Idea Lab

The Front Line of the U.S. Censorship Battle Is Behind Bars

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A longer version of this post first appeared on MIT's Center for Civic Media blog. In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, editor and co-founder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN. PLN operates in a unique media environment, where the very act of distributing a magazine to their customers might first require winning a lawsuit. You see, their primary audience is made up of prisoners themselves. Prison Legal...

• January 27, 2012
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Knight Lab to Help Illinois Publishers Cover Congressional Primaries

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When it comes to the mission of journalism, it's hard to imagine any function more fundamental than providing people with the information they need to choose their elected representatives. That's why the first major initiative of the Knight News Innovation Laboratory, announced this week, will focus on coverage of the March 20 congressional primary elections in Illinois. There are 25 contested primaries in Illinois' 18 congressional districts, the first elections under newly drawn district boundaries. As a result of the decennial redistricting process, many people will be choosing among candidates they know little about. Many of the districts are huge,...

• January 25, 2012
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How We Created a Startup Culture at ASU's Cronkite School

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

It was a few days before the end of the fall 2011 semester, and a friend at a small southern university was bemoaning the lack of innovative spirit among her students. She'd built in an entrepreneurial module into her class, but only a small percentage of the students took the bait to even try to come up with a business idea. By contrast, on that very same day, my office was buzzing with students seemingly in no hurry to pack up for the holidays and head home. And, interestingly, only one of them was my actual student. One was a...

• January 3, 2012
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Journalism in the Open: Are Our Systems for Learning Making the Grade?

by Dan Sinker

This week on MediaShift, we're exploring the moving target that is teaching journalism. Stay tuned as we offer tips, tools and insights on educating tomorrow's journalists. "Beyond J-School 2011" is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers an intensive, cutting edge, three semester Master of Arts in Journalism; a unique one semester Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism; and the CUNY J-Camp series of Continuing Professional Development workshops focused on emerging trends and skill sets in the industry. I had a brief exchange on Twitter recently with ProPublica's Scott Klein about how high school poets end up as...

• November 14, 2011
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Knight Foundation Extends Medill Journalism Scholarships for Programmers

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Four and a half years ago, Northwestern University and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a novel program: scholarships for people with computer programming experience to study journalism in the Medill School's master's program. It was such a sufficiently unusual idea that it got the attention of BoingBoing, one of the most popular tech/culture blogs, which ran a short item under the headline, "Turn coders into journalists (hint: add spellcheck, subtract Skittles)." Today, the idea that journalism needs more software developers is mainstream. And that's why Medill and the Knight Foundation are announcing an extension of the...

• November 10, 2011
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TileMill Helps Activists Make Maps in Pakistan, Afghanistan

by Eric Gundersen
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week I'm at Innovation Lab Pakistan, helping train journalists and media activists from Pakistan and Afghanistan on how to better leverage technology in their stories and media advocacy. We've blogged before about how maps can quickly tell the story behind complex issues like the famine in the Horn of Africa and violence against journalists in Afghanistan, and it's thrilling to be working with media folks directly and helping them learn how to do this themselves. Specifically, I'm teaching folks how to use our open-source map-making tool TileMill, an easy-to-use toolkit for designing custom online maps with any available dataset....

• October 27, 2011
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How to Produce Groundbreaking Journalism on the Cheap

by Victoria Fine
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at The Tiziano Project were shocked and honored last week to be named as finalists for the 2011 Online Journalism Awards in the categories of General Excellence in Online Journalism - Micro Site and Community Collaboration. The Tiziano Project provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to report their stories and improve their lives. We're nominated for our citizen journalism site, 360 | Kurdistan, a project that was produced on a shoestring budget, with a group of incredibly talented volunteers. When I say shoestring, I mean it -- during...

• September 7, 2011
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Zeega Enables Communities to Create Interactive Documentaries, New Forms of Storytelling

by Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at Zeega want to enable anyone to create interactive documentaries and invent new forms of storytelling. For inspiration, we've looked to a figure who challenged the documentary form right when radio and film were being invented a century ago: Dziga Vertov. Best known for the remarkable film "Man with a Movie Camera," Vertov also created the first newsreel program in Russia, each episode a new experiment. This was a time when people were thinking about displaying news and telling stories in totally new forms, like rolling out a camera on a horse and buggy in the town center and...

• August 24, 2011
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Mobile Tech Brings Hope to Children in Zimbabwe

by Tina Rolfe
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Zimbabwe, it's common for people to receive information over their mobile phones rather than using email or the Internet. That's why Kubatana, a non-profit that aims to improve the accessibility of human rights and civic information in Zimbabwe, teamed up with Freedom Fone to broaden access to information about Operation of Hope. Freedom Fone provides a voice database with which users can access news and public-interest information via land, mobile or internet phones. In August, Operation of Hope arrived in Harare, Zimbabwe. Operation of Hope is an American volunteer surgical team that travels to developing countries each year to...

• August 19, 2011
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Public Lab Helps Communities Do 'Civic Science' Investigations

by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently, a resident of Plaquemines Parish, La., made a striking comment to me about the importance of local involvement and knowledge in post-disaster projects: Listen to the people that have been down here, lived here, fished here, and camped here their whole entire lives and even their parents' lives, for generations. Because they know how these waters are, they know how the tides come and go, they know how the storms affect this area, they provide a lot of valuable information and a lot of valuable ways that people can accomplish what they want to do without destroying the things...

• August 17, 2011
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With The Tiziano Project, Citizen Media Evolves

by Jon Vidar
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2006, the phrase "community journalism" was exploding as a possible savior for the journalism industry (similar to the much-hyped hyper-local journalism today). Somewhere along the way, however, the concept got washed over by a sea of organizations simply distributing Flip Video cameras and expecting amazing content. Who needed a journalism degree? Promoting local voices is important, and it's easier than ever to have those views be heard. However, "community journalism" has another important word in the phrase -- journalism. The Tiziano Project provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to...

• August 15, 2011
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The Frightening, Real-World Strength of Channel 4's 'Sweatshop' Game

by Simon Ferrari
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sweatshop is a new browser game, developed by Littleloud for Channel 4 Education, in which players fill the role of a factory floor manager in a developing nation. Taking design cues from the tower defense genre, the game tasks you with placing skilled workers and child laborers along a conveyor belt. It's also one of the most compelling and effective political games I've seen in recent years. Orders for different kinds of garments -- including hats, shirts, bags and shoes -- come down the line, and laborers assemble these products at varying speeds according to their specialty (or lack...

• July 27, 2011
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Prototypes, Visualizations Take Shape in Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab

by Cody Shotwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today marks the end of the second week of the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab, an experiment in which 63 "mad scientists" with ideas for how to improve digital storytelling have been thrown together in a common digital space to learn and refine those digital ideas. In the first week, we heard lab interface designer Aza Raskin speak about the power of the prototype; Storify co-founder Burt Herman offered up the ingredients of a successful news startup; and New York Times graphics editor Amanda Cox demonstrated the power of data and visualizations. In the second week, Chris Heilmann, Mozilla's international developer evangelist,...

• July 25, 2011
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At MIT Knight Confab, Public Activism Looms Large

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The smell of public activism wafted across this year's Knight Civic Media conference at MIT. Mohammed Nanabhay from Al Jazeera English (AJE) spoke about how Al Jazeera covered the Egyptian revolution. Political consultant Chris Faulkner spoke about Tea Party activism; Yesenia Sanchez, an organizer for the P.A.S.O./Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, talked about the "Undocumented, Unafraid and Unapologetic" campaign; NPR's Andy Carvin spoke about curating and verifying tweets from Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab Spring; and Baratunde Thurston, digital director of The Onion, gave a tremendous riff about his own -- and his mother's --...

• June 30, 2011
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Ushahidi's Online Toolbox Helps People Understand the Service

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

[Post written by Melissa Tully and Jennifer Chan. This post is the third in a series of blog posts documenting a 9-month Ushahidi evaluation project in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative supported by the Knight Foundation.] We have made great progress on the Ushahidi Kenya evaluation. Jennifer has been back at the iHub continuing to build the 3-part assessment and self-evaluation tool. The goal of this toolbox is to help interested organizations learn about the Ushahidi platform using a web-based interactive tool. There's also a low bandwidth and no bandwidth option as detailed in our earlier post. In Nairobi,...

• April 7, 2011
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Female Entrepreneurs Hit Glass Ceiling for VC Funding

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Journalism is dead! Long live journalism! And so it goes as we continue on through the process of Schumpeter's gale of creative destruction. With pay walls that come and go and come again (or hacked with four lines of code) and linkbacks ever so briefly taking it on the chin, how is it that we continue to misunderstand the business of the news? We've got to get long past the "what, me tweet?" debate and must move on to a diversity of news-telling technologies that serve communities across the globe. News needs new monetization models; to get there, we must...

• March 23, 2011
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Inside Shelbyville Multimedia's Ambitious Immigration Project

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Shelbyville project kicks off with a series of "Welcoming" videos Chances are you haven't yet heard of Shelbyville, a small rural community in Tennessee. If not, then you're probably also unaware of the upcoming "Welcome to Shelbyville" documentary or the online project that is forging a pilot, or prototype, for communities to tell and share their own stories. So let me share my initial impressions of this remarkable, ambitious effort. Last Monday I was lucky enough to be a part of a "digital brain trust" of 20 progressive media and non-profit representatives at the Bay Area Video Coalition headquarters....

• March 21, 2011
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MIT Produces a String of Civic Media Success Stories

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we wind the way toward the end of our four year grant, I thought it would be nice to describe some of what we've learned at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media (C4). In the coming weeks, I will call on a few of our researchers to offer similar blog reflections on our unique blend of communities, information, and action. First, though, I want to describe some of the exciting project highlights from the last few weeks. Because C4 is a multi-disciplinary institution, different projects end up affecting different audiences, so I wanted to put them all in one...

• March 14, 2011
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VoIP Drupal Kicks Off at Drupalcon

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Voip Drupal, a plugin that allow full interaction between Drupal CMS and phones.

• March 13, 2011
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Churnalism.com Reveals Press Release Copy in News Stories

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Editors' Note: Martin Moore is the director of the Media Standards Trust, which recently launched Churnalism.com -- a website that helps the public distinguish journalism from "churnalism," a news article that is published as journalism, but is essentially a press release without much added. Two weeks in, and the public response to Churnalism.com has been fantastic. Since we launched the site on February 23, we have had 50,000 unique visitors, over 330,000 page impressions, and hundreds of press releases pasted in and saved. According to Google Analytics the site has been visited by people in 134 countries. People have tracked...

• March 9, 2011
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The Inside Story of the Knight News Innovation Lab

by Vincent Stehle

Editors' note: This is a guest post by Knight Foundation consultant Vincent Stehle. His full bio is included at the end of the piece. In late 2009, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation invited me to explore the creation of one or more innovation labs for the improvement and promotion of digital media tools for local media. At the time, I had just departed from the Surdna Foundation, where I was program director for nonprofit sector support. In that capacity, I was fortunate to be able to help with innovative projects in media and technology, like the Public...

• March 7, 2011
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Knight News Innovation Lab Seeks Executive Director

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight News Innovation Laboratory at Northwestern University, whose mission is to "accelerate media innovation" in the Chicago region and beyond, is seeking an executive director. The lab, supported by a four-year, $4.2 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is part of the Medill-McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism. When the grant was announced last month, Eric Newton, vice president of Knight's journalism programs, described it as a "pioneering partnership between a school of journalism and a school of engineering." The executive director will oversee the Lab's operations and staff -- which...

• March 7, 2011
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3 Ways to Expand the News Ecosystem

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spot.Us founder David Cohn has convened a virtual carnival: He's posing monthly questions that he'd like to see journalists take a stab at answering. The latest: how do we diversify the news ecosystem? He put it differently -- "Considering your unique circumstances, what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?" -- but I'm pretty sure the end goal is a greater diversity of information and expanded news ecosystem. What can I do? Work to make document-based investigative reporting a little easier and a little more transparent. That's what DocumentCloud is all about. One thing we can...

• February 23, 2011
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MIT's Civic Media Session Explores Data in Cities

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

With a redoubled focus on the community in the civic media community, the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched a new series last week. These relaxed, informal conversations about civic media featured ground-level practitioners, activists, hackers, and local leaders. The first session, "Bustling with Information: Cities, Code, and Civics," brought good friends Nick Grossman, Nigel Jacob, and Max Ogden to our Cambridge campus. As you can see from the video clips below, these sessions are unique opportunities to talk about the amazing work that goes on in this sphere, intriguingly out of earshot...

• February 18, 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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Introducing Sourcerer: A Context Management System

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you want to follow the news, the web has a lot to offer: a wide variety of information sources, powerful search tools, and no shortage of sites where people can voice their opinions. At the same time, though, the web can be overwhelming. Hundreds of links turn up in a Google search. Relevant information can be scattered across dozens of sites. Online conversations often generate more heat than light. And if you have a question about a news topic, it's hard to find the answer. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a website that made it easier to...

• December 15, 2010
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Why Design is So Important for Journalism Projects

by Cody Shotwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

As this year's batch of News Challenge applicants hurriedly slid those last-minute applications under Knight's door, the SeedSpeak team and its technology partner Gate6 were busy prepping a very limited sneak peek of the SeedSpeak website. Please stop by and show us love by giving us your contact information; we'll use it solely for the nefarious purpose of letting you know when the fully functional version is running, which should be very soon! After that, why not follow us and give us a quick Like on Facebook? We are excitedly bracing ourselves for all of you to explore, evaluate and...

• December 3, 2010
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Medill Students: Audience Research Should Drive Hyperlocal Revenue Strategy

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the Block By Block "community news summit" in September, operators of locally focused websites came together to share what they knew and learn from their peers. Almost all of them were looking for advice on how to support their sites financially. Here's a start: "Sustaining Hyperlocal News: An Approach to Studying Local Business Markets," a new report from a team of master's students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The report is the first output -- with more to come -- from this term's "innovation project" class. "To become financially sustainable, hyperlocal publishers need to make...

• December 1, 2010
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Scholarship winner wants to help media "explore new digital revenue models"

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When a Knight News Challenge grant made it possible to award journalism scholarships to people with backgrounds in computer science, no one -- not even the first scholarship applicants -- knew what career opportunities would be available to "programmer-journalists." Five Knight scholars will graduate from Medill in December. Here's the second of a series of posts describing them and their career goals and plans. Other profiles: Geoffrey Hing. Jesse Young has worked for two Internet startups in the Bay Area, but he came to Medill in part because of his love for magazines -- the printed kind. He's particularly interested...

• November 23, 2010
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Graduating Programmer-Journalist Wants to Help Underserved Communities

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When a Knight News Challenge grant made it possible to award journalism scholarships to people with backgrounds in computer science, no one -- not even the first scholarship applicants -- knew what career opportunities would be available to "programmer-journalists." One of the first two Knight scholars wrote a guest post for Idea Lab suggesting eight different career paths for people who, as I like to put it, are bilingual in journalism and technology. Five Knight scholars will graduate from Medill in December.  Here's the first of a series of posts describing them and their career goals and plans. Geoffrey Hing's...

• November 22, 2010
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Student Team -- Including Five "Programmer-Journalists" -- Seeks Hyperlocal Solutions

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In December 2008, a class of Northwestern University journalism master's students -- including two Knight "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners -- unveiled a prototype news Web site called News Mixer. The site, one of the first to integrate Facebook Connect as a system for identity management, got a fair amount of attention for its novel approaches to user interaction around local news. Almost two years later, another team of students from Northwestern's Medill School is hard at work in another "innovation project" class. Once again, the class focus is on local news and information. And once again the class includes Knight scholars...

• October 13, 2010
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Local News Needs 'Bottom Up' Structure to Survive

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week Orkney Today announced it was closing. The paper, which served the small islands of Orkney just off the Scottish coast, was -- like countless other local papers -- battling against declining circulation and disappearing ad revenues. "Orkney Media Group management and the newspaper's excellent staff have tried a number of initiatives to reverse the fortunes of the newspaper," the paper reported, "but to no avail." If the news industry as a whole isn't exactly the picture of good health, local news is in the emergency room. News problems at a national level -- falls in circulation, and collapse...

• September 27, 2010
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How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently attended the Walkley Media Conference in Sydney, Australia. It is run by the Walkley Foundation, a very interesting outfit that I'm learning more and more about. The Foundation aims to encourage professional and ethical journalism in Australia, and they run the country's main media awards. They also publish the the Walkley Magazine every two months, which anyone interested in journalism should read. The conference had a lot of great speakers and led off with Peter Fray, the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, who spoke about Who moved my pyramid?. Speakers from the U.S. included John Nichols, Washington...

• August 18, 2010
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Programmer-Journalists Apply Talents to News21 Multimedia Project

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Manya Gupta and Andrew Paley are the first Knight "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners to participate in the News21 multimedia reporting project, an initiative in its fifth year that engages some of the nation's top journalism master's students. The Northwestern University team that Manya and Andrew are part of is focusing on young urban Hispanics and "how they are transforming American politics, media and education now and will continue to do so over the coming decades" said Steve Duke, director of Northwestern's project and associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism. Gupta, Paley and their teammate Kennedy Elliott are developing the...

• August 11, 2010
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How News Organizations Should Prepare for Data Dumps

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Soon every news organization will have its own "bunker" -- a darkened room where a hand-picked group of reporters hole up with a disk/memory stick/laptop of freshly opened data, some stale pizza and lots of coffee. Last year the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph secreted half a dozen reporters in a room for nine days with about 4 million records of politicians' expenses. They were hidden away even from the paper's own employees. Now we learn that reporters from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel did the same with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks somewhere in the Guardian's offices in...

• August 2, 2010
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Creating a Participatory, Open Source Map of an Entire Country

by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the past few weeks I've been working from Tbilisi, Georgia -- the other Georgia -- with a fascinating organization called OpenMapsCaucasus (OMC for short), which has been hard at work creating the first participatory, public domain road map of an entire country. Created by JumpStart International, and building on previous mapping work in the West Bank and Gaza, OMC employs dozens of GPS-wielding mappers who work in teams across Georgia to collect, process and publish map data. The OMC office in Tbilisi is abuzz with tech-savvy students, GIS wizards, and a fun-loving and coffee-fueled atmosphere. The sheer amount...

• July 30, 2010
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Serving as Media Innovator in Residence at University of Nebraska

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Flying over Lincoln, Nebraska, aboard a Delta jet, I peered down at the gently rolling meadows, farmlands and the statue on the peak of the high-rise state capitol, which is situated the heart of this cute town. The state capitol tower, a historic landmark, is one of the few places in the United States where all three branches of government are housed in one building.

• June 30, 2010
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Four More "Programmer-Journalists" Reach Halfway Point

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ever since the first Knight "programmer-journalist" scholars enrolled in the journalism master's program at the Medill School, I have checked in with them around the midway point -- and taken the opportunity to introduce them to the Idealab audience. As we mark the end of Medill's spring quarter, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our largest cohort of Knight scholars ever: Geoffrey Hing, Steven Melendez, Shane Shifflett and Jesse Young. Including Manya Gupta and Andrew Paley, who enrolled before these four, we now have six programmer-journalist scholarship winners here at the same time. All six are accompanying me this...

• June 16, 2010
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Fifth "Programmer-Journalist" Helps Develop Visualization Tool for Census Data

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There is probably no government data used more by journalists -- and non-journalists -- than the trove of population and demographic information collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. But while the bureau has kept improving its tools for online data access, it's still a challenge for someone not well-versed in the workings of the census to find the most useful information -- let alone identify ideas for a journalistic story. So when my colleagues and I at the Medill School of Journalism were thinking about interesting data sets that we might make more useful for journalists, the Census was an...

• June 15, 2010
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Hacks and Hackers: The Time Was Right

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"Hacks and Hackers," our young organization focused on bringing journalism and technology closer together, seems to have struck a chord. Over the weekend of May 21-23, 80 journalists and technologists in San Francisco participated in the group's first "Hacks/Hackers Unite" gathering, where they developed 12 iPad applications. Meanwhile, our "question-and-answer" site, Help.Hackshackers.com, launched less than two months ago, is becoming a thriving online community for people interested in computer programming for journalism and media applications. Here's the latest sign that Hacks and Hackers is meeting a need: the RSVP list for our first New York City event tomorrow night...

• June 1, 2010
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Programming Language for Kids Banned from Apple App Store

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The MIT News Office recently interviewed one of our colleagues at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, Mitch Resnick. Resnick is a long-time Media Lab professor best known for helping develop and deploy Scratch, a programming language for kids. But this month Apple rejected an app that would allow kids to view Scratch programs on iPhones and iPads. Resnick is his ever-reasonable self in the interview, saying that Apple doesn't allow applications that interpret or execute code and thus the Scratch app in question (which was developed by a third party) violates that policy. But it's an indication of...

• May 3, 2010
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Helium Balloons with Digital Cameras Create Grassroots Maps

by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm getting ready for day five of a two-week workshop for high schoolers at Beaver Country Day School in a suburb of Boston. The subject is my project, Grassroots Mapping, which helps teach people -- often young people -- around the world how to be activist cartographers and how to make their own maps. There's a twist, however: Instead of just marking a Google Map, or walking around with a GPS tracker, we construct simple capsules to hold a cheap digital camera, and send the whole package up on a helium balloon or a kite. The images are then...

• April 20, 2010
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Serving the Community of Programmer-Journalists: Help.HacksHackers.com

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For many years now, the NICAR-L email list has been the online home for journalists doing data analysis -- the people doing "computer-assisted reporting" or "precision journalism." Though email lists are an old technology, this one continues to thrive -- just in the past week, there have been 277 posts to the list. Beyond the numbers, I can personally testify to the importance of NICAR-L as a place to get practical problem-solving advice and to meet and interact with professional peers. When Aron Pilhofer and I proposed a "Hacks and Hackers" community -- for people doing software development relevant to...

• April 19, 2010
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Freedom Fone Promotes Information for All in Africa

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) strategies are viewed in many contemporary business circles as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. BoP refers to the 2.6 billion people who live below the $2 a day breadline and many business strategists argue that if targeted correctly, these consumers can offer businesses access to one of the fastest growing markets. Even if the price of products and services has to be reduced, profit can be made up in volume. A more neutral view of BoP strategies is that they are not simply a means to make millions. Instead, they...

• March 12, 2010
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Truly Serving the Public -- With Web Tools

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We journalists are fond of saying that journalism is constitutionally protected because of our critical role in providing information that people need to be citizens in a democracy. Which makes it all the more shameful that most newspapers -- in print and online -- have historically done such a lousy job of helping people navigate the core functionality of democracy: elections. The Chicago Tribune's Election Center, developed by the team that includes the first two programmer-journalists (whose journalism educations were financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships), is a great example of what's possible. The site provides an essential guide to...

• February 1, 2010
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Creating Community Video Entrepreneurs in Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Late last year, Stalin K., my partner in the Knight-funded project Video Volunteers, and I were seated in the video laboratory of VCU.br in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We were joined by nine of VV's new Brazilian Video Fellows. We were there to conduct a workshop about entrepreneurship in the creative field of video. The purpose of our recently-launched program in Sao Paulo is to create "video entrepreneurs," and this post is a snapshot of one of the exercises we did while we were there. The nine young people were all from favela/periphery areas of Sao Paulo, and on that day...

• January 29, 2010
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An Overview of Community Media in Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Almost undoubtedly, Brazil is the country with the largest public investment in community arts and culture. There are dozens of groups teaching video, hip-hop, graffiti, circus arts, carnival-related arts and digital media to youth from the favelas. In Rio alone, we visited five groups doing community arts, and between them we calculated there were roughly 500 kids from favelas this year alone learning video up to a semi-professional level. By contrast, when we started Video Volunteers in India, there were only two other groups in the country running permanent programs in community video. So the difference in Brazil, where we...

• January 27, 2010
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The Fascinating Innovators of Brazil Community Media

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

During our month in Brazil working on our new project VCU.br, my partner Stalin and I met with more than a dozen different community media groups. Every meeting was too short, with us starting off by explaining why we had called them and explaining our work, and then them explaining theirs, and then a brief -- too brief -- discussion about what we could do together. All the while we typed away at our laptop, eager to capture all the innovations and unique stories of the Brazilian community/alternative media innovators. Below are our meeting notes, which we hope give a...

• January 4, 2010
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Video Volunteers Launches in Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How can the disadvantaged earn a living from their creativity? Why are nearly all the "base of the pyramid" micro-businesses supported by microcredit agencies based on manual labor, or super-local activities like driving a rickshaw or running a small shop? Since much of the music we love today, or design that we see in stores, has its roots in folk traditions, why don't the rural and urban poor today earn much of a living through their creativity? This is the question Video Volunteers is asking with a new program we've launched in Brazil, called VCU.br. We're exploring how video can...

• December 16, 2009
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How Gotham Gazette Used Games as Storytelling Devices

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the launch of its energy game Switch, Gotham Gazette this fall completed a two-year Knight Foundation-funded project to create several news games about New York City policy issues. We think we produced some good games (to view and play them go here.) And we learned a lot. Most satisfyingly, we confirmed that for some issues, games -- or perhaps "policy simulations," just so you don't expect Grand Theft Auto here -- provide an informative and engaging way to tell a story. People who played our Garbage Game, for example, told us that it gave them a whole new appreciation...

• December 2, 2009
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Journalism, Technology Starting to Add Up

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in early 2008, as I headed off to a conference at Georgia Tech, I wrote a post for Idealab headlined "Computation + Technology = ?" Two recent developments suggest that we're starting to find answers to that question -- and more importantly, that there's a growing number of people trying to find these answers. Duke University has released an interesting report, and a group of journalists and technologists has begun meeting in Silicon Valley to address challenges that journalists and technologists might tackle together. The February 2008 conference at Georgia Tech, entitled "Journalism 3G: The Future of Technology in...

• November 24, 2009
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4th Programmer-Journalist Scholarship Winner Learns to 'Think Like a Journalist'

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Manya Gupta, a software engineer for telecommunications companies in her native India, is the fourth winner of a Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarship. She's now in her second quarter studying journalism at the Medill School at Northwestern University. She blogs occasionally at http://manya-myvoice.blogspot.com/. Learn some more about Manya from the following edited Q&A. Tell us about your background. I am from India. I received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from JSS Academy of Technical Education in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.. While working on projects I realized my passion for programming and decided to make it a career. So, I moved...

• November 18, 2009
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Gearing up Citizen Journalism in Grahamstown, South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Low literacy environments, and multi-lingual areas, like Grahamstown, South Africa, face particular challenges when it comes to encouraging citizen journalism. More than 80 percent of the population speaks English as a second language. While most people are able to speak and understand English, writing is not always a comfortable experience (and some are unable to read or write). That's partly why we've launched Izwi Labahlali (The Voice Of The Citizens), Grahamstown's first radio show with content that's largely produced and presented by citizen journalists and transmitted mainly in iziXhosa, the dominant local language. The show, which airs on Radio Grahamstown...

• November 16, 2009
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The New Era of Media Development, Part II

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is a telling sign that Wikipedia has no entry on media development. Rather, the search results suggest that perhaps you are looking for "ICT for development". Indeed, what is the future of media development when we're still unsure about the future of media in general? And, for that matter, where should funders invest their money to ensure that the same social benefits associated with traditional media (a sense of community, good governance, an informed citizenry) remain while journalism increasingly moves beyond broadcast, and beyond financial sustainability. In part one I looked at the history of media development, the major...

• October 25, 2009
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Machine-Generated News a Threat to Journalists? I Think Not

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Software that writes baseball game stories from box scores and play-by-play information now has a name: StatsMonkey. And it's making some journalists nervous -- needlessly. The software, the first version of which was developed this spring by a team of computer science and journalism students at Northwestern University, has evolved significantly since then. John Templon and Nick Allen (a "programmer-journalist" attending the Medill School of Journalism on a Knight News Challenge scholarship) were two of the students who worked on the initial version of the software, which has been made available on an open-source basis. John and Nick, both Medill...

• October 19, 2009
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New Citizen Journalism Newsroom Launched in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

During the massive Highway Africa conference, two Knight Foundation funded projects, the Iindaba Ziyafika ('the news is coming') Citizen Journalism newsroom and the Nika content management system, were launched. The Iindaba Ziyafika newsroom has 10 computers and the ability to download photos and content from any cellphone (both wirelessly and through the most amazing collection of cables!). This means anyone can walk in, write a story, download a photo and get it published on the Grocott's website, or in the twice weekly print edition of Grocott's Mail. You can watch this great SoundSlide show which captures the vibe and importance...

• September 24, 2009
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"Programmer-Journalist" Scholarships Yield Finalists for Online Journalism Awards

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our Knight News Challenge scholarship program to educate "programmer-journalists" at the Medill School at Northwestern University just won some significant external validation. The Online News Association yesterday announced the finalists for this year's Online Journalism Awards, and two of the finalists resulted directly from the scholarship initiative. News Mixer, the "conversations around news" site created by a team of master's students including the first two programmer-journalists, is one of four finalists for a new prize: the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism. The site is in some pretty good company; the other finalists are...

• September 1, 2009
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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
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Video Volunteers Creates a New Kind of Sustainability Using Community Video

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

"You mean to say that sending the email is free?! I don't have to pay for it?" Laxmi was amazed that there is no equivalent on the Internet to paying for a postage stamp to send a letter. The first twenty minutes of this workshop on digi-activism being held in Goa, India were over her head, but when she saw her own language, Telugu, appear on the Google.co.in search page, she jumped to attention. For the first time, Laxmi is seeing something on the Internet that she can actually read. She smiles and begins chattering away in her own language...

• August 21, 2009
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HuffPost Social News Helps Close the 'Awareness Gap'

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in December, as a team of Medill students (including the first two Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalists") was developing the News Mixer project, I wrote an IdeaLab post called "The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here." It captured my thoughts based on my experience of working with the students on the News Mixer project, which offered new approaches to news commenting driven by the capabilities of the Facebook Connect service. News Mixer was one of the first Web sites to take advantage of Facebook Connect to build an engaging social experience around news. It won praise from people interested...

• August 21, 2009
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Students Get Blogging Seminar, Digital Cameras for SochiReporter

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've just returned from helping deliver the first seminar about blogging and citizen journalism ever held in Sochi, Russia. Just weeks away from launching my Knight News Challenge project, SochiReporter.ru, I organized a seminar for third, fourth and fifth year students from the five leading Sochi-based universities. Thirty-five journalism and IT students participated in the two day seminar called "Web and Journalism: The New Trends." We received press coverage in over 30 online publications, in newspapers and from three of the city's leading TV channels. Clearly, this city, which will host the 2014 Olympic Winter Games, is ready to embrace...

• August 20, 2009
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Two Recent J-Education Conferences Show Resistance to Change

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's no intrinsic reason why organized journalism education shouldn't lead -- rather than merely reflect -- what's happening in the world of communications. Yet this passive "mirror" status cries out for transformation. Of course, not everyone sees J-schools as reflective entities. For years, editors worldwide have complained that the schools don't in fact reflect the mainstream media enough. J-teachers are blamed for a shoddy supply of new cogs to the newsroom machines. The industry's assumption has been that it knows exactly what's needed; that it's the J-schools that need changing. Educational institutions, in this view, should be service providers to...

• August 15, 2009
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Student Journalists, Technologists Collaborate on News Innovations

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eight computer science students and 11 journalism master's students -- including the third "programmer-journalist" scholarship winner, whose Medill journalism education was paid through a Knight News Challenge grant -- are putting the finishing touches on five innovative new products that combine journalism and technology. One product is a tool for working reporters, one is a new way of organizing content for mobile delivery, two leverage the growing power of Twitter and one generates baseball game accounts from box scores. All of the projects demonstrate what's possible when journalists and technologists collaborate. Details of the new concepts will start rolling out...

• June 8, 2009
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How Video Volunteers Improved Women's Rights, Sanitation in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do you teach creativity and critical thinking to people from very disadvantaged communities, with little formal education? Doing this is a major goal of Video Volunteers' work in training community producers. If organizations don't develop these training tools, the world could find itself in a situation where technology allows the poor to produce content, but the vast expressive potential this could release is still left untapped. VV gives writing exercises to community producers to help them develop their ability to think through an argument. I am sharing below two recent pieces of writing by community producers. These were written...

• June 7, 2009
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Making Uruguay's 300,000 Laptops Count - Part I

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Engineering a single laptop to serve the educational needs of young students throughout the developing world is no easy feat. Designers at MIT's Media Lab needed to keep the cost of the machine well below $200, and yet it required many of the same features that owners of traditional laptops have come to expect: a wireless internet connection, USB ports, a color display, a built-in webcam, and a processor powerful enough to record and render video files. There were also special needs to take into account: a durable case that wouldn't crack when dropped, a waterproof keyboard designed for young...

• June 3, 2009
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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
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'Hacker-Journalist' Finds Job, Seeks More Coders for Journalism

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For Brian Boyer, the circle is complete. Almost exactly two years ago, Boyer saw a posting on BoingBoing about scholarships for computer programmers interested in studying journalism. He was one of the first to apply for the "programmer-journalist" scholarships, and enrolled in the master's program at the Medill School in January 2008. In December, he was one of the first two scholarship winners to graduate. This past week, Boyer announced that he has a new job, starting soon at the Chicago Tribune. And for good measure, he published a guest post on O'Reilly Radar blog, one of the world's most...

• May 11, 2009
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Bringing Hyper-Local, Citizen-Driven News to South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Is hyper-local journalism interesting enough to engage its own audience? And is the prospect of being more "in the know," and more connected and more involved in one's community, attractive enough to inspire people to take the time out to do citizen journalism? The old adage that "all news is local" does hold a great deal of truth. News can be locally generated or outside news can be made local. The implications of any big news story - like H1N1 virus, a.k.a. swine flu - can almost always be localized to create stories about how this impacts on you, where...

• May 8, 2009
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The Bustling Tech Scene at the Russian Internet Forum

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am entering the large movie theatre hall where the conference dedicated to the social networks is just about to start. A prominent web expert is commenting on the Russian President's decision to launch a Livejournal account and the first post on the Internet development in Russia. Someone is talking about the recent You Tube Success of Susan Boyle and the hot-spot detecting WiFi sneakers invented by the Canadian designer Stefan Dukaczewski. The atmosphere is properly wired. Six panelists representing the leading Russian media outlets are about to report on how social networks are being used by their marketing departments...

• May 2, 2009
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PolitiFact Pulitzer Validates Journalism-Technology Collaborations

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If the survival of journalism depends on technology innovation, one or more of three things will have to happen: Journalists will learn technology development; Technology developers will learn journalism; Journalists and technology professionals will learn to collaborate. The Pulitzer Prize awarded last week to the St. Petersburg Times for PolitiFact, a database-powered website assessing the truth of political statements, is proof that journalists can learn computer programming. The idea behind PolitiFact came from Times reporter Bill Adair; the database and software development under the hood was built by reporter-turned-developer Matt Waite, whose job title is news technologist. The Knight News...

• April 28, 2009
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Introducing the 3rd "Programmer-Journalist"

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Nick Allen, a computer science student who got intrigued by journalism as a college senior, is the third "programmer-journalist" enrolled at the Medill School through the Knight News Challenge scholarship program. The first two (Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark) graduated in December. As he approaches his final-quarter "innovation project" class (like the one in which Brian and Ryan helped invent News Mixer), it seemed like a good time to introduce him to the Idea Lab audience. (And to re-emphasize that we still have scholarships available to our one-year journalism master's program to people with backgrounds in computer programming.) 1) Tell...

• March 23, 2009
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News [metadata] from Porto

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the IPTC worry about labelling data at source, we’re concerned with how to make sure those labels (or at least those ones that are relevant to the public) don’t get lost along the way. Which is why the Transparency Initiative – the MacArthur and Knight funded news project – and IPTC metadata standards, are so complementary.

• March 4, 2009
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Using Social Media in the Newsroom

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm working with the Poynter Institute to put together an online class for senior newspaper executives on how to use social media in the newsroom. From what I can discern, it's one of the least understood concepts in traditional media. For the Knight Digital Media Center program conducted through the Poynter, I'll likely be giving a webinar and taking part in online instruction around how journalists are already using the tools of social media. So I'd love to see some specific examples of how you're using social media (aside from blogs), or examples of how other sites are using...

• March 4, 2009
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A Cool (and Easy) Project from a 'Programmer-Journalist'

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we put together our Knight News Challenge application to offer journalism scholarships to computer programmers, the premise was that journalism needs people with the mindset of software developers. Here's one little example of why this premise was on target: ChangeTracker, a new service offered by Pro Publica and developed by Brian Boyer, who just graduated from the Medill School as one of the first two "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners. ChangeTracker is a service that "watches pages on whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov and financialstability.gov so you don't have to." It identifies changes made to any of these pages and allows people to track...

• March 3, 2009
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Social Networks for Doing Good

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Rising Voices we are getting ready to announce the newest grantee projects. We received over 270 proposals from non-profits, NGOs, and activists from around the world who want to use citizen media tools to bring new and under-represented voices to the conversational web. In addition to seeking small amounts of funding for digital cameras, internet access, and related workshop costs, many of the proposals we received also expressed a desire to connect with like-minded groups, reach new funders, and spread information about the work they are doing. Fortunately, a number of social and project-based networking platforms have arisen over...

• February 25, 2009
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Getting Ready for Testing

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Finally after a lot of project and design changes we are approaching the starting line of testing. Right now one prototype is ready to go. We just have to set up the server and upload the content. We decided that on-site testing was the best choice for our purposes. Since we are dealing with online content and games, it makes more sense to leave the subjects undisturbed in their offices and homes and give them freedom to take part in the test at their discretion. We also count on reaching a much wider user base via mailing lists. Initially we...

• February 22, 2009
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Playing the News Ready for Testing

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a lot of fits and starts, we are ready to deploy two different versions of the "Playing the News" prototype games. One uses a simulated environment that allows the user to visit various locations to interview stakeholders on the topic of the use of ethanol as fuel. The user plays the role of a legislative research assistant helping a U.S. Senator prepare for hearings on the topic. The user can visit a variety of locations and talk to auto dealer sales reps, farmers, advocacy groups for and against corn ethanol, environmentalists and others. After the user visits the locations...

• February 21, 2009
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It's 'Bring a Professor Night' for a Conversation About Journalism Education

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This Sunday, February 22, at 8 p.m. EST, it's "Bring a Professor Night" at CollegeJourn, a weekly live online chat about student media and journalism education. I spoke with Suzanne Yada today about the chat, why it's so important to bring the faculty to the table, and what she thinks they can learn from their students. Suzanne is one of the CollegeJourn moderators, and a student at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University. (Full disclosure: I'm still finishing up my graduate degree in the same department.) (Help transcribe or translate this video at dotSub.)...

• February 18, 2009
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BarCamp NewsInnovation Chicago: Join the Conversation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you've been following my posts to this blog, you know that I'm always interested in exploring ways to connect journalists and technology professionals. The Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarships are one approach. So is the idea of a "computational journalism" conference like the one held last year at Georgia Tech. (Early indications are that the second conference will be held this fall.) Here's a new opportunity: BarCamp NewsInnovation, a series of user-generated conferences focusing on the future of journalism. The next conference in the series will be held Saturday, Feb. 21, at the Medill School newsroom space in downtown...

• February 15, 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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News Mixer Options: Launch a Site, Use the Code or Be Inspired

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What's next for News Mixer? The demonstration Web site, launched in December by a team of Medill students, shows off some interesting new ideas for engaging people in online conversations around news. The site has attracted quite a bit of attention from people interested in the future of journalism, social media and new technology. More than just attention, in fact. There are now at least two separate organizations actively working with News Mixer's open-source code. One is the (Knight News Challenge-funded) Populous Project, which announced recently that it will incorporate News Mixer's functionality into the Populous open-source publishing platform for...

• February 2, 2009
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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
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Two Coders Head Off to 'Fix Journalism'

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are a lot of words I could use to describe Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, but perhaps the first one is: fearless. About 21 months ago, they heard (Ryan through a friend, Brian on Boing Boing) about a new scholarship program offering computer programmers a chance to earn a master's degree in journalism at the Medill School. Neither of them had journalism experience, and neither of them had ever considered studying journalism. But they decided to apply anyway, and as of December they became the first "programmer-journalists" (or "hacker journalists") to graduate from Medill. The vast majority of programmers...

• January 16, 2009
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News Mixer Generates Widespread Interest

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since we announced the launch of News Mixer, a Web application developed by Medill master's students to demonstrate new ways of fostering conversations around news, the site has gotten a lot of positive feedback. News Mixer is the final project for six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending Medill on Knight News Challenge scholarships. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system. The class officially ended Dec. 12, but the students and I have...

• January 5, 2009
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Interactive Journalism

by Angela Powers
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism hosted an informational meeting with local elected public officials on Wednesday, November 19, to showcase VoxPop, an interactive tool for civic engagement, developed by journalism students through the Knight News Challenge grant. The school is collaborating with the Manhattan Mercury to launch and research VoxPop. The software innovation allows area citizens to contact elected officials regarding local issues in the news. The AQ Miller School of Journalism at Kansas State University was among a consortium of universities awarded a $235,000 grant by the Knight Foundation to develop new ways and technologies that can help...

• December 18, 2008
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'News Mixer' Offers Better Engagement

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project -- six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending the Medill School on Knight News Challenge scholarships -- set out this fall to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults. Here's what they came up with: News Mixer. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system. News Mixer is already getting some positive buzz thanks to some Twittering last week after Team Crunchberry presented...

• December 16, 2008
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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
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Making News More Transparent

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With our Knight News Challenge grant we (the Media Standards Trust and Web Science Research Initiative) are exploring and developing ways in which to help the public find and assess news on the web (for which we have also received a MacArthur Foundation grant). Part of this initiative includes developing tools for making online news more transparent. What does that mean? It means enabling journalists, and people creating journalism, to embed basic information to their online news articles which helps the public establish an article's authorship and provenance (the same methodology applies to photos and video but I'll stick with...

• December 11, 2008
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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
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The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Social software -- technology that enables interactions among multiple people -- has existed for almost a half century now. (Clay Shirky, in a widely linked essay on this topic, traces the roots of social software to the PLATO system, built at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s.) I'm using the term "social software" because the more popular "social media" increasingly feels like an oxymoron. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg aren't media. Media refers to one-way communication -- like publishing or broadcasting. Today's social sites are, fundamentally, computer programs -- software that determines what users can (and can't)...

• December 2, 2008
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The Next Newsroom Proposal is Complete

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is with great pleasure that I'd like to announce that we have completed work on our newsroom proposal for The Chronicle, the independent, student-run newspaper at Duke University. The Chronicle’s board has adopted our proposal for a new home. That document will now serve as the basis for negotiations with officials at Duke University. The plan is available here: http://nextnewsroom.wikispaces.com. But first, I want to establish a little context for that document. The plan was written in collaboration with The Chronicle's board, officially known as the Duke Student Publishing Company. The proposal conforms to explicit guidelines created by the...

• November 20, 2008
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Student R&D Can Show the Way for Media

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Placeblogger, a Knight News Challenge winner from 2007, has launched a new design and announced that it is now indexing more than 3,000 "placeblogs" -- Web sites that deliver, as founder Lisa Williams puts it, "an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time ... about the lived experience of a place." The new design served to remind me -- yet again -- of how much has happened in online media in the past few years. About 4 1/2 years ago, I directed a team of Medill master's students who explored the potential of what they called "hyperlocal...

• November 17, 2008
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Whither Online Social Networks?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My "innovation project" team of master's students at the Medill School is tackling two interesting challenges: (1) improving the tools available for online interaction around news (for instance, better ways of commenting) and (2) engaging young adults in local news. They've decided to take advantage of Facebook Connect in building a news-interaction site. This means Facebook users will be able to log in using their Facebook ID, and it also means that this ID will serve as their persistent identity on the site. Read/Write Web, one of my favorite sites/blogs, posted last week about Facebook Connect. The post points out...

• November 10, 2008
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enviroVOTE: Side Project for Two Programmer-Journalists

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some more evidence that interesting things can happen when computer programmers spend some time learning (and thinking about) journalism: enviroVOTE. The site, built by "hacker journalists" Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, aggregates election results from around the country (contests for president, governor, U.S. Senate and U.S. House) through the prism of how environmentally friendly the winners are. Mark and Boyer, the first two Knight News Challenge scholarship winners, are now completing their final term in the journalism master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. The site was developed using the Django framework in what Boyer describes as a...

• November 5, 2008
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Not All Journalism Students Hip to Social Media

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Right now I'm attending a national conference in Kansas City (Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers) for student news organizations, and I must say I've been underwhelmed. There was a keynote yesterday afternoon from Rich Beckman, a professor at the University of Miami School of Communication. I think he started off strong, outlining where newspapers need to go on the Internet and mentioning the recent announcement from the Christian Science Monitor to go online only. Later in the speech (see attached YouTube video, recorded in very low light from my Flip Cam) he outlined how the Internet is changing things for...

• October 31, 2008
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How Philanthropy, Education and Industry Can Partner

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project is now officially past the halfway point, and I'm getting a clearer picture of what our student team can accomplish in the remainder of the fall quarter at the Medill School. The students' vision is coalescing around a Web site that enables young adults to interact with news and information via different types of "comment structures," which we're defining as forms of user interaction. The features in the software they are developing are: integration with Facebook (using Facebook Connect), with the following results: Users can log in using their Facebook ID's and have their Facebook identity carry...

• October 31, 2008
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Agile Programming: Good Model for Collaboration?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my experience in media companies and academia, developing or implementing new software is almost always a painful process. The people who are going to use the software can't communicate what they want, and the developers don't understand the end users' needs. The developers think the end users have unreasonable expectations, while the end users think the developers are dragging their feet. Software projects are always behind schedule, and even after completion, everyone involved is dissatisfied with the results. Such a scenario is bad enough when it plays out in the workplace. But the journalism "innovation project" I'm directing this...

• October 28, 2008
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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
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Scaling the Beanstockd Game

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Beanstockd was initially tailored to a very specific population, and as we built out the game and shared the idea with fellow entrepreneurs we received some interesting ideas and feedback that led us to consider other verticals.

• October 20, 2008
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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
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Interactive Literacy

by Mitchel Resnick
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What does it mean to be truly literate with new media? Certainly, it means more than the ability to send email and browse websites. Recent commentaries on new media literacy have emphasized the importance of the ability to analyze media critically and the ability to participate actively in online communities. Those abilities are clearly important. But I feel these commentaries haven't paid enough attention to another important aspect of new media literacy: the ability to express oneself with new media. This aspect of literacy is sorely lacking in today's society: very few people are able to express themselves fluently with...

• October 13, 2008
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Student Innovation Team Explores Needs of Young Adults

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project -- the innovation class that includes the first two Knight News Challenge programmer-journalists -- is moving forward rapidly. The six journalism master's students involved in the project started out exploring "conversations around news." As their instructor, I challenged them to build some kind of site or service that connects people to one another and to community news and information. After meeting with the staff of Gazette Communications (which, among other businesses, owns the daily newspaper and ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa), the class decided to target its work toward young adults, ages 20-35 in the Cedar...

• October 13, 2008
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Social Issue Games Get Older People Playing

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday during my bi-weekly "sarah palin" "snl" google search, I stumbled upon The Political Machine Express, a downloadable version of the popular PC game The Political Machine 2008 in which, "players take on the role of campaign manager for a US Presidential candidate." Having closely followed this year's presidential campaign melodrama, I was itching to play. The Political Machine leads the surge of educational, social issue games targeted toward anyone older than young adult. Its particular appeal lies in its focus on one of the most prominent, interesting and hot social issues now: the US presidential campaign. I (the target...

• October 8, 2008
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Medill Student Innovators Focus on Conversations Around News

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been almost a year and a half since a grant from the Knight Foundation allowed the Medill School to offer journalism master's program scholarships to experienced programmer-developers. Since then, on this Web site, I've been documenting the experience of the first two "programmer-journalists." Now things start to get interesting. For graduate students majoring in new media, Medill's one-year academic program ends with one of our "innovation project" classes. These are team-based classes in which the students are challenged to create a new digital or cross-media product. Sometimes these classes seek to apply proven technologies or business models to a...

• October 5, 2008
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Are We Ready for Citizen Journateerism?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Thanks to massive adoption of blogging and other do-it-yourself Web 2.0 tools like Twitter we have seen an explosion in citizen journalism in recent years. That goes without saying on a blog like this. But there is a related trend emerging which is perhaps not so apparent. Lets (rather clumsily) call it Citizen Journateerism. Citizen Journateerism = Citizen Journalism + Volunteerism. Basically that means ordinary folks leveraging social media tools to help people in need. I'm not talking about political or community-relevant reporting and opinioning, which is certainly a kind of volunteer community service, but about the re-purposing of citizen...

• September 28, 2008
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Open Invitation to the Alliance for Community Media Conference

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Denver Open Media is hosting the Western Regional Alliance for Community Media Conference, Oct 23-25, 2008 in Denver, CO. We will be showcasing the Drupal Modules being developed to empower user-generated media in our communities through Public Access TV stations and Community Technology Centers. The conference will be highlighting the new media technologies and efforts that allow access centers to operate on a streamlined, user-driven model. Deproduction has assembled a stellar Drupal Development team since being awarded the Knight NewsChallenge award, and they are making significant progress towards the first benchmark of our process: developing a robust set of custom...

• September 20, 2008
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Are the Info Needs of Local Communities Being Served?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy arrived in Silicon Valley to hold the first of its three planned community forums. I was asked to speak on a panel that day about "technology and innovation" but hung around for most of the day to listen to the other two panels and the wide-ranging discussion. This is timely and important work. I've spoken with numerous community leaders in Silicon Valley in recent months who are growing more anxious about what will happen to the quality of civic life if the coverage of local...

• September 15, 2008
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Youth, New Media Literacies, and Civic Engagement

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This fall, I am going to be teaching a course on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement, which is designed to help facilitate conversations across two of the projects we run through the Comparative Media Studies program: the Center for Future Civic Media, funded by the Knight Foundation as a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, and Project NML (New Media Literacies), which is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. My goal in the class is to systematically explore a rapidly expanding body of literature which deals with the ways that new forms of "participatory culture" are impacting how young people...

• September 7, 2008
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What's a Good Challenge for a J-School Innovation Class?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I noted in my last post, the first two programmer-journalists (whose journalism education was financed via scholarships from the Knight News Challenge) will be among the students enrolled in a Medill School "innovation project" class. Between now and when the class starts (Sept. 23), we have to decide what the focus of the project will be. In my experience with previous projects, the key is to come up with an interesting challenge or question for the students to explore. Right now there are two competing ideas, neither of them yet specific enough to organize the class around: Civic engagement...

• August 25, 2008
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Partner With a University to Jump-Start Innovation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dan Pacheco and Chris O'Brien wrote recently for IdeaLab about ways newspapers (or other media) can innovate successfully. One approach that wasn't mentioned (yet): partner with a university. Academic institutions are full of smart faculty members, including experts on innovation, technology, audience behavior, journalism and the business of media. Even more important, they are full of young people who are "wired" for the contemporary media world and can do amazing things if given an interesting challenge and the right amount (not too much, not too little) of coaching and direction. At the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where...

• August 15, 2008
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Visualizing the News

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Visualization tool: ManyEyes from JD Lasica on Vimeo. At the Future of Civic Media conference at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from the co-creator of Many Eyes. Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, described some of the uses for this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don't know" and "I don't recall." Here's a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and...

• July 21, 2008
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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
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Sharing the Same Space: News and Advertising

by Kimberly Sultze
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Innovation Incubators project is moving into the industry testing phase. Teams of students from seven institutions, Ithaca College, Michigan State, University of Nevada--Las Vegas, St. Michael's College, Western Kentucky, University of Kansas, and Kansas State, worked together to develop three new ideas for community journalism which will be tested in the months ahead. It's a good time to reflect on the project so far and to share one of my observations about what we've discovered during the collaboration process. One of the great challenges for the Innovation Incubator students--undergraduate and graduate alike, and from all institutions--was pitching an innovative...

• July 13, 2008
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Coder-journalist: Governments Should Open Up Their Data

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan Mark, one of the first two winners of our journalism scholarships for computer programmers, wonders why it's so hard to get usable government data. I wrapped up my second quarter of journalism school and my daily reporting class a couple of weeks ago. Learning firsthand what goes into a simple news article gave me a new-found respect for the work that's required. Making call after call, leaving messages with people who will never call you back, and then taking notes while paying attention to what somebody is saying is quite a difficult way to spend a day. The Internet...

• July 10, 2008
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Two Videos on Participatory Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I believe IdeaLab readers would benefit from a wide range of posts related to important developments taking place in the participatory media movement. With that in mind, here are two interviews that bear on that subject: The first is an 11-minute talk with Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, maker of Miro at getmiro.com. Miro's an important, rapidly maturing application that lets you watch and subscribe to millions of channels of content created by anyone with something to say (you can pull down any videos with an RSS feed, for example). You can also browse...

• July 7, 2008
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Whither Hyperlocal Mapping

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Three and a half conferences (12 hours onsite training at Google counts as the half) in three weeks has about done me in. At various times, I inevitably ask myself, "Why am I here and not at home?" But I realize why I travel to these events when the light bulb goes off. Usually it's about connecting the dots in a way that with 20-20 hindsight seems like stating the obvious. I posted a blog in early May on the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on mapping and social activism; I noted that having a purpose (outside of making money and/or...

• July 6, 2008
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$100 Laptop Redesign

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A new laptop design for the one-laptop-per-child project is being worked out. They have removed the keyboard and replaced it by a touch screen. This turns into a touch sensitive keyboard during normal operation, and the laptop can be used as an e-book reader otherwise. The price is $75, which sounds too good to be true. I used to be very critical of the OLPC project during its earlier stages because I could not understand the rationale behind giving a personal laptop to each child, instead of having them access a shared PC in a kiosk for example. The kiosk...

• July 3, 2008
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A "Programmer-Journalist" Contemplates Careers

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Halfway through his Medill graduate journalism education, programmer Brian Boyer reflects on the paths that might lie ahead: When I first spoke to Rich Gordon about becoming a "programmer-journalist," the meaning of the term was unclear. Not being the sort to be concerned by ambiguity, I dove into journalism school with no plans for what might come after. Six months into my re-education, I still don't know what to do with myself, but the potential jobs for which a programmer-journalist would be well suited are becoming clear. I will try and enumerate them here. Also, I will try and avoid...

• July 1, 2008
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Tandem Project Rolls On

by Jane Briggs-Bunting
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As summer speeds by, the MSU/Detroit News contingent has been working with a software developer on the Tandem Project. We are also creating an advisory council to seed Detroit neighborhoods to get the community involved in the process. At the suggestion of Nancy Hanus, online editor, and Jonathan Morgan, multi-platform editor, at The News, we have enlisted the directors and faculty of four Detroit area universities, Oakland, University of Detroit Mercy, University of Michigan Dearborn and Wayne State to join the project. Their students will enroll in Jonathan's JRN 408 Community Journalism Tandem course this fall along with, we hope,...

• June 30, 2008
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How Technologists Can Boost a Journalism Classroom

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

So what happens when people with computer programming backgrounds are part of the same journalism class with more traditional students? Liza Kaufman Hogan, a former CNN.com senior producer, found out this spring when she taught the introductory new media journalism class at the Medill School of Journalism. The class, "Interactive Techniques," revolves around blogging. Students create their own blogs (using Wordpress software and a commercial ISP hosting account that they establish and pay for). Class sessions focus on the critical issues involved in online journalism, from copyright to business models. Between classes, the students are required to blog regularly and...

• June 29, 2008
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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
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Takeaways from the Future of Civic Media Conference

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some takeaways from the Future of Civic Media conference, showcasing Knight News Challenge winners, that ended yesterday at the MIT Media Lab in Boston: • All in all, it was a fascinating gathering of some of the real thought leaders who will be driving new media forward in the coming years. The program grew stronger as it went along. • The Media Lab setting was inspirational. This was my first visit here, and the mix of astonishingly bright students and faculty meshed well with us ruffians from the outside world. One suggestion for future gatherings: Invite student and members of...

• June 14, 2008
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Live-Blogging Future of Civic Media Gathering

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- I am in the swanky Stata Center at MIT for the conference on "The Future of Civic Media," put on by the new Center for Future Civic Media. Nearly all the Idea Lab bloggers are here in attendance as the Knight Foundation is using this gathering to help all News Challenge winners get to know each other and collaborate more. It's also a chance for this new Center at MIT (which got $5 million in funding from Knight) to show some off some of its early work and thinking. Mitch Resnick, another Idea Lab blogger who...

• June 12, 2008
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Civic Media Innovation Camps

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've just arrived at MIT in Boston, where the Future of Civic Media conference is being held over the next three days. Attendees are gathering to compare notes, soak up new ideas (including some smart technologies devised by students here) and tease out ways to maximize the impact of civic media in our lives. Here's a proposal that I'll be bouncing off the assorted thought leaders: Civic Media Innovation Camps. The camps would be one part road show — trainers and local new media experts sharing learnings around social media technologies, case studies, interesting experiments and success stories --...

• June 11, 2008
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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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We Need a PowerPoint to Make Games

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"Playing the News" Update - Distil Interactive I just returned from Ottawa where Nicole Rinerand I went to collaborate with Distil Interactive. We spent two days in their office and it was a positive learning experience. I should make a premise that Distil is trying to build a system that will allow non tech-savvy users, with little knowledge of coding, to create a game or game-like environment in a simple way and in a short time. The system is based off XML, flash and C. Right now the XML code is what controls what is being displayed on screen and...

• June 6, 2008
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Prisoners Become Media Makers in Jamaica

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When thinking of Kingston, Jamaica, blogging and podcasting are far from the first words to come to mind. "Murder capital of the world", sure. Bob Marley and reggae music, of course. But a cutting edge prison rehabilitation program, which teaches prisoners at a maximum security correctional institute how to blog, podcast, and even participate in Second Life? Photo of Tower Street Correctional Facility by Christina Xu That is precisely what Students Expressing Truth (S.E.T.) has set out to accomplish with its new citizen media initiative, Prison Diaries. S.E.T. first began in 1999 when two former prisoners created the organization to...

• June 4, 2008
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Should We Teach with Open Source Software?

by Pam McAllister-Johnson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Western Kentucky University if one of seven academic programs working on a joint Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge grant (Ithaca College, Kansas State, Michigan State, Saint Michael's College, the Univeristy of Kansas, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas). Three student-developed projects were presented at the Online News Association conference last year. This summer, the innovative digital news projects are being tested at newspapers. We were instructed to use open-source software for our projects. Open-source is free. In the open-source community, there are comparable programs for every retail package produced by the big companies. Open-source software can be well- documented...

• May 28, 2008
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Still Seeking Coders Interested in Journalism

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's now been almost exactly a year since we announced (thanks to a Knight News Challenge grant) that programmer-developers could earn full scholarships to study journalism in the master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. We've got plenty of scholarship money still available -- but we have not been overwhelmed with applications. Here's where we stand: Two scholarship winners are now almost midway through their Medill studies. A third candidate will enroll next month. And we still have the equivalent of six full scholarships yet to award. From the beginning, I've felt that this project's biggest challenge would...

• May 26, 2008
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Collaborating with Distill for Games

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Finally I am able to post independetly, and after the semester is over I will have a chance to work more on the news project. As a matter of fact I already started working on it. I have an internship for the summer at the Johnson Simulation Center and I worked 3 days of this weeks on the news game. I mainly tried to understand the code, and try to implement some features in one of the mini-games, a breakout clone. The mini-game is still in an early stage, as well as the whole system actually. Other projects have been...

• May 24, 2008
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Into the Budget Dungeon

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, Gotham Gazette unveils the second of its news games: The Budget Maze. With challenges and a dash of humor, the game presents an entertaining way to educate New Yorkers about one of the eternal mysteries of policy and politics in the city: How the budget is determined. To make the topic engaging, we created three mazes. Players must navigate these labyrinths in a castle dungeon to try to win funding for a favored program or a tax cut. Each chamber presents a new challenge: How do you get information, who should you meet with, who holds the power? We...

• May 19, 2008
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Tandem to be powered by local communities

by Jane Briggs-Bunting
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are charging ahead with the Tandem Project, developed by a team of students this past year as part of the Innovation Incubator Project. Partnering with The Detroit News on the project, we hope for a launch in summer if we can get software issues handled. Tandem hits at the very heart of community journalism. The idea is to have news stories percolate from local communities. Community members on a wiki-style site start discussing issues they are facing within their neighborhoods. It may be street lights that are not working, gang issues, or turning local vacant lots into farm gardens....

• May 16, 2008
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Ceibal Jam! Developing Apps for the XO Laptop

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the '$100 laptop') to recreate the student computer's user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux. That decision led to the defection of Walter Bender who had been OLPC's president of software and content and a longtime colleague of Negroponte. It also led free software guru Richard Stallman, who ironically switched to a XO laptop himself just before the announcement, to ask out loud, "Can...

• May 14, 2008
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Medill Grad Students Study Locative Journalism

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At least once a day I ask myself how locative media can be used to more fully engage and connect folks to their communities. The question for this blog is a bit more focused: how can locative media and geo-localized content find form in the art and craft of journalism. And then to my surprise and excitement, LoJo, a new voice, enters the frey and expands the discussion. From www.lojoconnect.com: Shorthand for locative journalism, LoJo is the name of a project launched by a team of Northwestern University graduate students to study the intersection of journalism and emerging location-based technologies....

• May 12, 2008
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Journalism Class Should be Mandatory in High School

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today I'm publishing a guest post from Ryan Mark, one of the first two journalist-programmers attending the Medill School of Journalism on a Knight News Challenge scholarship. Ryan is a 2004 graduate of Augustana College, where he earned a BA in computer science. He later served as technology director for ZapTel Corp., a company that sells prepaid long-distance phone cards. Ryan's guest post: One thing I’ve discovered through talking to people, including teachers and others in education, is that the Internet is encouraging more people to contribute. Well, obviously, right? I think we are just starting to learn how to...

• May 6, 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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A Coder Practices Multimedia Journalism -- with Open Source Tools

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, the first two programmer-journalists whose Medill education is being financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships, have begun their second academic quarter (of four). They are reporting in Medill's Chicago newsroom and taking our introductory new media class, Interactive Techniques. For the new media class, they (like all the other students) are required to identify a topic that they will monitor and blog about it at least five times per week. All the students are required to set up and manage the technology underpinning the blog as well -- using Wordpress. Ryan's blog is called Digital...

• April 23, 2008
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Old and Young Playing a Video Game

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can a virtual world bring together young and old people to explore a community's history in a shared video game experience? This is a question we're pondering in the wake of some user testing of our Remembering 7th Street video game. We previously showed a video version of our game world to people who remembered Oakland's 7th Street blues and jazz club scene from the 1940s and 1950s, and were surprised by their generally positive reaction to the virtual re-creation of what they had actually lived. Several also said they hoped the game would help young people in Oakland learn...

• April 20, 2008
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Testing News Game Concepts

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is another report from our research assistant Fabio Berzaghi on the progress we are making on "Playing the News." Our struggle is to come up with embedded games that do not clash with the content of the topic or issue being addressed by the news organization. One of our "test" issues is a feature-type article on whether a potential pet owner should consider getting a cat or a dog. Here is a glimpse into what Fabio and Jesse Crafts-Finch were testing. Today I finally had a chance to work closely with Jesse, the producer/game designer at the Johnson Simulation...

• April 14, 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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"Serious Game" Design 101

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we continue to develop the "Playing the News" game, we wanted to share the inside workings of the process. Our partners at the Johnson Simulation Center submitted this report on their production process. An Overview of the JSC Production Process This is a short description of the Johnson Simulation Center's production process; that is, how we go about designing and then producing a game. There are two stages to this process, pre-production and production. Pre-production is a time during which everything about how the game will play and be built is written down on paper. We define the...

• April 7, 2008
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Journalism Education and Social Networks

by Angela Powers
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Citizen journalism, the blogosphere, YouTube, Facebook and more...what do these social networks and new media forms have to do with journalism and mass communications? Often they refer to individuals, rather than traditional media organizations, playing an active role in collecting, reporting and disseminating news. * For example, students at Northern Illinois University took to the streets writing, shooting photos and blogging during the hours and days that followed the Valentines Day shooting. Kyle Yataes posted a video on UTube, providing more moving coverage of the events than the local news. Journalism as we know it today is becoming less confined...

• April 7, 2008
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How Will We Find the Programmer- Journalists?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Thanks to the Knight News Challenge, the Medill School of Journalism can offer full scholarships to our master's program to people with computer programming backgrounds. The first two are on campus now. We're looking for seven more -- and they're not easy to find. Part of the problem lies in the nature of what we're trying to do: attract people to journalism school who might not even be thinking about journalism school as an option. And part of the problem is that journalism school requires students to do things -- like interview strangers and do a lot of writing --...

• April 6, 2008
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Human Rights Video in a Participatory Culture

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of our goals at the Center for Future Civic Media is to identify best practices from existing projects which might inform those initiatives which will emerge from the Center. We want to understand how people out there are using the tools available to them right now to enhance civic awareness, to play informal watchdog functions within the culture, to call attention to problems and force governments and other institutions to respond, to skirt around censorship and other kinds of regulation over communication, and so forth. We are looking at a range of different models -- from serious games to...

• April 6, 2008
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The Read and Write Library

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

From cataloguing books to training users how to blog At least six times a week, Gabriel Venegas, a dedicated and underpaid librarian in Medellin, Colombia, rises from bed while the world outside is still dark royal blue and heavy with the silence of early morning to in order to make the 45-minute bus ride that begins in the valley center and eventually climbs up the city's northern slope to the isolated community of San Javier La Loma. Five years ago it was Vanegas' responsibility to make sure that the library's book collection was catalogued and well-organized. Occasionally he would help...

• March 28, 2008
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Mini-Games As Bait?

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we work to create a news game that will engage readers, we are exploring what types of incentives we can use to meet the "gaming" expectations of hard-core players. We've decided to try embedding "mini-games" into the news game scenario. For example, a news game might create an environment where the reader is exploring the different aspects of the use of ethanol fuel. The player moves from one NPC to another to talk about the pros and cons. But before the player can talk to each of the NPCs, he or she will have to successfully complete a mini-game...

• March 24, 2008
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Virtually and Really Watching the Trees (grow)

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The city of Shanghai is geo-tagging over 1500 registered ancient tress with the plan to use gps devices to monitor and protect the trees in ways they couldn't before. Not unlike many cities, modernization poses enormous risks (and has exacted quite a toll) to nature and the natural. So often our built environment doesn't take into account what has been here for so long. Shanghai's gps monitoring allows the trees to be tracked in real time and the government to move quickly if the location of the tree changes. The system also enables construction companies to get location data early...

• March 20, 2008
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No Returning to the Cult of the Expert

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In response to this week's Newsweek article Revenge of the Experts suggesting the expert is back and user-created content is on the wane, columnist Tom Regan offers this in today's Christian Science Monitor: Credible Web? It's where we click most. Expertise is essential online, but the Internet's real 'killer app' is choice. (Jay Rosen and I are quoted in the piece.) An expert in the Newsweek article said, the world is "too dangerous a place for faulty information." People can deal with vetting information in two ways: rely solely on experts and authority figures. Or become a fact-checker, treating unverified...

• March 19, 2008
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Creating a Game-Building Tool for Newsrooms

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For those of us working on creating "serious games," the experience we've had with the "Playing the News" project might be instructive. We are working with the Johnson Simulation Center at Pine Technical College in Pine City, MN to develop a tool that will allow journalists (read, non-techies) create engaging games built from news coverage of ongoing coverage in a community. After much to-ing and fro-ing, we think we've hit on a strategy for the type of utility that will work. But it has taken some "technical fortitude" to get to this point. The JSC folks are working on what...

• March 17, 2008
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Newspapers Must Innovate or Die

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

On Friday Dan Gillmor wrote here about bringing an entrepreneurial mindset to today's journalism. On Friday, Dan's former employer, the San Jose Mercury News, laid off 15 newsroom staffers and lost five other editors through buyouts, shaving the editorial staff by about 10 percent, on top of a larger set of layoffs a few months ago. Or, to be more precise, the paper's corporate owners, MediaNews, did so. This is at once both troubling and ironic. Troubling, because the downsizing is indicative of deep-seated financial and circulation troubles in the newspaper industry as a whole. (As newspaper analyst Dave Morgan...

• March 9, 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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Journalists and Technologists: An Uneasy Courtship

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first Computation + Journalism Symposium, held Friday and Saturday at Georgia Tech, is over. It's been widely covered in the blogosphere -- you'll find some of the most thoughtful reflections here and here and here and here. As I said before the panel I moderated (on "Advances in Newsgathering"), the event was truly remarkable. More than 200 people -- a mix of academics and professionals, editors and reporters, journalists and Web developers (including the two Knight Challenge journalist-programmer scholarship winners) -- came together to talk about the ways technology is changing journalism and what journalism needs to do to...

• February 25, 2008
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Computation + Journalism = ?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When the Knight News Challenge awarded me (and the Medill School of Journalism) a grant to offer journalism scholarships to computer programmers, I thought teaching journalism to technologists was a pretty novel idea. But it turns out some faculty at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing were thinking along similar lines. Last spring, Prof. Irfan Essa and Ph.D. candidate Nick Diakopoulos taught an experimental course, "Computational Journalism," for computer science students at Georgia Tech. The course is being offered again during the current (spring) semester. Through readings and guest lectures, students in the two classes have learned how journalism is...

• February 17, 2008
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Will There Be a Newsroom in the Future?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The nature of our project at Duke University, the Next Newsroom Project, is to try to design the "newsroom of the future." But the other day on our project site, Leonard Witt of Kennesaw State University, started a discussion around the first, most obvious question we confronted: "Does the newsroom of the future really need to be a brick and mortar newsroom?" You can view the various responses, and some relevant links that got posted there. I wanted to withhold my reply until folks had their say. Naturally, it's not the first time I've heard that question since our work...

• February 14, 2008
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XO Laptop Turns Kids into Media Creators in Uruguay

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo. It's an amazing thing to watch--at least, to a city slicker like me who doesn't get to witness the miracle of birth every day. But what makes this particular video remarkable is that it was shot by a fourth-year student at Villa Cardal's Public School 24, using the built-in camera and recording software on the student's XO Laptop, within weeks of the machine's arrival at...

• February 12, 2008
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Place-Based Video Games Could Transform Education

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After reading Paul Grabowicz's post Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games, I thought I'd chime in and riff off of that statement and ask: What is the value of video games in education, formal and informal, and in the delivery of information. Paul makes great point about who determines perspective. In my field of digital storytelling, we often talk about what I call "the fading glory of the third person editorial overlay." Just look at community-created content; it's a form whose hallmark is the lack of editorial overlay, which may or may not be appropriate, but often the lack of...

• February 11, 2008
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Guiding Principles for the Next Newsroom

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Next Newsroom Project began last summer with a question: If you could build the ideal newsroom from scratch, what would it look like? We were asking that question on behalf of The Chronicle, the independent student newspaper at Duke University. Since receiving our News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation, we've interviewed journalists, digital media experts, architects, campus media advisers, academics, and innovation specialists. We profiled professional and campus newsrooms (and some organizations that had no newsroom). And we looked for ideas outside journalism from folks like innovation consultants Jump Associates . And we studied buildings like the Stata...

• February 4, 2008
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A Crisis in College Media?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• January 24, 2008
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Progress on 'Playing the News'

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hi folks. Our top-flight research assistant, Fabio Berzaghi, has written a narrative of the work we've been doing on the "Playing the News" project. Our goal is to design a game creation tool that allows news professionals to author engaging games around ongoing news issues in a community. The intention of the tool is to allow journalists to create a game that takes no more than 20 - 30 minutes to play through. We've been through quite a number of iterations on game design and Fabio provides the background. "The very first idea for our project was to focus on...

• January 2, 2008
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Video Games: Moving Between Virtual and Real

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Should virtual world video games offer a parallel game experience in the real world? This is something we've discussed adding to our Remembering 7th Street video game project, possibly using GPS devices, such as GPS-enabled cellphones. Our game currently exists entirely inside a virtual world - a re-creation of the jazz and blues club scene on Oakland's 7th Street in the 1940s and 1950s. Game play is confined to that virtual world, with the player exploring the jazz and blues clubs and engaging in game-play quests to learn about the history of 7th Street and its music. Adding a GPS-component...

• December 28, 2007
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Training a New Generation of Citizen Journalists Around the World

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Just three years ago, 'citizen journalism' and 'citizen media' were unknown phrases for more than 99% of the world's population. Slowly, but surely, a considerable movement is starting to help change that. Many of the Knight News Challenge winners are at the forefront of this movement. The Media Mobilizing Project of Philadelphia just recently finished their first round of video production training for a group of 20 Spanish-speaking immigrants poised to take advantage of the city's free wi-fi cloud. Similarly, Chi-Town Daily News will recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists - one in each Chicago neighborhood -...

• December 18, 2007
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Google and OLPC's Move to Create Global Pen Pals

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Google, UNICEF, and One Laptop Per Child recently announced the launching of the Our Stories project. The effort records the stories of children from different parts of the world and places them on a Google Map. But more than just an oral/video history project combined with geotagging, the effort claims to be: A joint initiative to preserve and share the histories and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using laptops, mobile phones and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends....

• December 17, 2007
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Meet the First Two Journalist- Programmers

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first two "journalist-programmers" -- experienced Web developers who won Knight News Challenge scholarships to attend the one-year master's program at the Medill School of Journalism -- will start their studies here at Northwestern University in just a few weeks. Let me tell you a little bit about them -- and, in the process, remind folks that we're looking for more programmers who are interested in studying journalism and exploring ways they might apply their technology skills to the media world. Brian Boyer is an experienced Web developer and software architect who most recently served as a co-founder of Daixo,...

• December 12, 2007
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Finding Overlap Between Locative Media and Location-Based Games

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I should disclose upfront I'm not much of a "gamer." When I was younger, I found myself in a few endless games of Risk, never did understand the appeal of Monopoly, and always wanted to overlay a romantic narrative on Chess. (How did the Queen convince the knight to battle the Bishop to death?) But I did like sports. Not so much because of the gaming aspect, but because sports are generally played outdoors. Whole summers playing running bases, hide and seek, and any number of make believe games. Like locative media, location-based games take place outside. Due to this...

• December 5, 2007
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Over Time, Students Recognize Value of Incubators

by Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been more than a month since the students and faculty in the Innovation Incubator project presented their projects to an audience of reporters and editors at the Online News Association in Toronto. Before that event, we surveyed the students about their expectations, their impressions, and their conclusions about the process. It was, without a doubt, a lot more difficult and time-consuming than they'd expected -- in fact, probably more than any of us had expected. I was probably as surprised as they were. I came into this project with a set of operating assumptions about what this carefully selected...

• December 2, 2007
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Common Lessons Learned about Video Games

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a video games seminar last month at MIT sponsored by the Knight Foundation, several of the MIT folks talked about lessons learned from games they developed that resonated with our Remembering 7th Street jazz and blues clubs project. One of the games MIT produced is Revolution, a video game recreation of historic events in colonial Williamsburg. You can read more about it on the blog of Henry Jenkins, director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. There were a number of parallels with our game: - While the Revolution game is designed to be educational, the designers believe "much...

• December 2, 2007
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"Locating" the Mississippi Blues in 3 Platforms

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

lat 33.4043 long -90.3055 Mississippi Blues Trail Tour in Google Earth (download Google Earth for free, then launch the kmz file) ScreenCast of Mississippi Blues Google Earth Geo-Tagged Project (a screencast is a video capture of what happens on the computer monitor.) Friday night arrived, our round-the-clock week's worth of work was done and it was finally time to present to all the participants and guest of the National Black Programming Consortium's New Media Institute. Prominent leaders in the Public Broadcasting world and NGO filmmaking community had participated in panels all week: Notables from PBS, CPB, NPR, PRX, ITVS,...

• November 22, 2007
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Wanted: A Marshall Plan for Campus Media

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the past few months, I've had a chance to visit various campus media groups as part of our research project on newsrooms. And as I've noted before, I'm continually surprised at how dramatically behind the times many of these groups are. Rather than closing the gap, it seems to me that these student groups are falling even further behind. There are a variety of reasons why this is happening, some of which are general, and some of which might be specific to certain organizations. But I see this is a big deal. These groups play a role that's at...

• November 19, 2007
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Old World Meet New World: Exploring History with New Media Tools

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's an interesting post about a mobile game called Amsterdam 1550 that was designed to teach local students about the old city of Amersterdam. "The game uses 3G cell phones and network to allow students to compete in finding answers to questions about the old city of Amsterdam, for history class excursion and assignment. Frequency 1550 explores the social potential of location-aware devices, inspired by the use of tracking technology and wireless media, human relationships, movement and identity; the project seeks to extend and re-appropriate the functions of locative technologies by exploring ways in which they can be socially constructive...

• November 18, 2007
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Making a Video Game Educational and Entertaining

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I mentioned in my last post how we're balancing the sometimes conflicting demands of education and entertainment in our Remembering 7th Street video game, especially deciding how much explanatory text should be included in the game. Here's a note from Becca MacLaren, one of the journalism students working on the game, about our discussions: One puzzle we're trying to solve in our Remembering 7th Street video game project is how to reach as broad an audience as possible - from people who lived in the neighborhood in the 1940s and '50s to teenagers who know very little about West Oakland's...

• November 17, 2007
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Text in Video Games: How Much is Too Much?

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a session on video games at the Online News Association conference last month, the panelists discussed how much text can be included in a game - a topic my students and I have been grappling with in our Remembering 7th Street video game project. A couple of the speakers on the Using Serious Games to Engage Readers panel cautioned against including long textual entries in games because they tend to turn off game players. "You can't provide reams of text, because they won't read it," said Duane Dunfield of Red Hot Learning, a video game company based in Canada...

• November 12, 2007
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Microsoft Demonstrates that Free Software is about Control of Our Own Future

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a follow-up to Amanda Hickman's post on open source free software games. Microsoft made tech news in the past week with reports that schools in Nigeria would use Windows XP rather than the Mandriva Linux on 17,000 computers ordered from Mandriva, a French GNU-Linux vendor. Public statements from Mandriva officials suggested foul play, but not many details were reported. Now, the Nigerian government has overruled the switch, Jeremy Kirk of IDG News Service reported, and his article published online yesterday by Computerworld UK has a lot more information on what actually happened. Nigeria's Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF),...

• November 10, 2007
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Locative Media and Geo-tagging the Delta Blues Continues

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our geo-tagging of the Blues Trail in the Mississippi Delta continues, albeit from afar. We've been deep in research. Using new media/online research tools, mostly archives and libraries that have been digitized--giving us the opportunity to spend all night wandering through history with unstoppable imagination, horror at the deeds of the past, but also with a renewed sense of excitement and wonder. The images I am most drawn to are the old maps. Our amazing project researcher, Ann Bennett, is deep into the process, leading us to sources such as * Archives of African American Music * Blues Archive at...

• November 2, 2007
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From "Informing" to "Empowering"

by Mitchel Resnick
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For me, our new Center for Future Civic Media at MIT provides an opportunity to weave together several strands of my career. I started my career as a journalist, writing about science and technology for Business Week magazine. Then I decided to make a career shift. I went to graduate school in computer science, and I began developing educational technologies -- in particular, technologies to engage children in creative learning experiences. How do I make sense of these two seemingly-disconnected careers? I have often explained that both careers grew out of the same underlying motivation: to help people understand the...

• October 30, 2007
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Locative Media and Embedding Stories in Place

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are a little more than a week away from heading down to the Mississippi Delta to start our project: geo-tag 3 markers on the Mississippi Blue's Trial - a trail that stretches from Jackson, MS up to Memphis, TN. One of the teams was given the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale. In techno talk, we'll be using geo-spatial technology to embed stories, sound and relationships to locations. We're hoping that this re-visioning of geographic space will help visualize the invisible and/or imaginary realities, helping us to see the present in a new light...and maybe even to help forecast the future...

• October 29, 2007
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Surprise! Students Resistant to New Media

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm currently attending the College Media Conference in Washington, D.C. And what I've been hearing from college media advisers this week confirms something that I've been seeing anecdotally while working on the Next Newsroom project at Duke. Advisers from colleges and universities of all shapes and sizes are frustrated at how resistant their students are to embrace new digital media tools and to collaborate with other media organizations on campus. At an otherwise jovial keynote on Thursday, Rob Curley, the Washington Post's digital and community guru, (see J.D. Lasica's previous post on Rob here) actually admonished the room full of...

• October 26, 2007
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Curley's New Directions in New Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of my heroes in new media is Rob Curley, vice president of new products at The Washington Post who honed his new media chops at the online paper in Lawrence, Kansas. If you want to know where the online news industry will be in a few years, watch what Rob and his team are doing today. In this 5-minute video interview at the Online News Association conference in Toronto last week, Rob talks about the Post's remarkable OnBeing series, its new citizen media site Loudounextra.com, mobile technology, geo-tagging and more. MPEG-4 video on Blip.tv Flash video on Internet...

• October 26, 2007
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Educate: Journalism and Teaching Technologies

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many who spoke at the Online News Association conference in Toronto defined education (of the public) as an important part of journalists' work. Most of us clearly do not feel the need to fulfill Toronto-raised Mary Harris "Mother" Jones' injunction to educate, agitate, organize (and not doing so is a disservice news organizations do to themselves and to society, I will argue later), but what would taking seriously the responsibility to educate, by itself, mean for news? The related content to which this connects is an online video recommended at the conference by Jeff Young (of the Chronicle for Higher...

• October 23, 2007
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Lost Connection Opportunities...

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Once again, another conference that didn't fully leverage technology tools to help people connect, make new friends, and collaborate instantly and on the fly....I am speaking of this week's Online News Asscociation Conference in Toronto. Here's how it might have been different: • Conference attendees provide some basic profile information and tag key interests using one of many web based tools like Confabb.com or intronetworks.com. • Rather than having to go around the room and make introductions or describe projects, those introductions/project descriptions could have been available on the Web or on your mobile device as a session was in...

• October 19, 2007
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Getting Down and Practical

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I love practical tips for multimedia journalists and other media makers to help us get our arms around the personal media revolution without costing us a fortune. At the session "Running a Digi-Newsroom on the Cheap," Dale Steinke of KING TV pointed to a wealth of online resources: Trumba.com is a powerful public events calendar. Put 5 lines of codes on your site and you've got a community calendar. He pointed to Videozilla, which, at $30, is an inexpensive alternative to Flash ($700) for video conversion. Want to put supertitles scrolling across the bottom of your videos? "Our IT dept...

• October 19, 2007
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Elevating Citizens to Be Journalists or Journalists to Be Citizens?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It struck me as interesting yesterday when I heard a former reporter and journalism professor refer to training ordinary people to become journalists as "elevating" them. As a non journalist it made me wonder if that is how most professional journalists still view their work and trade - as being "elevated"? If this is a common view among journalists then no wonder it is proving so difficult for traditional journalism to come to grips with citizen journalists and the like? I wonder if indeed part of the mindshift that still needs to take place is not just citizens learning to...

• October 18, 2007
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Reinvigorating Community News? Start with Middle-Schoolers

by Kimberly Sultze
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Innovation Incubator students have headed to Toronto for the Online News Association conference. Working with the challenge of re-invigorating community journalism, students from seven institutions have been working long hours since the beginning of the summer to come up with innovative ideas through what turned out to be the 'tough love' process of creation netting. As it happened, four students from St. Michael's College ended up working together in the pre-conference phase with students from Ithaca College and Michigan State. Together they developed LockerTalker--an interactive platform targeted at middle-schoolers that combines news articles and interest groups with locker decorations,...

• October 18, 2007
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Playing the News...The Challenge of Gaming Reality

by Nora Paul
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our Knight project is to create a toolset that would make the creation of a news simulation environment / game space easy for a somewhat motivated newsroom. The goal is to see if it would work to use a highly graphical and interactive environment as a way of presenting those "important but (too often) boring" issues in a community. Would this kind of presentation of the often complex and conflicting facets of an issue lead to greater citizen engagement, understanding, and action taking? We had some experience with creating a game, a mod of Neverwinter Nights that we used for...

• October 16, 2007
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What Do You Get When You Mix a Journalist and a Programmer?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We don't know, but thanks to the Knight News Challenge, we're going to find out. Earlier this year, the good folks at the Knight Foundation gave us money to offer full scholarships to Medill's graduate journalism program to people with strong backgrounds in computer programming. Geeks don't usually apply to journalism schools, but Adrian Holovaty demonstrates regularly that someone with both journalism and technology skills can come up with ideas -- and carry them off -- that most of us wouldn't even think of. As soon as the grant was announced in May, the team at Medill started scrambling. We...

• October 16, 2007
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Innovation, Entrepreneurism and Multiple Disciplines at Core of ASU's New Knight Center

by Christopher Callahan

Too often journalism schools are islands within the larger university communities. At the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication here at Arizona State University, we wanted to not only build an incubator for great new digital media ideas, but to create an environment where student journalists could work side-by-side with computer engineers, business majors, designers and students from other disciplines across campus. We also felt that J-schools traditionally have spent little or no time fostering an entrepreneurial spirit in our students. And we believe that spirit is vital in the creation of viable new media products that are...

• October 15, 2007
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Following the Carbon Cash in Colorado

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When Boulder, Colo., voters passed the nation's first municipal "carbon tax" last fall, it was an engraved invitation for me and my partner Amy Gahran at citizen journalism outfit I, Reporter. As long-time veteran environmental journalists with years of online experience, we've been on the look-out for ways to explore participatory journalism's potential on a tough eco-issue like global warming, with a local focus on a story that has national and international implications.

Then the Knight Foundation gave us our opportunity last May by funding our plan to build and launch our Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker citizen journalism web site. Since then, we've plunged ahead, learning as we go about what it takes to involve local citizens in such a complex, slow-breaking, but crucially important story.

• October 15, 2007
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What We're Learning About What Journalism Students Don't Know....

by Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It seemed reasonable, as we first started talking about the innovation incubator project 15 months ago, to expect that journalism students would be more technologically adept and experienced than we were. After all, we are a bunch of college administrators, women who (for the most part) have spent our careers in legacy newsrooms and scholarly environments. We figured that students who grew up with the Internet -- or, more accurately for this cohort, grew into adulthood with the Internet -- would come to the task of creating new approaches to community news not only with great ideas but with the...

• October 15, 2007
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Introduction to Rising Voices Outreach Initiative

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices is a new citizen media outreach project of Global Voices, which aims to spread the benefits of citizen media to regions, languages, and communities that are currently underrepresented on the conversational web. It serves as the third arm of Global Voices' triad of amplifying independent voices worldwide, advocating for their right to free speech, and providing universal access to citizen media tools as is described in our founding manifesto. For nearly three years now Global Voices has served as the web's leading network of bridge-bloggers from around the world who serve as cultural ambassadors of their countries' blogging...

• October 15, 2007
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A Conversation, Any Which Way

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the big lessons we've learned in just a few months into the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project is the enormous challenge of getting community members to think of themselves as journalists.So we're about to try a new approach. This week, we'll launch a new bulletin board service on the site with the aim of drawing in those citizen journalists through the relatively simple mechanism of the online comment.

• October 15, 2007
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Our City, Our Voices: Video Newscasts in the Digital Age

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is an image of the posters and flyers we have put out across Philadelphia as we prepare for the beginning of our video and basic web trainings on November 11th. The Media Mobilizing Project is planning to start with two classes of approximately 8-10 people which will take place from November into early December. In these classes people will learn how to use a video camera, write a script, edit and many other skills. Thus far we have been getting the project off the ground while holding a series of forums/conversations within the Mexican immigrant community to find...

• October 15, 2007
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The Second Life Option

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A lot of people have asked me why we didn't use Second Life to create our Remembering 7th Street virtual world and video game (if you aren't familiar with Second Life, Mark Glaser, who helped set up this weblog for the Knight Challenge Grant winners, did a recent story for MediaShift on Second Life and other online virtual worlds). When we started our project about two years ago, we took a long look at Second Life and discussed hosting our project there with some of their executives. Second Life offered a number of advantages, such as a relatively easy tool...

• October 15, 2007
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Center for Locative Media Launches Beta Site

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Center for Locative Media has launched its beta site. Leslie Rule, co-director of the Center quipped, "I've birthed babies and that was less painful than launching this site. OK, not really, but almost." The mission of the Center is to engender civic engagement, develop shared community goals, and develop new models of democratic participation using place-based narrative and emerging technologies. At the site, you'll be able to review completed projects, watch on-going projects evolve, stay on top of new gadgets, delve into the theory of place-based media, and investigate mobile learning. We are always looking for content, so if you...

• October 14, 2007
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Innovation Incubator Heads to Toronto for the Online News Association Conference

by Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been an extraordinarily challenging five months, and the students who have been working on the Innovation Incubator project are about to find out whether it's been worth it. About thirty-five students and faculty from seven journalism schools around the country are headed to Toronto tomorrow to present their projects at the ONA's annual conference. They've been working on them since June, when the group first gathered in Ithaca to talk about creation netting, the process we adopted to develop some new and original thinking about -- and approaches to - -community news. We figured there was nobody better positioned...

• October 14, 2007
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Old Timers React to the 7th Street Video Game

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A big concern we had when we started our Remembering 7th Street video game project was how older people who lived and worked on Oakland's 7th Street in the 1940s and 1950s and frequented the jazz and blues clubs there would react to our virtual world rendition of it. Would it look like what they remembered? Or would it seem an alien world to them? Worse, would the game just trivialize a precious memory? On Oct. 8 we got a chance to test this when my journalism students and I went to the West Oakland Senior Center to interview people...

• October 13, 2007
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History and Heritage Through Video Games

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can new technologies be used to tell old stories about a local community? That's the question we're trying to answer with our "Remembering 7th Street" project that uses a video game to tell the story of Oakland, California's old jazz and blues club scene. During the 1940s and 1950s, Oakland's 7th Street was a vibrant community and a mecca for jazz and blues musicians from all over the country. But in the late 1950s and 1960s the area fell victim to a series of ill-fated redevelopment schemes, and barely a trace of the jazz and blues clubs remains today. We're...

• October 13, 2007
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