Idea Lab

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
• 3 comments

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
• 8 comments

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
• 5 comments

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
• 1 comment

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
• 1 comment

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
• 3 comments

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
• 1 comment

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
• 1 comment