Idea Lab

Trust Me: Credibility Is the Future of Journalism

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My colleague Matt Stempeck said it best: "Dan, I know that your life has been a tornado wrapped in a hurricane wrapped up in a whole box of tsunamis this week, but you really need to start wearing pants to work." It turns out only part of that quote is accurate, but you'll never know which one for sure! This is why, before I can graduate from MIT, I have to create an automated bullshit detector. The basic premise is that we, as readers, are inherently lazy. It isn't just that we'll believe almost anything. (Remember that time in 1938...

• December 15, 2011
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ATTN-SPAN Personalizes C-SPAN Footage of Your Reps

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last month, I had the privilege of participating in the Mozilla-Knight Learning Lab. This four-week online lecture series pulled together 60 individuals interested in journalism and technology and got them to sit together watching an array of guest lecturers. The end product from each participant was a project proposal. Since it looks like I'm going to be one of the lucky ducks who gets to hack away on my proposed idea in Berlin this September, I wanted to share it here. I would love feedback, of course, but also if you know anybody who might be interested in incorporating their...

• August 30, 2011
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MIT Lesson: Change Happens Everywhere; Activists Need to Think it Through

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I attended last Thursday's afternoon plenary "Civic Media Mobilization," at the 2011 Knight Civic Media conference, expecting to hear discussion about specific activist technologies and techniques. I was also anticipating some juicy political friction between the Tea Party consultant and the immigrant law community organizer who were speaking at the event. Neither prediction came to pass. Instead I witnessed a far more situation-based analysis of what incentivizes action that concluded with a simple, summarizing message: The only thing technology can do is amplify a movement; to instigate actual change you need people on the ground. Hearing this summary launched dreams...

• June 28, 2011
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Using Technology to Aid Disaster Relief for Japan and Beyond

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The March 11 earthquake in Japan triggered a flurry of concern in the Media Lab community at MIT. The natural desire to help was amplified by the fact that the disaster had hit many of our friends close to home in a very literal sense. Most messages suggested donations to support relief organizations -- a worthy cause indeed -- but there was also a more unique reaction: A call for relief technology. It turns out that the use of digital tools in crisis situations is a concept with rich communities and plenty of solid examples. Within the Media Lab there...

• March 24, 2011
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Winning a Golden Ticket to the MIT Media Lab

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. I guess I'm old now. I started writing this post three months ago and in the blink of an eye an entire semester whizzed past my head. Or perhaps into my head would be more accurate; it's just that kind of place. I want to share a little bit about how the Lab works from a student's perspective, along with some first impressions from my first semester. It should be worthwhile for anyone interested in media labs. For everyone else I'll be sure to touch on where civic and community media...

• January 4, 2011
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Pondering Online Communities and Fluid Social Groups

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A friend once told me that if I were a superhero I would be called "The Includer." She was right, I'm usually the one trying to get more people involved in whatever is about to happen. Superhero or not, my crowd-mongering has taught me one thing: Groups are complicated. I'm sure you know what I mean. Sometimes people only feel like hanging out with the "core." Or maybe someone has decided that they like the group, but can't stand a few of its members which causes a rift. The dynamics of even a small group can drastically shift with a...

• June 9, 2010
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Designing a True Community Tool for the Online World

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last December I wrote about digital community and social media tools in a post titled, In Search of a Community That Takes 'Me' Out of Social Media. My ultimate argument was that although community tools exist, they are underpowered and unpopular compared to modern networking systems like Facebook and Twitter. That post sparked a lot of interesting comments, and it's clear that online community is something people care about. Within the comments I noticed two distinct camps: People who found the article through Facebook, and people who found the article through Twitter. Let's just say that I was surprised to...

• April 15, 2010
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How the iPad Can Save the News Industry

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Do you remember the disappointing iPad media event of 2010? You know, the one where Apple announced their magical, revolutionary device that can't run more than one application at the same time, won't have built-in videoconferencing, doesn't support Flash, and whose name sounds the same as the iPod's when spoken in Boston. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't crushed; I've never been an Apple fan-boy. My iPod Touch is gathering dust right now because I refused to cave into Apple's $10 milk-the-early-adopter patches (yes, even the one that enabled Apps). Starting today, however, things will be different. I'm joining the...

• February 9, 2010
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In Search of a Community That Takes 'Me' Out of Social Media

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As someone who aspires to be a new media expert, I don't actually use many popular social media services. I dislike Facebook, I rarely tweet, and before winning the News Challenge I had never written a blog post. It would seem like I'm downright un-hip; yet I'm a young technologist who has been communicating online for more than half of my life. Why the disparity? Simple: I care more about community than myself. I'm sure you've heard people talk about the ego-centric nature of today's social media, which tend to focus on one-to-one and one-to-many communication. Not only does the...

• December 15, 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations

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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Connecting People, Content, and Community

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the main goals of online information design is to present content in a way that allows users/readers to find what they want. Tagging, the digital extension of newspaper sections, is one technique used on just about every modern news website as a way to help users browse or search, but that isn't the only way it can be useful. Through tagging we can use computers to intelligently distribute content and enhance the media conversation. I'll take the context of a global aggregation system and go through the way I think this can be done, walking through the steps...

• May 10, 2008
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Tying it All Together

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The IdeaLab bloggers have spent four months talking about technologies, roles, and rules surrounding journalism and digital media. Now it's time to take some of the insights from those posts and design a system that will allow citizens and journalists alike to inform the media conversation, connect with their communities, and democratically drive the social agenda. I'll give an overview of one possible system here; over the next few weeks I'll explain each piece of it in more detail. System Elements Geotagging - by tagging content to physical location it is possible to personalize it without losing the benefits of...

• April 27, 2008
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Journalists, Citizens, and the Media Conversation

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my first post to this blog I said that the professional/citizen journalist debate was a "topic best left for another day." It seems that the time has finally come for me to put my two cents out there, and I'll be doing it by exploring what it means to be a journalist and a citizen in this digital world. Ultimately, though, I hope to convince everyone that although it may seem difficult, there doesn't have to be a tradeoff between quality and democracy: we can have it all.

• April 12, 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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Community Organization with Digital Tools

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I took a digital-communication-oriented glance at the war on Scientology being led by the nontraditional online group called Anonymous. I'm not exactly writing a part 2, but I want to start a follow-up discussion on a few of the comments made and questions posed by Anonymous about how digital media affects the dynamics of community organization. That being said, if you haven't had the chance to browse the comments of that post it's probably worthwhile. I have mentioned in the past that I want to see digital media facilitate local impact; to do that well we need to...

• March 1, 2008
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Anonymous vs. Scientology: A Case Study of Digital Media

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

So far I have avoided bringing up specific events and breaking stories here even when they might illustrate relevant uses of digital media. The reason for this is that I'm not really a reporter, but I've been watching something play out over the Internet and it is just too interesting to pass up. I'm talking about the recently declared and currently unfolding "War on Scientology" that is being led by an online group called "Anonymous." It is a really fascinating case study of how current technologies and information dissemination via digital media can snowball into something that actually results in...

• February 15, 2008
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Physical Location is Different from Physical Community

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I applied to the News Challenge last year there was a guideline that all proposals had to somehow further the way digital media was used to assist a "specific physical area". This is actually why my friend Ian Anderson mentioned GPS during our brainstorming session, which led right over to Geotagging. The funny thing is that we had actually misinterpreted the entire situation - we took "specific physical area" to mean "specific physical community" - yet our solution still fulfilled the requirements of the News Challenge. This post is about my suspicion that although Geotagging does connect information to...

• January 30, 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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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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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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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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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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Navigating World News With a Wii

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Most of you have probably heard of the Nintendo Wii, an increasingly popular video game system that features motion controls. Some of you may have even played it. Part of the reason I'm mentioning it here is because I'm a dedicated Nintendo fan, but the real motive is a very interesting (and free) feature that I haven't heard much talk about: the News Channel.

• October 30, 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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Deep Thought Strikes Again

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last year I sat down to brainstorm with my friend Ian Anderson in hopes that we could chip away at the question: "What is the Perfect News System?" An hour and a half later we had a nice list of what we felt such a system would have along with a few vague ideas about how to implement it all. Over the next few months that list and those ideas were fleshed out into a winning News Challenge proposal. Was the resulting system design actually perfect? Nope! If it was I would probably be programming right now, but I tell...

• October 16, 2007
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An "Outsider's" Perspective

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I found out that I won the "First Annual News Challenge" I wasn't sitting in an editor's office or getting ready to talk at a conference about new media - I was in my dorm room trying to decide whether or not I wanted to order a pizza for dinner. All of a sudden I was plopped at the forefront of an industry near the brink of some incredibly exciting technological innovations armed with nothing more than a big idea, a few complaints, and my Millennial demographic.

• October 14, 2007
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