Idea Lab

Meet Danielle Belton, the Woman Behind the Black Snob

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

From pop culture and politics to the personal, Danielle Belton's The Black Snob covers a lot of ground. During a recent week, Belton weighed in on everything from Mormons comparing themselves to Southern blacks during the civil rights movement, to the Michelle Obama Action figures. She didn't think much of either. Writing with a distinct voice that allows her personality to shine through, Belton rarely leaves the readers wondering what she's really thinking. "Big Sis sent me this story Friday and my head almost exploded from the sheer ignorance of it," she wrote about on the Louisiana judge who refused...

• October 17, 2009
• No comments

Blogging Positively Guide Encourages Open Conversations About HIV/AIDS

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices is pleased to announce the release of "Blogging Positively," a collection of case studies, interviews, and best practices about citizen media related to HIV/AIDS. You will be introduced to some of the leaders and veterans of the HIV-positive blogging community, and also to citizen media projects which aim to spread more awareness about the pandemic. The guide contains tips for workshop facilitators and teachers, and points readers to helpful resources for new bloggers just getting started. The Blogging Positively project began two years ago when Kenyan blogger Serina Kalande, volunteered to lead a working group to discuss how...

• August 25, 2009
• No comments

Liberian Bloggers Show Everyday Life in Monrovia

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Liberia was afforded a rare glimpse of international media attention this week when United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the capital Monrovia and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Most of the coverage focused on basic facts about Liberia. To learn more about everyday life we must turn to the country's bloggers.

• August 14, 2009
• 2 comments

Twittering Away the Jobs of Journalists

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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
• 7 comments

To Save Journalism We Need More than New Software Programs

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the recent edition of Times Magazine Matt Vilano looks at the role computer nerds can play in saving journalism. The piece details the forward looking work of the Knight Foundation and allied journalism schools like Northwestern's Medill, which have created specialized degrees in journalism for software programmers, in order to find solutions to the crisis in journalism. The assumption is that whiz kid programmers are going to develop software, like Everyblock, that will make journalism both relevant and financially solvent in the age of the Internet. While this article is definitely worth a read, and there are some important...

• June 8, 2009
• No comments

Community Journalism in Times of Economic Crisis

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Media Mobilizing Project recently started a new initiative: Community Journalism in Times of Economic Crisis. The initiative is a response to both the economic crisis, which is hitting Philadelphians hard, and the growing problems with the for-profit journalism model, which is making it difficult for local newspapers to cover stories about the struggles of everyday people during the economic downturn. The goal of this project is to report on and collect the real stories of Philadelphia and beyond on MMP's community blog, so we can begin to get a picture of the economic crisis from the ground up. Here is...

• May 28, 2009
• 1 comment

YouTube Orchestra Brings Together Musicians Around the World

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Well, it's Susan Boyle again singing "Now you say you're lonely," being not at all lonely with her 61 million YouTube viewers. That number makes the appealing British singer 61 times more popular than the YouTube Symphony Orchestra Global Mash-up musicians with their 1.1 million views. But the YouTube Symphony, a unique experiment uniting musicians from around the world, may be the one to watch (you can view the video embedded below). Ms. Boyle is singing a jazz standard and the YouTube Orchestra is playing the Internet Symphony #1 Eroica composed and conducted by the Chinese maestro Tan Dun. Both...

• May 28, 2009
• 4 comments

Rethinking Community Information Needs

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Following up on the Knight Commission's work and musings on "community information needs in a democracy", Mark glaser poses a much more targeted question which has yet to be fully addressed: "What is missing in terms of local community needs"? Most of the discussion in this area focuses on what you and might want in our own communities - things like crime reporting, new local ordinances, and hyper local happenings and events on your block. As David Sasaki points out Everyblock and Oakland Crimespotting are great tools to address these needs. But what about the folks that are not at...

• May 5, 2009
• 3 comments

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
• 4 comments

Good News as a Business Model?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In his "Are We Home Alone?" OpEd today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says "I've never talked to more people in one week who told me, "You know, I listen to the news, and I get really depressed." I feel the same way. It's something I've wondered about for years...why people are willing to accept a constant barrage of bad news? And not just recent Chicken Little reporting about the economic meltdown, but the endless reports on murders, shootings, natural disasters, bombings, etc. Not that we should ignore the real state of affairs in the world, but if you...

• March 22, 2009
• 20 comments

Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Four of Four)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Henry Jenkins: I do think that the concept of networked publics has a great deal to offer us in terms of identifying a way of addressing some of the concerns you raise here, but I also think you need to go into that realm with your eyes wide open. So much has been written about the democratic potential of an era of social networks and collective intelligence, yet the challenge you pose here is one which might push our current understanding of this potential to the breaking point. Anna Everett's Digital Diaspora: A Race For Cyberspace (2009) gives us a...

• March 9, 2009
• No comments

5 New Rising Voices Grantees in Ivory Coast, Liberia, China, Mongolia, and Yemen

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In January we received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGO's all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities - long ignored by both traditional and new media - to the conversational web. Of the 270 project proposals, the following five are most representative of the innovation, purpose and goodwill that Rising Voices aims to support. It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects.

• March 9, 2009
• 3 comments

Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Three of Four)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

(Part 1.) (Part 2.) Dayna Cunningham: Thank you for reminding me that we are talking about institutions and cultures and politics and that media are nothing more than tools within these contexts. We need social organizations, not just technology. Drat. I was hoping for a quick fix. I saw a Washington Post poll, reported on Inauguration Day, of black and white Americans asking their views on the persistence of racism in the US. Only 44% of African Americans polled said that racism is still a major problem. A majority of blacks said it was not (whites, true to past patterns,...

• March 6, 2009
• No comments

Mobile Voices and the Ethical Responsibilities of Citizen Journalism Training

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I gave a guest lecture to USC's COMM620 "research seminar on mobile phones, online community, and social change." The course is the academic component of an ambitious project called Mobile Voices, funded by the Annenberg Program on Online Communities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Nokia Research Center. It is a great example of academia, for-profit, and non-profit coming together to work on something that stands to benefit them all as well as the community they are targeting - in this case, migrant day laborers. In partnership with the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California the...

• March 5, 2009
• 2 comments

Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the most powerful sessions of my class on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement last fall came as a result of a visit from Dayna Cunningham from MIT's Community Innovators Lab shortly after the 2008 election. Cunningham challenged me and my students to think about whether new media tools and platforms might help address the erosion of the black public sphere. She argued that the structures that had sustained the black community during the Civil Rights era were collapsing without the emergence of new structures that would provide the basis for strong critiques of the operations of power...

• March 3, 2009
• 2 comments

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
• 2 comments

Pink Chaddi (Underwear) Campaign in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am posting here a blog written by Ruchika Muchhala, the online manager of Video Volunteers' website "Channel 19", ch19.org, where we post the videos made by the community producers. This is a blog she wrote for Rising Voices, where she has also recently started blogging -- courtesy of connections made in the Knight News Challenge community. I'm including it on Mediashift Idealab because the campaign she talks about -- the 'pink chaddi (underwear) campaign' -- is one of the cleverest and funniest uses of social networking and the internet I've seen in India. The campaign was started by a...

• February 17, 2009
• 1 comment

Voces Bolivianas Makes 'Web 2.0 for Everyone'

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Despite Bolivia's low internet penetration (among the lowest in Latin America at 4.4% compared to neighboring Chile's 36.1%, according to El Deber), the citizen media project and Rising Voices grantee Bolivian Voices is determined to spread Web 2.0 well beyond Bolivia's connected elite. Their latest initiative, Web 2.0 for Everyone, began Friday with a public event in Cochabamba followed by a day of intensive workshops aimed at teaching more Bolivians how to make their voices heard and gain social capital from tools like Twitter, blogs, and various photo- and video-sharing websites. Friday's public event began with an introduction to the fundamentals of Web 2.0 by Anne Arrázola. Hugo Miranda then moderated a panel on the history of Voces Bolivianas and their training workshops.

• February 1, 2009
• No comments

Philadelphia's Community News Portals

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As part of Our City Our Voices, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) in partnership with Juntos has launched a new drupal based participatory website. The Our City Our Voices portal is part of a network of community portals MMP has developed to create dynamic spaces for communities across the city to tell and share stories and get information. The aim of the network of community portals is to develop new spaces for folks disenfranchised by the digital age to have a place to speak and listen. The project entails 4 steps: 1) find and distribute low cost internet access to...

• January 30, 2009
• 1 comment

Each Culture Should Communicate News Their Way

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the "Community Video Unit" has lots of potential for great programming on arts and culture. But rural Rajasthan is a deeply conservative and feudal place, where the women are veiled, and there is very high incidence of child marriage and female foeticide. My hat goes off to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, the NGO who has set up this Community Video Unit...

• January 24, 2009
• 5 comments

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
• No comments

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
• No comments

When is a Riot a Riot?

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now almost everyone knows that a group of demonstrators protesting against the killing of a young father by a transit officer splintered off and began a wave of destruction in downtown Oakland. Mainstream media outlets called it everything from a riot to a violent protest. Some bloggers referred to it as a civil unrest, rebellion or both a riot and civil unrest. Like is true with many issues, our perception of what happened is often shaped by our fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography. Perhaps because I live in Oakland and spent some years in Detroit,...

• January 12, 2009
• 10 comments

A Holiday Gift

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Written English Version: During this holiday season, many people take the time to reconnect with their family. This is true with deaf people, too. Yet for a large number of deaf people, their families are hearing. The majority of interaction is likely to be spoken, and the deaf individual is unavoidably left out of them. This situation is certainly true for me. This situation is not to be pitied, but simply is. What this highlights to me is not the barriers inherent here, but the importance in getting through and overcoming them. How communication is utterly important in maintaining...

• December 24, 2008
• 1 comment

Rising Voices Seeks Micro-grant Proposals for Citizen Media Outreach

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Application Deadline: January 18, 2009 Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own. As the internet becomes more accessible to more people, including mobile phone users, the so-called digital divide seems to be narrowing. In its place, however, we see a participation gap in which the vast majority of...

• December 23, 2008
• 1 comment

Ethnic Hyperlocal News Network Launched in L.A.

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A project billed as the "first-ever online network of ethnic citizen journalists" was launched last week in Los Angeles. Called LA Beez, the effort is a project of New America Media with support from the Ford Foundation. It brings together six L.A.-area ethnic media outlets with the goal of providing a more diverse representation of views. The participating local publications include: Arab-American Affairs Magazine, Asian Journal, Carib Press, Impulso, Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, and the Los Angeles Watts Times. Despite a healthy appetite in general for locally relevant news and information in ethnic communities across the U.S., it will...

• December 22, 2008
• 2 comments

Language as a Bridge to Inclusion

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deaf people can participate in citizen journalism through written language tools. Given this, why do I believe that using American Sign Language videos are an essential tool to provide them access to journalism? For those who are confronted by the 'digital divide' there are often seemingly hidden elements that cause their lack of access. With any technology or system, there are built-in usability assumptions, including those that are taken for granted so much that they are not even acknowledged. For deaf people, most digital technology remains accessible to them as sound is rarely used as a primary interface element. Yet...

• December 21, 2008
• 2 comments

Study on Digital Inclusion and Civic Engagement

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hey folks, I wanted to tell you all about a study I am wrapping up with Peter Funke, Dan Berger and a few other folks in Philadelphia. We received a grant from the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC) "Necessary Knowledge for Public Sphere" initiative to study the Media Mobilizing Project(MMP) and their use of new media and digital inclusion to promote civic engagement in disenfranchised communities across Philadelphia To offer some background, MMP was launched in 2005 as a strategic initiative to partner with local organizations, facilitating grassroots media production to advance socio-economic justice through the (self) empowerment of...

• December 16, 2008
• 2 comments

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
• No comments

Answering the Info Needs of Non-Geographic Communities

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There has been much said about the idea of empowering local communities through citizen journalism. But when I view this within the context of minority communities, focusing solely on geographic communities is a mistake. Lets focus on the Deaf community as an example of this situation. The number of totally deaf people is on the order of less then 0.1 percent of the United States population. This number by far is much too little to make any real impact on society at large, and usually means that even a even a large city has a comparatively small and scattered deaf...

• December 7, 2008
• 1 comment

The Includer
Episode 12
Wisdom In Characters

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I read Charles Dickens's David Copperfield.  On my Sony PRS-505 Reader, thanks to Ricardo.  On my three-hour rides through the mountains between Sarajevo and Tuzla, thanks to the American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Also in bed, when I unwind, before I'd fall asleep, in my room in Grbavica, without Internet, thanks to God, who lets me wake up offline in every way, on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, so that I might devote my best intensity to my life's quest.  I'm discovering, and embracing, that God is alone.I write you The Includer.  As I write, perhaps you, my reader, will...

• November 28, 2008
• 8 comments

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
• 1 comment

The Includer
Episode 9
Africans Want to Chat With You

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our scheduled chats are how we bridge single tasking and multitasking. ... Fred Kayiwa of Uganda staffs our chat room on Saturdays thanks to a $100 gift from St.Benedict the African's choir. We're taking our first steps to link Chicago and Africa with our chat room.

• November 5, 2008
• No comments

The Includer
Episode 8
People Vs. Ideas

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Open culture is the interplay of open people rather than open ideas. I proposed an idea, but actually, I proposed to bring it to life. I and my team didn’t win funding to build Includers. Instead, I won the chance to blog about them at the PBS Idealab website. But what is the point of blogging about a one-year-old idea? My challenge is to link together those who care and bring to life something new. The challenge I bring to the Knight Foundation is to call for knights - for champions - for includers, rather than for ideas like the Includer.

• November 1, 2008
• 5 comments

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
• 13 comments

The Five Biggest Barriers to Online Participation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Team Crunchberry -- so-called because we're thinking about Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home of a large Quaker Oats cereal factory responsible for the nickname "City of the Five Smells" -- has emerged from its ideation process with a core idea and a target audience. The six-student team has created three personas representing 20-34-year-olds in eastern Iowa, and is brainstorming what the barriers are that keep them from participating in online conversations related to news and information. The brainstorming process, in turn, has begun to yield some very interesting ideas for improving online-news conversation systems. Like many online news sites, the sites...

• October 18, 2008
• 3 comments

The Includer
Episode 5
Hardship Letter

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Please think of him as your mother or father, or your grandmother or grandfather, who rely on your help to make sense of the mail they get, even more so when they are shocked, dismayed or confused. You are their shield, their sword, their justice, their advocate, their Includer. David and I share his hardship letter to Aurora Loan Services.

• October 18, 2008
• 2 comments

The Includer
Episode 4
Phone + USB = Brilliant

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the ability to connect to peripherals, the phone becomes an open, expandable system. People can use phones as the heart of a computer system, in a similar way to a laptop or PC. They can write emails more easily, type messages for discussion groups, enter text into web-forms, etc. The ability to download information from the web and print it out will benefit the wider community.

• October 12, 2008
• 1 comment

One Week of ReportingOn, International Style

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

One week after launching ReportingOn in a public beta that's helping me prioritize features and fix bugs in my programming, there is one big surprise: The large international turnout. The Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking media blogosphere appears to be truly excited about the idea of Twitter para periodistas, even as I try to differentiate from Twitter as fast as I can. Pablo Mancini, interactive services manager at the beautifully designed El Comercio of Lima, Peru, interviewed me by e-mail yesterday. Rodrigo Orihuela handled the translation, so if your Spanish is up to the task, you can read the exchange posted on...

• October 8, 2008
• 2 comments

The Includer
Episode 3
The Chain of Angels

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
• 3 comments

The Includer
Episode 2
Year 2

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ricardo and I agreed on four priorities, in the order below, for our work on the Includer and marginal Internet access: What would you like to share online? What is our business value? What are new technical solutions? What technical skills might we encourage?

• October 3, 2008
• 3 comments

South African Seniors Speak: Age Demands Action

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Originally published on Rising Voices. Which group is most affected by today's digital divide? The poor? Those who live in rural communities? The so-called Global South? Women? To a greater or lesser degree, they have all tended to benefit less from the advantages and opportunities afforded by the internet than, say, young men living in urban North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. But there is another demographic whose online exclusion trumps all others: the aged. According to a study by Jonathan Gardner and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, "almost three in five of the 18 to 24...

• September 29, 2008
• 1 comment

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
• 4 comments

The Includer
Episode 0
Our Hero

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

My story is real, except for the Includer, which may yet some day be real as well. The Includer is a device for Africans or anybody to read and write emails and other texts stored on their USB flash drives. Once a week they might walk the three miles or so to their Internet cafe to upload their emails and download more. The Includer is the hero of our every episode. I am simply the blogger for the Includer. I am real... so what. Yet I suppose that you matter. I will draw my characters and I will draw you...

• September 25, 2008
• 4 comments

Participatory Philanthropy, Part I

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the first of a two-part piece which examines how participatory media can help streamline and democratize philanthropy. First we'll look at how collaboritive tools can help draw out the brightest ideas and most capable project leaders. Next we will examine how participatory media can redefine the evaluation process after a project has already been funded by giving the targeted community a greater say in how the initiative has (or has not) had an impact on their lives. Imagine you have just started working for a philanthropic foundation that is about to request proposals that aim to strengthen community...

• August 29, 2008
• 1 comment

Meet the Editor Behind Sterohyped

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A little more than a year ago, when Jossip Initiatives launched Stereohyped, it tapped former print journalists Lauren Williams to be the editor for the "black interest" site, which boasts the tag line "Once you blog black, you never go back." Written with attitude, humor and at times a sense of horror at the mess we humans can make, the site provides one stop shopping for those who enjoy everything from Beyonce to Barack, from the serious to the celebrity. On any given day, Williams will post an item and links on subjects ranging from an historical overview of the...

• August 20, 2008
• 2 comments

How Different Media View Racial Controversies

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

No matter the medium, the subjects were the same. Jesse Jackson made some rather unwise remarks about Barack Obama and the New Yorker published a satirical depiction of the Obamas that many thought missed the mark. The difference came when you looked at how those stories were covered on the web compared to the "traditional mainstream" media. In the end, that was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the controversies because it was illustrative of the pros and cons of both forms of media. While some in the "mainstream" media struggled with how to characterize Jesse Jackson's off-camera and ill-advised...

• July 21, 2008
• No comments

Hero Reports Website

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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
• No comments

Participants of 'Our City Our Voices' Release First Videos

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The participants of Media Mobilizing Project and Juntos's Immigrant and Low-Wage worker video project have finished their first batch of videos. The videos tell a wide array of stories focusing on health in the community, discrimination against immigrants, the role of unions in protecting immigrant workers and community outreach. Please check out the first video Does Discrimination Exist Against Immigrant Workers

• July 16, 2008
• No comments

The Turning Tide for Online News

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the past few weeks, I've been interviewing candidates for an associate editor's position at the Daily News. Several things about that process convinced me that the tide has turned, both for our organization and for online news: I've been explicit with our candidates about the risks involved. We're a start-up, and it's possible that our grant funding will go away within a year. More than one candidate has told me that, given the state of our industry, he considers working for us LESS risky than taking a job with a daily newspaper. More than half of the applicants for...

• July 16, 2008
• 2 comments

ASL video of journalism as community building

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Note: This is an entry that I created for my website, providing some explanation to the deaf community of how I'd like to use some of the new journalism methods. Although vastly simplified due to time constraints, they provide the basic idea. I am crossposting here to provide you with both an overall view of my thinking, and an example of how I am currently attempting to post 'bilingually' in both ASL and written English. Original post here. Transcript: Signcasts is an attempt to find out how to successfully provide news to the deaf community. Of course, the deaf have...

• July 13, 2008
• No comments

Rebooting the Connection: The Deaf in the News Industry

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deaf people have an interesting relationship with the news. For over 100 years, the Deaf literally made the news. That is, a relatively large percentage of press operators have been Deaf. This just happened to be one of a few jobs where Deaf people could be hired due to the quite comfortable environment of loud, noisy presses. This gave the Deaf experience making the physical product of newspapers, which did translate into Deaf people creating their own newspapers. One of the most notable was Silent News. But even at its height, Silent News was little more than a monthly tabloid...

• July 12, 2008
• 1 comment

Polymeme Diversifies the Echo Chamber

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The iPhone is released. The world stops. While surfing around on the Internet today, you would be entirely forgiven for assuming that the only news worth talking about is the release of Apple's 3G iPhone. Of course, there are plenty of other notable and interesting conversations taking place online (among them: the ethics of for-profit fundraisers, a Danish island's march toward energy independence, and how English is "evolving into a language we may not even understand") but most of us don't know how to find those conversations as we navigate through our personal echo chamber of bookmarked websites, subscribed RSS...

• July 11, 2008
• 2 comments

Is a CNN For the Base of the Pyramid Possible?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we and our NGO partners initiate community members--young men and women from the slums and villages of India--into their new full-time jobs as 'Community Video Producers,' we often start the training sessions by drawing a triangle on the board. 'This pyramid,' the Video Trainer says, 'represents the global media.' The Producers then divide up the triangle into different layers--the nightly news programs at the top. Then, going down, CNN. Then India's Murdoch-owned English language stations. Then India's regional language private news stations, then India's national televsion, 'Doordarshan,' etc. etc. At each layer, a slightly wider percentage of the global...

• July 11, 2008
• 2 comments

Life in a Failed State Certainly Isn't Boring

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's hard to convey how important it is for those of us "left behind" to vicariously experience the richness of these networking opportunities.

• July 7, 2008
• 1 comment

Three Obstacles to a Truly Global Conversation

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine your own blogging community for just a second. Go ahead and put yourself at the center of your personal blogosphere - those you read and those who read you on a regular basis. What does it look like? Where do they live? What languages do they speak? What are their ethnicities, interests, political leanings, sexual orientations? What religions do they practice, or for that matter, not practice? Now, imagine that community, that sphere of burning blogstars, expanding like the universe itself. Imagine that it encompasses your entire city, and keeps expanding to include every citizen of your country, and,...

• July 4, 2008
• 2 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
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Glimpsing the Worlds of Neighbors Online

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over at TheRoot.com, Kim McLarin points out the ridiculousness behind the rumor that floating "out there" exists a tape of Michelle Obama using the term "whitey." McLarin does not base her argument on the fact that a Princeton and Harvard University graduate, married to a man with the political savvy to come from behind to be the presumptive Democratic nominee, is not likely to be guilty of such a political misstep. Nor does she argue that someone who has spent decades of her life navigating the racial fault lines is not likely to step on a cultural landmine by spewing...

• July 1, 2008
• 1 comment

People-Funded Journalism Budding

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A week ago at this time a small group of journalists and new media stalwarts were at Adobe headquarters in San Francisco talking with two dozen social cause proponents (they run a marvelous little private philanthropy fund called the Full Circle Fund) about the new Spot.us initiative. David Cohn, who writes below about the interesting issue of whether audience-funded journalism would work better for beats or stories, explained the contours of his nascent project, while a consultant, journalists for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Fog City Journal, and yours truly pitched in with thoughts about where this whole citizen...

• July 1, 2008
• 1 comment

Empowering Poor Communities through Mobile

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is one vision of the mobile future aimed at one of the most (technologically) overlooked segments of the U.S. population...low income and ethnic communities. Imagine a Latino youth living in East Oakland, California - one of the toughest urban neighborhoods in America: "My name is Jose Gutierrez. I am 18 years old and live in East Oakland, off of International and 24th Streets. We don't have a computer in my house, and other than Spanish language TV and radio we get all of our information on our mobile phones on LOCOBEAT (fictional). -On my cell phone I have my...

• June 22, 2008
• 11 comments

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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Reforming Media Will Help Reform Conferences

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Journalism That Matters "The New Pamphleteers," held earlier this week in Minneapolis, every session meant horizontal communication: no one on a stage, a circle of chairs with the facilitator at the same level as anyone else. John Nichols is most certainly one of my favorite organizers of the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), going on now in Minneapolis. He visited the earlier, far smaller New Pamphleteers and represented what is wrong with the NCMR model of conference. He dropped in without having attended the rest of the New Pamphleteers, without having had the experiences all the rest of...

• June 7, 2008
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Rising Voices at the Global Voices Summit 2008

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What is the state of the global blogosphere? Where is participatory media growing the fastest? And where, for that matter, are new voices being restricted by state censorship? Is social media actually changing the electoral landscape in emerging democracies like Armenia, Kenya, and Venezuela? Has the promise of an international, barrier-free, multilingual conversation finally become reality? Most importantly, where do we go from here? How do we encourage dialog in times of heated international debate? How do we bring new voices from new communities into the universe of web 2.0? And how do we protect their rights to free speech...

• May 23, 2008
• 1 comment

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
• No comments

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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Early Adapters Don't Conform to Conventional Use

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a recent meeting, a representative from Verizon and a former BET executive were discussing the seeming contradiction between the fact that African American males were early adapters of mobile technology, yet have a very low rate of posting videos on internet sites such as BET.Com and Youtube. BET tested the waters with two experiments. One involved fashion/entertainment and the other involved politics. Neither resulted in a flurry of posts, such as the ones MTV receives when it puts out a call for videos. What makes this interesting is that by all accounts African American males are not only early...

• April 8, 2008
• 1 comment

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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Fragmentation of Media is Democratization of Media: Retaining Reach

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Oso uses a German pilot's statement that he would not have shot down the author of the Little Prince, had he known, to ask: Will Global Voices' coverage of Iranian bloggers have any influence one way or the other on a potential US invasion? It is comforting to think that it could, but realistically, I doubt it. (I'm going to project a little there and clarify that it's comforting to think it could prevent a U.S. attack- which would probably be in the form of Guernica-esque bombing, rather than a land invasion.) Oso concludes: the fragmentation of media is part...

• March 17, 2008
• 1 comment

National Awareness Days are a Cry for Help

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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Every Nonprofit Tries to Give People Information, Which is Power

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At this year's SalesForce.com Foundation gathering, "Innovation for Nonprofit Success," the recurring theme was less the SalesForce software than the broader topic of the social web.  This is to SalesForce's credit; Suzanne DiBianca, cofounder and director of the Foundation, set the tone when she introduced Holly Ross, Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, as the keynote speaker. "What I really want to talk about is power," Ross said early in her presentation.  "Because powerful people can make change." "At the heart of every nonprofit you are trying to give people information, and information is power." Ross and other presenters...

• February 20, 2008
• 8 comments

We the Media, How Have We Failed: "Re: Fwd: Who is Barack Obama?"

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is old news, I know. Various political forums mentioned the "Obama is a MUSLIM" e-mail smear campaign more than a month ago. But when I read about it, my understanding was this hatemongering and lying - or at least the lying - had been laid to rest. But then the e-mail was forwarded to me. Thoughtfully. As in, "you should know this." I trust this friend. This friend is a good person. This friend has a college degree and has read more books than most of our presidential candidates, probably. And this friend forwarded me a whole troop of...

• February 6, 2008
• 10 comments

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
• 6 comments

Congratulations to the New Rising Voices

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The inaugural group of Rising Voices citizen media outreach projects have given us new and powerful voices from communities that previously were rarely seen participating online. Last month we put out a call for new citizen media outreach proposals, of which five would be selected to join our current projects based in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia, India, and Sierra Leone. In total we received 63 project proposals from over 35 different countries. Although the quantity of applications was less than the 142 we received in July, the quality and innovation that stood out throughout all of this round's proposals made the...

• December 28, 2007
• 2 comments

Rising Women's Voices

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago I interviewed Cristina Quisbert of the Voces Bolivianas project in El Alto, Bolivia. She made the point that in Bolivia - and across much of the world - women often have less access to new technologies than their male counterparts. Furthermore, once women are empowered to use new communications technologies such as blogs and online video, they are often subject to harassment in the form of comments and unsolicited, lewd emails. At Rising Voices we don't only want to help teach under-represented communities how to make themselves heard; we also want them to feel safe and...

• December 26, 2007
• No comments

It's Our Web?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How about this for a video game? Free Speech TV has put out a short video about the current and threatened enclosure of the Internet: Disclosure: The video is produced by Steve Anderson, whose COA News is a client of Agaric Design Collective. Some surprising background on the current extent of concentration and tracking supplements the video. Ironically, it comes off a little like an ad for the FreeSpeech.org community, but I strongly agree with the premise of online spaces under the control of regular folks, meaning notably open source free software and not legally owned by corporate stockholders. I...

• December 6, 2007
• 2 comments

When Mobile Media Becomes Political

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MobileActive.org posted an interesting interview with "Artivist" Ricardo Dominguez, who is working on a locative media project designed to assist immigrants crossing the border to the U.S. from Mexico. His work-in-progress concept, called the Transborder Immigrant Tool, leverages GPS enabled cell phones to aid in the safe passage of desert border crossers. "The device seeks to reduce the number of deaths along the border by helping immigrants locate resources such as water caches and safety beacons." Not only is the tool seemingly well designed (read below) for the population it targets, but it seems relevant for remote and wilderness emergency...

• November 23, 2007
• 2 comments

Bursting the Social Bubble and Getting Outside Your Sphere

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
• No comments