, plus smoothing out many user interface issues. Having a single console to schedule broadcast, make and receive phone calls, archive live speech and manage content sets GRINS apart from any other commercial or open-source radio broadcast software available so far. Here's a look at some of the features: Telephony: The current support for live telephony allows...

• December 18, 2009
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2008 Knight News Challenge Winner Launches Open Media Foundation

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deproduction, a Denver-based nonprofit media and technology organization and Knight News Challenge winner, has reorganized as the Open Media Foundation. The nonprofit media and technology organization was founded in 2003, offering media and technology training and services to nonprofits and individuals in the Denver area. In recent years, the organization spawned Denver Open Media, the Open Media Project, and a number of web-based initiatives through the Civic Pixel web & design department launched in 2008. The new name and website were officially announced November 19 at a fundraising breakfast hosted by Ashara Ekundayo and featuring presentations from Amy Goodman, host...

• December 1, 2009
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Virtual Street Corners Aims to Engage Public, Connect Neighbors

by John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the primary challenges of any community art project is how to engage the audience. If no one is lured to participate, the dynamism of the piece is lost. Virtual Street Corners, my Knight-funded community art project, benefits from the fact that there is an element of symbolism due to the respective histories of the two neighborhoods we are trying to connect. As I noted in my grant overview, "The Greater Boston neighborhoods of Brookline and Roxbury are 2.4 miles apart, yet there is little interaction between them because of divisions of race and class." This helps create interest...

• November 30, 2009
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Freedom Fone Comes to Dar es Salaam

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amanda and I have just returned from Dar es Salaam. We were on the road with Freedom Fone. Last Tuesday it was 9 degrees at 9am in orderly Johannesburg and 28 degrees with sweat inducing humidity at 7pm in chaotic Dar. After negotiating the jam-packed arrivals hall we smiled in relief when we discovered John holding up a torn piece of cardboard with Freedom Fone scribbled on it. We couldn't speak Swahili and he couldn't speak English but we made our greetings and jumped into his car for the ride of our life to a lodge off the Old Bagamoyo...

• November 26, 2009
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Overcoming Drupal Challenges as SochiReporter Nears Launch

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

SochiReporter is getting ready to launch on the web and for mobile users. We spent the last three weeks fixing linguistic, technical and design bugs, all with the goal of maximizing ease of use. So far we have drawn a fabulous group of people from both local and virtual communities: garage tech geeks and web schizophrenics, coffee-shop amateurs, and folks who want to use the site and offer feedback. Their comments have helped us to get better. We also attracted an avid gamer in Sochi who spends most of his time in an underground Internet café at the center...

• September 18, 2009
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How Talking into a Mobile Phone Can Help Change Lives

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The pre-cursors to mobile phones were two-way radios, also called Walkie-Talkies, that transmitted voice signals. The first generation of mobile phone networks were similar in that they also only supported voice communications. Second generation networks, and a happy accident, gave us SMS, and third generation networks provide even more advanced mobile data services. Most mobile phone applications now use these newer channels of communication -- SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a major part of mobile phone communications. And when it comes to performing social work, voice communication is actually the most important feature...

• September 3, 2009
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Future of News & Civic Media: The Motion Picture

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last June we held our Future of News & Future Civic Media conference, here at MIT, with many recipients of the Knight News Challenge meeting, speaking, and demoing their work. We chose to use the "barcamp" un-conference technique for most of the sessions, where all participants to the conference were able to host a session. This flat, democratic style turned out to be perfect for a group of citizen journalists, social software hackers, information activists, and researchers. Here is a brief video (by film makers Paula Aguilera and Jonathan Williams) that gives a sense of the flavor of FNFCM09....

• August 31, 2009
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Video Volunteers Creates a New Kind of Sustainability Using Community Video

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

"You mean to say that sending the email is free?! I don't have to pay for it?" Laxmi was amazed that there is no equivalent on the Internet to paying for a postage stamp to send a letter. The first twenty minutes of this workshop on digi-activism being held in Goa, India were over her head, but when she saw her own language, Telugu, appear on the Google.co.in search page, she jumped to attention. For the first time, Laxmi is seeing something on the Internet that she can actually read. She smiles and begins chattering away in her own language...

• August 21, 2009
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Students Get Blogging Seminar, Digital Cameras for SochiReporter

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've just returned from helping deliver the first seminar about blogging and citizen journalism ever held in Sochi, Russia. Just weeks away from launching my Knight News Challenge project, SochiReporter.ru, I organized a seminar for third, fourth and fifth year students from the five leading Sochi-based universities. Thirty-five journalism and IT students participated in the two day seminar called "Web and Journalism: The New Trends." We received press coverage in over 30 online publications, in newspapers and from three of the city's leading TV channels. Clearly, this city, which will host the 2014 Olympic Winter Games, is ready to embrace...

• August 20, 2009
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Using GRINS to Improve Technology and Processes at Community Radio Stations

by Zahir Koradia
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Radio Bundelkhand, one of the early community radio stations in India, started live transmission in October 2008. We visited the station in February 2009 as a part of Community Radio India Forum annual body meeting. During this visit we initiated talks of piloting the radio automation system being developed by us. We released the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System (or GRINS) in June, and setup GRINS at Radio Bundelkhand during our week-long visit in mid-July. This report describes (a) the operational setup at Radio Bundelkhand before GRINS was deployed, (b) the changes in the setup made by deployment of GRINS,...

• August 7, 2009
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Community Radio in India Includes Report on Eclipse, 'Bundeli Idol'

by Balachandran Chandrasekharan
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gram Vaani successfully launched its first pilot a few days back with Radio Bundelkhand! Radio Bundelkhand is a community radio station operating in the small town of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh (India), and was the first community driven CR station to start broadcasting after the new policy. It is being run by Development Alternatives, one of the largest NGOs in India. This pilot has been an excellent experience for us. We saw the folks at the radio station produce Bundeli Idol, a strong competitor to the American and Indian Idol (!!), and a program on the recent solar eclipse,...

• August 7, 2009
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Saving (or Destroying) Public Radio on a Mobile Phone

by Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Is the iPhone app Public Radio Player the good guy or the bad? The critics aren't so sure. Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on ReadWriteWeb, "How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio" took the super-hero stance, but Rafat Ali opted for the villain with "Public Radio Dangerously Close To Making Public Radio Obsolete" on PaidContent. Public Radio Player, the new version of the old Public Radio Tuner, is a free application that allows users to access more than 300 radio stations across the country. With a few swipes to the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch, users can listen to...

• July 27, 2009
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Inzwa: Listen up!

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, Kubatana launched Inzwa, Zimbabwe's experiment with Freedom Fone, providing audio information via mobile phones. We'll be updating our information every Tuesday, and we are interested in any feedback to help us improve the service. How does it work? Tune into Inzwa by phoning +263 913 444 321-8 and . . . - Press 1 for 60 seconds fresh bringing you current news and views - Choose 2 to enter the doorway to chibanzi for job vacancies, scholarships or resources - Press 3 to find out about everyday heroes and take a new look at Zimbabwean activists and activism...

• July 15, 2009
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'Alive in Tehran' Lets Iranian Citizens Report Through Voicemail

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been following Brian Conley's work at Alive in Baghdad since October 2007, when I met him at the Networked Journalism summit at CUNY. Conley -- somewhat more commonly known as Baghdad Brian -- is one of the few supporters of citizen journalism with several trips to wartime Iraq under his belt. In this interview, Conley talks about his recent project, Alive in Tehran. Listen to the full interview here (15:35) or right-click to download the mp3. Full transcript follows, with links added: Ryan: Hey this is Ryan Sholin here, I'm recording this today for PBS Idea Lab, and I'm...

• June 24, 2009
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How My 6-Year-Old Became a Citizen Journalist

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been involved in the social media revolution for years now, having started "citizen media" brands like Bakotopia that depend completely on social networking and user-contributed content, and various community tools in the late 1990s at AOL that opened media participation up to the average Joe. But it wasn't until a wave of tornadoes went through my hometown of Denver this week that I realized just how far the revolution has come. A confluence of inexpensive, accessible consumer technology, and microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, has lowered the barriers of entry so far to make me think we're witnessing...

• June 15, 2009
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First Release of the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System Is Here!

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

After working countless weekends and days and nights, we are very happy to announce that Gram Vaani's platform for community radio stations is now available for download. We call it GRINS, standing for the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System. GRINS is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations. Built on Gram Vaani's MINP platform, the current release of GRINS allows radio station operators to schedule broadcasts, preview programs, record live transmissions, and maintain an extensive semantically searchable library. In future releases, GRINS will be enhanced to handle telephony calls, sending and receiving SMS messages, and Internet connectivity to...

• June 11, 2009
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The Need for New Economic Models in the Public Media

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

For most of us, it's clear that there are a few social costs that we can't rely on the market to cover. Most of us, for example, want to ensure that a child born into poverty has access to a good education, even though that child and his/her family could not afford to pay for it. It's only a bit more of a stretch to argue for equal access to the media, and traditionally, our communities and our government have refrained from taking a pure, free-market approach to funding our media systems. In regards to TV, Lyndon B. Johnson and...

• June 10, 2009
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How Video Volunteers Improved Women's Rights, Sanitation in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do you teach creativity and critical thinking to people from very disadvantaged communities, with little formal education? Doing this is a major goal of Video Volunteers' work in training community producers. If organizations don't develop these training tools, the world could find itself in a situation where technology allows the poor to produce content, but the vast expressive potential this could release is still left untapped. VV gives writing exercises to community producers to help them develop their ability to think through an argument. I am sharing below two recent pieces of writing by community producers. These were written...

• June 7, 2009
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Moving Beyond Text for Cell Phone Citizen Media

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Cell phones are great for making calls, listening and speaking. So when it comes to media convergence, and the ability to do more and more on our cell phones, why is our media still so writing-centric? Even in the Iindaba Ziyafika project, our Knight funded expansion of the public sphere in Grahamstown City, we're focused on getting citizen journalism in via text (in particular in through SMS) and getting it back out via text. Text content for smartphones and mobile sites are huge and growing niches. But why not use voice more for citizen journalism, public debate, and just getting...

• June 2, 2009
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Community Journalism in Times of Economic Crisis

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Media Mobilizing Project recently started a new initiative: Community Journalism in Times of Economic Crisis. The initiative is a response to both the economic crisis, which is hitting Philadelphians hard, and the growing problems with the for-profit journalism model, which is making it difficult for local newspapers to cover stories about the struggles of everyday people during the economic downturn. The goal of this project is to report on and collect the real stories of Philadelphia and beyond on MMP's community blog, so we can begin to get a picture of the economic crisis from the ground up. Here is...

• May 28, 2009
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YouTube Orchestra Brings Together Musicians Around the World

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Well, it's Susan Boyle again singing "Now you say you're lonely," being not at all lonely with her 61 million YouTube viewers. That number makes the appealing British singer 61 times more popular than the YouTube Symphony Orchestra Global Mash-up musicians with their 1.1 million views. But the YouTube Symphony, a unique experiment uniting musicians from around the world, may be the one to watch (you can view the video embedded below). Ms. Boyle is singing a jazz standard and the YouTube Orchestra is playing the Internet Symphony #1 Eroica composed and conducted by the Chinese maestro Tan Dun. Both...

• May 28, 2009
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Open Media Project Sprints to Half-Way Point

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With two months remaining in the first half of our Knight-funded Open Media Project, we've got a busy few weeks ahead. Last month, we brought many of Drupal's top video and media developers together with the staff from the 7 OMP Beta-Test sites for the Open Media Camp in Denver. Next week, we're presenting the model at SCAN NATOA, hoping our user-automated model can be part of the solution for the endangered status of public access in LA. The following week, its up to Davis Media Access, where we'll assist them in the implementation of the Open Media tools. In...

• May 15, 2009
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Tech Design Decisions Behind Gram Vaani's Radio Platform

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a post more for the technology minded, but even others should find it interesting to get an inside view of what goes into designing appropriate technological systems in rural contexts that we are addressing. We've made many design decisions along the way, based on our prior experiences, foresight into expected problems, and observations made while visiting and learning about community radio stations in India. I will first outline some important technological goals that we want to achieve, then describe details of our platform, and finally show how our platform will be able to meet these goals. There will...

• April 22, 2009
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Waiting for the Bill (Gates) in Qatar

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It has been an exciting few weeks for Freedom Fone. We finally got back a version of our prototpye software which works with SIM cards, so we can use it here in Zimbabwe. We've been having focus group discussions with a range of people to help inform our first local deployment. And our Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, has been at ICTD 2009, giving a demo of Freedom Fone. She sent us this feedback: Here I am in Doha, Qatar with my jacket on inside a spectacular building on the Carnegie Mellon campus. I'm seated amongst hundreds of others listening to...

• April 20, 2009
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MTV Iggy and Community Video Coming Together

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers has partnered with MTV Iggy to produce videos in Kashmir about life in the refugee camps of Jammu. Here's a link to one of the videos, about a boy who watched his entire family be slaughtered: mtviggy.com | desi MTV igg is a new channel/show of MTV that is focused on Diaspora youth. The partnership unfolded as follows: in December, I did a small fundraiser in NY for Video Volunteers. At events like that, when people as ask how they can help and what we need, one of our appeals is, 'we need connections with the mainstream tv...

• April 17, 2009
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Making a Map Mash-Up with the G1 Phone and Flickr

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Combining mobility, time and location is becoming one of the most valuable techniques of media creation. Last week, some students and I did a small experiment that demonstrates how easy this is to do, and suggests all kinds of possibilities for journalistic follow-ups. This Flickr map has more than 120 photos, taken by me and Arizona State University journalism students Chris Cameron, Adriane Goetz, Travis Grabow, Chrystall Kanyuck, Bailey MOsier, Elizabeth Shell and Evan Wyloge. We chose, for this experiment, last week's Phoenix "First Friday Art Walk" -- a monthly, self-guided tour of a downtown-Phoenix district that contains a number...

• April 6, 2009
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Freedom Fone at W3C - Maputo

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone's Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, is currently at the W3C workshop in Maputo: Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development. The workshop has organised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), particularly the Mobile Web Initiative, and its Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group. As the organisers put it. "There are today more than half of the population living with less than 3$ a day, and lacking all kind of services (health, education, government...). The incredible growth of the mobile penetration rate last few years is providing a new hope. The potential of...

• April 2, 2009
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Second Implementation of the Open Media Project Complete

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ten members of the Deproduction team traveled to Austin this month to implement the Open Media tools at the second of 6 Beta sites, ChannelAustin. We traveled down in two RV's and scheduled the visit to coincide with SXSW, where we hosted a core conversation as part of the interactive festival. Austin is the first of the large Access Stations that we've worked with in this Knight News Challenge project, and it presented a whole new slate of challenges in comparison with the comparatively simpler implementation at Urbana Public TV. The entire process was documented, and the new ChannelAustin dev...

• March 24, 2009
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Community News as a Livelihood for the World's Poorest

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can a Community Producer like Samata, from a slum in Mumbai, ever become fully competitive in a mainstream market? In thinking about Video Volunteers' future work, I'm realizing we need to develop new models of community video that are scalable and allow for video to be a livelihood for thousands of the world's poor. We've developed a new idea for a program - a fellowship program where up to 200 community members across india (and when we have the resources, many other countries) would be trained in using flip cams to produce very short, very simple advocacy videos on different...

• March 7, 2009
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Breaking Even While Staying True to the Margins

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We recently applied to present Freedom Fone: Dial-up Information Service at an upcoming ICT for Development workshop. Our application was eventually accepted, but not before concerns were raised that Freedom Fone might be on its way to becoming a for-profit entity, which would be inconsistent with the conference sponsors' objectives. This was an ironic obstacle for us to encounter, particularly at a time when we're beginning to think through what our business model is going to look like as we move toward self-sufficiency. We are committed to making information accessible to people at the margins of society. And Freedom Fone...

• February 27, 2009
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Using Technology in the Fight Against Cholera in Zimbabwe

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week we gave our first targeted demonstrations of Freedom Fone, aimed at encouraging local health organisations to use Freedom Fone as one of the communications tools in the response to Zimbabwe's cholera crisis. We believe that given the rapid spread of the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe, greater use should be made of the country's most ubiquitous communication tool - the mobile phone - to share information that can help address the suffering and limit the number of deaths. Since August last year, WHO reports there have been over 80,000 cases, and over 3,615 people have died. This is an...

• February 21, 2009
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Pink Chaddi (Underwear) Campaign in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am posting here a blog written by Ruchika Muchhala, the online manager of Video Volunteers' website "Channel 19", ch19.org, where we post the videos made by the community producers. This is a blog she wrote for Rising Voices, where she has also recently started blogging -- courtesy of connections made in the Knight News Challenge community. I'm including it on Mediashift Idealab because the campaign she talks about -- the 'pink chaddi (underwear) campaign' -- is one of the cleverest and funniest uses of social networking and the internet I've seen in India. The campaign was started by a...

• February 17, 2009
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Philadelphia's Community News Portals

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As part of Our City Our Voices, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) in partnership with Juntos has launched a new drupal based participatory website. The Our City Our Voices portal is part of a network of community portals MMP has developed to create dynamic spaces for communities across the city to tell and share stories and get information. The aim of the network of community portals is to develop new spaces for folks disenfranchised by the digital age to have a place to speak and listen. The project entails 4 steps: 1) find and distribute low cost internet access to...

• January 30, 2009
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Building a Social Entrepreneurial Garage Startup in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Moving from ideas to execution is an ultra cool feeling. Gram Vaani is finally on the go and we are all extremely excited to see our dreams taking shape. The garage startup mode I always used to wonder what a Silicon Valley garage startup would feel like. Well, here's what it looks like -- a social entrepreneurial garage startup in India. This is Bala in his pyjamas, with dozens of audio cables and connectors strewn out on his desk in a manner that only he understands. Bala spends part of his day reading Kafka, and the rest of his day...

• January 24, 2009
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Each Culture Should Communicate News Their Way

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the "Community Video Unit" has lots of potential for great programming on arts and culture. But rural Rajasthan is a deeply conservative and feudal place, where the women are veiled, and there is very high incidence of child marriage and female foeticide. My hat goes off to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, the NGO who has set up this Community Video Unit...

• January 24, 2009
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Phase 2 of the Open-Media Project Begins This Week

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deproduction's KNC grant was designed in 4 distinct six-month phases. The first phase included an updated release of our Open-Source Drupal tools: the set of Drupal modules which enable Denver Open Media to function as a user-driven Public Access Community Media Center with no operating support from the city or cable provider in Denver. The process of developing these modules, and the features they are designed to include, can be seen at http://groups.drupal.org/open-media-project. The second phase officially launches this week, and involves a group of 6 beta-test partners who we will guide through the process of implementing the modules, and...

• January 23, 2009
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Community-Owned Media: What Does It Mean?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many people today who work in social change are convinced that the typical 'top down' approach to development, where bureaucrats and international agencies design large-scale social programs and then impose them on millions of poor people, isn't working. Instead, they favor the idea of 'community-led development', in which communities themselves design the social programs, and interventions only arise from the stated needs of the communities. The goals of all these programs is the idea of eventual 'community ownership' of programs themselves and of the social change process. It means that communities won't only participate, but they will be able to...

• December 24, 2008
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Online Filmmakers Offer New Glimpses of Iran

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The last time we checked in with Iran Inside Out, project leader Shaghayegh Azimi had just finished a trailer video to whet our appetite for what was to come. As she details in a two-part project evaluation, Azimi intended for Iran Inside Out to become a full-time venture to spread awareness about and raise the profile of young Iranian filmmakers by introducing their works to an international audience. The project has encountered several obstacles, but it has also made important progress over the past six months, including an attractive and interactive website. Iran Inside Out has also managed to publish...

• December 19, 2008
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Freedom Fone Interviewed on the BBC

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone's technical director, Brenda Burrell, was recently interviewed by Digital Planet, the BBC's weekly world technology update. Read the article, or listen to Brenda speak about Freedom Fone, and the potential of mobile phones as a vehicle for voice based information services....

• December 17, 2008
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Study on Digital Inclusion and Civic Engagement

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hey folks, I wanted to tell you all about a study I am wrapping up with Peter Funke, Dan Berger and a few other folks in Philadelphia. We received a grant from the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC) "Necessary Knowledge for Public Sphere" initiative to study the Media Mobilizing Project(MMP) and their use of new media and digital inclusion to promote civic engagement in disenfranchised communities across Philadelphia To offer some background, MMP was launched in 2005 as a strategic initiative to partner with local organizations, facilitating grassroots media production to advance socio-economic justice through the (self) empowerment of...

• December 16, 2008
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Freedom Fone Goes on the Road

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone had its first public debut at the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) 2008 Forum in Cape Town, 14-17 November. The event was a great opportunity to deploy Freedom Fone -- even in its software prototype state. We prepared different content for each of the four days of the conference, and ran four "channels," or options which users could access when they phoned in: Highlighted Sessions, Interviews with Presenters, Culture and Inspiration, and the Feminist Tech Hunt, which was run in association with Take Back the Tech. We took advantage of South Africa's deregulated VoIP and rented...

• December 1, 2008
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The Challenge of Bringing Net Access to Poorest Areas

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, I've given a lot of thought to how poor communities on the other side of the digital divide are able to connect. The Internet is now only accessible for a tiny portion of humanity. Probably less than 20% of humanity has regular internet access, and in rural India, where 700 million people live, it must be a far, far smaller number. When all of us English-speaking urbanites have forums to share and learn and grow, but vast numbers of people don't, it only increases the inequality of the poor. In addition to their financial poverty, they are becoming...

• November 3, 2008
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Printcasting Prototype Video

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I mentioned in my last post, Printcasting is finally beginning to take shape. We're very excited to have a working prototype that performs the very basic tasks: pulling in RSS feeds, flowing feeds into print templates, and placing targeted self-serve ads. You can see it in action in this 8-minute video: Printcasting Prototype Demo from Dan Pacheco on Vimeo. There are a lot of things that still aren't working in the prototype, which I get into in the video, and the design is still intentionally "wireframy" at this point. So why are we showing it? First, since our public...

• October 10, 2008
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Denver Open Media Close to Selecting Beta Sites

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you know of a Community Technology Center, Public Access TV station, University Media Program, or other non-commercial, community media outlet who may be interested in participating, please invite them to apply at http://deproduction.org/ombeta.

• October 5, 2008
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Framing the Candidates: The Daily Show Parodies

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the past two posts, I've suggested ways educators could use the campaign bio videos produced for the two national conventions as a way of encouraging civic literacy. I've suggested that they are powerful examples of the different ways that the parties "frame" their candidates and platforms. The focus on personal biography brings to the surface what linguist George Lakoff calls the GOP's "Strict Father" and the Democrat's "Nurturing Parent" models, both of which see the family as a microcosm for the way a president will relate to the nation. I've also suggested that the videos surrounding the Vice-Presidential candidates help to broaden the appeal by bringing in aspects of the other party's "frame" so as to speak to swing voters.

Today, I want to turn my attention to the parodies of these videos produced for The Daily Show.

• September 28, 2008
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Are We Ready for Citizen Journateerism?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Thanks to massive adoption of blogging and other do-it-yourself Web 2.0 tools like Twitter we have seen an explosion in citizen journalism in recent years. That goes without saying on a blog like this. But there is a related trend emerging which is perhaps not so apparent. Lets (rather clumsily) call it Citizen Journateerism. Citizen Journateerism = Citizen Journalism + Volunteerism. Basically that means ordinary folks leveraging social media tools to help people in need. I'm not talking about political or community-relevant reporting and opinioning, which is certainly a kind of volunteer community service, but about the re-purposing of citizen...

• September 28, 2008
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Framing the Candidates: The Vice Presidential Videos

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last time, I discussed, for example, how the McCain video uses images of his mother, even the phrase "mother's boy," to soften his tough, military-based persona, and how he was able to use images of personal suffering to express both vulnerability and toughness. We see many more such contradictions -- or appeals across party -- when we look at the videos for the Vice Presidential candidates.

• September 26, 2008
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Innovations in Storytelling: Using Comics for Journalism

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the summer, I saw an incredibly exciting piece of visual journalism over at USA TODAY. The production involved a mash-up of sorts between one of USA TODAY's bloggers, Twitter, some comic book artists, and a nifty bit of flash animation. You can check out the results here. There are a couple of things that got me excited. First, I just find it visually engaging. Next, it involves an unusual collaboration between comic book artists, a blogger, and online developers to produce something distinct. On a personal level, it warmed my heart that a "newspaper" was trying something this daring....

• September 25, 2008
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Framing the Candidates: A Closer Look at Biography Videos

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over my next three posts, I will look more closely at first the videos for the two Presidential candidates, then the bios for the two Vice Presidential candidates, and finally parodies of these videos produced for The Daily Show. I am hoping that this will provide inspiration for educators who might want a way to talk about the campaigns, the differences between the parties, and the role of media in the process.

• September 24, 2008
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Mobile Reporting Gave Raw View of Political Conventions

by Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The most dramatic example of how our mobile coverage played out was on the final night of the Republican National Convention. While thousands were preparing to cheer McCain’s speech inside the convention center, our Wisconsin reporter, Charlie, was hot on the trail of an anti-war protest gearing up outside. His “tweets” began…

• September 23, 2008
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Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

During the 2004 presidential election season, I ran a column in Technology Review Online which described the way that average citizens were exploiting their expanded capacity to manipulate and circulate images to create the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. These images often got passed along via e-mail or posted on blogs as a way of enlivening political debates. Like classic editorial cartoons, they paint in broad strokes, trying to forge powerful images or complex sets of associations that encapsulate more complex ideas. In many cases, they aim lower than what we would expect from an established publication and so they are a much blunter measure of how popular consciousness is working through shifts in the political landscape. Many of them explore the borderlands between popular culture and American politics.

• September 10, 2008
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Listen and Learn: Recording in Harare's Cafes

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Even though we're still a few months, and a telephony server with a PCI slot, short of our first deployment, the Freedom Fone creative team has been hitting Harare's arts scene. In an effort to train our ears and give our digital audio editing fingers a work out, we've been recording some audio at a few public events. A few lessons we've learnt along the way: 1. If you're at a public event with a sound system, make friends with the sound engineer At a discussion evening at Harare's Book Cafe on 21 August, we were able to get right...

• September 3, 2008
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Gustav Information Sources

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There is a great selection of new media information channels already to go even before Gustav has touched down in the U.S. These include: A Gustav Information Center on the social networking site Ning: A government Gustav Twitter feed A Gustav Wiki with centralized information: And a whole slew of live video feeds and news broadcasts on LiveNewsCameras.com Please help spread the word to those who can benefit from the resources now in place, many put together by volunteers....

• August 31, 2008
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An Olympic Moment for Mobile Media?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There has been a lot of hype in mobile media circles about how the Summer Olympics are signaling a watershed moments in broadcasting and media access on the fly. According to Nielson, 23 per cent US and 17 per cent of UK mobile internet users will be tracking the games through their phone browser, and 45 of US mobile video users will watch the Olympics on their handsets. Are those significant statistics and if so HOW significant? Depends on who you talk to. Based on the fact that only 3 of US cell phone users regularly watched video via...

• August 19, 2008
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From iPhone to Facebook to Live Photo-Blogging

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On some level I was live photo blogging (plogging?) from that party, complete with comments on some of the images. If we could create an application, which wouldn’t be hard, to upload iPhone pictures automatically to a blog or to the front page of a newspaper website the possibilities are endless.

• August 14, 2008
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ReelChanges Aims to 'Audience-Fund' Documentaries

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

ReelChanges.org, a nonprofit venture that promises to herald an era of viewer-funded documentaries, launched May 1. Since that time, the site has gained considerable traction, partly driven by the  tenacity of its founder, Hal Plotkin (a former journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle), and partly because of the sheer power of the idea. Last week Hal wrote a post about the positive reception to the site in the documentary filmmaker community and the site's partnership with Spot.us, an even newer effort that aims for the audience to financially support community and investigative journalism. Spot.us founder David Cohn has written...

• August 13, 2008
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Resorting to Interviews When Conversation Stalls

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we started the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project, we believed what local people involved in this effort told us -- that they'd be happy to contribute to this public conversation, speak up with their ideas and observations. Since we're dealing with a fairly niche topic mainly involving local government in a small city, we were relying on some initiative from people involved in what the city is doing with the carbon tax money. The kind of engagement we envisioned was people speaking up, having a public conversation. But when it came down to it, most of the people "in...

• August 11, 2008
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How Maps Shape Information and News

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This video was one of the amazing public mapping projects featured at this year's Center for Social Media's Beyond Broadcast 2008. Public Radio International President and CEO Aliza Miller created this video. She begins with the what's known in digital storytelling as the "dramatic" question: How does the news shape the way we see the world. How can maps shape the way we see the world? When I look at the mapping being done these days, I love hyperlocal, community mapping. But as has been debated here, some community mapping projects are devoid of adequate context, and therefore it's difficult...

• August 9, 2008
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Is There a Marketplace for Local Storytelling?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently took another look at Organic City, a project launched in 2006 to provide residents of Oakland, California with a place to listen to and share stories about happenings in their respective neighborhoods or to take audio and video tours of the city - all created by locals. The stories are tagged to specific locations in the city via a Google map, and the site also offers a special mobile version allowing stories to be uploaded and downloaded via a cell phone or other mobile device. Organic City is one of thousands of locative media projects created over the...

• July 24, 2008
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Participants of 'Our City Our Voices' Release First Videos

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The participants of Media Mobilizing Project and Juntos's Immigrant and Low-Wage worker video project have finished their first batch of videos. The videos tell a wide array of stories focusing on health in the community, discrimination against immigrants, the role of unions in protecting immigrant workers and community outreach. Please check out the first video Does Discrimination Exist Against Immigrant Workers

• July 16, 2008
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ASL video of journalism as community building

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Note: This is an entry that I created for my website, providing some explanation to the deaf community of how I'd like to use some of the new journalism methods. Although vastly simplified due to time constraints, they provide the basic idea. I am crossposting here to provide you with both an overall view of my thinking, and an example of how I am currently attempting to post 'bilingually' in both ASL and written English. Original post here. Transcript: Signcasts is an attempt to find out how to successfully provide news to the deaf community. Of course, the deaf have...

• July 13, 2008
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Rebooting the Connection: The Deaf in the News Industry

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deaf people have an interesting relationship with the news. For over 100 years, the Deaf literally made the news. That is, a relatively large percentage of press operators have been Deaf. This just happened to be one of a few jobs where Deaf people could be hired due to the quite comfortable environment of loud, noisy presses. This gave the Deaf experience making the physical product of newspapers, which did translate into Deaf people creating their own newspapers. One of the most notable was Silent News. But even at its height, Silent News was little more than a monthly tabloid...

• July 12, 2008
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Is a CNN For the Base of the Pyramid Possible?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we and our NGO partners initiate community members--young men and women from the slums and villages of India--into their new full-time jobs as 'Community Video Producers,' we often start the training sessions by drawing a triangle on the board. 'This pyramid,' the Video Trainer says, 'represents the global media.' The Producers then divide up the triangle into different layers--the nightly news programs at the top. Then, going down, CNN. Then India's Murdoch-owned English language stations. Then India's regional language private news stations, then India's national televsion, 'Doordarshan,' etc. etc. At each layer, a slightly wider percentage of the global...

• July 11, 2008
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The Next Newsroom in Second life

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In April 2006, I was sitting in a Durham, N.C., sports bar with Gary Kebbel, who runs the Knight Foundation's News Challenge grant program. Gary was officially letting me know I would be getting a grant for The Next Newsroom Project. Our plan was to research and design the ideal newsroom for The Chronicle, the independent student newspaper at Duke University, which was considering building a new facility on campus. I was so giddy that something he said at the time flew right by me: "As part of the grant, we'd like you to build a version of the...

• July 7, 2008
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Using Flowgram to Explain and Illuminate

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been advising a San Francisco startup, Flowgram, where Abhay Parekh and his team have come up with a novel Web 2.0 idea. It's a system that lets you guide someone through several websites or pages, showing various items -- but where the pages and links stay "live" for the user. Here's a smart one by a Flowgram developer, Tony Lopez, showing some great blogging tools:I've created several journalism-related Flowgrams with a focus on new media. Keep in mind that I'm still an amateur at this, as will be obvious...For example, take a look at this brief introduction to the Washington Post's...

• July 3, 2008
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Street Team Honors Young Vets for July 4

by Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Throughout the primaries, a number of issues have recurred with young people, whether it be gas prices, the environment, education or the war. Yet, one statistic has broken through, and it is that MTV Research recently reported that nearly 70% of 18-29 year-olds personally know someone who has fought in Iraq, a staggering number that uniquely defines this generation. So we believed that it is of vital importance to hear the stories of our young soldiers returning home from war.

• July 3, 2008
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Initial Milestones from Denver

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Goal 1: Staffing. Our first goal for the Deproduction / Denver Open Media project was to establish the development team. In June, we hired long-time contractor Brian Hiatt, as well as his partner/designer Sharee Dierringer, merging their Drupal development shop, Civic Pixel, into the Deproduction Family. We also posted our Developer Job Opening and with Brian at the helm, conducted a three-part interview process, and feel good about our top candidate. We hope to bring him on-board full-time by July 1. We're also lucky to have applied-for, and received, a CTC Vista, who will start on July 1 and will...

• June 13, 2008
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Will 3G iPhone Help Push Geo-Based News?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Apple's announcement yesterday of a GPS-enabled iPhone is further fanning the flames of excitement around location based services and mobile social networking. Being able to connect with friends (and strangers), and to interact with your immediate environment via your smartphone is the new new thing. But we still have a ways to go with all of this mobile-enabled location activity... The economic opportunity is a big one, which is precisely why so many services are coming on line, and why so much attention is being paid to open mobile platforms (i.e., Android and LiMo) that will fertilize the space. In...

• June 10, 2008
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Prisoners Become Media Makers in Jamaica

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When thinking of Kingston, Jamaica, blogging and podcasting are far from the first words to come to mind. "Murder capital of the world", sure. Bob Marley and reggae music, of course. But a cutting edge prison rehabilitation program, which teaches prisoners at a maximum security correctional institute how to blog, podcast, and even participate in Second Life? Photo of Tower Street Correctional Facility by Christina Xu That is precisely what Students Expressing Truth (S.E.T.) has set out to accomplish with its new citizen media initiative, Prison Diaries. S.E.T. first began in 1999 when two former prisoners created the organization to...

• June 4, 2008
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From GeoGraffiti to GeoJournalism

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently began playing around with a new service called GeoGraffiti, which allows you to post or access voice notes or "markers" while at a specific physical location using any cell phone. I like the idea of localized, user generated information which GeoGraffiti is a platform for. Everything from getting traffic tips to the real time reviews and tips on local restaurants or places of interest. Think of it as a kind of mobile Yelp (user generated reviews on business services, entertainment, and events) using voice instead of just text. The other nice feature of GeoGraffiti is that is allows...

• May 25, 2008
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Tell Me You Hear the Writing on the Wall?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Microsoft's Tell Me subsidiary announced the launch of a new audio service for the BlackBerry which allows the user to conduct local business search, get directions or traffic information, etc. using voice commands. Apparently, by uttering a singe word like "coffee" your GPS enabled Blackberry will do an automatic search (in this case via Microsoft Live Search) and provide you with the nearest cafe links, directions, phone numbers, etc. That's a cool feature to have, especially as our "smart" phones get smaller and their screens way too damn small to read. Of course voice activated software has been around for...

• April 24, 2008
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ManyEyes: Data-Rich Features on the Cheap

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The web offers news organizations whole new ways to present complex stories to readers, but even the emergence of free tools hasn't made online databases or Google Maps mashups a daily commonplace in your average news organization's website. Often, that's because the effort involved in building a rich, complex visualization is just too high for it to become an everyday occurrence. But what if those days are coming to a close? Enter ManyEyes, a free service created by one of IBM's research labs that allows near-instant interactive visualizations of a data set. Your Excel spreadsheet of public job salaries and...

• April 23, 2008
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MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 - Leaning Local

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The premise of our MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 is that the path to civic participation and becoming a voter is different for everyone, particularly among today's youth. Frequently, young people disconnect the issues that concern them most, from the act of voting - on the premise that their individual vote won't make a difference, or that the news media nor the political candidates NEVER speak about the issues THEY care about most. The job of each Street Team '08 member is to determine what is important to youth in their states, and get young people engaged in...

• April 22, 2008
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Iran Inside Out

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Shaghayegh Azimi is the epitome of what is often referred to on Global Voices as a "bridge-blogger"; that is, someone who uses his or her weblog to bridge two or more cultures. There is only one catch - Azimi isn't really a blogger. As a former film producer in Iran, video has always been her preferred medium of expression. And she's not alone. In an interview over Skype, Azimi says that thousands of Iranian youth yearn to become filmmakers, but that limited access to equipment, along with Iran's few channels of distribution, mean that only the very best, luckiest,...

• April 19, 2008
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News Is Code #1: Attack of the Podium Weasels

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How can technology improve on even the best journalistic work and help journalists hold officials to account? In the first of the News Is Code series, we take a look at the recent Pulitzer won by Dana Priest and Anne Hull of the Washington Post for their series on conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

• April 13, 2008
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Our City, Our Voices Graduates Second Round of Students

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

On Sunday April 13th, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) and Juntos will graduate a second round of twelve students from an English Speaking video and web workshop. The graduation will take place at Songhai City Cultural Center at 3117 Master Street in Philadelphia at 3pm. Like their counterparts from the previous Spanish speaking workshop, members of this class learned web skills, video-making skills and media literacy.

• April 10, 2008
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Human Rights Video in a Participatory Culture

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of our goals at the Center for Future Civic Media is to identify best practices from existing projects which might inform those initiatives which will emerge from the Center. We want to understand how people out there are using the tools available to them right now to enhance civic awareness, to play informal watchdog functions within the culture, to call attention to problems and force governments and other institutions to respond, to skirt around censorship and other kinds of regulation over communication, and so forth. We are looking at a range of different models -- from serious games to...

• April 6, 2008
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My Brief, Torrid Affair with the Nokia N95

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mobile media isn't just the future -- it's the present, big time. Recent research from the Pew Internet and American Life project shows that mobile devices (especially cell phones) are already the can't-do-without-it media tool of choice for many US demographics, especially among Hispanics and Latin Americans. (Read more analysis of this research, and what it can mean for community media at the Knight New Media Center.) Mobile is becoming a key channel for all kinds of content and communication -- so it should be a key focus for anyone providing news and information to almost any community. So why...

• April 2, 2008
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Nuestra Ciudad, Nuestras Voces

by Gabriel Berrios
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Versión en español más abajo. Greetings all, for some time now we have been deeply involved in developing our project and carrying out the audiovisual production workshops with the immigrant population in Philadelphia. The workshops have had a good turnout, and as you may know already from my colleague Todd Wolfson, the first 20 participants finished the course successfully and are now in the process of making their videos. The first round of workshops was directed at the Spanish-speaking immigrants who came to Philadelphia looking for a better quality of life; soon we will be screening the videos they have...

• March 20, 2008
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Virtually and Really Watching the Trees (grow)

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The city of Shanghai is geo-tagging over 1500 registered ancient tress with the plan to use gps devices to monitor and protect the trees in ways they couldn't before. Not unlike many cities, modernization poses enormous risks (and has exacted quite a toll) to nature and the natural. So often our built environment doesn't take into account what has been here for so long. Shanghai's gps monitoring allows the trees to be tracked in real time and the government to move quickly if the location of the tree changes. The system also enables construction companies to get location data early...

• March 20, 2008
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Is Citizen Media Skipping Small Town America?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am on a hunt. While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic "user-generated" content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America. As part of E-Democracy.Org's Rural Voices project in Minnesota we seek to discover bloggers, social networking groups, wikis, online community forums, etc. from rural/Greater Minnesota. This map of 200 blogs aggregated by MNSpeak, shows just three outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area....

• March 19, 2008
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A News Mashup

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The good folks at Netsquared in San Francisco are sponsoring a Mashup Challenge, designed to encourage civil society and social benefit organizations to submit innovative new ideas for Mashups(web_application_hybrid) supporting social change. Of the 50 or so entries submitted so far, a number of them have a news angle that may be of interest to journalists and the larger media community. For example, a submission called Community News & Caring Map is aimed at allowing writers to know where their readers are geographically located. The idea being that if you know more about who your audience is, the better you...

• March 12, 2008
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How Do You Know When to Take Mobile Seriously?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How does mainstream media know when to take mobile seriously as a distribution platform? 1) When the New York Times unveils a mobile-to-PC application? The NYT's new ShiftD application allows you to move its content from one device to the other, insead of having to save and move them separately. A bit of a time saver perhaps, but not all that exciting really. 2) When key online social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook develop their own mobile applications? We're getting warmer here. When we can seamelessly do all the social stuff on our cell phones that we really like...

• February 25, 2008
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Wearing Your Media on Your Sleeve

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some really interesting experimentation is being done with "wearable media" these days. Wearable media is simply clothing or other accessories that allow for the transmission or display of digital information. Some examples... Wearable Resistance a dress adorned with LED that can be programmed to depict images or text. Check out some of the other work being done by Dutch artist collective De Geuzen, "a foundation for multi-visual research". The Internet of Things: The University of Washington is conducting an experiment to understand the next step in social networking by connecting objects and people in a wireless, monitored network. Beginning in...

• February 17, 2008
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XO Laptop Turns Kids into Media Creators in Uruguay

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo. It's an amazing thing to watch--at least, to a city slicker like me who doesn't get to witness the miracle of birth every day. But what makes this particular video remarkable is that it was shot by a fourth-year student at Villa Cardal's Public School 24, using the built-in camera and recording software on the student's XO Laptop, within weeks of the machine's arrival at...

• February 12, 2008
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Michael Wesch: Toward an Ethnography of YouTube

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm currently at DIY Video Summit, a well-organized gathering of academics, video-bloggers, and other web enthusiasts and critics. The first panel provided an overview of the state of academic research regarding online do-it-yourself video. A lot of the conversation centered around theoretical definitions of what constitutes an "amateur." All of the panelists and many from the audience observed the blending of the professional and the amateur. Now commercial endeavours use 'amateur' as a hot marketing buzzword (think porn, American Idol, Laguna Beach) while amateurs try to represent themselves as professionals. I thought the most interesting speaker was Michael Wesch. Wesch...

• February 8, 2008
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A Discussion of Mobile Technologies and News Making

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is an interesting academic review of how mobile technoligies are changing the news landscape. A number of important points are made, including... 1) The notion that mobile technologies in the hands of the public may be resulting in event-driven news overtaking institutionally based news. See this monster of a study on this topic. but here are some interesting stats from the BBC on how the public is engaging news organizations directly: "...In the aftermath of July 7 (2005) bombings, [14] BBC received 20,000 written accounts via e-mail, 1,000 photos and 20 videos from citizens. Similarly, in the summer floods...

• February 2, 2008
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Explore New Videos at Rising Voices

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first round of Rising Voices outreach projects have already been training participants in underrepresented communities how to use the tools of citizen media for just over seven months now. Of course in the beginning they started slow. First each of the project participants created their blogs and learned how how to link to other information on the internet. Slowly, the projects then explored digital photography and photo-sharing websites like Flickr. Now many of the projects are taking their media production skills to the next level by using Windows Movie Maker to produce short video documentaries that reveal the realities...

• February 2, 2008
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A Private Picture is Worth How Many Words?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For those of you who attended the Consumer Electronics Show last week, you may have seen this new "TV Glasses" gadget that allows you to watch a movie played on an MP3 player or cell phone. It appears to be the next evolution of what began with the Walkman and personal digital devices toward the further privitization of the public media space. While old schoolers might compain that the "iPodization" or tuning out of our culture is bad enough as it is, others might argue that such devices are no worse than someone reading a book or checking their blackberry...

• January 19, 2008
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Will Online Video Make the World a Better Place?

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The impact of the digital divide (or at least the bandwidth imbalance) is most pronounced when it comes to online video. In regions where lightening-fast internet connections are taken for granted, such as North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, it has become a common occurrence to observe teenagers watching YouTube videos on their iPhones or Korean businesswomen watching the nightly newscast on their mobile phones. Even those who have yet to transform their mobile phones into television sets, still regularly catch up on the latest and most popular YouTube videos. In fact, much of the world has already moved...

• January 5, 2008
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Google and OLPC's Move to Create Global Pen Pals

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Google, UNICEF, and One Laptop Per Child recently announced the launching of the Our Stories project. The effort records the stories of children from different parts of the world and places them on a Google Map. But more than just an oral/video history project combined with geotagging, the effort claims to be: A joint initiative to preserve and share the histories and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using laptops, mobile phones and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends....

• December 17, 2007
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Philadelphia's Latino Immigrants Tell Their Life Stories

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We finished the first round of video production training! On Monday December 3rd, 20 Spanish-speaking immigrants received diplomas for successfully completing the first in a series of workshops in which they were trained in video production and basic web skills. This project, developed by the Media Mobilizing Project with Mexican immigrant community based organization JUNTOS is called, Our City, Our Voices: Immigrant Newscasts in the Digital Age. To remind people, the goal of the project is to give Philadelphia's newest inhabitants the capacity to tell their own stories and document their struggles through short digital videos. At the forefront...

• December 7, 2007
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It's Our Web?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How about this for a video game? Free Speech TV has put out a short video about the current and threatened enclosure of the Internet: Disclosure: The video is produced by Steve Anderson, whose COA News is a client of Agaric Design Collective. Some surprising background on the current extent of concentration and tracking supplements the video. Ironically, it comes off a little like an ad for the FreeSpeech.org community, but I strongly agree with the premise of online spaces under the control of regular folks, meaning notably open source free software and not legally owned by corporate stockholders. I...

• December 6, 2007
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"Locating" the Mississippi Blues in 3 Platforms

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

lat 33.4043 long -90.3055 Mississippi Blues Trail Tour in Google Earth (download Google Earth for free, then launch the kmz file) ScreenCast of Mississippi Blues Google Earth Geo-Tagged Project (a screencast is a video capture of what happens on the computer monitor.) Friday night arrived, our round-the-clock week's worth of work was done and it was finally time to present to all the participants and guest of the National Black Programming Consortium's New Media Institute. Prominent leaders in the Public Broadcasting world and NGO filmmaking community had participated in panels all week: Notables from PBS, CPB, NPR, PRX, ITVS,...

• November 22, 2007
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Curley's New Directions in New Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of my heroes in new media is Rob Curley, vice president of new products at The Washington Post who honed his new media chops at the online paper in Lawrence, Kansas. If you want to know where the online news industry will be in a few years, watch what Rob and his team are doing today. In this 5-minute video interview at the Online News Association conference in Toronto last week, Rob talks about the Post's remarkable OnBeing series, its new citizen media site Loudounextra.com, mobile technology, geo-tagging and more. MPEG-4 video on Blip.tv Flash video on Internet...

• October 26, 2007
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Educate: Journalism and Teaching Technologies

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many who spoke at the Online News Association conference in Toronto defined education (of the public) as an important part of journalists' work. Most of us clearly do not feel the need to fulfill Toronto-raised Mary Harris "Mother" Jones' injunction to educate, agitate, organize (and not doing so is a disservice news organizations do to themselves and to society, I will argue later), but what would taking seriously the responsibility to educate, by itself, mean for news? The related content to which this connects is an online video recommended at the conference by Jeff Young (of the Chronicle for Higher...

• October 23, 2007
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10Questions Offers a 'Netroots' Presidential Debate

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

On my Democracies Online blog I shared my dismay about the so-called online candidate debates thus far this election cycle. With E-Democracy.Org we hosted the first online candidate debate back in 1994, so I am looking for innovations that involve the public in determining the questions and would be satisfied without real candidate rebuttals online. E-Debates have a long way to go, but 10Questions.com is a huge step in the right direction. 10Questions, with scores of netroots and some media sponsors as led by TechPresident, allows you to upload you video question to various video services. You simply tag your...

• October 19, 2007
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Baristanet Book Club Launches with Jay McInerney

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Debbie Galant of Baristanet has launched the Baristanet Book Club, opening with an author interview conducted by Jay McInerney: So, why is Jay McInerney writing for Baristanet? It starts with the precipitous decline in book reviewing by mainstream media, a trend documented here and much fretted about by authors, reviewers, and publishers. As an author, I knew about this. But who thought I could be part of the solution? Well, Paul Bogaards, a Glen Ridge resident, avid Baristanet reader and executive at Knopf, did. In mid-September, he invited me to a lunch with representatives from the Association of American Publishers...

• October 19, 2007
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Our City, Our Voices: Video Newscasts in the Digital Age

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is an image of the posters and flyers we have put out across Philadelphia as we prepare for the beginning of our video and basic web trainings on November 11th. The Media Mobilizing Project is planning to start with two classes of approximately 8-10 people which will take place from November into early December. In these classes people will learn how to use a video camera, write a script, edit and many other skills. Thus far we have been getting the project off the ground while holding a series of forums/conversations within the Mexican immigrant community to find...

• October 15, 2007
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