Much of the discussion about online games focuses on the technical issues, and that's not surprising since the technical aspects make a game a game or a simulation and not a conventional story. But as Gotham Gazette continues its efforts to create interactive features to involve and educate New Yorkers on key policy issues, we have discovered that the reporting piece can be far more complicated than we originally imagined. Games, at least those that entail budget numbers, carbon emissions or other figures, require a level of precision most stories simply do not. This is not to say that reporters...
more »Gail Robinson
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Government Data: File Not Found
Earlier this month the district attorney in Albany, New York, released thousands of pages of documents related to his investigation of a scandal involving former Gov. Eliot Spitzer. This goes back to the days when Spitzer's alleged improprieties involved misuse of the state police, over-the-top aggressiveness and a lust for smearing political opponents. Not as titillating as the governor's later transgressions, perhaps, but still of interest to those of us who follow the sad state of government in the Empire State. State political reporters salivated -- until they heard how DA David Soares was issuing the material. Instead of putting...
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NYC Police Deny Press Passes to Online Reporters
The New York City Police department, which issues (or refuses to issue) press passes and identification cards, has denied credentials to at least three on-line reporters we know of, including Gotham Gazette city hall editor Courtney Gross. In some instances, the denial seems like out and out political retribution. Leonard Levitt, a former Newsday reporter who now writes the blog NYPD Confidential, lost his pass. Levitt has been a persistent police critic, dating back to his days in print. But once he moved on line, the city had an excuse to pull his credentials. The New York Civil Liberties Union...
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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...
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How Do We Deal with Stolen Content?
In an ideal world, I suppose, all information would be free and widely accessible. Maybe not credit records, health stats or income information -- but certainly journalism would be. Alas, though, we're not in an ideal world. On-line publications need readers (hits) to survive. In the case of a small independent site like Gotham Gazette, we need hits to attract funders and advertisers and to build our reputation and credibility. And we need to maintain control over our material to preserve our integrity. So it was distressing when our technical director, Amanda Hickman, using Technorati, found many sites using our...
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The Long Shelf Life for News Games
People who run news sites can be resistant to encouraging the developing games and other interactive feature. Perhaps it's that "game" sounds too playful, although given that most newspaper feature comics, crosswords and Sudoko, to say nothing of the latest celebrity photos and gossip, it's hard to see why. The interactivity may make some editors nervous as well as pairing a light approach -- a game -- with a serious issue such as the deaths in Darfur, hurricanes or legislative redistricting. The amount of staff time and resources -- technical experts, designers, writers, editors-- that go into a game can...
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All the Summaries Fit to Print
As so many people who blog here have observed, newspapers face a quandary as they struggle to attract and keep readers to their print editions as well as their Web sites. They want to win customers at the same time they are giving those customers less for their money. One way to get around that is to give people the same or less and make it look like more. Is that the idea behind the New York Times redesign revealed this week? For those of you who haven't seen it, the Times seems to have exported a Web idea --...
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In the almost three months since Gotham Gazette launched the Garbage Game about New York City's refuse, we've learned interesting things - some about on-line games and some specific to this game and this topic. For a roundup of responses and reactions, presented on Gotham Gazette last month, click here. First, even people playing games on a relatively wonky site like ours want to have a game experience. That means they want to win or lose. Our game did not explicitly provide that, so people sought to provide it for themselves. Some wanted to compare their score - on money...
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After many nervous moments and late nights, Gotham Gazette's The Garbage Game is on our site and ready for players. This is the first in a series of six games on key policy issues facing New York City that Gotham Gazette will be producing over the next two years. As we hope you'll see for yourself, this one focuses on managing the almost 7 billion pounds of residential trash that New Yorkers produce every year. The idea behind the games is to let New Yorkers not only read about policy dilemmas but play an active role in addressing them. And...
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Our Technical Director, Amanda Hickman, is not a formal Idea Lab blogger, so I'm posting this on her behalf. This won't be the last you hear from her on the Idea Lab. --Gail As the Gotham Gazette prepares to launch our first Knight-funded news game, I've been thinking a lot more about their requirement that we produce our games using free and open source software. It is only fair for me to start with a couple of observations about where I'm coming from: I think that software freedom matters, a lot. As a Circuit Rider at the LINC Project I...
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One reason Gotham Gazette has long been intrigued by the idea of so-called serious games is that they offer another way to tell a story. And the more methods one uses to tell a story, the more people will read (or hear, or watch, or play) that story. As a site on NYC policy and politics, it's been our mission from the beginning to try to attract people beyond the base of Wonks and City Hall habitues (no offense intended; they are, after all, a loyal and helpful audience). To do that, we try to tell present complicated issues in...
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The staff of Gotham Gazette is counting down to the day later this fall when our first online game goes up on our site. It's been an interesting process getting us this far. First, of course, we needed a concept. In some respects, this was the easy part as brainstorming sessions over the summer produced literally dozens of ideas. We'd like to do them all -- and we will do some of them in the next two years -- but we decided to do the first one on garbage. What to do with tons and tons of garbage has long...
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In the end, there's no real trick or black magic to making news valuable: it's about providing readers with what they want to read, as opposed to what publishers think they should be reading.
— Joe Franscella
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