Idea Lab

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
• 5 comments

New Tools For Journalists From TechCrunch 50

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Earlier this week, I spent two days at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. The conference organizers pick 50 web companies who officially launch at the conference. The overall group was pretty mixed, but a few start-ups offer interesting services or ideas that might be of interest to folks thinking about the future of news and information. Here's a selection: Citysourced: The company has a platform for "citizens to identify civic issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to City Hall for quick resolution." They are launching soon with a project with the city of...

• September 17, 2009
• 3 comments

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
• 1 comment

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
• 19 comments

News Ecosystem Demands Collaboration, Not Us vs. Them Mentality

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
• 8 comments

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
• 13 comments

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
• 8 comments

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
• 5 comments

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
• No comments

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
• No comments

Innovations in Storytelling: Using Comics for Journalism

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• September 25, 2008
• 1 comment

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
• 5 comments

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
• 11 comments

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
• 13 comments

The Next Newsroom in Second life

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• July 7, 2008
• 4 comments

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
• No comments

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
• No comments

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
• 2 comments

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
• No comments

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
• 17 comments

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
• No comments

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
• 1 comment

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
• No comments

A Crisis in College Media?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Anyone interested in the challenges facing college media, especially independent college media, should check out a series that ran this week in The Daily Bruin, UCLA's independent student newspaper. There are three stories posted so far, including one that features The Chronicle Duke University, and its editor David Graham: "We were seeing all of the dire predictions about the future: We have to go online, do multimedia, blog, do video," said The Chronicle's Editor-in-Chief David Graham. "Those who are interested in journalism as a career realized we had to be pragmatic and be aware of this." But: But until the...

• January 24, 2008
• 1 comment

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
• No comments

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
• No comments

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
• 1 comment

A Fresh Start

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I could begin by reciting in mind-numbing detail my experience running The Next Newsroom Project. There have frustrations (many); there have been moments of despair (a few); there has been progress (some); there have been unexpected discoveries (lots). But this blog is just getting started, and there will be plenty of time for those stories. For the moment, you can visit our project site for the skinny. Instead, I'd like my first post here to sound a note that's far more hopeful, if not exactly profound: I feel optimistic about the future. And that, more than anything, is the most...

• October 14, 2007
• No comments