Idea Lab

ScraperWiki Lets You Make Magic Out of Web Data

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

January 30, 2012
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by Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's a wonderful magic wand that every member of a digital newsroom wants to get their hands on. Take control and you can work wonders, untangle the world wide web of information, and even decrease your workload to fit in that extra cup of coffee. "What is this wand?" you ask, and "How can I get my hands on it?" It's the wondrous API (application programming interface). At ScraperWiki, we provide the tools to custom fit your wand to your magical purpose. Learn a couple of incantations in either Ruby, Python or PHP and you can concoct an API of...

January 25, 2012
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Why PRX, Knight Created an Accelerator for Public Media

by Jake Shapiro

We announced PRX's partnership with the Knight Foundation to create the Public Media Accelerator about a month ago. Since then, it's become clear that the accelerator concept is new to many people in the non-profit and public media worlds, even as tech folks fret that accelerators have jumped the shark. Our tagline for the Public Media Accelerator is "seeking mission-driven entrepreneurs changing media for good." We're in a time of remarkable technology innovation, and our goal is to channel the forces driving that growth towards public service media. The two forces, the tech sector and public media, need each other:...

January 19, 2012
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3 Keys to Naming Your Product

How We Created a Startup Culture at ASU's Cronkite School

Two and a half years ago, I co-founded Stroome, a collaborative online video editing and publishing platform and 2010 Knight News Challenge winner. Considering the fact that "video" is one of the most searchable words on the web, our first startup challenge -- actually coming up with a name for our site -- proved to be extremely daunting. Recently, I was asked by Jason Nazar, founder of Docstoc and a big supporter of the L.A. entrepreneurial community, if I had any tips for startups regarding choosing a name for their product. A short, 3-minute video response can be found at...

January 9, 2012
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by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

It was a few days before the end of the fall 2011 semester, and a friend at a small southern university was bemoaning the lack of innovative spirit among her students. She'd built in an entrepreneurial module into her class, but only a small percentage of the students took the bait to even try to come up with a business idea. By contrast, on that very same day, my office was buzzing with students seemingly in no hurry to pack up for the holidays and head home. And, interestingly, only one of them was my actual student. One was a...

January 3, 2012
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Idea Lab: Year in Review 2011

by Desiree Everts

It's been an eventful year on MediaShift's Idea Lab, marked by mergers, beta releases and site redesigns for the many innovators in digital media. This past year also saw the Knight Foundation announce 16 winners of its News Challenge contest, up from 12 grantees in 2010 -- and the total prize money hit $4.7 million, thanks in part to a $1 million contribution from Google. A couple of themes that ran big among the winners this year were data and mobile. We saw the rise of the hacker-journalist, and many projects were focused on making sense of the stream...

December 28, 2011
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If We Were Starting NPR's Project Argo in 2012

by Matt Thompson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the past two years, I've been working on Project Argo -- a collaboration among NPR and 12 member stations in which the stations launched 12 niche websites on a platform we developed (built on WordPress), each putting their own spin on a common editorial model. As the pilot phase of Argo comes to a close, and we turn our attention to spreading and operationalizing what we've learned more broadly throughout the public media system, the question I get more than any other is, "If you were to start back at the beginning, what would you do differently?"I'd reframe the...

December 27, 2011
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OpenBlock: Can You Explain Data to a Computer AND a Human?

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since the OpenRural project started in November, one of my primary efforts has been to lift the hood on the OpenBlock application itself and find the "unknown unknowns," as a former defense secretary once said. We saw data go in, and maps and lists come out. But what happens inside the belly of the beast? Over the course of the next several posts, I'm going to give you an X-ray view into the guts of the OpenBlock application. Together, we're going to watch how data gets ingested and processed into information and insights that residents of rural communities can use...

December 22, 2011
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The Pros & Cons of Hiring Third-Party Vendors

The Importance of Collective Memory, in Latvia and Beyond

Two and a half years ago, I co-founded Stroome, a collaborative online video editing and publishing platform and 2010 Knight News Challenge winner. Originally started as a master's thesis project at USC's pioneering Annenberg Program on Online Communities, we didn't have all the resources necessary to build every piece of the product ourselves. As a result, we did something that many early stage startups do: We turned to a third-party vendor. Recently, I was asked by Jason Nazar, founder of Docstoc and a big supporter of the L.A. entrepreneurial community, if I had any tips for startups regarding the pros...

December 12, 2011
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by Victoria Fine
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the holiday season gears up around the world, we at the Tiziano Project are throwing ourselves into the festivities by kicking off three new programs on different continents. We just began the remote component of a new training in Palestine, as well as an after-school program in South Central Los Angeles. Finally, our team hit the ground in Riga, Latvia just in time for Thanksgiving. Our Latvia program is a dramatic change from our usual digs -- instead of teaching in rolling blackouts in 130-degree heat, we've had the delight of kicking off our program in two castle-cum-classrooms, to...

December 6, 2011
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NextDrop Makes a Leap of Faith

by Ari Olmos
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Starting a social enterprise is hard. As a startup, you face tremendous uncertainty. Your business is full of leaps of faith, fundamental ideas about your company that you hold but can't yet prove. Paramount among these is the following: Customers will like the service we're providing and will be willing to pay for it. NextDrop informs residents in India about the availability of piped water in order to help them lead more productive, less stressful lives. After three months of providing text message updates to residents in Hubli, using information sourced from utility employees who operate local valves, we believe...

December 5, 2011
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Public Media Should Mind the Developer Gap

by Jake Shapiro

Early on in PRX's history we faced a critical decision. Do we outsource the development and maintenance of our main web application, or take the plunge and bring all coding in-house and become a technology-driven company? We took the plunge, and since then have grown an award-winning tech team, responsible not only for PRX's web-based services but for a growing portfolio of successful mobile apps. I'm not myself a developer, have not written a line of code, and other than being a super user and obsessive early adopter, I have little claim to true tech skills. But as a non-profit...

November 30, 2011
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Spot.Us Merges With Public Insight Network

by David Cohn

Spot.Us launched in November of 2008, making this our three-year anniversary. Counting the months of planning (and applying for the Knight News Challenge) that went into the launch, I've been working on Spot.Us, a journalism crowdfunding project, for almost four years. In that time, we've pushed boundaries, and have had many successes and shortcomings which I've tried to share along the way. As I've always said, Spot.Us will never be perfect. It will never be "done," and as long as we can strive for something, we're making progress.Today we are taking a big stride by formally being acquired by the...

November 29, 2011
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The Future for Non-Profit News: Build a Community of Members, Donors

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the past few years, foundations and philanthropists concerned about newspapers' declining fortunes have put up millions of dollars to launch non-profit online publications covering national affairs (ProPublica), statewide topics (Texas Tribune, Wisconsin Watch, MinnPost, California Watch) and metropolitan areas (the Bay Citizen, the Chicago News Cooperative, St. Louis Beacon). These new "watchdog" organizations have produced some distinguished journalism -- ProPublica, in fact, won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting earlier this year. But three separate research reports, released in the past two months, make clear that great journalism isn't going to be enough to keep most of them alive...

November 28, 2011
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Too Big to Be Awesome: Big Giving and Its Discontents

by Tim Hwang
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the Institute for Higher Awesome Studies, our latest research has focused on thinking about the origins of awesome ideas, and how organizations and institutions play a role in supporting (or inhibiting) the implementation of those projects in reality. The big, looming question in this work is simple: What does the current social infrastructure supporting awesomeness look like? And, how could we tweak it to make it better (or in the very least, suck less)? Obviously, the classic piece of social infrastructure that casts the longest shadow (and the biggest piles of money) over this discussion is the arena of...

November 23, 2011
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Feeding OpenBlock: A New Newsroom Pet That Eats Elements

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few months ago, my kids hit an inevitable, but still terrifying, milestone -- they began asking for a pet. Being a complete Scrooge, I quickly set to work explaining that pets are hard work and expensive. Showing a strong knack for journalism, they demanded proof of my assertions, so we set off to the pet store where my son quickly was ready to invest his birthday money in a small bird. "Sure, you can buy the bird," I told him. "But what are going to feed it?" With the launch of our OpenBlock project in North Carolina, rural newspapers...

November 17, 2011
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Public Lab's 'Barnraising' Focuses on DIY Infrared Camera Development

by Adam Griffith

Stephen Debique, a student from Trinidad, carefully removed the screws from the digital camera, trying not to destroy it in the process. His hands shook a little as he hesitated just before popping the hot-filter off the heart of the machine with exactly the correct amount of pressure. After a few minutes of nervous reassembly, Stephen and several others had successfully modified off-the-shelf $49 cameras to take infrared (IR) images instead of regular images in the visible light spectrum. IR images are useful in determining how much photosynthesis is happening in an area and have traditionally been used by governments,...

November 16, 2011
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4 Tips for Finding the Right Web Developer

Live Chat: How Journalists Use SMS + Radio in Developing World

Two and a half years ago, I co-founded Stroome, a collaborative online video editing and publishing platform and 2010 Knight News Challenge winner. One of our first -- and biggest -- hurdles was finding someone who could actually build the product my partner and I wanted bring to market. But the real challenge, we quickly realized, wasn't just hiring a developer; it was hiring the right developer. Recently, I was asked by Jason Nazar, founder of Docstoc and a big supporter of the L.A. entrepreneurial community, if I had any tips for hiring the right developer to fill in the...

November 15, 2011
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by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Text messages are becoming an important medium in parts of the world where less people have Internet access and smartphones. There are various services, projects and radio programs that are using SMS as a way to interact with their audiences in places like Afghanistan, Uganda and Zimbabwe. So we decided to host a live chat on Twitter about the use of SMS and texting technology by journalists, news organizations, radio shows and more around the world. Many projects are using SMS to help connect communities to important news and information, and to create a feedback loop for programs. On Nov....

November 3, 2011
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Open Media Explores New Paradigms in Community Media

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the Alliance for Community Media Conference in Tuscon, Ariz., I participated on a panel called "New Paradigms in Fundraising." Despite the name of the panel, my focus was more on "financial sustainability" than on fundraising, per se. I've outlined a variety of fundraising approaches emerging in non-commercial media in previous posts. But to me, the true "new paradigm" for community media lies not with raising more money, but with finding ways to enable the community to serve more of their own needs. Rather than looking for new ways to pay for doing things the same way we always have,...

November 2, 2011
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Lessons From the Entertainment Industry for the Digital Entrepreneur

3 Difficult Document-Mining Problems that Overview Wants to Solve

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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by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Overview project is an attempt to create a general-purpose document set exploration system for journalists. But that's a pretty vague description. To focus the project, it's important to have a set of test cases -- real-world problems that we can use to evaluate our developing system. In many ways, the test cases define the problem. They give us concrete goals, and a way to understand how well or poorly we are achieving those goals. These tests should be diverse enough to be representative of the problems that journalists face when reporting on document sets, and challenging enough to push...

October 26, 2011
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Public Lab Aims for Affordable Hydrogen Sulfide Gas Sensors

by Sara Wylie
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was co-authored by Shannon Dosemagen. In September, members of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) met with residents of Garfield County, Colo., to discuss the growing hydrogen sulfide problem in their small, rural community. Public Laboratory is an organization and membership community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. Hydrogen sulfide, a neurotoxic and potentially lethal gas, can be produced by bacteria growing in natural gas wells, or can natively occur within reserves of natural gas. Natural gas development is booming across North America, and with it, cases of hydrogen sulfide poisoning...

October 25, 2011
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How NextDrop Beat the Indian Bureaucracy to Get Back on Track

by Anu Sridharan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

I knew something was wrong when I got 28 text messages from the NextDrop system at 9:02 a.m. on Sept. 28. All 28 messages were supposed to go out between the hours of 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. to our residents (giving the different areas advance notice of water arrival as well as real-time water delivery information) but for some reason, they only got delivered to everyone at 9:02 a.m. -- which basically defeats the purpose of our entire business. NextDrop, winner of the 2011 Knight News Challenge, informs residents in India about the availability of piped water in order...

October 24, 2011
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Wikipedia Isn't Journalism, But Are Wikipedians Reluctant Journalists?

by Heather Ford
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Wikipedia articles on breaking news stories dominate page views on the world's sixth-largest website. Perhaps more importantly, these articles drive the most significant editor contribution -- especially among new editors. In the first three months of this year, English Wikipedia articles with the most contributors were the 2011 Tucson shooting, the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami articles with 460, 405 and 785 editors contributing to the growth of the article respectively. Interestingly, a number of Wikipedia policies discourage writing articles on breaking news. One of Wikipedia's 42 policies, titled "What Wikipedia is not" (or WP:NOT),...

October 20, 2011
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What Would a Nutritional Label for the News Look Like?

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The standard U.S. Food and Drug Administration nutrition label is well-known here in the United States because it is both consistent (for better or worse) and ubiquitous: You'll find it on almost all packaged foods, excluding certain foods like fresh meat (until 2012) and fresh-baked goods (creating an opening in the market for cupcake detectives). As we consider the equivalent of a nutritional label for information consumption, I'd like to strike a balance between the consistent, widely recognized FDA label and the far more creative, dynamic approaches to visualizing information all over the Internet. The Center for Civic Media's MediaRDI...

October 17, 2011
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'Neighbor Connect' Space Heats Up as HuffPost Buys Localocracy

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Congratulations to Conor White-Sullivan and the team at Localocracy, which became a recent acquisition of the Huffington Post, as reported by Kara Swisher on WSJ's AllThingsD. Arianna Huffington said, "[Conor and team are] pioneers in using the web to empower citizens to improve their towns, and their unique vision and talents will enable us to deepen our users' engagement with our sites." This is further evidence of the "neighbor connect" online space heating up. In the past year, I'm aware of at least two dozen significant startups focused on facilitating conversation among people who live near each other. Some, like...

October 14, 2011
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How Tiziano Project Beat CNN and NPR in the New Journalism Paradigm

by Jon Vidar
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

"The next category is Community Collaboration," says the emcee as we slowly sink down in our seats at the Online Journalism Awards. We're resigned to defeat against our formidable competition, which includes both CNN and Andy Carvin for his social media-infused orchestration of NPR's coverage of the Arab Spring. No way are we going to win this category. "And the winner is ... The Tiziano Project!" Cue music scratching to a stop. Wait. What? I'm still processing. How did our tiny organization complete a project in Iraqi Kurdistan, with an all-volunteer team, that actually beat both CNN and NPR? The...

October 13, 2011
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What If We Had a Nutrition Label for the News?

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Alisa Miller's TED Talk brilliantly illustrates what news industry observers have been warning for years: Our news diet is distorted. We get very little news about places outside the United States, and that amount dwindles further when we remove Iraq from the equation. If you look at our supply of news from places outside the United States that the U.S. is not directly involved in, the effect is even more pronounced. Miller points out that demand for international news has actually increased in recent years. It's beyond clear that in this global era, we need to know what's happening...

October 11, 2011
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How Would You Start a Newsroom's Website From Scratch?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Starting from scratch, where would you start? Last Friday was my last day as program director of DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web. I've got a few more talks lined up (I'll be showing off DocumentCloud at SEJ in Miami and talking about our work at MobilityShifts), and I'll still be part of DocumentCloud's advisory group, but it was time to hand the reins over to the (very capable) staff at IRE. For my next trick, I'm helping get a new accountability journalism project off the ground....

October 10, 2011
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ONA Boston Succeeded in Diversity of Speakers

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

What a difference a year makes. The Online News Association Conference in Boston looked a lot more like America in terms of diversity than last year's Washington, D.C., gathering. People of color were included in most sessions, including timely discussions on elections and crowdsourcing. From the opening plenary with Vivek Kundra, the former U.S. chief information officer, to the Mini-Law School for Digital Journalists, where five of the nine presenters were women, to the workshop on Augmented Reality, the conference felt more inclusive. The Saturday morning plenary on Diversity was well-attended -- and as the moderator, I thank all who...

September 27, 2011
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Barriers to Failure

by David Cohn

At this year's ONA conference, I'll be on a panel called "I failed and so can you." I've always been a big fan of failure. I think journalism should hold a "fail camp" (inspired by Ethan Zuckerman). When I restarted the blog carnival, a site that I've organized where bloggers can convene to all write about the same topic, I dedicated a month toward failure. I'm working on a new project (details to come soon, promise) and I think/hope failure will be a big part of it. We talk a lot about barriers to success. But we also say that...

September 14, 2011
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How Development Seed Mapped a Non-Profit's Donors, Recipients

by Sean Dalby
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you maintain a database of the work your organization does, then you need to be able to learn from that information and communicate about your data effectively. Data visualizations do this quickly and efficiently. Development Seed, which helps organizations use data to explain complex issues and make better decisions, recently worked with A Wider Circle, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit that collects furniture and household goods and distributes them to families transitioning out of shelters or otherwise in need, to map its operations. A Wider Circle uses a database to monitor its work, tracking how many beds, dressers, desks, tables,...

September 12, 2011
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AP's Overview Will Try to Make Sense of Mountains of Data

by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the last year, my colleagues and I at The Associated Press have been exploring visualizations of very large collections of documents. We're trying to solve a pressing problem: We have far more text than hours to read it. Sometimes a single Freedom of Information request will produce a thousand pages, to say nothing of the increasingly common WikiLeaks-sized dumps of hundreds of thousands of documents, or huge databases of public documents. Because reading every word is impossible, a large data set is only as good as the tools we use to access it. Search can help us find what...

September 9, 2011
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Taking Steps Toward DIY Spectrometry, So Citizens Can Test for Pollutants

by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Several Public Laboratory groups have emerged around the development of new tools for measuring contamination and quantifying ecologic issues. Among them is an informal spectrometry working group, which is attempting to create an inexpensive spectrometer. Such an instrument offers the possibility of detecting and even quantifying contaminants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs -- exactly the kind of toxic residue which has resulted from the BP oil spill, and identified in concentrations of up to 4.5 percent at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, N.Y. While this is an ambitious and even speculative project, the idea that...

September 8, 2011
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How to Produce Groundbreaking Journalism on the Cheap

by Victoria Fine
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at The Tiziano Project were shocked and honored last week to be named as finalists for the 2011 Online Journalism Awards in the categories of General Excellence in Online Journalism - Micro Site and Community Collaboration. The Tiziano Project provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to report their stories and improve their lives. We're nominated for our citizen journalism site, 360 | Kurdistan, a project that was produced on a shoestring budget, with a group of incredibly talented volunteers. When I say shoestring, I mean it -- during...

September 7, 2011
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Journalists Should Join Google+ to Understand What Comes Next

by David Cohn

This month's Carnival of Journalism, a site that I've organized where bloggers can convene to all write about the same topic, was hosted by Kathy Gill, a social media consultant and senior lecturer at the University of Washington, who seized on the new social network that is Google+. Still in its infancy, Google+ has been the topic of many-a-tech blog posts. As a former tech writer, I love and hate this stuff. Sometimes I want to slap Mashable right in the "http" and tell them to never do another "Top X Ways [name your industry professionals] Can Use [new social-networking...

September 1, 2011
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PANDA Aims to Make Data Analysis Easier for Journalists (And We'll Be at ONA!)

by Brian Boyer
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

What's got rows and columns and sucks at data? Excel. Though to be fair, we misuse it. Excel was built for spreadsheets, but it's become most folks' go-to kit for poking at data. It's installed on your computer. It opens CSV files. It's what you know. Of course, databases are great at data, but they're hard. Microsoft Access is limiting, and real databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL aren't the easiest things for a non-hacker to get up and running, let alone query. Learning a little SQL will make you a better reporter, but digging through many datasets from different sources...

August 26, 2011
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In Denmark, a Citizen Journalism Experiment Heads to the Soccer Field

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

For me, June has always been a conference month -- and this year was no exception. On my way to the annual MIT-Knight Civic Media meet-up in Cambridge, Mass., I made an essential stop in Aarhus, Denmark. Aarhus University, which is based in the Danish city, organized a major soccer conference in partnership with a European organization called Play the Game. Aarhus has amazing scenery -- it's a historic city with colorful, dainty houses. And while the buildings' walls speak of that history, also in the air during my visit there were innovation and a passion for technology. The conference,...

August 23, 2011
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NextDrop Tackles Water Availability Issues in Urban India

by Ari Olmos
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Western countries, we take it for granted that we have access to clean water 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At our fingertips is water that is plentiful enough to run our washing machines, warm enough for a hot shower, and safe enough to drink. In much of the developing world, however, this simply isn't the case. In 90 percent of South Asian cities and one-third of African and Latin American cities, water is provided intermittently. The 200 million residents of urban India receive piped water for only a few hours at a time, and they have...

August 22, 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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DocumentCloud Welcomes a New Lead Developer

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As DocumentCloud settles into our comfy, new home in Missouri, we're quite pleased to welcome Ted Han aboard as our new lead developer. Though our prior lead developer, Jeremy Ashkenas, has moved to a full-time position at The New York Times, he continues to be an active and enthusiastic contributor to DocumentCloud's open-source tools and platform. DocumentCloud is a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web. Ted joins DocumentCloud from Videojuicer, an online video platform focused on open standards and software integration. He's a computational linguist by degree, developer by...

August 10, 2011
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The Argo Philosophy: Capitalize, Synthesize, Harmonize

by Matt Thompson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Part of the mission behind NPR's Project Argo is to construct a software platform that can maximize the output of a one- or two-person team of reporters. Project Argo is a collaboration between NPR and member stations to strengthen public media's role in local journalism. As the project has progressed, we've realized that we evolved a set of design and development principles that have guided our work throughout. This is how software invention looks in the era of the framework: Ten years ago, armed with an unstoppable designer/developer combo like Argo's tech architect, Marc Lavallee, and our designer/front-end developer,...

August 9, 2011
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DocumentCloud Weathers Obama Birth Certificate, Palin Emails, Merger with IRE

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When President Obama released his birth certificate and dozens of news organizations turned to DocumentCloud to present it to their readers, I snarked a bit. Though the birth certificate did prompt a few questions -- which we're still navigating -- about the best way to handle duplicate uploads, the secret truth was we were both proud and flattered that so many newsrooms, faced with a document they wanted their readers to see, came straight to us and knew they could count on us. When half a dozen newsrooms turned to us to help them get Sarah Palin's emails out to...

July 26, 2011
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Stop Yammering and Start Hammering: How to Build a 'Maker Space' for News

by Phillip Smith

Over the next four weeks, a very interesting experiment is going to unfold. The most exciting part about it is that it’s entirely open source: You can observe it, interact with it, and improve it. We’re calling this experiment the “learning lab.” It’s the second stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, which kicked off in May with an online competition that solicited 300 news innovation ideas from people around the globe. With the competition complete, it’s time put on our mad scientist lab coats and start mixing things up. Our aim is to find an antidote to “yammering” about...

July 12, 2011
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The New News Paradigm: 'Pivot or Perish'

How Newsrooms Can Win Back Their Reputations

At the recent MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, I had the pleasure of speaking to 16 of the most promising thinkers in the area of digital news. Culled together from myriad of disciplines and backgrounds, some had already established themselves as pioneers in the digital space.Others had come from legacy newsrooms. A few had found their voices in the field. But regardless of their backgrounds, they all were united by a drive to innovate, inform and empower. In short, these 16 new news entrepreneurs had come to Cambridge, Mass., with a plan: Reinvent the news business. But if I had just...

July 5, 2011
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by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The journalism industry ships lemons every day. Our newsrooms have a massive quality control problem. According to the best counts we have, more than half of stories contain mistakes -- and only 3 percent of those errors are ever fixed. Errors small and large litter the mediascape, and each uncorrected one undermines public trust in news organizations. In Pew's last survey in September 2009, only 29 percent of Americans believed that the press "get the facts right." Yet the tools and techniques to fix this problem are known and simple. I've been working in this area for the last two...

June 24, 2011
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A Tale of Two Paradigms: E-books and Newspapers

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last night, on the eve of the latest Knight News Challenge winner announcement, I was reflecting back on what I've learned from working on BookBrewer -- a project that grew out of the 2008 Knight News Challenge-funded Printcasting -- and what it says about how packaging and consumer expectations affect the monetary value content. These two products are essentially the same underneath the hood, but the expectations of the reader couldn't be more different. The bottom line is that I now wonder if we ever could have made a successful business with Printcasting simply because it was built within the...

June 22, 2011
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Dotspotting Launches to Help People Gather Data on Cities

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dotspotting.org is officially live, at long last! The project, which aims to make tools to help people gather data about cities and make that data more legible, has been in a partially completed stage for a few months now, and I've blogged about it before. We've got a few new things to announce as well: The url is now http://dotspotting.org; no more of this stamen subdomain stuff. The cartography is completely revised, with a severe black-and-white style we're calling toner, in a gentle nod to the halftone process that newspapers use. (The project is funded by the Knight News Challenge...

June 20, 2011
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DocumentCloud Merges With IRE

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

DocumentCloud is beyond delighted to announce we've found a long-term home for our project. We're merging our operation with Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit grassroots organization committed to fostering excellence in investigative journalism. This transition means that DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web, will have a permanent place in a longstanding resource for investigative reporting. IRE has a long and established history of supporting investigative reporting, and we'll be a proud part of their ongoing work to provide journalists with tools that support their reporting. It...

June 9, 2011
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Spot.Us, Byliner, Atavist Are Showing Freelance Writers the Money

by David Cohn

I often joke that an unexpected job duty of Spot.Us is that I've become an agent for freelancers. I like to pretend I'm a Jerry Maguire figure for small independent freelance reporters. They ask me to show them the money or sometimes they want a clip in a big publication. And sometimes at Spot.Us I've got a little ray of hope in a pitch, and I ask which freelancers are "coming with me" as I waive a suitcase in the air. Spot.Us was built with freelancers in mind, a way they could pitch the world and all editors at once...

June 8, 2011
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Reporters Bring Sources Right Into the Story With DocumentCloud

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Embedding notes makes it even easier for reporters to bring source documents right into the story. One of DocumentCloud's primary goals is to make it simpler for news organizations to show their work -- to invite readers to review the very same documents the journalists used to draw the conclusions in their reporting. The latest addition to our toolbox, which we quietly rolled out last month, allows reporters to embed a single annotation in a story online, and we've been delighted to see newsrooms making excellent use of it. City officials in Torrance, Calif., circulated a press release explaining their...

June 7, 2011
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Time to Bake Smart Correction Tools Into New Publishing Platforms

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A window of opportunity is open right now for online journalists to build accuracy and accountability into the publishing systems we use every day. To understand why this is such a big deal, first hop with me for a minute into the Wayback Machine. It's the mid-1990s. Journalists have just arrived on the web. They're starting sites like Hotwired and Pathfinder, Salon and Slate. They're doing good work, but also, inevitably, making mistakes. Their customary corrections routine -- post a notice in the next edition or issue -- makes no sense in the new medium, where stories are just files...

June 6, 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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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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SaferMobile Helps Protect Your Cell Phone Data from Threats

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Activists, rights defenders and journalists use mobile devices and communications for reporting, organizing, mobilizing and documenting. Mobile gadgets provide countless benefits -- relatively low cost, increased efficiencies, vast reach -- but they also present specific risks. Mobile communication is inherently insecure and exposes you to risks that aren't easy to detect or overcome. SaferMobile is a project that aims to help people, including journalists and citizen reporters, assess and better protect themselves from mobile threats. The project launched with content and announced tools (currently in beta) in April, and development began in January. SaferMobile is a project of MobileActive.org. Understand...

May 18, 2011
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Journalists, Marines Find a Middle Ground on Censorship for Basetrack

by David Gurman
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sundev Lohr contributed research and writing to this post. How can you share war stories online, in real time, without compromising operational security? Can a reporting system be designed to ensure that, while in the field, your story can be communicated without giving the enemy information they could use to harm you? Can you censor reporting while maintaining journalistic integrity? These were the critical questions we considered during a Skype conference call in September with Basetrack's Teru Kuwayama, Balazs Gardi and Tivadar Dominizcky the day before the team left for Camp Leatherneck, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Basetrack is an independent, civilian...

May 16, 2011
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Does Social Media Really Boost Traffic?

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's clear that social networks have become a new kind of Holy Grail in the quest to build web traffic. What seems less clear is what all the tweeting, Tumblr-ing and Facebook posting is designed to do -- and how to gauge its effectiveness. Gotham Gazette (GG), a small site that cannot afford consultants and does not have a marketing person, has worked to create Facebook pages and to tweet to try to draw readers to our pages. We've all taken this on (with varying levels of zeal) -- since gone are the days when reporters didn't also have...

April 28, 2011
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'There's No Problem!' Newsrooms in Denial About Rampant Errors

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jonathan Stray has opened a new conversation about measuring accuracy in news reports. Stray, who works at the Associated Press and blogs on the side, comes at the issue with a refreshingly analytical, data-driven perspective. His in-depth post, which I urge you to read, does a couple of things. It summarizes important research: There seems to be no escaping the conclusion that, according to the newsmakers, about half of all American newspaper stories contained a simple factual error in 2005. And this rate has held about steady since we started measuring it seven decades ago. And it offers some useful...

April 27, 2011
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Notifying Next of Kin in the Age of Facebook

by Teru Kuwayama
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

When she picked up the phone, I could tell from the sound of her voice that she didn't know yet. "I'm sorry to tell you this -- but I wanted you to hear from a friend, not Facebook. Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya. Chris Hondros too. I'm really sorry." There's a nauseating absurdity to those words, but it's the conversation I had yesterday morning with a friend. I'd been getting "pings" for an hour, mostly by Facebook IM, asking if I knew anything about the tweets coming out of Libya. I wasn't taking them especially seriously at first, having...

April 21, 2011
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Designing a Newsgame Is an Act of Journalism

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

A common thread woven through our various projects in the Newsgames research group has been our subscription to the tenets of journalism. Our first endeavor was not related to games at all. We bought a stack of copies of Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's "The Elements of Journalism" book and immersed ourselves in not just the business of news but rather the practice of news. Sure, we could have seen videogames as a way to add exciting features that would draw readers to websites -- and if we were an Internet startup, we probably would have -- but as...

April 20, 2011
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How DocumentCloud Helped Award-Winning Investigations

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) announced their medal winners this week, and we were impressed to see that both winners wove DocumentCloud into their winning reporting. Since 1979, IRE has honored outstanding investigative work with their annual awards. This year they honored a Los Angeles Times series on outrageous salaries in one of California's poorest towns and a collaboration between International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the BBC for a report on the global asbestos trade. Breach of Faith Los Angeles Times was awarded an IRE Medal for Breach of Faith. An investigation of financial impropriety in a small town...

April 14, 2011
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Ushahidi's Online Toolbox Helps People Understand the Service

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

[Post written by Melissa Tully and Jennifer Chan. This post is the third in a series of blog posts documenting a 9-month Ushahidi evaluation project in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative supported by the Knight Foundation.] We have made great progress on the Ushahidi Kenya evaluation. Jennifer has been back at the iHub continuing to build the 3-part assessment and self-evaluation tool. The goal of this toolbox is to help interested organizations learn about the Ushahidi platform using a web-based interactive tool. There's also a low bandwidth and no bandwidth option as detailed in our earlier post. In Nairobi,...

April 7, 2011
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Juan Williams, Fox News Admit to Flagrant Error About Racial Prejudice

by Mark Follman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in late February, Fox News columnist Juan Williams wrote a scathing piece about racial prejudice in the media. Exhibit A was the Washington Post's coverage of a poll showing that African Americans and Latinos are optimistic about the economy. The Post, Williams charged, had "buried" this good news because it didn't fit with the bleak racial stereotypes typically found on the front pages of "the big, white press." Since it turns out that the Post actually had splashed the upbeat poll story all over its Sunday front page and its website, the "entire premise" of Williams' column, as a...

April 6, 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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Lessons From Phase 1 of the Ushahidi Evaluation in Kenya

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was written by Melissa Tuly and Jennifer Chan. This is the second in a series of blog posts documenting a 9-month Ushahidi evaluation project in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative supported by the Knight Foundation. The Ushahidi-Kenya evaluation is off to a strong start. Since returning from Nairobi in January, 2011 we have worked on the self-evaluation and assessment tool for individuals and organizations interested in using Ushahidi. The purpose of the tool is to help interested parties learn about the Ushahidi platform via a web-based learning tool, to provide access to community resources, and to actively...

March 28, 2011
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Female Entrepreneurs Hit Glass Ceiling for VC Funding

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Journalism is dead! Long live journalism! And so it goes as we continue on through the process of Schumpeter's gale of creative destruction. With pay walls that come and go and come again (or hacked with four lines of code) and linkbacks ever so briefly taking it on the chin, how is it that we continue to misunderstand the business of the news? We've got to get long past the "what, me tweet?" debate and must move on to a diversity of news-telling technologies that serve communities across the globe. News needs new monetization models; to get there, we must...

March 23, 2011
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Fresh from SXSWi: 6 Ways to Integrate Hacking in Newsrooms

by Nathaniel James

Going over my notes from the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, the panel that was definitely the most valuable to my work on the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership was Hacking the News: Applying Computer Science to Journalism. What we're doing The Knight-Mozilla Partnership will be embedding 15 techie fellows within news organizations for a year of news hacking. We want to build really useful new open web technologies for the whole field of journalism. We'll recognize success when journalists at newsrooms all over the world use the stuff we build. While we're getting a wonderful response to the partnership,...

March 17, 2011
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Why Hasn't LA Weekly Corrected its Lara Logan Story?

by Mark Follman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

On February 15 the LA Weekly published a post by Simone Wilson under the headline "Lara Logan, CBS Reporter and War Zone 'It Girl,' Raped Repeatedly Amid Egypt Celebration." The opening paragraph stated that Logan had been "brutally and repeatedly raped" -- with that phrase emphasized in bold type. The LA Weekly apparently got the story wrong. Logan had suffered a horrifying sexual assault while working in Cairo's Tahrir Square, disturbing details of which came to light in subsequent media coverage. But according to reporting from three different news outlets -- The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and...

March 11, 2011
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Churnalism.com Reveals Press Release Copy in News Stories

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Editors' Note: Martin Moore is the director of the Media Standards Trust, which recently launched Churnalism.com -- a website that helps the public distinguish journalism from "churnalism," a news article that is published as journalism, but is essentially a press release without much added. Two weeks in, and the public response to Churnalism.com has been fantastic. Since we launched the site on February 23, we have had 50,000 unique visitors, over 330,000 page impressions, and hundreds of press releases pasted in and saved. According to Google Analytics the site has been visited by people in 134 countries. People have tracked...

March 9, 2011
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Kachingle is Overrated, So Let's Stop Writing About It

How to Remove Location Information from Mobile Photos

As someone developing a new online ad platform for newspapers and magazines (NowSpots), I read a lot of news about the news industry. Waking up and reading the latest industry headlines on MediaGazer is always a highlight of my morning... unless there's a story about Kachingle. Then I get irked. This happened recently, prompting me to express my feelings in comic book form: Now, I've never met the Kachingle people. I'm sure they're fine people, really. But at a time when newspaper CEOs are publicly dissecting the trials and tribulations of failed hyper-local pioneer TBD.com, advertising companies are rolling out...

March 3, 2011
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by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Prabhas Pokharel contributed research and writing to this post. In a previous Idea Lab post, we described how to add location information to mobile content, including images and stories. For some reports, location information adds value, context, and interest to venue-specific reports. But today, we talk about how to remove that same location information. This is also detailed, step by step, in the screencast below. There are many reasons why one would not want to include location information on content or images, but at the top of the list is the need for security and privacy. For journalists, citizen reporters,...

February 28, 2011
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Ushahidi Takes First Steps in Evaluating Kenya Projects

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was written by Melissa Tully and Jennifer Chan. It is the first in a series of blog posts documenting a 9-month Ushahidi evaluation project in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and supported by the Knight Foundation. A version of the post below was originally published on the Ushahidi blog During the first two weeks of January, we traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, to begin phase one of a 9-month evaluation of Ushahidi's Kenya projects. Ushahidi is a web application created to map the reported incidents of violence during the post-election crisis in Kenya. As part of a team,...

February 25, 2011
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Basetrack in Limbo as Embeds Removed Due to Map Concerns

by Matt Farwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the weekend we learned that someone, somewhere, decided that Basetrack's journalists would have to go. So after we posted up the letter, we scratched our heads and wondered why. Actually, we're still wondering, especially since we received this note from the Marine Corps public affairs office in Afghanistan: Teru, Good chatting with you. As discussed, we very much appreciate the Knight Foundation's efforts in highlighting the important work of our Marines and Sailors of First Battalion, Eighth Marines over the past six months in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Your team has not been disembedded; media ground rules were not violated. ...

February 10, 2011
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See an Error at the Washington Post? Now You Can Easily Report It

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Beginning Monday, every new staff-written article on the Washington Post's website came with a prominent link labeled "YOUR FEEDBACK: Corrections, suggestions?" One click takes the reader to a form for reporting errors or providing other feedback to the newsroom. This makes the Post the first major U.S. news outlet to heed the call that MediaBugs, Craig Silverman and I made with the Report an Error Alliance, urging news sites to make this sort of link a standard feature, like the now-ubiquitous "share" and "print" links. The Back Story Actually, Post managing editor Raju Narisetti explained in an email that the...

February 9, 2011
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Councilpedia Follows the Money in New York City Politics

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

More than two years since the idea first began buzzing in our collective brains, Gotham Gazette finally launched its Councilpedia site last week. Councilpedia, funded in part with a News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation, is a unique new tool that will let people track the influence of money in New York City politics and help New Yorkers monitor their public officials. To accomplish this it does three main things. First, it brings together an array of information about two citywide elected officials and the members of the New York City Council: legislative records, campaign finance information, and places...

February 7, 2011
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U.S. Local News Experiments Leagues Ahead of U.K.

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is easy to overestimate the similarities between the U.S. and the U.K. As Oscar Wilde wrote back in 1887, ''We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language." But one of the unfortunate recent similarities has been the parallel crisis in local news, especially at newspapers. In both countries existing local news providers have been the hardest hit by the structural changes in news provision and consumption, each having relied so heavily on classified and recruitment advertising. Yet the reactions of the two countries have been very different, particularly in the last couple of years....

February 1, 2011
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3 Excellent Videos Explain the 'Game Layer' Conversation

Salon.com Retracts Vaccination Story, But Shouldn't Delete It

Want to learn more about the gamification of news that Chris O'Brien wrote about here last week? I did, so I spent the last few days digging into the web for videos and talks about taking game mechanics outside of what we typically think of as "games." Sure there's tremendous potential for news organizations that build games around their content, but it's just a darn interesting idea in general. In my searching I dug up three videos you should check out to get a sense of what people talk about when they talk about adding a "game layer" to something....

January 26, 2011
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by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week Salon.com, a publication I helped edit for many years, officially retracted "Deadly Immunity," a 2005 story by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that had promoted scientific research (never very persuasive and now widely discredited) linking autism to preservatives once used in vaccines. It's not often that publications go back and fix this sort of problem. It's painful to admit error; the public rarely keeps track of past sins; and journalists generally work facing forward. Every now and then you do encounter massive cleanups of the record like this one, which ran in a Kentucky paper in 2004: "It has...

January 24, 2011
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SochiReporter Becomes Major Russian Media Player in 2010

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

2010 was a very good year for us at SochiReporter. In late December we took time to analyze the year's achievements and, to be frank, I was excited about the list of various activities SochiReporter initiated or participated in. Of course, I try to be cautious about praising myself and our team too much, as satisfaction is always a killer of development and a friend of stagnation. The undeniable good news, however, is that SochiReporter launched in the fall of 2009 and we managed to reach some serious heights in 2010, especially on the marketing side of the product. SochiReporter...

January 13, 2011
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Neighborhood Sites Can Awaken Community Involvement

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

"When I was first on my own I used to bemoan that my fellow renters could hardly be bothered to return a wave but someone kept stealing my newspaper...," wrote author Laura Grace Weldon in a recent blog post, What Makes A Street Into A Neighborhood?. "Then we moved to a little house. It was silly how hard it was to meet the neighbors. They'd wave but that's about it." Along the same lines, Sarah Byrnes wrote in YES! Magazine that "In the past, neighbors knew each other and engaged more naturally in mutual aid, sharing common resources and helping...

January 3, 2011
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Lessons Learned from ReportingOn

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2008, I was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to build ReportingOn, a back channel for beat reporters to share ideas, information, and sources. The goal of the project was to provide journalists of all stripes with a place to talk about content -- not craft, or process, or skillset. I taught myself enough Django -- and sought out advice from friends and co-workers with little regard for their interest or priorities -- to launch the first iteration of the site in October 2008. In July 2009, with fresh design and development from the team at Lion Burger, ReportingOn...

December 30, 2010
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Why Are New Media Conferences Lacking in Minorities?

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been a couple of weeks since Tim O'Reilly's News Foo rolled into the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix, and while I truly enjoyed thinking big thoughts with big thinkers about the direction of our industry, I couldn't help but notice how lacking in diversity the invitation-only gathering was. The same thing could be said for the Online News Association conference held in Washington, D.C., the end of October. True, there were a lot more brown faces at this last gathering than six or seven years ago when Ju-Don Roberts, then a senior editor at...

December 28, 2010
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Will Murdoch's The Daily Evolve Corrections for a New Platform?

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're entering one of those fertile, exciting periods when the fundamentals of publishing are, yet again, undergoing massive revisions thanks to new technology. This time the trigger takes the form of the growing understanding that our consumption of news and information -- still in mid-transition from print and broadcast to digital platforms -- is migrating yet again, from our desktops to mobile devices. Yet publishers and newsrooms still haven't fully digested or adapted to all the changes stemming from the first wave of change. In the realm I've been working on lately, the error-correction process, news organizations are still only...

December 21, 2010
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The Challenge of Attracting Traffic in a Post-Loyal Era

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in the early days of websites -- way back, a decade ago -- there were far fewer publications on the web than there are today, of course, and many people read them as they had read print newspapers and magazines. A reader would go to a favorite site and check in perhaps once a day, once a week or even once a month -- whenever they thought it might feature new material. Now, of course, that has changed. While some of us remain loyal to a few sites, we're more likely to click around, using search engines, blogs, email...

December 16, 2010
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3 Reasons Every Local Blogger on Drupal Should Get Drupad

CNN Fails to Correct Mistaken Identity for New Zealand PM

Last June, my company, NowSpots, won Knight News Challenge funding to build better local online advertising products for newspapers, alt-weeklies, and community newspapers. We've been building our product and working in closed beta with pilot publishers these last months. We're seeing great results and are about to open up to new publishers. If your publication is interested in getting in early on a new flavor of online ad, one that local businesses, colleges, and political campaigns actually want to buy, drop us a line. In the meantime, we want to use these pieces on Idea Lab to focus some attention...

December 8, 2010
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by Mark Follman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

CNN's broadcasts are packed with cheerleading for the network's viewer participation opportunities. You're encouraged to "share your story" at CNN iReport or "join a live chat" at Anderson Cooper's blog or check out CNN Heroes on Facebook or follow one of the network's nearly three dozen Twitter feeds. Welcome to the brave new world of interactive news! But what if you notice an error in a CNN broadcast and want to tell the network about it? Welcome to the jungle. Email Black Hole Back on October 28, a MediaBugs user filed a bug pointing out that a CNN broadcast had...

December 6, 2010
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Why Design is So Important for Journalism Projects

by Cody Shotwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

As this year's batch of News Challenge applicants hurriedly slid those last-minute applications under Knight's door, the SeedSpeak team and its technology partner Gate6 were busy prepping a very limited sneak peek of the SeedSpeak website. Please stop by and show us love by giving us your contact information; we'll use it solely for the nefarious purpose of letting you know when the fully functional version is running, which should be very soon! After that, why not follow us and give us a quick Like on Facebook? We are excitedly bracing ourselves for all of you to explore, evaluate and...

December 3, 2010
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'Report an Error' Button Should Be Standard on News Sites

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The web is a two-way medium. But when it comes to reporting errors on news sites, too often, it might as well be broadcast or print. It's time to change that. That's why, yesterday, we announced the launch of the Report an Error Alliance -- an ad hoc coalition of news organizations and individuals who believe that every news page on the web ought to have a clearly labeled button for reporting errors. Today's articles come with their own array of buttons for sharing -- and print and email and so on. We believe that opening a channel for...

December 1, 2010
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Last Minute News Challenge Tips: Tell a Story, Be Realistic, and More

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Planning to spend the long weekend finalizing your Knight News Challenge application? It's too late for my favorite bit of advice ("don't wait until the last minute!"), but as someone who's been involved with three different winning projects, I like to fancy that I've got got some insight into what makes a good project. A half dozen prospective applicants have sat down with me to workshop their News Challenge ideas, and I think I've helped them think through their projects to get them to a more viable place. The application process isn't hard, but you do need to give some...

November 24, 2010
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Innovation Strategy #1: Don't Take 'No' for an Answer

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past week, Tom Grasty and I were invited to the Paley Center as part of "The Next Big Thing: The New News Entrepreneurs." We were asked to present Stroome before an extraordinary audience stuffed with CEOs, COOs and presidents of some of the world's most important media companies. During one presentation, Google's entertaining president of global sales operations and business development, Nikesh Arora, claimed the company culture regarding innovation at Google is about saying "let's try to find a way to say yes." It was one of the most inspiring leadership principles laid out during the two-and-a-half day conference...

November 24, 2010
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How the FCC is Creating Better Open Data

by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the context of our TileMill project, we’ve been talking about our goal to help make open data from governments more actionable by making it easier to turn GIS data into custom maps. We’re focused on building better tools so people can turn data into custom maps to tell better stories online, but another important part of this process is getting good access to quality data in the first place. What does it look like to open up data effectively, so that it’s not just available but useful to the public? FCC Setting a Good Example The Federal Communications Commission...

November 23, 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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Google News Meta Tags Fail to Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Far be it for me to question the brilliance of Google, but in the case of its new news meta tagging scheme, I'm struggling to work out why it is brilliant or how it will be successful. First, we should applaud the sentiment. Most of us would agree that it is a Good Thing that we should be able to distinguish between syndicated and non-syndicated content, and that we should be able to link back to original sources. So it is important to recognize that both of these are -- in theory -- important steps forward both from the perspective...

November 18, 2010
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Blimee Brings Local News, Engagement and Instant Offers to Digital Signage

by CJ Cornell
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

New ideas, new ventures, new visions: They never turn out quite the way the entrepreneur expects, and often the path to success comes from walking backwards into a great idea. That's what happened with an innovative digital media journalism venture that emerged from the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The founder wasn't even a journalism student. He was a film student with an idea for a better way to get people interested in watching movies. In fact, his idea was nearly a product with a customer and investor lined...

October 30, 2010
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The Best User Feedback Comes From Watching and Listening

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

ProPublica used DocumentCloud to develop an excellent story they published Friday. I'd planned to write it up, but Krista Kjellman Schmidt, the news applications editor who worked on the story, put it much better than I ever could have. Here's the opening of her post: On Oct. 8, we published an investigation examining how a judicial opinion in a pivotal lawsuit brought by a Guantanamo detainee vanished, only to be replaced weeks later by an entirely different opinion. At the center of our reporting are two documents representing separate versions of that same opinion: the original opinion written by Judge...

October 12, 2010
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How to Get Past the Fear of New Technology with Ushahidi

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was authored by Rebecca Wanjiku There is something nice about people who attend our Ushahidi 101 sessions in Kenya. They come to us having heard lots of good things about our information-mapping platform, and many have intentions to implement it within their organization or project. These sessions, which we started earlier this year, attract new users, current users and those who have deployed and have lessons to share. The majority are new users and they come to the iHub in Nairobi in search of answers and a way forward. For many, the intention is there, but they wonder...

September 30, 2010
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How to Build a Website: One Piece at a Time

An Anaylsis of Six Journalism Startups

The likelihood that an online video editing site, a 21st century technological innovation if ever there were one, would draw inspiration from a 34-year-old Johnny Cash song about a broken-down, piece of junk Cadillac is, admittedly, a tad anachronistic. But as my partner, Nonny de la Peña, and I roll up our sleeves, crawl back under the hood and start fine-tuning Stroome, one of this year's Knight News Challenge winners, it seems we've found our muse in the most unlikely of places. "One Piece at a Time" Released in 1976, the Johnny Cash song "One Piece at a Time" tells...

September 22, 2010
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by David Cohn

In the last few weeks there has been some interesting and exciting news in the journalism startup world. I wanted to take some time to highlight new players and provide my own personal analysis. Collaborative Storytelling: Three New Startups Kommons.com Kommons was founded by the young Cody Brown who busted into the conversation with some epic blog posts last fall. Brown and his co-founder taught themselves how to code (this is a bootstrapped operation) and iterated like mad. For that, my hat is off. Disclaimer: I've had the chance to chat with Brown a few times and find him to...

September 21, 2010
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5 Mistakes That Make Local Blogs Fail

Open Data + Custom Maps = Better Afghan Election Monitoring

So you're thinking about starting a local blog. Maybe you're a reporter tired of office politics and lowest-common-denominator assignments. Maybe you're a neighborhood gadfly who wants to create a new place for locals to gather. Maybe you're a realtor who wants to generate new leads.Either way, your local blog, like most new things, will probably fail. It will fail to support you. It will fail to win an audience. It will fail to have real impact in your community.I meet a lot of local bloggers and people thinking about starting local blogs who ask me for tips or for feedback. ...

September 17, 2010
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by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

If your organization is working on an open data release and your goal is to maximize the reach and impact of your data, sometimes just releasing the data and tools isn’t enough to accomplish your goal. Derivative products — like custom maps that visualize key data — extend the reach of data even further and help reach people who will never use complex tools or know how to meaningfully manipulate raw data. That’s why this week when the National Democratic Institute (NDI) launched an open data site for election monitors in Afghanistan, they also released 14 sets of custom map...

September 16, 2010
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DocumentCloud Helps Newspapers Bring Transparency to Government

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since we last updated readers on DocumentCloud's progress, we've made it much easier to upload a lot of documents at once, and introduced a related documents search that uses data about names and places provided by OpenCalais to find documents that are probably related to the one you're looking at. We've also added a bit more contextto the data we help reporters comb through. Most of this work is happening inside the gates of the DocumentCloud workspace, but it is resulting in some lively reporting. For example... Using Documents to Tell the Story This summer, as the federal 5th Circuit...

September 7, 2010
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Washington Post Caught Napping at Imaginary Intersection

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Of this we can be certain: There is no such thing as the intersection of Mozart Place and 16th Street NW. These two Washington, D.C, thoroughfares in the Adams-Morgan area parallel each other. So when people who knew the neighborhood read the Washington Post's "Crime Scene" post on Aug. 12 about a homicide in the area, and saw a reference to such a location as the place where the victim was found, they knew something was wrong. In fact, the first three commenters on the story pointed out the mistake. What happened next was that the Post quickly corrected the...

August 27, 2010
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10 Must-Read Sites for Hyper-Local Publishers

Helping D.C. Drinkers and Bikers with Custom Maps

Here at NowSpots we're developing a new advertising platform that will let local publishers sell and publish real-time ads on their sites. In my last post here on MediaShift Idea Lab, I explained why real-time ads are a better business model for hyper-local bloggers and local publishers than AdSense or existing display ad solutions. Since winning a 2010 Knight News Challenge award to kickstart development of our new platform, we've been busy meeting with publishers to learn more about their needs and problems. We've also been busy reading up on what's happening in the hyper-local publishing space. This week I'm...

August 26, 2010
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by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my last post about [TileMill](http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2010/08/tilemill-custom-maps-to-help-with-data-dumps-hyper-local215.html), I outlined some of our general plans and the background for why we're working on this project to help make it easier for people to design very custom maps online. One question that we get a lot from people who are new to the GIS space is, "When would I need this? How could I hope to improve on what [fill in the blank:Google/Bing/etc.] make available?" The answer is that it's all about the details of the specific communications goal you want to accomplish.

August 24, 2010
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How Can Civic Media Help Cover 'Slow-Motion Disasters'?

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm helping MIT's Center for Future Civic Media put together a talk on how better to cover slow-motion disasters, and I'd like your thoughts. The bursting of the housing bubble, for example, cost the American economy $8.3 trillion. Yet for a decade, national media missed signs of the coming disaster, acting instead to simply keep pumping. While we can cover hurricanes and terrorist attacks, we – the media, Americans, humans – seem to be terrible technologically and rhetorically at covering disasters that unfold slowly, stories like oil spill cleanups or health care policy that take months or years to fully...

August 19, 2010
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Ushahidi Builds Community with 3 L's: Listen, Learn, and Leverage

by Ory Okolloh
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the things we have quickly learned at Ushahidi is that it is about more than just about creating great code/design and an easy-to-use tool -- what really makes everything come together is the people; or, if I can appropriate the term, it's about the peopleware. By this I mean not just the team behind Ushahidi, or the wonderful volunteers who work with us, but the wider community of people using the tool...whether it is a civil society group, an election monitoring group, or the individuals who take the time to submit a report to a Ushahidi deployment. What...

August 17, 2010
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NowSpots: Working to Make Local Web Ads That Work

How News Organizations Should Prepare for Data Dumps

NowSpots are beautiful online ads that feature the latest social media updates from advertisers, and make it easy for a reader to follow and share their content across the web. For the last year at WindyCitizen.com, a social network for Chicago news aficionados and urban explorers, we've been selling a simple version of NowSpots ads to small businesses and local colleges -- and we recently won a Knight News Challenge Award to spin the format off into its own company that provides these ads to other publishers. In a world where thousands of small businesses are signing up for sites...

August 12, 2010
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by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Soon every news organization will have its own "bunker" -- a darkened room where a hand-picked group of reporters hole up with a disk/memory stick/laptop of freshly opened data, some stale pizza and lots of coffee. Last year the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph secreted half a dozen reporters in a room for nine days with about 4 million records of politicians' expenses. They were hidden away even from the paper's own employees. Now we learn that reporters from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel did the same with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks somewhere in the Guardian's offices in...

August 2, 2010
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Bloomberg Circles the Wagons on Misleading Gulf-Spill Poll

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

News organizations' default response to criticism is to circle the wagons. "We stand by our story!" is a stirring thing to say, and sometimes it's even the right thing. But in the web world of 2010, where everyone has a public platform, ignoring critics can also squander a news outlet's credibility and alienate its audience. The basic premise of MediaBugs -- which I laid out in this video -- is that news organizations can begin winning back the public trust they have lost by engaging civilly, in public, with people who criticize them about specific errors. Whoever is right...

July 29, 2010
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Spot.Us Goes National, Gets Clay Shirky as Sponsor

by David Cohn

Anyone that has followed Spot.Us from the beginning knows we've tried to remain iterative and agile. In the earlier stages of Spot.Us I thought this was one of the larger lessons for journalism-entrepreneurs. I went through the iterative and agile process and tried to document it so others could repeat. I hope to continue this tradition as I get ready for an academic fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Indeed, the heart of this post addresses two features of Spot.Us (expansion and community-focused sponsorships) which will be my focus while in Missouri. Inherent to this mindset is the ability to...

July 27, 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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How to Gauge Success Using New Metrics

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, I met with two people from a non-profit in Phoenix that looks at progressive policies to balance economic development with the environment. Land use and livable communities are two of their key talking points, so it seems logical that they should be aware of a service that encourages and enables people to use light rail to get around the inner city, right? For those unaware, that describes our Knight Foundation-funded project, CityCircles. As we discussed CityCircles during the meeting, the inevitable question arose: How much traffic are you getting? The answer, in all honesty, is not much at...

July 21, 2010
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South African Paper Uses Mobile Services to Engage Readers

by Anne-Ryan Heatwole
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Grahamstown, South Africa, getting and sharing news is a mobile experience. Grocott's Mail, a local paper, incorporates mobile phones into many aspects of its news service -- from disseminating headlines via SMS, to encouraging readers to text in their opinions and making it a part of a Knight News Challenge-winning citizen journalist training program. The paper, which sells 6,400 copies each week, is a good example of how mobiles can create a richer news experience for both readers and publishers. Idea Lab contributor Harry Dugmore, is a professor at the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University....

July 19, 2010
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Help MediaBugs Make News Sites Track, Correct Errors

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine you're sitting at the back of a classroom. The lecture is on a fascinating topic -- the American Civil War, say. The professor has started a riveting back-and-forth with students in the front about the Union's initial motivations for fighting. The professor says, "And then Harriet Jacobs wrote 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' which galvanized many northerners in the cause of abolishing slavery. What role do you think Jacobs' book played?" You cock your head. Harriet Jacobs? It was Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin." You raise your hand to ask for a clarification, but the back-and-forth between the...

July 14, 2010
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When It Comes to Corrections, Most News Sites Fail

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Because web pages are just computer files, news stories on the web can be altered at will after publication. That makes corrections on the web a little more complex than corrections in print -- but it also makes them potentially much more effective. Unlike in print or broadcast, you can fix the original. You can make errors vanish -- though not without a trace, if you're doing it right. So why do so many news organizations continue to handle their online corrections so poorly? At MediaBugs, where we're devoted to improving the feedback loop between the public and the press,...

July 13, 2010
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Where Did We Go Right? How to Be a Successful Entrepreneur

by CJ Cornell
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine a well-known Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Wanting to repeat his success, he scrutinizes all his articles and discovers they contain the letters "E" and "R" 10 times more frequently than any other letters. In his next article, he focuses on increasing the use of these letters, and then plans on teaching his new-found secret during his journalism seminar next fall. More than likely, his success as a reporter is due to a combination of talent, hard work, circumstances, personal relationships and some luck. Which means that evangelizing the benefits of proper letter frequency is irrelevant at best and probably harmful...

July 9, 2010
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Crafting a Simple Elevator Pitch for the Public and Investors

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A Knight Foundation grant is a wonderful gift, but in our case at CityCircles (and for many projects), the grant only lasts for one year. Because most of that year may be spent on programming, this gives winners very little time to craft a pitch. By "pitch" I mean: How do you explain this to your audience in 10 seconds or less (i.e., an elevator pitch)? How do you explain this to people who may want to work with you after the grant ends? We've finally found an approach that seems to be working for CityCircles, so let me save...

June 28, 2010
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Gathering Examples of Collaboration in Investigative Reporting

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently attended the Investigative Reporters and Editors 2010 conference and ended up talking with Astrid Gynnild, a post doctoral research associate in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen in Norway. She's researching collaborations in investigative journalism. I showed her some of my favorites: The Los Angeles Times, ProPublica, ABC News and Washington Post working together on Disposable Army was one of them. Frontline, ProPublica and the Times-Picayune's coverage of police shootings that were never investigated after Hurricane Katrina is also great reporting, but she's looking for more. Are you collaborating internationally? On...

June 23, 2010
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FeedBrewer Pays It Forward to Knight Media Innovation Fund

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week at MIT's annual Future of News and Civic Media conference, I stood on the stage with Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen and made an announcement. FeedBrewer Inc., a new company I co-founded with two other Printcasting team members, is donating 6 percent of its corporate stock to a brand new Knight Media Innovation Fund. Our hope is that our future success can also enable success for others who, just as we did with the Knight News Challenge, will receive grants that allow them to create new innovative media tools and programs. You can read more about our company...

June 21, 2010
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Why Can't Journalists Handle Public Criticism?

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Why do so many journalists find it so hard to handle public criticism? If you're an athlete, you're used to it. If you're an artist, critics will regularly take you down. If you are in government, the pundits and now the bloggers will show no mercy. If you're in business, the market will punish you. In all these cases, the seasoned professional learns to deal with it. But over and over today, we encounter the sorry spectacle of distinguished reporters losing it when their work is publicly attacked -- or columnists sneering at the feedback they get in poorly moderated...

June 17, 2010
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Pew: 27% of Americans Use Digital Tools to Talk to Neighbors

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Special Invite - Join the Pew Internet and American Life report author in a special Q and A discussion on the Locals Online community of practice now! Cross-posted at blog.e-democracy.org (with additional links). According to the just released Neighbors Online report from Pew Internet and American Life, 27% of American adult Internet users (or 20% of adults overall) use "digital tools to talk to their neighbors and keep informed about community issues." This is an amazing number and a great starting point. Today, we finally have baseline for the growing neighbors online movement. The other week we hosted a webinar...

June 9, 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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MediaBugs Helps Correct Errors Ignored in Comments

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our public beta of MediaBugs.org has been open for about three weeks now. We're still tinkering with our interface, coping with problems at our Internet service provider, and working on plans to increase participation. But we've already got some fascinating results from our experiment. Here's what I think is the most interesting one so far: The first two errors that we helped get corrected were (1) a listing in the East Bay Express that provided the wrong location for a theater event; and (2) a reference in a TechCrunch story to the wrong police department. In both of these cases,...

May 13, 2010
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How to Use Ushahidi for Non-Crisis Projects

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rebecca Wanjiku is a project assistant for Ushahidi in Kenya. She interfaces with many organizations and individuals who have inquiries about Ushahidi. In this post, she shares her perspective and experience. "How do we inspire active participation in a project that is non-political, and not related to a crisis?"   This is a question asked by many organizations who are thinking of using Ushahidi, our Knight-funded project. They usually ask it immediately after I am done explaining that the platform can be used in non-crisis situations, even though its genesis was Kenya's post-election violence.   I'm uniquely suited to understand this predicament...

April 23, 2010
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Programmer-Journalist? Hacker-Journalist? Our Identity Crisis

by Aron Pilhofer
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jacqui Maher is the most recent addition to my Interactive News team at the New York Times, and although she started almost six months ago, I have yet to get her business cards -- an embarrassing fact she (rightly) points out at regular intervals. I'm not raising this to highlight my shortcomings as a manager, but rather as a plea for help. The biggest reason Jacqui doesn't have business cards? I just can't come up with a title that...fits. This is a problem of no small significance, because as the career paths of journalists and developers converge, the labels we...

April 22, 2010
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What Kinds of Experimental Ads Are Local News Sites Using?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the search for new business models for community news sites, many experimental advertising platforms have been used. MinnPost has its Real-Time ads widget. Printcasting is trying out MediaBids. And Spot.us is planning something called Community-Centered Ads, where people could view an ad or fill out an advertiser's survey in exchange for credits they can use to pay for original reporting. So here's a question to Idea Lab bloggers and readers: What other experiments have you seen in local sites running advertising that's beyond the norm? What is working and what has failed? Share your thoughts and observations in the...

April 2, 2010
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A Plan for Spot.Us to Use Community-Centered Ads

by David Cohn

Perhaps it's ironic for me to write about advertising. Fellow Knight News Challenge winner Dan Pacheco can quote me as once saying "f*&# advertising" and one of the initial inspirations for me to get into journalism was Adbusters Magazine. Below I want to describe a potential advertising model that Spot.Us hopes to employ (and others can steal) along with general thoughts about the diversification of revenue streams.Community Centered Advertising The underlying inspiration for Spot.Us is to give the public a freelance budget so they can help set the editorial agenda. Right now that is done via contributions from their own...

April 1, 2010
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Contrasting Boston Neighborhoods for Virtual Street Corners

by John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Things have started to kick into gear for Virtual Street Corners, my project that will connect the Boston towns of Brookline and Roxbury by live 24-hour video connection. At this point the most time-consuming task is community organizing as we create excitement for the project and identify groups who will use the installation to generate dialogue between the two neighborhoods. The project requires us to draw on the resources of each community as we solicit merchants for space, identify community groups who use the portal, introduce technology and plan the aesthetics of the installation itself. Dudley Square is a commercial...

March 30, 2010
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SochiReporter Drives Traffic with 2010 Olympics Coverage

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

At SochiReporter, we looked at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics (and Paralympics) as an important event that can move our site forward and attract more international users. I'm happy to say that our efforts have paid off with increased traffic and interest in the site. During the Games, SochiReporter experienced a 350 percent increase in the number of European and North American visitors to the site. We also published several exclusive posts from Yuliya Talmazan, a Russian-speaker from Vancouver who works as an editor at NowPublic. During the Olympics, Talmazan worked for NBC doing editorial research, and she also attended...

March 23, 2010
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How to Break Through the Difficult 'Phase 2' of Any Project

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you want to know what it's like pitching a new media project, just go to the experts: This South Park clip, a classic in its own right, is a favorite around the MIT Center for Future Civic Media because every single new media project -- ours and those from our Knight News Challenge colleagues -- inevitably hits a wall at "Phase 2." For South Park's Underpants Gnomes, "Phase 1: Collect underpants" is like every great idea we've all had: It doesn't quite make sense to everyone else yet, but we know it's gold. We also know it totally will...

March 18, 2010
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10 Reasons Why News Organizations Should Use 'Linked Data'

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On a news organization's list of priorities, publishing articles as "linked data" probably comes slightly above remembering to turn the computer monitors off in the evening, and slightly below getting a new coffee machine. It shouldn't, and I'll share 10 reasons why. Before I do, I should briefly explain what I mean by "linked data." Linked data is a way of publishing information so that it can easily -- and automatically -- be linked to other, similar data on the web. For example, if I refer to "Paris" in a news article, it's not immediately apparent to search engines whether...

March 16, 2010
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Top 5 Lessons from the Failure of The Zonie Report

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, I wrote a blog post on The Zonie Report (TZR), my Arizona news blog, that I was temporarily shuttering it to spend more time working on CityCircles, a Knight Foundation News Challenge project. Since most of you probably haven't heard of TZR, here's a quick recap of my post: In my digital farewell, I talked about why I did what I did, outlined a few things I learned, and shared what I planned to do next. Since then, I realized I should have elaborated more on my lessons learned because I feel they have been misinterpreted. I could...

March 11, 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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So You Want to Try Crowdsourcing?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is no secret that I'm always on the hunt for great crowdsourcing projects. We're still learning a lot about what "the crowd" can tackle and what it can't, but turning to your readers (listeners, community, neighbors) is a great way to foster civic participation because it gives people a stake in the news. What I really want to know, though, is what makes crowdsourcing sing? Sunlight's Transparency Corps project to slice Kentucky legislative voting records has been sitting less than half complete for months now, while the Brooklyn Museum's "posse" is madly tagging, flagging and organizing projects digital photos...

February 26, 2010
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Faint Praise for Citizen Journalism Misses Point

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

John Darnton is a good novelist, and was a superb journalist in a long career at the New York Times. Now he's curator of the Polk Awards, one of only a couple of journalism prizes that means anything. (Journalists have a tedious tendency to give themselves prizes, more so than any other business I can name.) The Polk awards have been ahead of the game in recent years. Two of its recent honorees, notably, have recognized that journalism has moved squarely into the Digital Age, even though most of the kinds of journalism achievements that win big prizes -- notably...

February 24, 2010
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Don't Blame the Tools -- People Plagiarize Copy!

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two high-profile cases of plagiarism made recent headlines -- one at the New York Times, one at the Daily Beast. In each case, the plagiarist expressed confusion and surprise when confronted with the evidence, and in each case, he blamed the speed of Internet-era reporting and the cut-and-paste tools that make lifting someone else's words so easy. I think we all need to remember that, "Every plagiarist says it was accidental." Those aren't my words. That's why I put them in quotes and linked to the place where Steve Buttry said them. When I first read Buttry's words I copied...

February 19, 2010
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How Partnering with McDonald's Helped Boost SochiReporter

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm excited about finding new ways to market and promote SochiReporter.ru that inspire the citizens of Sochi, Russia to contribute to the site. I believe that you can be a lot more creative when marketing a website. As opposed to a newspaper or radio station, a website can reach a larger, even global, audience. I strongly believe that, because it is a form of new media, the marketing and promotion of a website should also break from tradition. We've done just that by pursuing a partnership that would probably make a lot of people scratch their heads. With the 2014...

February 16, 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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What Are the Universal Principles that Guide Journalism?

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 2, 2010
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Truly Serving the Public -- With Web Tools

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 1, 2010
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Centralizing a People Finder for Haiti, Plus an SMS 911

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The information activist community has been rushing to respond to the Haitian earthquake. What I find remarkable is the capacity that has been built up in the last few years; from software standards, like the pfif standard generated after Katrina, to early systems like the Ushahidi engine designed during the Kenyan election violence, to larger organizations and resources like the Crisis Commons wiki and the Crisis Camps. First on the scene were a variety of technologists who were addressing the problem of people finding -- how to bring separated people back together, both for peace of mind and for social...

January 17, 2010
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How Gotham Gazette Redesigned a Decade-Old Website

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette, our website about New York City policy and politics, unveiled its redesign recently. (Please take a look and let me know what you think by emailing grobinson at gothamgazette.com). For our readers, we hope the redesign will create a more useful publication by making it easier for visitors to find information about New York City issues. For our advertisers -- who we hope will increase in number -- it offers more space and more options. And for the GG staff, it reflects our evolution -- and to some extent, the web's evolution -- over the past decade. When...

January 12, 2010
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Lessons Learned When Expanding Video Volunteers to Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers recently started a new program in Brazil that is focused on using video as a way for young people from favelas to earn a living. Starting a project in a new country has been an interesting, but also challenging, process. When I started VV in 2003, we did a few projects in countries such as Brazil, Rwanda, Uganda and the U.S. in addition to India, where we are currently based. But at that point, what we were doing was relatively easy: identifying volunteers, designing some basic video training modules or film script ideas, and sending them off. Once...

January 11, 2010
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LocalLabs - Connecting Geeks Building Tools for Local Government Transparency

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Who the heck are the people building these local "apps" for the NYC Big Apps competition Amanda Hickman alerted us to in her recent post? I don't know, but they are invited to join LocalLabs to connect with other developers working to build the plumbing for far more transparent and participatory local government and communities. Over the last year, in part based on the 2008 e-election, the national work of the Sunlight Foundation and now the Obama Administration stirring the pot with the Open Government Directive, I've noticed a huge upswing in interest among software developers in open government. My...

December 29, 2009
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The Post's Public Enemy Gaffe: Why Circle-The-Wagons is a Joke

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A lot of virtual ink has already been spilled, by me and others, on the now-infamous Washington Post Public Enemy correction. (If you missed it, the Post ran a correction explaining that a story had "incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number." The correction went viral and inspired a flurry of Twitter responses mocking the paper with other misunderstood hip-hop song titles.) Before we move on, though, it's worth recording what this incident reveals about the disconnect between newsroom traditions and contemporary reality. A post by the Washington...

December 17, 2009
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Lessons Learned From Launch of CityCircles Beta Site

by Aleksandra Chojnacka
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the journey to launch our CityCircles beta site, we encountered many bumps in the road that turned out to be valuable lessons, and important opportunities. Below is some of what we've learned. And for those not familiar with our project, here's a description of what we're building: CityCircles is a collaborative platform where users and journalists work together to create and share information around each light-rail stop in the Phoenix metro area. That includes news, events, promotions, classifieds and social networking. There's even a community improvement tool that helps our users create, join and accomplish projects that make the...

December 14, 2009
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The Challenge for Non-Profit News Organizations

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Non-profit status is often cited as an exciting new option for struggling local news outlets. ProPublica, MinnPost, and the Voice of San Diego are inspiring examples of non-profit startups, while the Christian Science Monitor, NPR and other organizations are all long-standing examples. It's not difficult to see that old and young non-profit platforms alike are among the leaders in news innovation. I agree that there are many upsides to the non-profit path, but it also carries significant management risk. The business environment of non-profits is often deeply misunderstood, even by the managers of tax-exempt companies themselves. More worrisome, boards are...

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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The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The New Journalist in the Age of Social MediaView more documents from JD Lasica. I'm at Day 2 of a remarkable two-day conference that is bringing nonprofits, citizen journalism and social media together in ways I've never seen before. I'm jazzed, hopeful and intrigued by the challenges ahead. The passion in the room is palpable. The 40 people who convened at the Visioning Summit yesterday in San Francisco, and the 30 participants who are steering the program today, consist of some of the most talented and forward-thinking innovators — nonprofit execs, strategists, journalists — that I've come across in recent...

November 24, 2009
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How Do We Categorize All Journalistic Errors?

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

How many different kinds of errors is it possible for journalists to make? And how would you classify them or organize them into useful categories? These questions are not my attempt to concoct a tactful paraphrase for "How many different ways is it possible to screw journalism up?" Rather, they represent one of the interesting issues we face as we move work on MediaBugs from the project-organizing phase to the "let's build something" stage. There's a wealth of established practice in the software field for the kinds of data you can associate with a bug that a user finds in...

November 11, 2009
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How the Spot.Us Garbage Patch Story Got to the NY Times

by David Cohn

Today in the New York Times science section you'll find a piece written by Lindsey Hoshaw about the Pacific garbage patch and an accompanying photo slide show. This piece would not have been possible if Spot.Us and a community of over 100 people hadn't come together to fund her trip. It is a great case study for Spot.Us, and arguably the best of the 40-plus projects we've undertaken in the past year. Despite its ambition, and the mound of publicity it generated, the story went off without a hitch. It involved almost every facet of how I imagined Spot.Us could...

November 10, 2009
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Kicking Off the Grant Process With Monitoring and Evaluation

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at the Jefferson Institute began our experience as a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner with one of the more exciting and misunderstood elements of the grant cycle: monitoring and evaluation (M&E). When done properly, M&E begins with the grantee setting out clearly the objectives of the grant, the activities necessary to achieve the objectives, and the resources applied to make these activities happen. So, for example, blogging for Idea Lab is an activity. An objective might be to create a thriving community, or to help guide the way for community news in transition. For our Knight project, the objective...

November 5, 2009
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How to Win a Knight News Challenge Grant

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

October 12 was a day of high emotion; it was finally time to thrive under pressure. I got home from work, rushed to my friend's house, and cracked open my laptop. The goal was to brainstorm like crazy, write up some solid project descriptions, and submit as many Knight News Challenge grant applications as possible over the three days I had left. Thank goodness fate had a better plan: the deadline was extended. Now that we all have another two months, I'm going to take a few steps back and try to combine my formal education in information systems...

October 28, 2009
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Good, Fast and Cheap: Startups Can Only Pick Two of These

by David Cohn

Whenever people ask me about the process of building a website, here's how I explain their choices: "There is good, fast and cheap -- you get to pick two." Spot.Us has quietly started development again. I'll be putting up sketches of a much needed re-design on the Spot.Us blog soon, but you can see a sneak peek at the bottom of this post, courtesy of Lauren Rabaino. Looking back at what has almost been a full year of work, this is the part of building something from the ground up that plays to one of my strengths. It comes down...

October 12, 2009
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Ten Points on Funding Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week the Salzburg Global Seminar organized two back-to-back meetings which brought together passionate enthusiasts in the field of new media for three days, and then traditional funders of media development for another three days. Josh Goldstein of UNICEF Innovation and Erik Hersman of Ushahidi each blogged about the gathering. There has also been a flurry of blogging by Anne Nelson and Susan Moeller on the Strengthening Independent Media blog. During the first meeting I gave the following presentation about my experience funding citizen media projects over the past two and a half years. HiperBarrio began when a Colombian media...

October 11, 2009
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Non-Profit News Becomes the Flavor of the Month

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Something that's been lurking just below the surface of the San Francisco Bay Area news scene for several months finally bubbled up to the top last month. Financier Warren Hellman announced the creation of a new, non-profit news organization. This news organization will partner with KQED, the the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and most likely the New York Times. The Bay Area News Project has a web site and a Twitter feed. The San Francisco Chronicle had a story. And so did the New York Times. There are few details available about the...

October 9, 2009
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MediaBugs Aims to Fix Errors, Rebuild Public Trust in Media

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As a student journalist working for my high school and college newspapers, I learned basic reporting from a strict rulebook. I can still recall my truculent resentment at one particular rule: why did we have to include the middle initial whenever we mentioned somebody's name? What a pain to have to ask for it each time! What an invitation to introduce a trivial error! On one level, of course, the middle-initial rule was, even then, a pretentious holdover from a bygone era of compulsivity, and today those lonesome capital letters are less and less commonly seen in print and on...

October 2, 2009
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Spot.Us Expands to L.A. with USC Annenberg

by David Cohn

First: The big news. Spot.Us is expanding to Los Angeles and we are doing so with USC's Annenberg School of Journalism. Needless to say, we are very excited about the opportunities and possibilities. The main Spot.Us homepage will aggregate pitches from both the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles regions. You can go to Subdomains to find pitches specific to those regions: la.spot.us and sfbay.spot.us. As many know, I grew up in Los Angeles (Hamilton High School anyone?) so this is a bit of a home coming for me. I will remain up north running the Bay Area Spot.Us -...

September 22, 2009
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Journalism Teachers Get Mobile-ized in South Africa

AP News Registry Aims at Most Flagrant Infringers

Most Africans don't have computers or access to the Internet. Cell phones are a different story. So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places -- even in places with access to computers and the Internet. Answers to this challenge were provided in Grahamstown, South Africa last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas, a Knight grantee, ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University. Participants were brought together under the auspices of another...

September 21, 2009
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by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry. The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components: • All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc. • The wrapper also will carry a built-in "digital beacon," or tracker, to monitor use of the content by others to track usage and compliance. (As I understand this, the content is not encrypted...

September 21, 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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For News Organizations, Transparency is the New Objectivity

by David Cohn

Back in the spring, I made an analogy about journalism being a game of chess. On the chess board of journalism, content is King (the most important piece) but collaboration is Queen (the most powerful piece). To extend the analogy further: transparency is the board itself. Unfortunately, freelancing is a horribly antiquated system. It works behind closed doors. Independent freelancers are left out in the cold and have to build personal relationships with editors to get any paid work. These relationships are always one-to-one. This make it an outdated model. It made perfect sense 30 years ago, but now it...

September 15, 2009
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Mobile Projects Shouldn't Overlook 'Dumbphones'

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, CityCircles (formerly Daily Phoenix) attended a lunch event at Arizona State University that allowed us to have one-on-one conversations with college seniors who were interested in our project. (The event is summarized here.) This was a crucial event. ASU has a huge footprint in the Phoenix area because it has 69,000 students. They buzz around the Valley in cars, on bikes, on foot and yes, on light rail. This makes them a huge group for us as potential users and collaborators. As we talked to them, we realized that an assumption we made early on -- one that...

September 14, 2009
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Look Beyond Data When Considering New Models for News

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My post last month -- Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content -- generated some thoughtful discussion and comments. But there was one thread that I want to highlight in order to elaborate on an important concept for news innovators. Before I dive into the details of the conversation, let me summarize my overall point. When it comes to understanding behavior, there are two general strategies. The first is to gather as much data as possible. And in this Google-driven, engineering-led era of product thinking, this tends to be the dominant approach. The Anecdotal And Observational Approach But...

September 10, 2009
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Community Media's Path Out of Obscurity

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Times of great change represent an opportunity to shift power, and the power shift many of us are working towards here is the democratization of the media. We seek to establish truly effective alternatives to the commercial media system, alternatives that are not relegated to obscurity. To build an effective alternative, we must begin by identifying the needs that are neglected by commercial media. Then we can capitalize on the competitive advantages that non-commercial media institutions have over our corporate media counterparts. Today, the media serve three primary needs: The media facilitate consumerism: The media informs consumers about products and...

September 9, 2009
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How Citizen Journalists Can Learn from Work of 'Citizen Scientists'

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I visited Carnegie Mellon University's website for the first time as an alumnus. The front page, often dedicated to highlighting faculty work, had a picture of an iPhone screen displaying brightly colored data visualizations. I didn't have to look past the first two words of the title -- "Citizen Scientists" -- before I knew that it would be worth my time to keep reading. The article described how Eric Paulos, an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, is equipping "everyday mobile devices" with sensors used to collect reliable scientific data. The point of all this effort is...

August 27, 2009
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Adrian Holovaty Talks about EveryBlock Sale to MSNBC.com

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The big news last week was that Knight-funded startup EveryBlock was bought by MSNBC.com for an undisclosed sum. EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty is one of the Idea Lab bloggers, and has been a pioneering programmer/journalist at the Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan., and at the Washington Post. There had been some online scuttlebutt around the way EveryBlock released its open source code, and then was bought by MSNBC.com, so I thought it would be a good idea to go straight to the source, with a Q&A with Holovaty himself. The following interview took place over email, and included a couple questions...

August 25, 2009
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Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

During an otherwise mundane story about Microsoft's recent decision to offer a free, web-based version of its Office suite of products, I was struck by this sentence in an Associated Press story: With Office 2010, Microsoft must decide how much software it can give away online without undermining its lucrative desktop software business. If it doesn't make the right calculation, the software maker could find itself in the same position as newspapers that gave online content away and now are struggling to replace print revenue. That second line is almost a throwaway, written with no attribution. That means that the...

August 13, 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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The Leadership Vacuum in Journalism

by David Cohn

Ideas are cheap; execution is everything. There are several factors that come into play to make the difference between a successful and a failed execution. One of those factors is leadership. There are different kinds of leaders. Some lead from the front. (William Wallace comes to mind.) But, in war at least, we haven't had a general lead from the front since Alexander the Great. It simply drains a person too much to lead from the front, especially on a modern battlefield where too much is happening all at once. Some lead like ants, working hard and getting others to...

August 5, 2009
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How Fear, Brand Addiction and Paranoia Block Innovation

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been thinking a lot lately about organizational behavior and innovation, and how the former can hinder the latter. It comes to mind not because I like to dwell on the negative, but rather out of hope that understanding the root cause of problems can help us all avoid the mistakes of the past. This is an important exercise because, as many of us were reminded in the re-imagined "Battlestar Galactica" series, "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." Or if you prefer the non-geeky version: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned...

August 3, 2009
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No Newspaper Bailouts without Civic Representation

News Ecosystem Demands Collaboration, Not Us vs. Them Mentality

Government money to bail out newspapers is a rather "un-American" suggestion. It has been put forward by various commentators who feel that emergency circumstances call for drastic measures. After all, it's not just jobs at stake, but the survival of a key pillar of democracy. If newspapers go under, the argument goes, so too does the bulk of professional journalism. The same proposal has been roundly condemned by people whose knee-jerk reaction is that government money means government control. For this camp, government control engenders the oxymoron of "government journalism." Ergo, a bailout is not a solution for saving an...

July 23, 2009
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by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the great tragedies that I see in the current debate about the future of journalism is the way the discussion continues to be framed around a series of binary choices. Newspapers or blogs. Print or online. Journalists or algorithms. In each case, there seems to be a simple-minded belief that the future will inevitably be one or the other. I consider this tragic because the result is a lot of dead-end debates that devolve into spitball fights about whether one will replace the other. My belief is that the better conversation is about how these things should complement...

July 16, 2009
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Ideas for Professional Journalists to Prove Their Value

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you were a professional journalist and I asked you, "what does mainstream media provide that the crowd can't?" I have some guesses about what I might hear in your answer: It's more credible, more comprehensive, fact-checked, less biased, professionally composed, more knowledgeable, presented in the larger context, and more reliable, to name a few. But wait! It's a trick question, and not just because there are countless examples of all classes of reporting from both mainstream and creek media. The trick is epistemological: The existence or non-existence of these qualities on either side is practically meaningless if nobody can...

July 15, 2009
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Lessons Learned in Rollout of ReportingOn 2.0

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Those of you who have been keeping score surely noticed that I've saddled the iteration of ReportingOn that launched late on July 1 with a "2.0" label when I talk about it. Many of you might remember what the backchannel for beat reporters looked like before the clock struck "late" on July 1: That's what it looked like, and it did some interesting things, but not as much as I would have liked. And so began the process of building 2.0. And with it, the cataloging of lessons learned from the first run. Here's what it looks like now, almost...

July 14, 2009
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Discussing Spot.Us Business Model with Mother Jones' Steve Katz

by David Cohn

I met Steve Katz of Mother Jones in 2007 at a Personal Democracy Forum conference and he has been a fantastic resource for brain-picking. Recently Katz and I have been having an interesting conversation about the funding model for Spot.Us, the future of non-profit journalism, and other related topics via our blogs. Now that our conversation has turned to the web, I thought I would share this open brain-picking session. Kudos to Steve for starting it up. The recap The conversation began when Katz asked a question about fundraising for Spot.Us, which allows readers to donate to fund individual journalism...

July 8, 2009
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Reports of Journalism's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

An Update on ReportingOn 2.0 Development

Spare a thought for journalists these days, the folk feeling particularly unappreciated as they face a barrage of public scorn on the one hand and panic-stricken managements pushing for cuts in salaries, rises in productivity, and even retrenchments, on the other. They don't want your pity. They're seeking your respect -- and your helpful answers to some of their questions about the future. Journalists under siege For sure, professional reporters are not saints deserving of hero-worship. But they don't deserve to be dubbed a closed priesthood interested only in preaching to the masses and keeping lay-people out of the profession....

June 25, 2009
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by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's an eight-minute tour of ReportingOn 2.0, as it stood on our development server on Tuesday June 17, 2009. I'm extremely psyched to report that we're on track for a July 1 launch of the second phase of this Knight News Challenge funded project. As a quick refresher, ReportingOn 1.0 launched back in October 2008, as a rather Twitter-like backchannel for beat reporters to connect based on common interests. Some pieces of the first iteration worked out well, and some of them -- well, we learned a lot. What's next? Launching version 2.0 on July 1, releasing the open source...

June 19, 2009
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What Are The New Obligations Of Readers?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago, I was reading an interesting story about the state of the Columbia Journalism School that appeared on the New York Magazine website. In short, the story tried to examine concerns about how well Columbia was making the transition to the digital journalism era. After reading the story, I dutifully tweeted a link to it to those following me through my Next Newsroom account: Columbia J-School struggles to adapt to the digital age: http://is.gd/mY0s "F--- new media," says one prof. A short time later, I received this reply from ajsundby: @nextnewsroom That @nymag post has many reporting...

June 17, 2009
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Twittering Away the Jobs of Journalists

Spot.Us Maps Out Three-Month Plan for Growth

Jon Steward did a funny bit last night, referencing how the major news networks were forced to rely on the "hearsay" of Twitter and Facebook postings to understand the events unfolding in Iran. But with the State Department requesting that the good folks at Twitter delay their scheduled site maintenance to keep Tweets flowinng from Iran, you know we have turned a corner. So in all seriousness, in the era of twittering and crowdsourced journalism, are journalists themselves still relevant? Obviously I am not the first person to ask this - or to piss people off by asking it again....

June 17, 2009
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by David Cohn

If you want to cut to the chase - the most important link is this simple Google Form where we are collecting feedback on our progress. Spot.Us recently had its second community advisory board meeting at Tech Liminal. We experimented with making the meeting more open by inviting new interns, volunteers and people in the community, so that we could have an open discussion about setting goals. We felt it was important to get as much input into this process from different community members in order to create a conversation about the direction of Spot.us as an organization. On the...

June 17, 2009
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Think Community? Think Maps! (Going to MIT. Part One)

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm looking into the Delta airplane illuminator at the white snow valley with scattered grayish mountain peaks of Greenland, which just recently became independent of Danmark, and comparing the view with the satellite map right behind me on the horizontal Kindle-size screen. First thought: since last summer Delta tech guys made a great step forward and significantly improved the entertainment services onboard, introducing a sensor screen and a possibility for the flyer to choose movies, games, CDs by genres and tracks. And finally build a personal playlist, which is a worthy alternative to watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button...

June 17, 2009
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Knocking Down Barriers for Newspapers to Try New Technologies

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

During my time at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I had a chance to learn about some of the harsh realities that come with taking on yet another technology. The general idea was that even if it's "free," there is unfortunate baggage that comes with adding tools to the newsroom -- baggage like increased overhead, learning curves, and brand new risks that have to be mitigated. I hate to think that a newspaper can't take advantage of free, open source, low hanging fruit simply because it would create another system that has to be taught and maintained! At the same time, though,...

June 16, 2009
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Citizen Journalism Networks Stepping Up Editorial Standards

by David Cohn

I tend to avoid the "professional vs. amateur journalism" debate, saying "I have constructive criticisms for both sides." As we've hit a flash point for traditional news organizations, the evolution of citizen journalism networks like NowPublic, AllVoices and others may shed light on how the media space will resolve. Perhaps the two "opposites" will meet somewhere in the middle or, as I suspect, find out that they are more alike than they ever thought. Recent news in the space has included Orato and Ground Report making shifts to require higher editorial standards in the submissions they accept and publish. Alfred...

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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The A Word: Information and Activism

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the central shifts implicit in user-generated information is that in many cases the user will be closer to the subject than a reporter may have been. Journalists, like ethnographers or consultants, are separated from their subjects by factors like structures of reward (salary) and professional codes (organized skepticism, systematic disinterestedness). These factors are sometimes driven by ethical positions and sometimes are byproducts of revenue structures, but have been seen as important to the neutrality and objectivity that characterize recent ideas of journalism. Citizen-created content falls in a different space; as I have said elsewhere, it starts to look...

June 5, 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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How Crowdfunding at Spot.us Has Worked -- and Fallen Short

by David Cohn

It has been a year since Spot.Us was officially announced as a project and six months since our website launched. So it is time to reflect back on what we have accomplished, where we have succeeded and failed. It is amazing what can happen in six months! It is far easier to look at one's own project, their baby, and gleefully point out where it has surpassed expectations. Don't worry, I will probably do that in this post. At the same time, however, I feel an obligation, perhaps with an extra critical eye, to point out where it can improve....

May 12, 2009
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Bringing Hyper-Local, Citizen-Driven News to South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Is hyper-local journalism interesting enough to engage its own audience? And is the prospect of being more "in the know," and more connected and more involved in one's community, attractive enough to inspire people to take the time out to do citizen journalism? The old adage that "all news is local" does hold a great deal of truth. News can be locally generated or outside news can be made local. The implications of any big news story - like H1N1 virus, a.k.a. swine flu - can almost always be localized to create stories about how this impacts on you, where...

May 8, 2009
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The ReportingOn Roadshow: Feedback and Notes from San Jose and Philadelphia

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been a busy few weeks for ReportingOn, with development of Phase 2 continuing behind the scenes, and a lot of public conversation about the network's start and continuation as I've traveled to San Jose and Philadelphia in recent days. In San Jose, I gave a short talk on ReportingOn as part of my requirements at San José State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communications, where I've now finished up a graduate degree. The audience, mostly made up of my fellow grad students and the faculty, had some great questions and feedback for me, much of it focused on...

May 6, 2009
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The Bustling Tech Scene at the Russian Internet Forum

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am entering the large movie theatre hall where the conference dedicated to the social networks is just about to start. A prominent web expert is commenting on the Russian President's decision to launch a Livejournal account and the first post on the Internet development in Russia. Someone is talking about the recent You Tube Success of Susan Boyle and the hot-spot detecting WiFi sneakers invented by the Canadian designer Stefan Dukaczewski. The atmosphere is properly wired. Six panelists representing the leading Russian media outlets are about to report on how social networks are being used by their marketing departments...

May 2, 2009
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by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One pig, if only in the news topic logo*, usually gets a cameo in television coverage of swine flu. The lonely pig is out of context, though -- separated from the three-quarters of a million caged, crammed, and fattened pigs slaughtered annually at the massively polluting pig factory in the town with the first human case of the virus. There is not yet hard proof that the pigs half-owned by U.S. agribusiness giant Smithfield Farms evolved the virus in their literal cesspool conditions -- there isn't a single pig outed with having this flu anywhere -- but media are rarely...

April 30, 2009
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PolitiFact Pulitzer Validates Journalism-Technology Collaborations

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If the survival of journalism depends on technology innovation, one or more of three things will have to happen: Journalists will learn technology development; Technology developers will learn journalism; Journalists and technology professionals will learn to collaborate. The Pulitzer Prize awarded last week to the St. Petersburg Times for PolitiFact, a database-powered website assessing the truth of political statements, is proof that journalists can learn computer programming. The idea behind PolitiFact came from Times reporter Bill Adair; the database and software development under the hood was built by reporter-turned-developer Matt Waite, whose job title is news technologist. The Knight News...

April 28, 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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How Can We Improve Information Needs of Local Communities?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

With some fanfare, the Knight Foundation and Aspen Institute announced a new Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy a couple years ago, with the idea of finding out just what needs were being served -- and what was lacking. The problem with many of these types of "commissions" is that a lot of important people go behind closed doors and decide what's best for us, the public, and then we can complain afterward just how wrong they are. In this case, the Commission decided to do the opposite, and get input from the public...

April 21, 2009
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Cultivating a Community Garden, not a Public Toilet

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently attended the Integrated Media Association conference in Atlanta and sat in on a panel of web content providers addressing public radio folks about online content. Jesse Thorne moderated a great discussion about how to provide content your audience wants to hear, how to listen and how to foster online communities around your content. Online community building is of particular interest to our project as it is a key feature Radio Engage will provide. The Sound of Young America Merlin Mann made the following observation about how to handle community and conversations: Creating community is not as simple as...

April 16, 2009
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Progress Made: So What About the Hyphen? (Car Plant Scene 1)

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

According to the Council for Research Excellence, created by the Nielsen Company, an adult is exposed to screens - TVs, cellphones, even G.P.S. devices - for about 8.5 hours a day, the NYT reports. It seems like those last five weeks I was spending twice more time in front of my Mac and iPhone screens moving the Sochi Olympics Project forward. It was a creative spell of life. First, Sochi Olympics Project actually got a name. Out of a pool of various potential names I have chosen the one which I believe fits best. Needless to say, the decision was...

April 6, 2009
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Innovation, Legacy Assets Give Newspapers Hope

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been a long six months, but I'm finally dusting off my keyboard and re-starting my blog here. First things first, a disclaimer: I don't graduate until May, so it's safe to say that I still don't know what I'm talking about. My hands, however, are a little dirtier than before thanks to folks at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who graciously hired me as intern. This experience has made me all the more hopeful about the future of news organizations, and I would like to rattle through a few thoughts inspired by my time there so far. The Spirit of Innovation...

April 3, 2009
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As Newspapers Implode, Diverse Voices Move Online

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a few weeks the American Society of Newspaper Editors will release its annual census. The census, created to capture an accurate picture of the industry's diversity, will also tell us how many jobs were lost in this year of layoffs, buy-outs and shuttered newspapers. As newspaper companies struggle with advertisers and audiences continuing to migrate to the web, the horrifying and at times mind-numbing rate at which the industry appeared to be imploding has take the question of diversity virtually off the table. As one newspaper CEO said to me a while back, "Diversity isn't only off the front-burner,...

April 1, 2009
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Collaboration is Queen: Spot.Us Moving Forward

by David Cohn

There are more updates to spot.us than I can really fit into a MediaShift IdeaLab post. For the list-y version of recent milestones - scroll down to the bottom. But first, I want to highlight a very specific example of forward momentum both for Spot.us and the notion that news organizations don't try new things. I try and avoid the "new media v. old media" debate. What I often say is "I have constructive criticism for both sides." Details on new media criticism: It needs to mature and blossom. Details on old media criticism. It must learn to be agile...

March 30, 2009
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ReportingOn: Phrased in the Form of a Question

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I last wrote here to report on ReportingOn's progress, I talked about the work I was doing with my development and design team to define the terms of the RO pitch. A dozen or so whiteboards later, the Lion Burger team is actively putting together mockups and the beginnings of the database for what we're calling "Phase 2" of the project. And it's a huge rethinking of what a "back channel for your beat" looks like. While it's been easy to tag the initial version of ReportingOn as simply "Twitter for journalists," journalists already have a Twitter. It's called...

March 26, 2009
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Redesigning Journalism At Stanford's Design School

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had the great privilege to be invited to sit on a panel earlier this month at the Institute of Design at Stanford to provide feedback on an effort called, "Redesigning Journalism." I've been wanting to visit the "D School" for some time now. So I jumped at the chance to participate. In this case, design refers to the fundamental way a product is conceived and built. The D School teaches something called "design thinking". It's a powerful method and I'll be writing more in the near future about using it to find new ideas for journalism. In brief, a...

March 26, 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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Life After Newspapers: One Reporter Takes on the Island of Alameda

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Bit of a busy couple weeks for those watching the newspaper business. The presses stopped at the Rocky and the P-I, Clay Shirky and Steven B. Johnson took turns penning big think pieces about the Future of News(papers), and -- good news -- the San Diego Union-Tribune looks like it will sell to a private equity firm. So what does life after newspapers look like, especially in major-metro-adjacent neighborhoods? I asked one reporter-turned-blogger about the local news site she started after leaving the Bay Area Newspaper Group, the chunk of Dean Singleton's MediaNews that includes the Oakland Tribune and a...

March 18, 2009
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The Intelligence is in the Network, Social Media and Local Public Life Gathering in Boston Thursday

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Join me this Thursday evening at Harvard's Berkman Center for a discussion of Social Media and Local Public Life. It should be an interesting conversation, particularly if you bring examples with you. On a related note, I am getting ready to speak on Saturday at the Newout.Org conference in Boston which is described as: _NEWSOUT: What to do when the newsroom lights go out: _ _In the last 18 months, some 15,000 U.S. working journalist have lost their jobs through retirement, buyouts or layoffs. New England newsrooms have not been immune. _ _If independent, watchdog journalism is critical to participatory...

March 18, 2009
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Where the Journalists Aren't

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Where the journalists aren't: the Marketplaces/Drilling Down on Local conference, a gathering of industry execs and venture investors. The "how do we make money on local" question that is generally the conversation ender at journalism confabs is the conversation beginner at this gathering, where the first panels are stocked with venture investors talking about what they will -- and will not fund, and what they expect to get back, and why. The tone -- and the dress code -- are totally different than those you might find at ONA or Poynter. I'm in stealth mode. (Don't tell anyone: I'm wearing...

March 16, 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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News [metadata] from Porto

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the IPTC worry about labelling data at source, we’re concerned with how to make sure those labels (or at least those ones that are relevant to the public) don’t get lost along the way. Which is why the Transparency Initiative – the MacArthur and Knight funded news project – and IPTC metadata standards, are so complementary.

March 4, 2009
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Using Social Media in the Newsroom

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm working with the Poynter Institute to put together an online class for senior newspaper executives on how to use social media in the newsroom. From what I can discern, it's one of the least understood concepts in traditional media. For the Knight Digital Media Center program conducted through the Poynter, I'll likely be giving a webinar and taking part in online instruction around how journalists are already using the tools of social media. So I'd love to see some specific examples of how you're using social media (aside from blogs), or examples of how other sites are using...

March 4, 2009
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Army of Geeks

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As communications change and the demand grows for local networks, our mission becomes clear: we are being called upon to organize an army of geeks to accomplish the tasks that lie ahead. The Background Joaquin Alvarado presented the plan for National Public Lightpath to public broadcasters at the Integrated Media Association conference last week in Atlanta. He called on the audience to actively build partnerships in their local communities and apply for economic stimulus grant money to make the network a reality. This is a common goal to be shared by NPR, PBS, CPB and all the stations. Doc Searls...

February 27, 2009
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Cell Phone Journalism and Better Democratic Decision-Making: What Do We Measure?

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do you build a culture of participation? What does it mean to empower people to participate in projects and politics that might improve their own lives? How do you seed participation in a way that promotes sustainability after the initial impetus? 15 years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, following decades of political mobilization by anti-apartheid movements and organisations, these questions are still burning brightly in South Africa. Since 1994 'belonging to something' has fallen off significantly in South Africa. Religious affiliations, belonging to a sports clubs, even union membership is down, often sharply. Many lament the...

February 25, 2009
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How Can Disadvantaged Citizens Learn to Be Journalists?

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do I even have the gall to write here? I do not have any special knowledge of the media to impart. I am not a journalist with a degree or newspaper experience. I am just an everyday person who has realized... I have to be a journalist. This might be a strange dilemma, but it is one that has become increasingly common. Many everyday people have looked at their communities and tried to answer for the lack of information that exists. This is especially important when such a lack is a root cause at the persistence of many other...

February 22, 2009
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Janet Robinson's Remarks at TimesOPEN

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, the New York Times is hosting TimesOPEN, their first developer conference. We're now listening to tech book publisher Tim O'Reilly, but just a few minutes ago Janet Robinson, President and CEO of the New York Times Company, concluded her remarks. As a nonjournalist, I never developed the skill to take shorthand, but I did my best to transcribe her remarks: We're encouraging you today to be part of our past, part of our present, and definitely part of our future...Today we are asking you to be part of our future and to shine a spotlight on what our future...

February 20, 2009
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Spot.Us Deals with the Good and Bad of Limitations

by David Cohn

Long-time readers of Spot.Us updates will know I am a big believer in staying agile and iterative. Take small bites, chew well, rinse and repeat. With that in mind - I am "en route" to visit my developers to do another "dev blitz" to try and get Spot.Us as close to a 2.0 version as I can with limited means. As I've said before - the current version of the site contains about 1/4th of what we've designed (see full but outdated designs here). We have been limited in resources so I've constantly had to pick and choose what features...

February 16, 2009
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ReportingOn is Back in the Lab, Defining the Terms of the Pitch

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

[I'm going back to the proverbial drawing board for ReportingOn, working with the development and design team at Lion Burger to build the next iteration of the backchannel for your beat from scratch, more or less. Here's some of what we're talking about in front of the whiteboard...] I've been pitching ReportingOn using the same set of phrases for more than a year now, but until I sat down with my new development team earlier this month, it hadn't occurred to me that the entire scope of the project was actually encapsulated in those little slogans. For example: "It's the...

February 14, 2009
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News Mixer Options: Launch a Site, Use the Code or Be Inspired

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What's next for News Mixer? The demonstration Web site, launched in December by a team of Medill students, shows off some interesting new ideas for engaging people in online conversations around news. The site has attracted quite a bit of attention from people interested in the future of journalism, social media and new technology. More than just attention, in fact. There are now at least two separate organizations actively working with News Mixer's open-source code. One is the (Knight News Challenge-funded) Populous Project, which announced recently that it will incorporate News Mixer's functionality into the Populous open-source publishing platform for...

February 2, 2009
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Protests in Madagascar and the Importance of Citizen Journalism Training

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The recent coverage of Tropical Storm Eric, Cyclone Fanele, and the ongoing protests and political turmoil in Madagascar by local citizen journalists reveals the importance of 1.) citizen journalism training programs, 2.) the translation and contextualization of local content for a global audience, and 3.) networks of media groups so that local voices can be amplified and understood when breaking news hits.

January 28, 2009
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Spot.Us Has Success and Failure in the Same Week

by David Cohn

Spot.Us has just had one of its most exciting weeks chalk full of successes and failures. The most interesting lesson is related to the Oscar Grant shooting in Oakland California. It is a tragic event that occurred where a Bart police officer shot and killed a young man. The entire event, caught on camera, has touched on deep seeded issues of class and racism in Oakland. Subsequent protests turned into civil unrest and the city of Oakland continues to deal with the emotional aftershocks. All this came just four days after we had successfully funded an investigation into the Oakland...

January 28, 2009
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Online-News@ reborn as News-Online@ -- E-mail List Nostalgia or the Best Way to Interact?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As spaces for those interested in online news like WiredJournalists.com and Poynter's online groups go completely web-centric, my heart pangs for the simple e-mail list. Something I can easily read and post to in those rare idle moments in transit on my handheld or from the place I still spent the majority of my time online - conveniently from my desktop e-mail. On a whim, I decided to contact those who posted to the Online-News e-mail list (Steve Outing started it way back in the early 1990s) in the months before it was retired. Poynter's moved on with their conversion...

January 27, 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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Choosing a Domain Name: Getting to Know Cyber Squatters (Starbucks Scene 1)

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's not the case when you can remain unnamed. At this stage - when working out the site structure and drawing graphic schemes, you can't stop thinking about the domain name. Soon after the Knight Foundation announced that my proposal made it and I was selected one of the winners of the '08 Knight News Challenge, I registered several domain names which could alternatively be the site address. In case with Sochi, most of the domain names bearing a word 'sochi' or a combination of words 'Olympic' and 'sochi' were purchased in a wholesale format by cyber squatters several hours...

January 19, 2009
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Rising Voices: 2008 in Review

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2007 Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices aimed at bringing under-represented voices from the developing world to the social web, got its feet on the ground. 2008 was a year of scaling up and defining processes. In 2009 we plan on becoming more inclusive to build a global resource and knowledge network centered around citizen media training.

January 15, 2009
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Gates Foundation Invests $2 Million in Chilean Social Web

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in March last year I pointed to Contenidos Locales ("Local Content"), a program of Chile's national library network, as a model example of how public institutions like libraries can foster more civic participation by training their local users how to take advantage of new media tools: Examples include Buscando Mis Raices ("Looking for my Roots") by Rosa Tromilén, which offers a personal history of the Mapuche-majority community Juan Calfumán; Conjunto Folklórico Renacer de Cucao, a youth-group on Chiloé Island dedicated to preserving local folkloric traditions; and the website of the Asociación de Artistas Plásticos de Puerto Montt ("Association of...

January 13, 2009
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Populous Is Adopting News Mixer (And More)

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're chugging along over at Populous, and getting closer and closer to a public release of our CMS beta and demo. Right now we have an alpha of our CMS we're using to test and get selected feedback on, and we still have a bit more refinement to do to get things up and running for public consumption. I'm excited to discuss some of the other projects and features we're incorporating into Populous. We realized a long time ago that we weren't going to be able to make a viable platform for online publication unless we included a number of...

January 12, 2009
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Unrest in Oakland: Who's On The Case?

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My friend and fellow citizen-journalism thinker Amy Gahran once asked, "Was Zapruder a journalist?" Zapruder's home-movie camera captured the famous footage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, TX. If your answer to that question is yes, then there were an untold number of journalists on the Oakland BART train platform on New Year's Day, where they pointed increasingly ubiquitous pocket-size video cameras toward Oscar Grant and BART transit police officer Johannes Mehserle. The videos these onlookers took show the chilling final interaction between Grant and Mehserle, which left Grant dead, and Oakland in a...

January 9, 2009
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News Mixer Generates Widespread Interest

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since we announced the launch of News Mixer, a Web application developed by Medill master's students to demonstrate new ways of fostering conversations around news, the site has gotten a lot of positive feedback. News Mixer is the final project for six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending Medill on Knight News Challenge scholarships. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system. The class officially ended Dec. 12, but the students and I have...

January 5, 2009
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End of the Year Radical Transparency for Spot.Us

by David Cohn

It is the end of the year and I received some questions from the TIdes Center who are doing due-diligence reports for the Knight Foundation. I've been meaning to do a public "where is Spot.Us" post for some time and since I'm answering all these related questions I thought - why not just go crazy and blog the questions and my answers. If I have to update Knight Foundation - I should update everyone, since in the end I view this as a project owned by the community of people who take interest in it (everyone who has been following...

December 22, 2008
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Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture

'News Mixer' Offers Better Engagement

Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect. But perhaps we shouldn't use the J-word. The precipitous slide of journalism from iconic cultural power status to cultural irrelevance during the past decade is stunning. When the Shorenstein Center's Prof. Tom Patterson told his board last month that the nation's premiere think tank of, by and for top-notch...

December 18, 2008
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by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project -- six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending the Medill School on Knight News Challenge scholarships -- set out this fall to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults. Here's what they came up with: News Mixer. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system. News Mixer is already getting some positive buzz thanks to some Twittering last week after Team Crunchberry presented...

December 16, 2008
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ReportingOn: Changing Horses Mid-Stream is Easy When You're the Horse

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

DIY development, design, community management, and marketing isn't for me (this year). This is an update about what's going on with ReportingOn, which is to say, there's not much going on with ReportingOn. For now. My Knight News Challenge-funded project to connect journalists on the same topical beat with their peers launched on October 1. I continued development work on it through the month of October, and then was completely tackled by a pack of wild bears known as my day job, life at home, and a need for some brief moments of sanity in between the rest. Now that...

December 12, 2008
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Hiring for Change: How to Staff a New Media Project

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now, I had something all ready to post, but I loved Chris O'Brien's post on Mistakes I Made With The Next Newsroom Project that I'm going to do one of my own. I've been working on Placeblogger, a 2007 News Challenge Winner, with Tish Grier, over the past year and a half. Like a lot of technical projects, Placeblogger had a ski-jump-like curve of complexity and features; when you're making something new online, you often do a ton of work in the background before anyone sees anything at all. That's one of the things that makes our most recent release...

December 11, 2008
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Making News More Transparent

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With our Knight News Challenge grant we (the Media Standards Trust and Web Science Research Initiative) are exploring and developing ways in which to help the public find and assess news on the web (for which we have also received a MacArthur Foundation grant). Part of this initiative includes developing tools for making online news more transparent. What does that mean? It means enabling journalists, and people creating journalism, to embed basic information to their online news articles which helps the public establish an article's authorship and provenance (the same methodology applies to photos and video but I'll stick with...

December 11, 2008
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Mistakes I Made with the Next Newsroom Project

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now that I've officially completed the work on our Knight Foundation News Challenge grant that funded the Next Newsroom project, I wanted to share some of the horrendous, grotesque mistakes I made over the past 18 months. I'm doing it not because I'm feeling particularly masochistic. But rather, I hope there will be something valuable here for those still working on projects, and those who are going through the current application process. For some context, let me confess that I'm a full-time, paid journalist at a newspaper. I'd never written a grant proposal before applying for a News Challenge grant...

December 11, 2008
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Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Politics to Poetry

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Go to Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog and you don't know if you're going to find a post on politics, poetry, the NFL or the world of videogames. A journalist who has worked at Time Magazine and the Village Voice, Coates started his own blog after being laid off from Time Magazine. Then, back in August, the author of the recently released "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood," was added to the magazine's roster of bloggers at the Atlantic.com. There he continues to interweave culture and politics in posts that ruminate on topics ranging from...

December 8, 2008
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Extract: Civic Defense 2.0

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week our development team announced the release of the LandmanReportCard (LRC), the first of our experiments in designing tools for community understanding and self-defense. We've chosen one of the most difficult community contexts imaginable: neighborhoods, mostly rural, that stand in the path of some of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world. In the mix are weak and compromised governments, a lack of local media, mutant baby goats, a toxic soup of industrial byproducts, unmatched potential for profits, flammable tap water, and a clean burning source of energy that may be central to national security. It is...

December 7, 2008
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The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Social software -- technology that enables interactions among multiple people -- has existed for almost a half century now. (Clay Shirky, in a widely linked essay on this topic, traces the roots of social software to the PLATO system, built at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s.) I'm using the term "social software" because the more popular "social media" increasingly feels like an oxymoron. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg aren't media. Media refers to one-way communication -- like publishing or broadcasting. Today's social sites are, fundamentally, computer programs -- software that determines what users can (and can't)...

December 2, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 11
$100 Solar Project

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Peter noted that many people are weak from HIV/AIDS and they need alternative work to laboring in the fields. He also notes the great need for electricity because, for example, people in his part of rural Kenya typically turn off their mobile phones after 6:00 pm because they are saving the battery power because they have to walk a long ways to recharge their batteries.

November 21, 2008
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The Next Newsroom Proposal is Complete

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is with great pleasure that I'd like to announce that we have completed work on our newsroom proposal for The Chronicle, the independent, student-run newspaper at Duke University. The Chronicle’s board has adopted our proposal for a new home. That document will now serve as the basis for negotiations with officials at Duke University. The plan is available here: http://nextnewsroom.wikispaces.com. But first, I want to establish a little context for that document. The plan was written in collaboration with The Chronicle's board, officially known as the Duke Student Publishing Company. The proposal conforms to explicit guidelines created by the...

November 20, 2008
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Student R&D Can Show the Way for Media

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Placeblogger, a Knight News Challenge winner from 2007, has launched a new design and announced that it is now indexing more than 3,000 "placeblogs" -- Web sites that deliver, as founder Lisa Williams puts it, "an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time ... about the lived experience of a place." The new design served to remind me -- yet again -- of how much has happened in online media in the past few years. About 4 1/2 years ago, I directed a team of Medill master's students who explored the potential of what they called "hyperlocal...

November 17, 2008
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Bloggers Demonstrate the Difference Diversity Makes

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two days after the election both UNITY and the National Association of Black Journalists sent out open letters urging the media to redouble their efforts to diversify staffs in the aftermath of the historic election of Barack Obama. At the same time, others privately wondered if there are some people who would argue that the election of the first African-American president signaled the country has moved past the need to be concerned about racial equity. It is true that some television networks put on air more African-American commentators during the campaign. Those additional voices, however, were not numerous enough to...

November 13, 2008
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Spot.Us: Launching a Site and Being Iterative

by David Cohn

Anybody that's been following my posts on IdeaLab should notice a pattern. Growing a Community and the Importance of Being Iterative Eliminating the Fear of Being Open and the Importance of Being Iterative Starting Small and the Importance of Being Iterative I'm always trying to chop Spot.Us into small and executable steps. Test an idea, see how the community reacts and if it's positive, build a more stable infrastructure around it. The Spot.Us wiki, which has been moderately successful with three and a half pitches funded, is a perfect example. It was very informative and helped us refine our designs...

November 10, 2008
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enviroVOTE: Side Project for Two Programmer-Journalists

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some more evidence that interesting things can happen when computer programmers spend some time learning (and thinking about) journalism: enviroVOTE. The site, built by "hacker journalists" Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, aggregates election results from around the country (contests for president, governor, U.S. Senate and U.S. House) through the prism of how environmentally friendly the winners are. Mark and Boyer, the first two Knight News Challenge scholarship winners, are now completing their final term in the journalism master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. The site was developed using the Django framework in what Boyer describes as a...

November 5, 2008
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How Philanthropy, Education and Industry Can Partner

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project is now officially past the halfway point, and I'm getting a clearer picture of what our student team can accomplish in the remainder of the fall quarter at the Medill School. The students' vision is coalescing around a Web site that enables young adults to interact with news and information via different types of "comment structures," which we're defining as forms of user interaction. The features in the software they are developing are: integration with Facebook (using Facebook Connect), with the following results: Users can log in using their Facebook ID's and have their Facebook identity carry...

October 31, 2008
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Agile Programming: Good Model for Collaboration?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my experience in media companies and academia, developing or implementing new software is almost always a painful process. The people who are going to use the software can't communicate what they want, and the developers don't understand the end users' needs. The developers think the end users have unreasonable expectations, while the end users think the developers are dragging their feet. Software projects are always behind schedule, and even after completion, everyone involved is dissatisfied with the results. Such a scenario is bad enough when it plays out in the workplace. But the journalism "innovation project" I'm directing this...

October 28, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 6
Help Room

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2008, Minciu Sodas was the online world's most responsive network for helping Kenyans during the post-election turmoil. At our chat room, we coordinated the flow of news from SMS and Skype and letters to wiki to Ushahidi and blogs and reporters. We organized response.

October 26, 2008
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What Newsrooms Can Learn from Obama Campaign

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This thought occurred to me over the weekend when I heard that Barack Obama's campaign had purchased advertising space in videogames. According this Associated Press Article: "Nine video games from Electronic Arts Inc., ranging from the extremely popular 'Madden 09' football game to the street racing 'Burnout: Paradise,' feature in-game ads from the Obama campaign. The ads--they appear on billboards and other signage--remind players that early voting has begun and plug a campaign Web site." Now, what do videogames and Obama have to do with newsrooms? It's clear that over the past year, Obama's campaign has developed a profound understanding...

October 20, 2008
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Microblogging Tools for your Newsroom

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I thought about ReportingOn for more than a year before the public beta launched on October 1; I turned the idea over in my head, scrawled back-of-a-napkin sketches, and built several HTML prototypes before I ever got close to building something with dynamic code. While I was going through that process of refining the idea and deciding which features were crucial and which would just be gravy, it turned out that a lot of other people were trying to solve the same problem, although not strictly with journalists in mind. Here are some of the ways you can build a...

October 16, 2008
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Finding Political Sleazemongers

The Includer
Episode 3
The Chain of Angels

I have invited researchers at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media to participate in an effort to blow the whistle on groups who are falsely presenting themselves as "ordinary bloggers," but instead are paid to spread false information about candidates during the 2008 campaign in viral internet campaigns to influence voters. The project, already involving students from Columbia and Harvard, traces the IP addresses of these content originators to track those who are sending out large packets of these identical negative messages and claiming to be individuals. But a MIT researcher protested that this kind of research was not to...

October 9, 2008
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by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Includer is a tool for a solitary thinker. When we center our world on the solitary thinker, then we'll all be one, in life and death, in our evergrowth - our choice to grow forever, to live forever. Let's connect the scattered dots. David Ellison-Bey and I are still up. The police are still searching outside. They have the measuring tape out. A couple of hours ago we heard a crackly crackle of what I thought was fireworks, but David understood was a gunfight. I went outside when David alerted me to the police lights. I thought, I must...

October 7, 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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Why ReportingOn Launched on Django

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

First things first: ReportingOn is live, it's a public beta, and it's built in Django. Whoo-hoo! I have a long list of things to polish, add, tweak, revise, and rethink, but it was time to open the site up to users and let them help me figure it out. Last time I wrote about the options I was considering for Web development, I was leaning toward Django and away from Drupal. Here's why I gave up on Drupal for this project and moved on to Django: Drupal is a fantastic content management system out of the box, with little --...

October 3, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 1
Sisterhood

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We all wish to thank Janet for her wonderful contribution written out on our behalf which first read exactly as if she was writing from our minds eyes.

September 28, 2008
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Are We Ready for Citizen Journateerism?

Innovations in Storytelling: Using Comics for Journalism

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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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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iamnews: A Global DIY Newsroom

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As one of the very early members of the Online News Association, I've attended my share of ONA conferences over the years. This year, I wasn't able to attend the annual gathering that ended in Washington, DC, over the weekend. Instead, I spent most of last weekend at TechCrunch50, a technology conference in San Francisco now in its second year put on by TechCrunch, one of those upstart startups that may put the San Jose Mercury News out of business some day. Reviews of the ONA conference have been mostly positive, especially for the keynote delivered by my friend...

September 15, 2008
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Start with the Low Hanging Fruit with Software Development

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A key component of Freedom Fone is the software development we will undertake over the next two years. Last weekend Brenda and I met with a handful of people who have experience with open source development projects like those we'll be undertaking. We got to share our ideas and experiences to date developing the Freedom Fone prototype, and we benefited from their contributions and suggestions. Much of what they recommended resonates with some of David Cohn's blogs and the importance of being iterative. See for example: Eliminating the Fear of Being Open Growing a Community and The Importance of Being...

September 15, 2008
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Are the Info Needs of Local Communities Being Served?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy arrived in Silicon Valley to hold the first of its three planned community forums. I was asked to speak on a panel that day about "technology and innovation" but hung around for most of the day to listen to the other two panels and the wide-ranging discussion. This is timely and important work. I've spoken with numerous community leaders in Silicon Valley in recent months who are growing more anxious about what will happen to the quality of civic life if the coverage of local...

September 15, 2008
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Challenges for the Collegiate Press, Part 2

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my opinion everything the new media people are working on equals better journalism, and more accessible content. But it's not enough. Newspapers have to find a way to become central to the exchange of information and ideas in their communities if they want to start making more money.

September 12, 2008
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Eliminating the Fear of Being Open

by David Cohn

Spot.Us is about to hit the ground running. We hope to have something to show in mid-to-late October (assuming everything stays on schedule). We've gotten here through a couple of stages. The Cliffs Note version of that is as follows. Stage one: Narratives After realizing Spot.Us would become a reality I got writing. Essentially this was a chance to toss ideas around and create a vision for the site. The basic approach was: Define the types of users that would interact with spot.us and then write out their experience of the site - and what they'd see on each page...

September 12, 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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Growing a Community and The Importance of Being Iterative

by David Cohn

As always: If you just want the status update of Spot.Us as a project -scroll down to the bottom for a nice digestible list of what's going down. Or - keep reading for detailed thoughts. This will be cross-posted at the Spot Us blog. Two months ago I decided that instead of sitting on my hands and waiting for a "tada-moment" to launch spot.us, we should just get started by using a wiki and a blog."Best decision ever" (said in the voice Jeff Albertson).Producing something from nothing Granted, the site can best be described as fugly (take a guess what...

August 28, 2008
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Project Management 101

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Whenever I tell someone that I'm majoring in Information Systems the response tends to be something along the lines of "Ahh that's nice... What's Information Systems?" For the first two years of my college education my answer was just "think of it as Computer Science lite." The real answer is much better: Information Systems is the art of applying technology to improve processes and help people accomplish their goals. Since most IdeaLab readers and writers are ultimately aiming to do exactly this in the field of journalism, I figured it might be nice to give a crash course in...

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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None of Your Business Model

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"What's the business model?" It's a question I hear again and again at meetings and events. The existing model for newspapers is quickly unraveling, so we need a 'new new thing' to serve some of the vital functions that newspapers used to. Whatever that new new thing may be, it is supposed to have a business model: a business model is what separates the well-meaning amateur from the sustainable enterprise. It is vital for securing loans or venture capital. You can't be serious about sustaining a venture unless you have a plan for a business that will sustain that venture....

August 10, 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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Five Steps to Foster Innovation in the Newsroom

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last month, Dan Pacheco asked for readers' ideas on How to Foster Innovation in Newspapers. He was speaking at an upcoming Knight conference and was looking for feedback to augment his presentation. I didn't have a chance to respond in time to help him, but it's a subject I've been thinking about a lot over the past year as part of The Next Newsroom Project. I'm sure there are plenty of doubters who think newspapers are a lost cause at this point when it comes to innovation. Fine. But it's important to understand that this question is one that any...

August 5, 2008
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Five Ways to Gather and Report News with Twitter

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I read Chris O'Brien's IdeaLab post about the latest Twitterquake and the 10 (so far) comments with a great deal of interest. After all, ReportingOn borrows a great deal from Twitter, and I've been writing about the exponentially growing micro-blogging service for around a year now. I can't help but notice that a commenter or two seem to think that anyone actually takes is seriously when Twitter asks its base question of "What are you doing?" This is what makes it easy for those who haven't sipped from the Tweetstream to write it off as crap for tweens. Actually, that's...

August 3, 2008
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Is Twitter the Newsroom of the Future?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I was sitting at my desk at the San Jose Mercury News on Tuesday when I first heard about the Los Angeles earthquake through an inter-office message from a colleague. My next instinct was to click over to my Twitter account to see what was going on. Like a lot of folks who have developed a cultish appreciation for the microblogging service, I've increasingly found that Twitter has become the place get breaking news before it hits online news sites or television. I follow Twitter through a desktop application called Twhirl. Since I only follow a limited number of folks...

July 30, 2008
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My Advice to Knight on Local Democracy Online

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight Foundation is beginning to make some waves in local democracy circles. And I am not just saying that because they fund this blog. Earlier this year they hosted a conference with community foundations on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, then they announced the Knight Center of Digital Excellence focused on universal access to the "digital town square," and most recently announced a commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy and $24 million in matching funds for community foundations (see my collection of online civic engagement resources for community foundations referenced in a...

July 30, 2008
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Use Ready-to-Wear to Avoid the Custom CMS Albatross

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It’s always tempting to be cutting edge and build custom web publishing tools for a new web site. But we've found real benefits to using off-the-shelf content management tools -- especially for a small operation without an in-house web developer.

July 26, 2008
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Visualizing the News

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Visualization tool: ManyEyes from JD Lasica on Vimeo. At the Future of Civic Media conference at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from the co-creator of Many Eyes. Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, described some of the uses for this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don't know" and "I don't recall." Here's a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and...

July 21, 2008
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A Call for Quality Comments

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few days ago I was snooping around Digg when I noticed a popular submission titled The Difference Between Digg and Reddit. I clicked, eager to learn, and was presented with an image juxtaposing two very distinct flavors of user-submitted comments surrounding the breaking news of Tony Snow's death. The first comments shown at Digg offered generic words of respect that you might expect to hear about a public figure that passed away. The top comment at Reddit, however, was a bit more candid to say the least. The discussion that followed ranged from folks saying "maybe I should join...

July 18, 2008
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Hero Reports Website

When the Star of the Story is Understanding Itself

The "Hero Reports" website project turns the anti-terrorism "See Something, Say Something" campaign on its head, to visualize security as civic connectedness.

July 17, 2008
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How to Foster Innovation in Newspapers?

Maybe information and explanation ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. What put me in that mind is a special episode of "This American Life" called The Giant Pool of Money. It's a one-hour explainer on the mortgage crisis, the product of an unusual collaboration between Ira Glass, the host and force behind This American Life, Alex Blumberg, who works with Glass, and NPR, which lent economics correspondent Adam Davidson. He used to work for the show he was collaborating with. If you don't know "The Giant Pool of Money" you...

July 17, 2008
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by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Next week I'm leading a discussion at a conference run by the Knight Digital Media center about innovation within newspapers. The topic of the conference is "Transforming News Organizations for the Digital Now."They've asked me to talk about two things: The "ecology of innovation." What type of environment fosters innovation best?Provide examples of innovation that helps journalists to transform. I have my own thoughts about this, informed by my work in Bakersfield as well as at previous companies. I will share those ideas here soon, in addition to anything that comes out of the panel discussion. But to make sure...

July 8, 2008
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Defining Civic Media at MIT

Whither Hyperlocal Mapping

Here at MIT, summer means time to dig into our research. A group of us at the Center for Future Civic Media is working on a white paper defining "civic media." We are interested in how civic media is empowering new user-creators, with related effects on governing elites. Inspiring people to take action, through access to information and the public spotlight, is a familiar goal to those of us on the team who used to be journalists. We used to facilitate the agency of an isolated person or community to make the government act for justice or change. It often...

July 7, 2008
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by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Three and a half conferences (12 hours onsite training at Google counts as the half) in three weeks has about done me in. At various times, I inevitably ask myself, "Why am I here and not at home?" But I realize why I travel to these events when the light bulb goes off. Usually it's about connecting the dots in a way that with 20-20 hindsight seems like stating the obvious. I posted a blog in early May on the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on mapping and social activism; I noted that having a purpose (outside of making money and/or...

July 6, 2008
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The Print on Demand Revolution

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I delve more into Printcasting, I've been learning about the relatively new and growing POD movement -- which stands for Print on Demand. And every new leaf I turn over is another confirmation of what we suspected when we originally entered Printcasting into the Knight News Challenge. There's an all-out technology revolution happening with print which, until now, newspapers have largely missed out on. Here are just a few examples. For this first one, I have to thank Medill student and journalistic-programmer Brian Boyer who introduced me to the service. When I met Brian at the MIT Future of...

July 2, 2008
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CopyCamp: Community Unconference in the Newsroom

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

(photo by Rob Knight) As part of the Next Newsroom Project, I've been exploring several core questions about the structure of news organizations, both physical and operational. One of those central questions is this: What is the ideal relationship between a newsroom and its community? One of the exciting things about the era we're entering is that there are much wider range of options to consider when addressing this question. We're moving away from the traditional broadcast model where information flowed in one direction from the newsroom to the community. It's clear that the community should be placed at...

July 2, 2008
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Exploring a Range of Development Options

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the past few weeks, I've ramped up development of ReportingOn. Of course, for me, that means I'm spending time early in the morning and late at night exploring different options, creating mockups, ditching everything I've done and starting over again. Here's a few paths of exploration I've been down lately: Drupal: Drupal 6 isn't ready for what I need it to do. The Views and CCK modules aren't up to speed yet, or maybe I just haven't found the right set of instructions yet. That brings me to my biggest complaint about Drupal: Although there's a huge open source...

June 30, 2008
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World of Digitalmediacraft

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There is one reason and one reason alone that I haven't catastrophically dropped out of college yet: I avoid World of Warcraft as though it were the plague. In case you are unfamiliar, World of Warcraft is an incredibly popular game made by Blizzard Entertainment in which players take on the role of an adventurer in a Tolkein-esque virtual world alongside thousands of other people. Obviously the game must be fun, but what makes it dangerously addictive is that the more you play the more you can do and the better you can do it. The result is an incredibly...

June 27, 2008
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Representative Journalism: Funding Beats or Stories

by David Cohn

I'm on the "board of advisers" for Representative Journalism and Leonard Witt, who coined the phrase, is also on the board of advisers for Spot Us. So - I thought I'd take a post to look at how Witt defines Representative Journalism. It is very much in-tune with Spot Us. In fact, whenever I explain Spot Us - I also bring up RepJ as an experiment playing in the same space. In my mind the only real difference between RepJ and Spot Us is the scope of what we are trying to raise money for. More on that below. The...

June 26, 2008
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Journalists Need to Update Stories Online

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For people without their own web site or blog, a newspaper article can become their primary identity online. Local news sites face this responsibility most often and most intensely. Every article or blog on the internet can become part of the permanent record, but the publisher doesn't control how and when people access this information- for the most part, search engines become the gatekeepers. However, news organizations can and should take responsibility for ensuring their piece of the permanent record provides their best understanding of reality. JD Lasica (also an Idealab blogger) quoted Terry Heaton riffing on a post by...

June 26, 2008
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TimesPeople a Puzzling Piece of NYT Development

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

TimesPeople is the beginning of a social network from the New York Times. Sort of. It's a pleasant interface and a clever application, living in the browser as a Firefox add-on that doesn't get in the way of my NYT browsing. It's simple: Hit the recommend button on any story or blog post and a link shows up in your activity stream and your friends can see that you recommended a story. The app is supposed to notice when I rate a restaurant or add a comment to a story, too, although I don't see that happening after a quick...

June 20, 2008
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The Sites in their Sights

1st Day at Knight News Challenge Winners Conference

So which are the regular websites visited by the big names at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media conference? I asked people like Jay Rosen, JD Lasica, Amy Gahran, Paul Grabowicz, Henry Jenkins and others to share their favorites. Surveying ten or so folks shows that top of the list is Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine. It's followed closely by Amy Gahran's E-Media Tidbits and Jay Rosen's Pressthink. Dan Gilmor, Romanesko and Mark Glaser's MediaShift are also popular online destinations. Also mentioned were: Paidcontent.org ReadWriteWeb Dave Winer's Scripting News Doc Searles Steve Outing JD Lasica's Social Media Online Journalism Review Cyberjournalist.net...

June 13, 2008
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by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

report from the 1st day at the Knight Conference at MIT

June 12, 2008
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Election Day Could Be Our Own Pangia Day

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When the filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED), her wish was to create one day where people across the world gathered at the same time to watch films produced by international filmmakers. Best known for her film Control Room(film), Noujaim believed the power of the films could help the audience see beyond our differences to the humanity that binds us together. Or, as the tag line declared, "4 hours. 24 films. A new way to see the world." Pangia Day, as it came to be called, took place on May 10th at 18:GMT, 11 am PDT, at...

June 10, 2008
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How to Create a Reader-Driven News System

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We all know that the "audience" analogy no longer represents the way journalism should work. We know that the people reading the news have opinions, perspectives, and facts that are relevant to the conversation. Some of them just have observations, but others are reporters at heart or maybe they have the wordsmithing abilities of a columnist. This post is about how the news system I've been blogging about can be driven by user generated content and collective intelligence. In a larger sense, however, it is about the way in which any news organization can make the move past the one-sided...

June 8, 2008
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Google News Layered in Google Earth

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the Where 2.0 conference in May, Google announced Google News would be now be accessible and located in Google Earth. As Brandon Badger, Product Manager noted in his Lat Long Blog entry The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser. By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide. The amount of content available Google Earth is astounding, but even more interesting is the ways in which...

June 2, 2008
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Give the Public Access to Public Records

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm on an open API kick here at IdeaLab, so here's the second of three entries on the potential of application programming interface for news organizations. (I'll post a final video interview on Monday.) This is a way to give the public true access to public records. Oddly, that rarely happens now, with media organizations playing gatekeeper and releasing stories through the editorial process -- but not the raw data itself. In this 8-minute video interview I conducted yesterday at the NetSquared conference -- notice the venue: Cisco, not a media company -- founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle discusses Louisville-based YourMapper.com,...

May 29, 2008
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NY Times to Test Crowdsourcing Its Data

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

News about a potentially big deal in the newspaper industry broke just before the holiday weekend. No, not another story about a chain swallowing another chain, or news about the formation of yet another online advertising platform that's doomed to underperform. Instead, this was a kind of news that only a geek would love: MediaBistro reported, and Read/Write Web republished, word that the New York Times is planning to release an open API this summer. Huh? An API, as Wikipedia reminds us, is short for application programming interface. Those of us in or near Silicon Valley are well aware of...

May 27, 2008
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From GeoGraffiti to GeoJournalism

Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations

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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by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Before I went home this summer I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Twedt, a reporter at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who teaches one of the few journalism classes at Carnegie Mellon. I told him about the Idealab and the user driven system I've been writing about here. The first big question he asked deserves a well thought out response: "What if the users don't contribute?" Steve is right; a developer can't rely on user contribution unless he/she is sure users will contribute. Since one can never actually be sure about that, we are left with three simple tasks: hedge...

May 24, 2008
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Any There at Where 2.0?

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Where 2.0 happened May 12-14 at the San Francisco Airport Marriot just south of the city. This annual event, now in its 4th year, is a strange mix of grassroots geo-enthusiasts and entrepreneurial geo-hackers. Where 2.0 is primarily a developer's conference, so the majority of time and certainly the focus was on tools and how they function and less on how these tools are being used. (Or not being used. For the most part, location apps are in beta.) There was definitely the Field-of-Dreams-feeling, "build it and they will come." The exceptions were the tools and apps in the social...

May 19, 2008
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Can Newspaper Classifieds Be Saved?

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Steve Outing -- who's been trying to prod the newspaper industry to embrace its digital multidirectional future for the past decade -- asked me what the future holds for newspaper classifieds. He's behind the site ReinventingClassifieds.com, an initiative aimed at bringing experts together to revive newspaper classifieds by finding a new business model that's relevant in the Internet age. I left the Sacramento Bee 12 years ago to work at various Internet startups, and the contrast between newspaper culture and tech startup culture couldn't be more stark. If newspapers are to revitalize their revenue streams in the online medium,...

May 12, 2008
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Sean Bell Illustrates Lines that Divide Us

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Blaring red headlines on the Drudge Report announced to the world that the three New York City Police who shot Sean Bell 50 times, killing him, were found not guilty. Drudge, with his right wing reputation, it turns out was one of the only mainstream white blogs to prominently play the Bell verdict. In fairness, the Huffington Post did have a small headline about the verdict. Things were different in the black blogosphere. It wasn't just that the black interest sites carried the coverage, it was also that many included rich texture and context in which to look at the...

May 12, 2008
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It's Not Just a Newspaper Problem; It's a Media Problem

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past week, the National Association of Music Retailers landed in San Francisco to hold their 50th annual convention. Never heard of them? Neither had I, until I responded to a random email pitch and decided to attend for a few hours. Essentially, NARM is a trade group that includes every piece of the music ecosystem, from artists and songwriters to retailers to record labels. While the organization was unfamiliar to me, the main topic of conversation at the convention was all too familiar: How do we find a new business model in a digital world? The music world has...

May 12, 2008
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Newspapers Suffer from Marketing Myopia Online

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've attended a few conferences and it appears to me that most folks in journalism hate advertising. Maybe that comes from seeing the last eight inches of their story end up on the composing room floor to make room for another two column by four-inch ad or just distrust of business. I wouldn't hazard a guess. Regardless, it would seem some journalistic purists are using the current situation to seek wholly different business forms to fund journalism in general. While the national practice of the craft has been benefited by foundations, the idea that anything approaching hyperlocal can be funded...

May 11, 2008
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A Collage of Business Models from NewsTools2008

Finding Local Community Online

Some of the most interesting discussions and demonstrations at last week's NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley centered around making the changing news landscape sustainable. Here are some of the ideas I heard, along with a few of my own: 1) News Consultancies: Leveraging local information channels & relationships to connect average people with local influencers and experts. Examples: -An online/offline service which people pay journalists to help them navigating local political/business channels. i.e, the fastest way to get a building permit approved or knowing which local developer to talk to about a project. -recommending a trustworthy plumber of mechanic. This idea...

May 5, 2008
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by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been thinking a lot about just how "local" most people want to be online. The greatest myth about the Internet is that people only want to go to world online. That they only care about creating social networks with friends or people like themselves with similar interests from thousands of miles away. It is as if the cross-dressing organic gardener from Sweden connecting with those like themselves on the other side of the world (someone I met once who shared his tipping point experience with the power of the Internet) has more virtue than enabling a plant swap online...

May 2, 2008
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How Do We Deal with Stolen Content?

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In an ideal world, I suppose, all information would be free and widely accessible. Maybe not credit records, health stats or income information -- but certainly journalism would be. Alas, though, we're not in an ideal world. On-line publications need readers (hits) to survive. In the case of a small independent site like Gotham Gazette, we need hits to attract funders and advertisers and to build our reputation and credibility. And we need to maintain control over our material to preserve our integrity. So it was distressing when our technical director, Amanda Hickman, using Technorati, found many sites using our...

May 1, 2008
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13 Ways to Talk to a Programmer

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

[With apologies to Wallace Stevens.] If you decide to venture beyond talking about how your news organization's site should work into actually changing how it does work, there's one essential skill you'll have to learn: how to talk to a programmer. Most nonprogrammers have no idea how to communicate their idea for a new feature or a whole new website in a way that's going to be useful to the person who's actually building that site. Here are thirteen tips to get you started on the road to fluency: Learn how to write a spec. One of the biggest frustrations...

April 30, 2008
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Participants Balk at Controversial Topics

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It might seem a good starting point for building virtual community when people already know each other in the real one. But for Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker, we've been surprised to find that doesn't seem so true. For many potential users of our online group blog and forums, the risks of speaking about a controversial topic so openly in an online public forum appear just too great. When we launched our project in the summer of 2007 in the wake of the city's approval of a carbon tax to fight global warming, we began with the premise that experts and...

April 22, 2008
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Our Hidden Biases Reflected in Our Work

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent post Lauren Williams editor of the black interest blog Stereohyped, wrote about the case of a black man accused of killing a white police officer in New Hampshire. In defense of the accused, Mahzarin Banaji, the creator of Implicit Association Test, a web-based test that measures an individual's inherent biases, testified that it would be virtually impossible for a black defendant to get a fair trail by an all white jury. The movie Race to Execution makes a similar argument, noting that once the jury composition tips in favor of white men, the chances it will deliver...

April 19, 2008
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Ten Things Journalists Should Know About Surviving In a High-Tech Industry

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Journalism is becoming a high tech industry, and that means that career norms for journalists are approaching those of high tech workers -- shorter job tenures, working for smaller companies, and much more. Here are ten things that can help journalists survive Web 2.0 with their sanity intact: High tech is a boom and bust industry. We get laid off when the economy is good, and we get laid off when the economy is bad. Investors get fed up and pull the plug on small companies; at big companies, the CEO must, on ceremonial occasions, throw a few sacrificial victims...

April 17, 2008
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Google Earth, New York Times Team Up

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In early March, the amazing Amy Gahran and I presented at Knight Digital Media Center seminar talking about new tools. I spoke about locative media, showed examples, learned a lot, and assured all the participants that they too could create multimedia editorial pieces using Google Earth's very simple toolkit. One participant from a medium-sized paper in New York State took me up on my offer to walk her through the process. She thought it was cool and wanted to bring it into her newsroom. We soon hit the wall: systemic infrastructure issues like only administrators can add applications (standard operating...

April 13, 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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Good Night, and Good Luck

by Gabriel Berrios
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Versión en español abajo What is it that journalism needs? That the people can put their trust in it; many years have gone by since journalism was invented to communicate in a better way among those living in a common place, whether it be a neighborhood, town, city, country, or world. Furthermore it must be said that journalism has been converted into spectacle. Journalism has become selfishly motivated, converting its' own journalists into celebrities, into "newsmakers" themselves, James Bond types who reveal the truth, or, like Indiana Jones, seeking adventures in far-off lands that, from the perspective of first-world marketing,...

April 6, 2008
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EveryBlock FAQ created

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since launching the Knight-funded Web site EveryBlock just over two months ago, we've been asked many questions about the project, from the philosophical ("Why is this 'news'?") to logistical ("When will the code be open-sourced?"). We've compiled the most frequently asked questions into a brand-new FAQ. Check it out....

April 5, 2008
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How Do You Balance Anonymity & Accountability?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's your question for the week on Idea Lab. Many people think that anonymity is important online for people who are whistle-blowers or would not speak out if they were identified. But the flipside of that is that many people use the protection of anonymity to lob insults and ad hominem attacks at opponents and turn civil conversations into flame wars. What happens if you try to pin down people and make them use real names in forums? Does that bring more civility? That's certainly the case at Front Porch Forum, where people must use their first and last name,...

April 3, 2008
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Keeping it All Together

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I wrote a long-ish piece that's up over at poynter.org about how we organize and manage our crew of three dozen citizen journalists. We've had to take some unexpected detours into CRM software, etc., to make sure people and stories don't fall through the cracks, but it seems to be working fairly well....

April 2, 2008
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Finalists for the Knight News Challenge

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight Foundation today posted a list of the finalists for the next round of its News Challenge grant program. This list does not include the names of the 17 projects that were chosen for funding. Those winners will be announced on May 14, 2008, at the E&P Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas. Knight says it posted this list of finalists because: "Many finalists had excellent proposals worthy of being considered by other foundations and funders." The 29 projects listed are all intriguing and worth checking out just to get a sense of where some of the sharpest minds...

March 31, 2008
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Hyperlocal Sites Can Deliver More Than Display Ads

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mark Glaser, our host on Mediashift, asked: " ... is there something (hyper-local news sites) can offer the businesses beyond just a display ad or a place in an online directory? Is there a more creative partnership they might have, where reader/contributors could give the business honest feedback on the site -- positive and negative? Paulding.com, for those who are aware, is based on a simple message board shtick. We have a front page with news but the majority of the action - some 2200 posts a day - occur within the forums. These posts are typically viewed by members...

March 30, 2008
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What Journalism Needs: A Product People Want

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When journalists were asked in a recent survey to identify the most important aspect of their work, 91% said "make my publication successful by creating appealing content for its audiences." What a turn-around from the not too distant past when such sentiments would have been denounced in many newsrooms as pandering to the public and giving people what they want, not what they need. This shift in perspective was predictable in the face of hemorrhaging print circulation and broadcast viewership and the recent precipitous decline in ad revenue, at least for newspapers. But I think it also should inform some...

March 30, 2008
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(Only) Two Visions for the Future of Blogging?

All the Summaries Fit to Print

An interesting battle of the blogging titans was covered in the "Bits" section of today's New York Times. It's basically an exchange between popular technology bloggers (and blog owners) Michael Arrington and Rafat Ali. Their differing views are worth examining because they touch on a hot button issue in blogging and journalism: How are new for-profit business models impacting blogging and the journalistic integrity of bloggers? In their personal scrap Mr. Arrington and Mr. Ali are tackling the difficult question of profitability models for blogging. Mr. Arrington seems to favor a monopoly approach, where blogs are brought together to form...

March 30, 2008
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by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As so many people who blog here have observed, newspapers face a quandary as they struggle to attract and keep readers to their print editions as well as their Web sites. They want to win customers at the same time they are giving those customers less for their money. One way to get around that is to give people the same or less and make it look like more. Is that the idea behind the New York Times redesign revealed this week? For those of you who haven't seen it, the Times seems to have exported a Web idea --...

March 28, 2008
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What Drives News Decisions (What Are They Thinking)?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Senator Barack Obama mischaracterized statements of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. To be charitable, there's only so many media narratives any one person or even campaign can try to change at one time. That's my question for today: how are these media narratives formed in the first place, and why? Easier question: Did you see the videos below? The seven and ten minute versions, not the seven and ten second versions? Obama, in his speech, chose to defend Wright as a person and a leader, but he denounced the statements as divisive and reflecting a static view of progress in history. In...

March 25, 2008
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How Would You Engage People in Public Policy?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The one million figure is my number, but seriously, the UK government wants advice on how to engage lots of people online. Engage is the key word, the British Prime Minister already receives e-petitions online (nothing like that with the White House, Congress, or even one U.S. governor despite our constitutional right to petition) which is more about political expression than engagement. From the UK-based OpenDemocracy site you can learn about UK government's "desire to hold a national debate on a British Statement of Values as part of the Governance of Britain Green Paper." You can read a summary of...

March 25, 2008
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Life Inside the Non-Profit News Model

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of our group bloggers here, Geoff Dougherty, founder of the Chi-Town Daily News, is the focus of an extended profile that appears in Miller-McCune magazine. The profile was written by one of my former Mercury News colleagues, Ryan Blitstein, who uses Dougherty's story to explore some themes that have emerged on this blog: The possiblities of citizen journalism and the sustainability of the non-profit news model. An excerpt: "Civic entrepreneurs across the country are offering multiple visions of local journalism's future, from technology-heavy, amateur-dependent nonprofit sites to more traditional approaches to news that just happen to be tax-exempt...

March 21, 2008
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Media's "New" Community Role

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I just got back to the U.S. from my first visit to Rome. The whole trip was great, but my favorite part was The Roman Forum. This ancient gathering place represents, as far as I'm concerned, the epitome of community facilitation given the resources available at the time. This may not seem like a relevant anecdote at first but the point is that I think members of the news industry who are looking for a role in this crazy Internet filled world may discover that the answer to their identity crisis isn't so new after all. This post is about...

March 21, 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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How About a Chris O'Brien New Media Business Model Award!

Is Citizen Media Skipping Small Town America?

Returning to Chris O'Brien's Business Model Challenge, here are some suggested approaches and models from the perspective of an entrepreneur and strategic consultant. For a more rigorous approach I would absolutely check out Chris's recommended NewspaperNext report. That said, let's try and smash some boxes or at least poke some holes in existing ones... 1) MyPaper model: Going beyond the trend in news aggregation and self-customized news portals like NetVibes, why not think about physical papers that are delivered to your door (or on the Web/mobile device) which combine your specific preferences for local, national, and international news + features...

March 20, 2008
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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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The State of the News Media Is Troubled

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

On Monday the Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report. It's worthwhile reading for anyone who's interested in the major trends affecting not just the news industry but the culture of information dissemination in this country. I've been reading the report since last night and find myself agreeing with just about all its major observations. Here are some especially noteworthy snippets. From the Introduction: The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago. And the problems, increasingly, appear to be different than many experts have...

March 18, 2008
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Where's the Innovation in Business Models?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been following closely a theme that has developed here in recent days. It began last week with David Sasaki's post about the legacy of the Knight family, continued with Dan Gillmor's call for more entrepreneurial thinking in journalism, and was amplified by J.D. Lasica's call for newspapers to innovate or die. All great thoughts, and worth reading to the word. But I have a particular interest here. As a business reporter at the San Jose Mercury News the past nine years, I've been living at the tragic center of the events being addressed to some degree by each of...

March 13, 2008
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Newspapers Must Innovate or Die

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

On Friday Dan Gillmor wrote here about bringing an entrepreneurial mindset to today's journalism. On Friday, Dan's former employer, the San Jose Mercury News, laid off 15 newsroom staffers and lost five other editors through buyouts, shaving the editorial staff by about 10 percent, on top of a larger set of layoffs a few months ago. Or, to be more precise, the paper's corporate owners, MediaNews, did so. This is at once both troubling and ironic. Troubling, because the downsizing is indicative of deep-seated financial and circulation troubles in the newspaper industry as a whole. (As newspaper analyst Dave Morgan...

March 9, 2008
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Is Old Media Really Dead?

National Awareness Days are a Cry for Help

According to this new report released by We Media/Zogby, two thirds of Americans think traditional journalism is out of touch with what they want from their news and nearly half now get their news online. The report suggests that 29% of Americans get their primary news information fromTelevision, 11% from radio and only 10% from newspapers. Is traditional media really dead or dying? Is journalism itself the problem or is it all about a shirft in medium and not the quality of journalism itself that is itself the cause of our dissatisfaction? Or are these the wrong questions to be...

March 2, 2008
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by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, March first, is National Self-Injury Awareness Day. You may not know much about this issue. A Google news search turned up one article, in the independent Charleston Gazette. I am meaningfully aware that people self-injure only through a friend's yearly blog post to mark self-injury awareness day: "We are male and female. We are artists, athletes, students, and business owners. We have depression, DID, PTSD, eating disorders, borderline personalities, bipolar disorder, or maybe no formal diagnosis at all. Some of us were abused, some were not. We are straight, bi, and gay. We come from all walks of life...

March 1, 2008
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Tips to Win a Knight News Challenge Grant

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Earlier this week I was at WeMedia 08 in Miami, where I was on a panel about the Knight News Challenge. (Last year, Adam Glenn and I won a Knight News Challenge grant to fund our community journalism project, the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker.) Also on the panel were Gary Kebbel, director of the News Challenge progam for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and fellow grantee Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota. Here are five points I think are useful to anyone considering applying for a News Challenge grant, based on Adam's and my experience so...

February 29, 2008
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Going Beyond Point A to Point B

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Phones use one of two methods to figure out where they are (and if you happen to be carrying it, where you are). The first is built-in gps. Nokia is leading the way with these smart phones, having announced four new phones earlier this month at the Mobile World Congress 2008, where 50,000 people (including keynote Robert Redford) gathered in Barcelona to talk all things mobile (but mostly about devices and less-than-innovative uses of these devices). The second way to locate your device is how Apple is doing it. Late to the game and experimenting with workarounds, location-based applications found...

February 26, 2008
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The Washington Post vs. washpost.com

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Washington City Paper this week published an extensive profile of the online strategy used by The Washington Post. Called, "One Mission, Two Newsrooms," the piece details how the Post has built an entirely separate newsroom for the online staff across the river in Arlington, Va. While the online team has flourished, and developed a number of innovations, the profile notes that this arrangement has led to tension between the old newsroom in the city and the dot-com operation. The story kicks off with an extended anecdote about how Dana Priest and Anne Hull kept their big investigative series on...

February 21, 2008
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Databases as Entry Points to Investigative Stories

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you want to know what the future of investigative reporting might look like online, check out what the Las Vegas Sun has done with its special section on Flight Delays. It's an interactive map and database on plane delays at McCarran Airport. You can check a particular flight, look at patterns in delays to other airports and find out how long it takes to go through security checkpoints at different gates at different times of the day. And there's a video of interviews with people at the airport, along with time-lapse videos showing planes arriving at the airport and...

February 18, 2008
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Is Your Blog Login Secure?

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Several News Challenge projects, including ours (the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker), feature blogs as a publishing tool. So consider this a friendly tip: If you or anyone who will be posting to your blog even occasionally uses net access of unknown or uncertain security (such as public wifi, or a hotel's network), make sure you use a secure login to your blog's back-end.

Why? Because it's pretty common for unscrupulous folks to monitor networks used by many people with the express purpose of "sniffing" userIDs and passwords. This can have obvious bad consequences if they get access to your web-based e-mail -- but it can also mess up your blog, too.

I learned my lesson last November...

February 18, 2008
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Will There Be a Newsroom in the Future?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The nature of our project at Duke University, the Next Newsroom Project, is to try to design the "newsroom of the future." But the other day on our project site, Leonard Witt of Kennesaw State University, started a discussion around the first, most obvious question we confronted: "Does the newsroom of the future really need to be a brick and mortar newsroom?" You can view the various responses, and some relevant links that got posted there. I wanted to withhold my reply until folks had their say. Naturally, it's not the first time I've heard that question since our work...

February 14, 2008
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NewsTools2008 to Bring Geeks and Journalists Together

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One truism that has remained constant over the years is that journalists and technologists rarely cohabit the same physical plane. Even when they cross each other's path, they rarely speak each other's language. And yet, any great leap forward in the new media space requires great technology. As much as journalists like to imagine that careful reporting, balanced writing and the oldtime verities of the craft are what matters most in the new digital world, upstart startups like Digg, TechCrunch and Facebook are proving otherwise. So it came as welcome news that MediaGiraffe's Journalism That Matters project will be...

February 11, 2008
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Toward a Community Media Toolset

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the past three years, since I co-founded Ourmedia.org, a lot of would-be community publishers have asked me the same question, which more or less is this: How can I get a site up and running without investing a lot of time or resources into building a content management system and technology infrastructure from scratch? There's good news and bad news, I tell them. The good news is that there are now hundreds of free, open source content management systems to run your publication or social network on. Some of the more popular ones include Drupal, Plone/Zope, Joomla, Ruby...

February 11, 2008
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Why I Love Forums -- and Not Blogs

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I have an admission to make. I really don't like blogs. They are not conversational and they don't build a community. I love forums because they are conversational and with a little nurturing, they can blossom into a full-blown on-line community. This is true whether the common interests are cars, collectibles or a geographic community. Another reason I love forums is that, unlike a blog, I could have stopped writing at the end of the last paragraph. On an active forum that assertion would have been enough to effectively start a conversation that possibly would be just as informative as...

February 5, 2008
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Guiding Principles for the Next Newsroom

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Next Newsroom Project began last summer with a question: If you could build the ideal newsroom from scratch, what would it look like? We were asking that question on behalf of The Chronicle, the independent student newspaper at Duke University. Since receiving our News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation, we've interviewed journalists, digital media experts, architects, campus media advisers, academics, and innovation specialists. We profiled professional and campus newsrooms (and some organizations that had no newsroom). And we looked for ideas outside journalism from folks like innovation consultants Jump Associates . And we studied buildings like the Stata...

February 4, 2008
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When Frames Go Bad: My Apology to NYT Reporter Jens Erik Gould

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A previous post of mine had an inflammatory headline unjustified by the text: "Lies about Venezuela: If NYT.com ran Related Content". I was guilty of looking at Jens Erik Gould's article, "Venezuela's Fateful Choice," through a frame: that major media coverage overwhelmingly seeks to portray the Venezuelan government as illegitimate and bad. My own view (frame) that the New York Times has that overall frame overrode a good analysis of the article. I apologize specifically to the reporter. Gould's article, while (despite the headline) primarily about accusations that the Venezuelan government lacks financial transparency, was not by itself part of...

February 1, 2008
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A Developer's Dilemma: Who's a Journalist?

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I just got back onto campus after a glorious winter break and I'm full of chocolate and food from the holidays. To get back into things I was planning on using this post to flesh out my ideas for content moderation in a user-facilitated aggregation system. To be specific, I wanted to find a way to give journalists a special place in the content judging process without losing a sense of democracy. Unfortunately, within 10 minutes of sitting down I realized that there was a big snag that needs to be addressed before the conversation can even begin. The Snag:...

January 14, 2008
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One Location Doesn't Cut It

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two months ago I made a post about the fun little news application on the Nintendo Wii. Dan Burd responded to the post with this comment criticizing some of Wii News' interface assumptions: "I think it's limiting to say that each news story only pertains to one location. Many news stories are overviews of the relations between two or more countries. I'm guessing the AP thing would place them at whatever city the reporter is reporting from. I think that's a bit misleading." If you ask me, he is spot on. Burd's comment refers to global news, but the...

January 3, 2008
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It's The Network, Stupid!

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My challenge has been summed up as making money from a hyperlocal community web site or, said differently "It is the sales, stupid." (see previous entry) That is a gross oversimplification. What my 21st Century Newchallenge is all about is building a sustainable business model based on connecting a community. That means it is always about the network. Sales and revenues impact sustainability but are secondary to the core mission, which is to develop the community. If challenged to say what is the community, I could just smirk and say, read the site; all 1.7 million posts. If you were...

December 30, 2007
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It's The Sales Stupid!

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is the sales stupid! No it is not ... it is the network (Check the companion entry It is the network stupid) that determines if you attract a viable audience that generates monetize-able journalism ... I.e. journalism that attracts a salable audience. My belief has always been that sales will come when you have a viable audience. I'm here to report that it does even when you're barely competent at sales. Yep, I've had sales ... although any reasonable businessperson would say that sales I've generated so far are lackluster. The secret of good sales is a good salesperson...

December 30, 2007
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Traditional Tagging is Important Too

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There has been a lot of talk about Geo-fillintheblank on this blog. Much of it is coming from me, so I want to take a second to bring things back down to earth (pun!). This post is about the old standard of information breakdown: separation by topic. Since "sections" are a typical feature for most, if not all, traditional news sites and newspapers, I don't think I need to spend time trying to explain why topical categorization is useful in general. Instead, I just want to make sure we re-incorporate this navigational technique while making the mad rush towards new...

December 24, 2007
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Making Maps Work with Geo-Filtering

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's finals week here at Carnegie Mellon, and now more than ever I don't want to spend unnecessary time digging around for information. I want my notes organized and easy to flip through, I don't want to have to look at 5 different course portals to find the study guides that my professors put online, and I definitely don't want to download and read half of an assigned paper only to realize that it doesn't matter for the test. In fact, these desires sound a lot like the desires of an information consumer in general - I would like my...

December 13, 2007
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Lies about Venezuela: If NYT.com ran Related Content

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Lara, Venezuela, lacks widespread internet access, cutting off Agaric Design Collective from our sysadmin. If you want to tell us Hugo Chávez's administration in Venezuela is doing a bad job developing the country, we have reason to listen, with prejudice. But the accusations slipping unchallenged into news articles that Venezuela is anti-democratic, that Chávez is unpopular, and that the proposed constitutional reforms up for approval tomorrow are unlikely to pass - these are lies with consequences. These unsourced and poorly sourced claims, dripping like acid rain showers on the informed public's understanding of Venezuela - are lies where the truth matters....

December 1, 2007
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Targeted, Democratic Content Moderation

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In an earlier post I suggested a process intended to maintain journalistic standards in a globally accessible, user-maintained aggregated news site. Its key feature was a purgatory section where new articles would be rated by readers for quality, apparent credibility, and a few other traits before being published. If a report didn't get high enough numbers it would be deleted from the system or, in the case of a close call, maybe it would be reviewed by designated members of the relevant community.

That description probably sounds very similar to Digg's Upcoming section, but this post should help differentiate the two. I'll describe a quick twist that turns an open and fairly loose peer review scheme into a targeted one that (I think) stands a decent chance at providing accurate regional and topic specific news without losing article integrity.

December 1, 2007
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Open Journalism Challenge: Can Paid Media Report on Plan Mexico this Well?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Immigration, military contractors, fiscal responsibility, foreign policy, domestic policy, trade policy, business, labor, crime- this story has it all, plus underlying themes about access to information and democracy (optional, if you care to report on those kinds of things). And all with a presidential race coming up! Is your favorite news source keeping up? The Bush administration is trying to get Congress to approve what it calls the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion aid package to Mexico in order to fight drug cartels. The plan is more commonly known as Plan Mexico because of its inevitable similarities with Plan Colombia,...

November 20, 2007
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Wanted: A Marshall Plan for Campus Media

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the past few months, I've had a chance to visit various campus media groups as part of our research project on newsrooms. And as I've noted before, I'm continually surprised at how dramatically behind the times many of these groups are. Rather than closing the gap, it seems to me that these student groups are falling even further behind. There are a variety of reasons why this is happening, some of which are general, and some of which might be specific to certain organizations. But I see this is a big deal. These groups play a role that's at...

November 19, 2007
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Tapping the Potential of Geotagging

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I saw someone wearing a shirt that said "Think Globally. Act Locally. Eat Noodles." The noodles part still confuses me, but I think the rest of the message does a really good job of summarizing what I want digital media to facilitate. It seems that the key to bringing local into the inherently non-physical Internet is Geotagging and geographic interfaces. These technologies open up some innovative ways to present stories, but before looking at this idea more closely I'm going to describe the current situation from the perspective of a 21 year old media consumer in the hopes that it will illustrate the need that I'm trying to address.

November 15, 2007
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Thirteen Beat Reporters to Build Social Networks

Plain Dealer Should Deal Openly with Blog Ethics

Two weeks ago I said at Idea Lab that NewAssignment.Net's third major project--after Assignment Zero and OffTheBus.Net--will be Beatblogging.org. My idea was to run parallel experiments to see whether "beat reporting with a social network" is a viable pro-am method in journalism-- or just an attractive concept. I said I was trying to recruit at least 12 beat reporters and get their editors on board with a simple proposition... Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a "live" social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat...

November 14, 2007
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Bursting the Social Bubble and Getting Outside Your Sphere

By now you may have heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer featuring four voices from the ranks of local bloggers: two left, two right. They were paid as freelance contributors. Here's the way the "reader representative," Ted Diadiun, described the meltdown. It began when Rep. Steve LaTourette, a Republican Congressman, found out that one of the Wide Open bloggers, Jeff Coryell of Cleveland Heights, had contributed $100 to his opponent. LaTourette was unhappy that the newspaper would pay someone who financially supported his opponent to write political opinion. He complained to...

November 11, 2007
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by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Once again, the issue of social networks versus social bubbles has been on my mind since I attended the Online Newspaper Association. While I was there, several people either asked me directly or raised the issue of diversity in online social networks during panel discussions. I think what they were really talking about is how to burst their social bubble and actually create a social network. A network, particularly on the hyperlinked web, suggests to me a vast series of connections that naturally lead you away from your comfort zone and into the home of those you might never encounter...

November 7, 2007
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Moderating User Content in the Land of Journalism

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When people talk about the job of a moderator, they are talking about maintaining some type of standard. During a conference panel a good moderator might make sure that all the panelists get the chance to talk and keep the audience from throwing tomatoes. For YouTube it means promoting quality entertainment and keeping out the spam. But how do you maintain standards that are as high and complex as those of the journalism tradition, and how do you keep those standards in a democratic way? We have all faced these questions in one form or another, particularly when discussing the...

November 6, 2007
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Is This News? Reporting with Opinion on Plan Mexico

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What is the public to do when an important matter such as $1.4 billion of military-police funding for a neighboring country head toward Congressional rubber-stamping with little media coverage? We take what we can get. And that tends to be reporting from people who have no steady income assured for their considerable journalistic efforts. When one does reporting out of a love of and a concern for humanity, one tends bring some of one's own perspective to the task. And in part what we get appears to be what we want. Alternative sources and aggregators for points of view are...

November 4, 2007
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Free and Open Source Games

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our Technical Director, Amanda Hickman, is not a formal Idea Lab blogger, so I'm posting this on her behalf. This won't be the last you hear from her on the Idea Lab. --Gail As the Gotham Gazette prepares to launch our first Knight-funded news game, I've been thinking a lot more about their requirement that we produce our games using free and open source software. It is only fair for me to start with a couple of observations about where I'm coming from: I think that software freedom matters, a lot. As a Circuit Rider at the LINC Project I...

November 2, 2007
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Figuring Out Beat Reporting with a Social Network

Reader Comments: Send Me Your Success Stories

Below is a lightly revised version of a letter that went out last week to a number of professional news organizations--some big and famous, some small and unsung--asking if they want to participate in the figuring out. My goal is to find 12 willing beat reporters at 12 newsrooms. I have about 7 to 8 of the 12 signed up now. Interested in participating? Email me or leave a comment This is a simple project testing a single idea: Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a "live" social network connected to the beat,...

November 1, 2007
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by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am working up a post on reader comments to news stories on media sites, comments on media-hosted blogs, or media hosted online forums. At the recent Online News Association conference there was definitely a sense of turmoil surrounding reader comments online. I'd hate to see interactivity switched off due to the lack of "here is how we make it work" knowledge sharing. Those in local media are in particular asked to send in some success stories. Please comment here or privately to me - clift@publicus.net - about your success stories. Add links to examples when possible. Some questions to...

October 31, 2007
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Report from Digital Hollywood Confab

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When my book Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation came out in 2005, the Hollywood studios were still doing everything in their power to resist the onrushing wave of the personal media revolution. These days, it's a far different story. Hulu, the online video portal backed by NBC and News Corp., is about to launch, and talk in the hallways at Digital Hollywood this week is all about how to embrace our digital destinies. Talk during the panels is not about how to build a better Facebook but how to build a widget that gains traction on Facebook. Will...

October 31, 2007
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Reuters' Mobile Journalism the Wave of Future?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Reuters has been experimenting with mobile journalism, testing out a way for reporters to file stories from the field using videophones. The news service has given reporters a Mobile Journalism Toolkit, including a Nokia N95, a fold-up keyboard and directional microphones. The idea is that reporters could do video, photo, audio and text reports without having to use a laptop. This effort mirrors an initiative by Ganett to outfit "mojos" with gear to report in multiple media from the field. But if you peruse Reuters' special website to see the early reports from Reuters mojos, they are uneven, with blurry...

October 29, 2007
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Surprise! Students Resistant to New Media

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm currently attending the College Media Conference in Washington, D.C. And what I've been hearing from college media advisers this week confirms something that I've been seeing anecdotally while working on the Next Newsroom project at Duke. Advisers from colleges and universities of all shapes and sizes are frustrated at how resistant their students are to embrace new digital media tools and to collaborate with other media organizations on campus. At an otherwise jovial keynote on Thursday, Rob Curley, the Washington Post's digital and community guru, (see J.D. Lasica's previous post on Rob here) actually admonished the room full of...

October 26, 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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Some Goals and An Idea

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jay Rosen beat me to the punch but I'm still going to jot down seven goals that I think the perfect news system would address. I used this list as a foundation when thinking about how to utilize digital media and it is what I feel any type of aggregation system should include. Afterwards you'll find a quick summary of the idea that got me into this big mess in the first place.

October 22, 2007
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Lost Connection Opportunities...

10Questions Offers a 'Netroots' Presidential Debate

Once again, another conference that didn't fully leverage technology tools to help people connect, make new friends, and collaborate instantly and on the fly....I am speaking of this week's Online News Asscociation Conference in Toronto. Here's how it might have been different: • Conference attendees provide some basic profile information and tag key interests using one of many web based tools like Confabb.com or intronetworks.com. • Rather than having to go around the room and make introductions or describe projects, those introductions/project descriptions could have been available on the Web or on your mobile device as a session was in...

October 19, 2007
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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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Getting Down and Practical

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I love practical tips for multimedia journalists and other media makers to help us get our arms around the personal media revolution without costing us a fortune. At the session "Running a Digi-Newsroom on the Cheap," Dale Steinke of KING TV pointed to a wealth of online resources: Trumba.com is a powerful public events calendar. Put 5 lines of codes on your site and you've got a community calendar. He pointed to Videozilla, which, at $30, is an inexpensive alternative to Flash ($700) for video conversion. Want to put supertitles scrolling across the bottom of your videos? "Our IT dept...

October 19, 2007
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Community and the Next Newsroom

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a world increasingly obsessed with the virtual, I'm leading a project focused on the physical. Our aim is to imagine the ideal physical space that will serve the needs of journalism for the next 50 years. There's no shortage of folks who will immediately say, "In the future, there will be no newsrooms." Perhaps. And there are some news organizations that operate that way now. Check out the New Haven Independent which operates virtually except for an occasional staff meeting in a local coffee shop. But I'm not convinced that's the model for most groups. There's still something intangible...

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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Ready? Here's My Formula for Online News Success