Idea Lab

Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect. But perhaps we shouldn't use the J-word. The precipitous slide of journalism from iconic cultural power status to cultural irrelevance during the past decade is stunning. When the Shorenstein Center's Prof. Tom Patterson told his board last month that the nation's premiere think tank of, by and for top-notch...

• December 18, 2008
• 8 comments

Finding Political Sleazemongers

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I have invited researchers at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media to participate in an effort to blow the whistle on groups who are falsely presenting themselves as "ordinary bloggers," but instead are paid to spread false information about candidates during the 2008 campaign in viral internet campaigns to influence voters. The project, already involving students from Columbia and Harvard, traces the IP addresses of these content originators to track those who are sending out large packets of these identical negative messages and claiming to be individuals. But a MIT researcher protested that this kind of research was not to...

• October 9, 2008
• 4 comments

Hero Reports Website

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The "Hero Reports" website project turns the anti-terrorism "See Something, Say Something" campaign on its head, to visualize security as civic connectedness.

• July 17, 2008
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Defining Civic Media at MIT

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here at MIT, summer means time to dig into our research. A group of us at the Center for Future Civic Media is working on a white paper defining "civic media." We are interested in how civic media is empowering new user-creators, with related effects on governing elites. Inspiring people to take action, through access to information and the public spotlight, is a familiar goal to those of us on the team who used to be journalists. We used to facilitate the agency of an isolated person or community to make the government act for justice or change. It often...

• July 7, 2008
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