Idea Lab

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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FTC's Hearings on Journalism: Why?

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As everyone knows, the nation's scam artists, monopolists and market-riggers have all gone into hibernation during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. This has given the Federal Trade Commission the breathing room it needs to intercede in an arena where its role is, at best, unclear. This week, the commission held a two-day workshop entitled How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? -- the purpose of which is "to explore how the Internet has affected journalism." There's been lots of blogging, Tweeting and journalizing about it. Some people think it was a valuable exercise. I question that, especially...

• December 3, 2009
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Why it Matters that Pierre Omidyar is Launching a News Startup

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is launching a for-profit news startup in Hawaii, where he and his family live. This is important news, and not just because he's involved. A few months ago Pierre and Randy Ching founded Peer News. Their first project was a Twitter-related experiment called Ginx, which didn't get critical mass and is being closed. Now they've announced Peer News' more important move -- a project aimed at creating the kind of local journalism that brings accountability and value to a community. Pierre, in a note on the company blog, says he and his team are launching...

• November 18, 2009
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Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A fierce and fascinating debate has broken out over the cover photo on Time magazine's April 27 print edition. Time paid a pittance for the picture -- at least a pittance next to what big magazines normally pay for cover art -- and that's made a lot of professional photographers furious. They should get over it. But they and their gifted-amateur and part-timer peers -- especially the ones capturing breaking news events -- should start agitating for some better marketplaces than the ones available today. More on that below, but first some background: The marketplace for photography in the...

• July 29, 2009
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How Law Enforcement Overreached in Lori Drew Case

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When public officials start talking about "protecting the children," watch out. Those are often code words for whacking civil liberties -- and in the Internet age, they go directly to core liberties such as free speech. A breaking-news example is the ugly case of Lori Drew, in which a federal judge is in the process of rescuing us from a prosecutor whose legal theories would have created criminals of just about everyone who ever signed up for just about anything online. The judge said last week he's overturning a jury verdict that prosecutors won by abusing the law while appealing...

• July 7, 2009
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Saving Journalism, One Idea at a Time

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

True/Slant's hybrid model (reporters find their own advertising sponsors) will save journalism! Or not. The Huffington Post is creating tomorrow's business model for journalism! Or not... Northwestern University's "computer nerds" will save journalism! Really? Ultra-cheap netbooks could save the media industry! Umm... Journalism Online LLC will save newspapers (!) by helping them charge for what they've been essentially giving away for 50 years. Could be.The iPhone will revolutionize mobile journalism! Or not. The recent panic over the demise of newspapers has led to a predictable flurry of omigod, now-what speculation. We're being treated to one hype-filled piece after another about...

• June 11, 2009
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Journalism's 3.0 Business Model(s)

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A guest blog post by Jeremy Pennycook: The Internet killed journalism. At least, as we know it. Legacy media is on a serious decline. It's hard to argue with the numbers. The often named champions of web 2.0 - Google, Facebook, Twitter - these tools didn't destroy the foundation of a business model which supported journalism and promoted a free, democratic, and open society for decades. Instead, the real culprit is a fundamental shift in how society communicates, collaborates, and disseminates information.

• May 6, 2009
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Making a Map Mash-Up with the G1 Phone and Flickr

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• April 6, 2009
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Journalism Education's Broader, Deeper Mission

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Accepting an award from Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably "the best general education that an American citizen can get" today. Perhaps he was playing to his audience, at least to a degree. Many other kinds of undergraduate degree programs could lay claim to a similar bragging rights; a strong liberal arts degree, no matter what the major, has great value. Still, there's no doubt that a journalism degree, done right, is an excellent foundation for a student's future.Even if McNeil overstated...

• February 7, 2009
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Endow Newspapers? Wrong Question

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's a debate under way in the newspaper/journalism corner of the blogosphere and Twittersphere, spurred by an op-ed commentary in the New York Times earlier this week. The piece, by Yale's chief investment officer, David Swensen, and his colleague Michael Schmidt, a Yale financial analyst, starts with a questionable idea -- that newspapers should be endowed as nonprofits in order to save them -- and goes south from there. The column begins: "The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right," Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. "And...

• January 30, 2009
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Updating the Pulitzer Prizes for the Internet Age

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The people who run the Pulitzer Prizes, undoubtedly America's premier journalism awards, have taken some useful steps into the 21st Century with new rules that welcome online-only entries. From the official rules (PDF): Entries for journalism awards must be based on material coming from a text-based United States newspaper or news organization that publishes--in print or online--at least weekly during the calendar year; that is primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories; and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles. Printed magazines and broadcast media, and their respective Web sites, are not eligible.This will open the...

• December 11, 2008
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Self-Promotion Becomes a Prerequisite for Online Journos

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Scott Rosenberg, a former editor at Salon Magazine who's writing a book on blogging, takes aim at a fact of life for people creating new media online: They have to find ways to be noticed: This is the way the Web works. If this (or any) blog were my primary focus, I'd be out there rustling up readers for it, because that's what you have to do. I think a lot of journalists still see this as a grubby, low, self-promoting activity that is beneath them. Of course, it can be done in a grubby way (and often is) --...

• August 16, 2008
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How Newspapers Can Re-Engage with Communities

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Will Bunch recently published a piece at American Journalism Review about journalists' disconnection with the communities they cover, and wondered if (how) online tools could help them reconnect. Read it all. Here are the thoughts I shared with him in full (edited to remove redundancy now that I've added links to previous postings). Q: When you worked in newspapers, especially at a larger metro with a mobile staff like the Mercury-News, did you feel that reporters and editors were well-connected to the communities that they covered -- engaged in the community and in conversations with citizens that led back to...

• August 5, 2008
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Using Flowgram to Explain and Illuminate

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• July 3, 2008
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Try Basecamp to Organize Tools for Projects

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the past several years I've been involved in a variety of projects ranging from education to startups. All have involved collaboration, and in most cases the people involved were not in a single location.One tool has risen above the others for helping keep projects running smoothly. It's called Basecamp, an online collaborative-organizing system, and it's gaining adherents all the time.Basecamp was created by the team at 37signals, a company that offers a suite of Web-based applications aimed at helping you get things done. 37signals is also the crew behind Ruby on Rails, an open-source Web development framework that has...

• July 2, 2008
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Finding a Good Domain Name

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Are all the good Internet domain names already owned by someone? No -- only the obvious ones are taken. Every new enterprise, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, needs a domain name -- the identifier that shows up in a brower's address field. For example, the MediaShift Idea Lab blog lives inside the Public Broadcasting Service's pbs.org domain. The absolutely perfect name for your new project or company, or at least the simplest one, may well be owned by someone else. In fact, it probably is. The odds are definitely slim that you'll get a domain name that a random person would...

• April 28, 2008
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Jumping Back on the Entrepreneurial Horse

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The irony was deliberate when Steve Outing and Steve Kearsley soft-launched their new online comic strip, techGRL, a week ago today. It's a humor site, yes, but the goal -- "not just a comic strip, but also an online community" -- was no April Fools joke.Reinventing comics online is an expanding arena. Mark Fiore and other talented folks have been blazing digital paths to revive a once-tired form. Adding online community is a natural extension of going digital.Before I continue, several disclosures: Steve Outing (pictured at left) is a longtime associate and friend in the online journalism world. He's written about my work, and vice...

• April 8, 2008
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Bringing Entrepreneurial Thinking to Journalism

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

(Note: I wrote this initially for PR Week magazine. What follows is slightly updated.) A cliche of business holds that good ideas are a dime a dozen; it's hard work and investment capital that turn them into businesses. As with most cliches, this one has a solid foundation of truth. But something has changed, and it has profound meaning for the future of media and communications, including journalism, entertainment and PR. Digital technologies are dramatically reducing the cost of entree for creating new products and services, and, in the case of digital media, those costs can be close to zero....

• March 7, 2008
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