Idea Lab

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

The past month and a half has been very busy for us at Poderopedia. We settled into a large office space in Ariztía Lab, a building with a cultural heritage in the heart of the immigrant area in downtown Santiago, with our friends from Urbz Chile. We hired Rodrigo Guaiquil and Mónica Ventura, two great and experienced journalists who have been hooked on the Internet since 1996, working on news and data-based projects. And we've outlined the milestones and road map to the first alpha release of Poderopedia, a project that aims to promote greater transparency in Chile by creating an...

February 9, 2012
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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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OpenBlock: Can You Explain Data to a Computer AND a Human?

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since the OpenRural project started in November, one of my primary efforts has been to lift the hood on the OpenBlock application itself and find the "unknown unknowns," as a former defense secretary once said. We saw data go in, and maps and lists come out. But what happens inside the belly of the beast? Over the course of the next several posts, I'm going to give you an X-ray view into the guts of the OpenBlock application. Together, we're going to watch how data gets ingested and processed into information and insights that residents of rural communities can use...

December 22, 2011
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Meet the 1% Who Call the Shots in Chile

Grassroots Mapping in Butte Goes Analog

Marco Kremerman, an investigator from SOL, a Chilean foundation that conducts research about the labor market, recently published a column in which he stated that 4,000 families run Chile. Kremerman's post was highly controversial among Chile's elite, an endogamous group of power players, little accustomed to public scrutiny and not fond of being forced out in the open. It also caused some deep rumblings among the middle class, during a time when issues such as inequality and the extreme gap between the rich and poor have become a matter of national and international public interest around the world. One of...

December 16, 2011
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by Mathew Lippincott
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This article was co-written by Olivia Everett, Butte site coordinator for Public Laboratory. As a newcomer to Butte, Mont., and as a grassroots mapper, I've learned a lot about a neighborhood's memories of itself, and the role that mapping can play in reasserting a human-scale sense of place. My experience here has since led to a collaboration between Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, of which I'm a founding member, and the National Affordable Housing Network, which is engaged in redevelopment in Centerville. While mining still occurs in Butte, it's no longer central to the city's economic life. But...

December 13, 2011
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#DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Good ideas aren't enough. They need champions and constant vigilance, or Congress will take them from you. Many problems arise when your country's legislature is consistently more responsive to its donors than its constituents. One of these problems is that simple good ideas can't just be left alone to bask in their goodness. The Internet is clearly a good idea -- not tautologically good, but certainly one of the better things that's happened to human communication and the spread of knowledge in recent centuries. But now some people in Congress who didn't know what an MP3 was until their granddaughter...

November 21, 2011
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Feeding OpenBlock: A New Newsroom Pet That Eats Elements

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few months ago, my kids hit an inevitable, but still terrifying, milestone -- they began asking for a pet. Being a complete Scrooge, I quickly set to work explaining that pets are hard work and expensive. Showing a strong knack for journalism, they demanded proof of my assertions, so we set off to the pet store where my son quickly was ready to invest his birthday money in a small bird. "Sure, you can buy the bird," I told him. "But what are going to feed it?" With the launch of our OpenBlock project in North Carolina, rural newspapers...

November 17, 2011
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OpenCourt Goes Back to High School

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the live-stream of Quincy District Court is the cornerstone of our project to open the court through digital technology, OpenCourt is in the process of expanding. One of our hopes is that the project will be used as a resource for high school civics classes. I asked one high school social studies teacher we got in touch with, Jack Buckley at nearby Cohasset High School in Cohasset, Mass., how he would use OpenCourt in his classes. He teaches an elective called "Intro to Law" that he says is like a traditional civics class -- save for the fact that...

November 9, 2011
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OpenBlock to Help Rural Newspapers Get Access to Public Data

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A visit to one of America's small, rural communities that are called home by more than 60 million of us is sometimes like a step back in time. Cars downtown still park parallel to the curb, and not too far beyond downtown are fields and maybe even a factory or two still. Go to a town like Whiteville, N.C., on the right day -- any Monday or Thursday -- and you'll see a woman standing in the middle of the road selling newspapers to cars lined up on either side of her. This is an America where people still read...

October 28, 2011
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How Mobile Phones Could Bring Public Services to People in Developing Countries

This Is How Water Really Works in India

In Santiago, Chile, more than 60 percent of the poorest citizens don't have access to the Internet. In the rest of the country, that number increases to 80 percent, and in rural areas, an Internet connection is almost nonexistent. But there are more than 20 million mobile phones in the nation, according to the latest survey by the Undersecretary of Telecommunications. (That's actually around 1.15 cell phones per capita in a nation of 17,094,270 people.) And in rural areas, cell phones are king. As Knight News Challenge winners FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi and NextDrop have shown, mobile communications are crucial for citizens...

October 6, 2011
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by Anu Sridharan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was co-written by NextDrop's Jessica Tsai and Madhusudhan B. NextDrop, which informs residents in India via cell phone about the availability of piped water, has been fortunate enough to have the full and sincere cooperation of Chandru, one of the best valvemen in Hubli. It's incredibly helpful to work with someone so willing to share the know-hows of the water system here, because the on-paper description of the process is much different than what actually goes on. Chandru let us tag along as he opened and closed a myriad of valves in his water areas, providing service to...

September 26, 2011
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ATTN-SPAN Personalizes C-SPAN Footage of Your Reps

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

August 30, 2011
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Poderopedia Keeps Track of Chile's Most Powerful and Influential

EuroSay.eu Gives Latvians a Voice in Legislation

In December 2008, almost a year before Sebastián Piñera was elected president of Chile, the millionaire businessman and politician got together with his closest friends for a small birthday party in his investment headquarters in upper Santiago.This tight group, which the media has dubbed "Piñera's business West Wing," was composed of Piñera's brother Pablo, CEO of the state bank BancoEstado; his top adviser and current Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter; and seven high-profile businessmen who own some of the biggest investment banks, pension funds, private health care companies, airlines, and TV stations, among other things. Many are also board members in...

August 25, 2011
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by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

EuroSay.eu, a social initiative framework similar to Avaaz.org and Change.org, aims to let people bring their ideas into the agenda initiatives for parliaments or state institutions. It was launched in Latvia at the start of July. It stands out with its user-friendly interface and integrated functionality for all involved parties -- the users, administrators and the target group (decision makers). Three days after its launch, Valdis Zatlers, Latvia's outgoing president, made a public appeal to use Manabalss.lv. Within a week, Saeima, the parliament of Latvia, decided to vote on the first of Manabalss.lv initiatives, and it was adopted in the...

August 4, 2011
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OpenCourt's Balancing Act: Redacting Sensitive Info vs. First Amendment

by Joe Spurr
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

OpenCourt, our Knight Foundation-funded project devised to help make courts more transparent, is facing a legal challenge soon to be heard by a judge in the highest court in Massachusetts. The central issue at stake is a First Amendment question of whether the court can order a news organization to redact material that has been presented to the public in an open courtroom. On July 8, WBUR, a public radio station, filed a response memo as well as a supplemental affidavit of our executive producer to the state's Supreme Judicial Court. The documents are the latest in a lengthy legal...

July 19, 2011
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How Social Networking Can Help Neighbors During Disasters

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can social-networking sites be used by neighbors to help each other during disasters, as well as with more pedestrian issues the rest of the time? NPR recently covered political scientist Daniel Aldrich's work looking at how neighbors help each other during disasters. From NPR: Aldrich's findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive ... a disaster. Government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a...

July 13, 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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MIT Sessions Address Prison Blogging, Networked Revolt in Arab World

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MIT's Center for Future Civic Media redoubled its public events efforts this past year, thanks to a push by its fellow Ethan Zuckerman. Zuckerman brings a unique perspective -- a civic one -- to media developments so often dominated by politics and business-model debates. This approach couldn't be more evident than in the case of two recent Civic Media Sessions, videos of which you'll see below. Our sessions, spread throughout the semester, are conversations around civic media topics we're just now defining, including the coalescing of the field itself around information needs, geographic communities, and replicable, sustainable technical innovation. "Design...

May 19, 2011
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Why Our Project (and the Country) Needs Cheap, Universal Broadband

by Joe Spurr
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Of all the challenges since November, when we began our Knight-funded project, hooking up the Internet was probably the least expected snag. Our project, OpenCourt (formerly Order in the Court 2.0 ), aims to modernize an old-school district courtroom and stream its proceedings live online. There was so much policy to chisel out. There was the logistical challenge to assemble the myriad of stakeholders necessary to have balanced discussions. Bottom-up site design and development. Content to produce. Community outreach. Surely any one of these would gobble more focus than a procedure typically taken for granted to be slightly more complicated...

April 26, 2011
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How DocumentCloud Helped Award-Winning Investigations

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) announced their medal winners this week, and we were impressed to see that both winners wove DocumentCloud into their winning reporting. Since 1979, IRE has honored outstanding investigative work with their annual awards. This year they honored a Los Angeles Times series on outrageous salaries in one of California's poorest towns and a collaboration between International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the BBC for a report on the global asbestos trade. Breach of Faith Los Angeles Times was awarded an IRE Medal for Breach of Faith. An investigation of financial impropriety in a small town...

April 14, 2011
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Map Mashup Shows Broadband Speeds for Schools in U.S.

by Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Department of Education (ED) recently launched Maps.ed.gov/Broadband an interactive map that shows schools and their proximity to broadband Internet access speeds across the country. This is an important story for ED, an agency that has a stated goal that all students and teachers have access to a sufficient infrastructure for learning -- which nowadays includes a fast Internet connection. The map is based on open data released last month by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As you can see below, the result is a custom map that shows a unique story -- how schools' Internet access compares across the...

April 1, 2011
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Mobile Citizen Journalists Determined to Stay 'Alive in Libya'

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Armed with a few Kodak Zi8 cameras, six HTC Wildfire mobile phones and expertise in training citizen journalists, Small World News is working to share stories from embattled Libya with the larger world. Small World News is on the ground in Benghazi training Libyans to capture and tell video stories of events in this volatile region. Along the way, the team has also captured footage that no other mainstream media outlet has been able to get, such as this video of opposition forces heading out to the front lines: MobileActive.org chatted late Wednesday night with Brian Conley, founder of Small...

March 18, 2011
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SeedSpeak Launches, Uses Geotags to Solve Local Problems

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the joys of living in Phoenix, besides the winters, is the local airport. Sky Harbor bills itself as the nation's friendliest airport and, while I won't go that far, I love the fact that you can get in and out with minimal hassle. Even with construction to build a tram system linking the economy parking to the terminals and the terminals to the city's new light rail system, getting around the airport is still a breeze. The only issue I've ever had with Sky Harbor is its signage. After a long, late flight from the East Coast, I...

March 16, 2011
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How Dotspotting Began with Colored Dots on Drains in San Francisco

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In some ways you could say that the Dotspotting project started with San Francisco's sewage and drain system. A few years ago I started noticing some strange dot markings on the curbs of city sidewalks, directly above the storm drains like the one you see on the left But on closer inspection, it turned out they weren't just single dots. They seemed to be dots that had been applied, rubbed off a bit, and reapplied. Like Roman palimpsests, the curbs above drains looked like reusable canvasses -- but for dots, instead of edicts. The image below is one close-up example....

March 15, 2011
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Why We Won't Live-Stream Restraining Order Hearings

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the first questions people ask when I tell them about our project, Order in the Court 2.0, to live-stream court proceedings is, "Is there a way to turn the camera off?" They must imagine a camera bolted to the wall, gobbling up images of domestic violence victims and child sex offenders with no regard to how it affects justice being served. But I have the opposite fear too -- that the judges in those courtrooms will become so skittish that they'll keep turning the camera off and we'll lose the ideal of openness that is the purpose of...

March 10, 2011
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Councilpedia a Hit with New Yorkers, But Not Politicians

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been a month since Gotham Gazette launched its Councilpedia project to monitor city elected officials and track money in local politics. (To read our earlier entry on Councilpedia, go here.) In those weeks, we've learned a lot about what people like and don't like about the service. This information will help us improve what we think is an important tool for New Yorkers and an example other local news sites might want to follow. Popular with People, not Politicians First, by and large, people like it. Even though most of the information -- but not all of it --...

March 4, 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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7 Lessons From the Egyptian Revolution

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As an information activist working in Zimbabwe, I've found the role of digital technologies in Egypt's revolution fascinating. Here are some observations surrounding the 18 days of protest, which successfully challenged President Hosni Mubarak's nearly 30 years of rule. 1. People at the heart. Whilst information and communication technology (ICT) provided critical channels to mobilize and magnify the revolution, it was the motivated, driven activists, such as the leaders of the April 6 Movement who effectively and deliberately used these tools to organize the protests. Millions of brave, determined demonstrators took action and met on the streets. Thus, it was...

February 16, 2011
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Will the Next Revolution be Stroomed?

by Tom Grasty
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

When you think of the recent unrest in the Middle East, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube immediately come to mind. Yet in an era where the revolution no longer need be televised -- now it's tweeted -- wouldn't a collaborative online video editing platform that allows producers, correspondents and reporters to create news reports in real time be a welcome addition to the insurgents' arsenal? Well, such a tool does exist. It's called Stroome. And in a time when the journalist's traditional role -- to build and curate an informed public -- is rapidly eroding as...

February 15, 2011
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'Data and Cities' Conference Pushes Open Data, Visualizations

by Jordan Salinger
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I entered Stamen's offices in the Mission district of San Francisco, I saw four people gathered around a computer screen. What were they doing? Nothing less than "mapping the world" -- not as it appears in flat dimension, but how it reveals itself. And they weren't joking. Stamen, a data visualization firm, has always kept "place" central to many of their projects. They achieved this most famously through their crimespotting maps of Oakland and San Francisco, which give geographical context to the world of crime. This week they are taking on a world-sized challenge as they host a conference...

February 9, 2011
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Councilpedia Follows the Money in New York City Politics

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

More than two years since the idea first began buzzing in our collective brains, Gotham Gazette finally launched its Councilpedia site last week. Councilpedia, funded in part with a News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation, is a unique new tool that will let people track the influence of money in New York City politics and help New Yorkers monitor their public officials. To accomplish this it does three main things. First, it brings together an array of information about two citywide elected officials and the members of the New York City Council: legislative records, campaign finance information, and places...

February 7, 2011
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Lawyers Voice Concerns About Live-Streaming Court Cases

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the first things First Justice Mark Coven told us when we went down to the Quincy District Court to start talking about our project, Order in the Court 2.0, was that we had to hold an all-court meeting to introduce the project to everyone to get their input. This seemed like an excellent thing to do before waltzing into the complex world of the court with our video camera and high-speed Internet in hand. On the day of the meeting in December, the First Session of the courthouse was standing room only, and included the entire court staff,...

February 4, 2011
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What Would the Ideal Democracy-Enabling Tool Look Like?

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some say that the last place where true democracy existed were the city-states of Ancient Greece. They had it all: Direct communication between citizens and public officials, complete transparency, minimal corruption. Time passed and the population increased dramatically, which in part meant that public officials fell out of touch with the people who put them in office. To alleviate this, over time and in other societies, trade unions, non-governmental organizations and various movements were started -- and democracy got more complicated. Turns out, this is all backwards. In my view, modern people no longer identify themselves by any one characteristic....

January 7, 2011
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Dotspotting Launches to Make City Data Mappable

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dotspotting is the first project Stamen is releasing as part of Citytracking, a project funded by the Knight News Challenge. We're making tools to help people gather data about cities and make that data more legible. Our hope is to do this in a way that's simple enough for regular people to get involved, but robust enough for real research to happen along the way. There's currently a whole chain of elements involved in building digital civic infrastructure for the public, and these are represented by various Stamen projects and those of others. At the moment, the current hodgepodge...

December 2, 2010
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From Fighting in Afghanistan to Blogging for Basetrack

by Matt Farwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

ser·en·dip·i·ty [ser-uhn-dip-i-tee] -noun 1. an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident. 2. good fortune; luck: the serendipity of getting the first job she applied for. 2007 I'm sweating despite the snow on the ground. I'm at the wheel of my humvee, silently begging the platoon leader on my right to stop the banter that gets us through most long missions. The missions are routine now, a year into a 16-month deployment to Afghanistan, but I still hate this drive. A photographer from a national magazine rides with my infantry platoon up into the mountains of Eastern Afghanistan, in the Omna...

November 30, 2010
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MIT Unveils Civic Tools for Communities Affected by Natural Gas

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last Friday, MIT Center for Future Civic Media's director Chris Csikszentmihalyi formally released extrAct, a suite of Internet-based databasing, mapping and communications technologies for use by communities impacted by natural gas development. extrAct is targeted not only at communities and landowners but also at the journalists who cover local development and environment issues. It is a novel platform for community education and civic action. While outlets such as 60 Minutes have picked up on both the unprecedented opportunities and health risks of American natural gas extraction, which is touted as the country's path to energy independence, Csikszentmihályi and his team...

November 26, 2010
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How the FCC is Creating Better Open Data

by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the context of our TileMill project, we’ve been talking about our goal to help make open data from governments more actionable by making it easier to turn GIS data into custom maps. We’re focused on building better tools so people can turn data into custom maps to tell better stories online, but another important part of this process is getting good access to quality data in the first place. What does it look like to open up data effectively, so that it’s not just available but useful to the public? FCC Setting a Good Example The Federal Communications Commission...

November 23, 2010
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Order In The Court 2.0 Adds Staff, Plans Live-Streams from Court

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the last few weeks Order in the Court 2.0 has made enormous strides in moving forward with our project. Most importantly we've brought on board two very talented individuals who are responsible for the day-to-day operation of this project. Below is the note that I put out to the staff of WBUR, which is the home-base of this Knight News Challenge initiative. New Staff Joe Spurr and Val Wang are joining WBUR to work on our new online initiative, Order in the Court 2.0. Order in the Court 2.0 is a Knight News Challenge funded initiative that will explore...

November 17, 2010
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SeedSpeak Seeks Government Feedback on Pushing Open Data

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the ways SeedSpeak will measure success is by the number of "seeds" that become successful projects or solutions in a community. Neighbors might suggest improvements to their community ("let's turn a community lot into a neighborhood park" or "let's paint a mural on a brick wall that faces a thoroughfare"), but unless the people who can make it happen buy into it and help make it a reality, those great suggestions might die on the vine. To that end, one of our biggest concerns in designing SeedSpeak is to make sure we get feedback and buy-in from local...

October 28, 2010
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DocumentCloud Users Make Ballot Design An Election Issue

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we make lists of the kinds of source documents users can upload to DocumentCloud, they can get pretty long. DocumentCloud is court filings, hearing transcripts, testimony, legislation, lab reports, memos, meeting minutes, correspondence. I can say with absolute confidence that in all of our planning, "ballots" never once came up as the sort of document a news organization might want to annotate for readers. Our relentlessly creative users have shown us otherwise. This summer, the Memphis Commercial Appeal rounded out its guide to August's primary elections with a sample ballot. Their digital content editor told us that many readers...

October 27, 2010
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Basetrack Pushes Off to Follow Marines in Afghanistan

by Teru Kuwayama
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Safi Airways flight 4Q-52. Sept 28, 2010 at 20:00 GMT-Zulu -- I'm airborne and en route to link up with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment (a.k.a. "one-eight," the subject of our Knight News Challenge grant), in southern Afghanistan. We're at cruising altitude, somewhere between Hungary and Turkey, on a civilian flight into Kabul. The first leg of our trip, on Singapore Air between New York and Frankfurt, was fully packed. Frankfurt to Kabul is almost empty. Go figure. Apparently Afghanistan has yet to re-establish itself as a vacation destination for European tourists. Battling Red Tape Plan A was to travel...

October 19, 2010
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New Media as a Force for Mobilizing Political Change

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Does the dramatic uptake of new media tools such as mobile applications, digital media, blogging, social networking and video activism mean that citizens, citizen groups and service organizations have the power to challenge the state and mobilize political change? This is a question that I'll be pondering along with my fellow participants at the New Media: Alternative Politics Conference at the University of Cambridge. Below are some of my thoughts on the topic, as well as a specific look at the situation in Zimbabwe. After the conference is over, I'll share some of the opinions expressed by key researchers and...

October 14, 2010
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The Best User Feedback Comes From Watching and Listening

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

ProPublica used DocumentCloud to develop an excellent story they published Friday. I'd planned to write it up, but Krista Kjellman Schmidt, the news applications editor who worked on the story, put it much better than I ever could have. Here's the opening of her post: On Oct. 8, we published an investigation examining how a judicial opinion in a pivotal lawsuit brought by a Guantanamo detainee vanished, only to be replaced weeks later by an entirely different opinion. At the center of our reporting are two documents representing separate versions of that same opinion: the original opinion written by Judge...

October 12, 2010
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Pushing the Limits of What a Wiki Can Do with Councilpedia

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Barely two decades into the digital age, we take online media for granted. So much is so easy and convenient -- at our fingertips -- that we can forget technology can only do so much. Then we come up with a great idea that leaves us with the challenge of how to successfully push the limits. This is what has confronted Gotham Gazette as we move into the final stages of creating our Councilpedia site. Councilpedia, a Knight News Challenge winner that I've blogged about here previously, will explore more fully the links between money and politics in New York...

October 6, 2010
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How is Privacy Protected with Transparency Coming to Courts?

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Going into last week's meeting at Quincy District Court, Joan Kenney, the state court's chief public information officer and I had a quick phone meeting on what we were going to talk about at an upcoming meeting with Judge Andre A. Gelinas. Judge Gelinas, a retired justice who sat on the Massachusetts Appeals Court, now serves as the Special Advisor to the Chief Justice for Administration & Management for Information Technology. In short, Judge Gelinas was going to be a legal referee for Order in the Court 2.0 who will help us determine what the project could or should be...

September 28, 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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A Groundbreaking Survey of New Media and The Courts

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Late last month the Conference of Court Public Information Officers released the results of a nearly year-long study entitled, New Media and the Courts - The Current Status and a Look at the Future. I have anxiously been awaiting this report. I believe it will play a major role as we outline the activity of Order in the Court 2.0. I first became aware of this study as I prepared my Knight News Challenge proposal. During the submission process, I consulted quite frequently with one of the co-authors of the CCPIO report, Chris Davey. Davey and I agreed that if...

September 8, 2010
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DocumentCloud Helps Newspapers Bring Transparency to Government

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since we last updated readers on DocumentCloud's progress, we've made it much easier to upload a lot of documents at once, and introduced a related documents search that uses data about names and places provided by OpenCalais to find documents that are probably related to the one you're looking at. We've also added a bit more contextto the data we help reporters comb through. Most of this work is happening inside the gates of the DocumentCloud workspace, but it is resulting in some lively reporting. For example... Using Documents to Tell the Story This summer, as the federal 5th Circuit...

September 7, 2010
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The Challenges of Life and Transparency at Quincy District Court

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now that the celebrations and congratulations are in the past, the hard work of building Order in the Court 2.0 has begun. The idea that received the endorsement of the Knight News Challenge is now being tested in the real world with formal meetings with officials from the Massachusetts court system. I'm happy to report that we have so far received overwhelming support and encouragement for this project. Our first meeting took place at the Quincy District Court where we met with Judge Mark Coven, the first justice of the court, the clerk of the court, the state court's public...

September 1, 2010
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New Media Tools Play Pivotal Role in Kenya's Constitution-Making

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Kenya is moving towards greater democracy and more transparent governance thanks to the recent constitutional referendum that received 70 percent "yes" votes. The new constitution, which is scheduled to be signed into law on Friday, replaces the one drafted during Kenya's colonial era. It includes a Bill of Rights, which states that all Kenyans should have access to clean water, decent housing, basic sanitation and quality food. The new constitution aims to decentralize political power, increase government accountability, create more robust checks and balances against corruption, and foster a move towards fairer distribution of wealth. President Mwai Kibaki said, "The...

August 25, 2010
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Helping D.C. Drinkers and Bikers with Custom Maps

by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my last post about [TileMill](http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2010/08/tilemill-custom-maps-to-help-with-data-dumps-hyper-local215.html), I outlined some of our general plans and the background for why we're working on this project to help make it easier for people to design very custom maps online. One question that we get a lot from people who are new to the GIS space is, "When would I need this? How could I hope to improve on what [fill in the blank:Google/Bing/etc.] make available?" The answer is that it's all about the details of the specific communications goal you want to accomplish.

August 24, 2010
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SocMap.com (GoMap) Helps Communities Map Local Events, News

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

SocMap.com (GoMap) is a map-based interface for local news, initiatives, building projects, public hearings and tweets. Our project, which won a 2010 Knight News Challenge grant (GoMap)-riga, is ment to turn a city into a neighborhood, a place where everybody sees and hears his/her friends, can communicate with each other, and have fun based on their geographical location. Here's how the project was described by the Knight Foundation: To inspire people to get involved in their community, this project will create a live, online map with local news and activities. SocMap.com (GoMap) Riga will pull some content from the web...

August 16, 2010
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Order in the Court 2.0: Making the Justice System More Public

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The idea behind Order in the Court 2.0, one of this year's winners of a Knight News Challenge grant, is to restore and reinvigorate the public's access and understanding of our nation's courts. Up to now journalism has been the primary bridge connecting the public to the courts. But the media's ability to cover the courts is diminished due to shrinking resources. At the same time, many in the public are equipped with new media tools like smartphones, Wi-Fi and access to multiple social networks. Working with the judiciary and the public, Order in the Court 2.0 will establish best...

August 13, 2010
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Wikileaks Case Illustrates Need for Compelling Storytelling

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're in the midst of another wartime disconnect, though it's different this time around. During the Vietnam War, the disconnect was between the government and its citizens. With the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, the press solidified a long-suspected belief that the government, through its spokespersons and the military, was misleading the public about the prosecution of the war. Because they were published in 1971, the Pentagon Papers were too late to the game, so to speak, to affect public opinion about the war. Yet they helped turn Americans away from their government: Americans knew their government had failed them,...

August 9, 2010
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TileMill: Custom Maps to Help with Data Dumps, Hyper-Local

by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

TileMill is an open source toolkit that helps you create beautiful custom maps in the cloud, built by Development Seed. We recently won a Knight News Challenge award (a.k.a. “Tilemapping”) to help us release a new version of TileMill that will make it even easier for people to design highly custom maps — using their own data or freely available public data — that they can then use anywhere online. Over the coming year, our team will be blogging on Idea Lab to share different pieces of our work and talk about our progress. In this post we want to...

August 5, 2010
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Councilpedia In Private Pilot, Overcoming Tech Challenges

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the last several months, Gotham Gazette has made major strides on its Councilpedia project, which will help New Yorkers keep tabs on their local officials and share their knowledge with others. Over the last year, the project has evolved and -- we think -- improved from our original plan. Currently we have a pilot for the site with the design, the structure and information for three office holders. We are not ready to release this to the world, but if you would like a sneak preview please email me at grobinson at gothamgazette.com. Councilpedia Brings City and Candidate Information...

July 16, 2010
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Pew: 27% of Americans Use Digital Tools to Talk to Neighbors

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Special Invite - Join the Pew Internet and American Life report author in a special Q and A discussion on the Locals Online community of practice now! Cross-posted at blog.e-democracy.org (with additional links). According to the just released Neighbors Online report from Pew Internet and American Life, 27% of American adult Internet users (or 20% of adults overall) use "digital tools to talk to their neighbors and keep informed about community issues." This is an amazing number and a great starting point. Today, we finally have baseline for the growing neighbors online movement. The other week we hosted a webinar...

June 9, 2010
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New Media Should Dig into Issues Around Cyber-Security

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I was honored to be invited by the EastWest Institute to attend in Dallas a Cyber Security Summit, which gathered a fascinating collection of tech elites including Michael Dell, Esther Dyson, Ross Perot Jr., and Randall L. Stephenson; current and retired military and intelligence like James L. Jones, Tom Ridge, and T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley; and financial titans like George Russell and Francis Finlay. The mantra of the event was that cyber-security will be the new big obsession of our various security services for the next century -- an obsession on par with the human and material resources that went...

June 2, 2010
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Sourcemap Makes Data Visualizations Transparent

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday colleagues of mine at MIT were brainstorming plenaries for an upcoming media conference. Data visualization came up, but each of us grumbled. "Overdone," one of us said, to nodding heads. We'd done a session on that at every one of our conferences and forums, as had others at theirs. Data visualization had become tragically hip, as if we were in charge of a music festival and one of us had just proffered Coldplay. But as we teased out our reservations, we realized that it wasn't visualization that we had an issue with; yes, we agreed, it's an overdone topic,...

March 31, 2010
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Competition in Internet, Mobile Services Boosts Democracy

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) such as the Internet and mobile phones are often recognized for their role in helping connect people and communities, and spread knowledge and information. People may be unaware, however, that they're also a powerful force for international development -- provided that they are not suffocated by regulation and censorship. The ICT Development and Initiative Dossier from June 2002 [PDF file] stated that, "since the beginning of the 1980s almost all national telecom and information technology markets worldwide have been transformed by technological innovation, product diversification (especially the introduction of mobile/cellular telephony and Internet) and market...

March 29, 2010
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Can Citizen Journalists in South Africa Help Open up Government Data?

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Communities need information, particularly information about what government is doing, and how people can access government services. In South Africa, this information doesn't flow so much as trickle -- and often a paper-based trickle at that! The fact that communication between government and us citizens is so poor is arguably part of the reason why we are reportedly second only to China in terms of the number of social protests per day (and they have 20 times our population). In many areas, government is doing more than people know, but the lack of data sharing and access to basic information...

February 27, 2010
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A New Model of Media Research

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How to piss off the subjects of your research study Everyone who had the opportunity to do so pointed out that we were just a few blocks from one of Beirut's Hezbollah-controlled neighborhoods. But we were also just a couple blocks from a Starbucks, snuggled comfortably in a new shopping center with more security guards than window shoppers. Over the next couple weeks such juxtapositions would form the basis of how I viewed most aspects of Beirut. On the second floor of the Hazmieh Rotana Hotel - catering to foreigners, the wealthy, and anyone who enjoys snail-paced internet connections -...

February 22, 2010
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Announcing the Technology for Transparency Network

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices, the outreach and citizen media training initiative of Global Voices Online, has launched a new interactive website and global network of researchers to map online technology projects that aim to promote transparency, political accountability, and civic engagement in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and Central & Eastern Europe.

January 19, 2010
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LocalLabs - Connecting Geeks Building Tools for Local Government Transparency

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Who the heck are the people building these local "apps" for the NYC Big Apps competition Amanda Hickman alerted us to in her recent post? I don't know, but they are invited to join LocalLabs to connect with other developers working to build the plumbing for far more transparent and participatory local government and communities. Over the last year, in part based on the 2008 e-election, the national work of the Sunlight Foundation and now the Obama Administration stirring the pot with the Open Government Directive, I've noticed a huge upswing in interest among software developers in open government. My...

December 29, 2009
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'Climategate' and the Perils of the Media's Short Attention Span

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There is a moment with which all stand-up comics are familiar. It comes when they release their big punchline, sometimes known as the "drop." For the drop, timing is everything. A successful drop means a joke takes off. An unsuccessful drop leaves it flat on its face. The already-infamous release of climate change emails was a fantastically successful drop. Though the emails themselves date from the late 1990s onwards, their release was perfectly timed to capture the media's attention just before the Copenhagen climate talks -- to achieve maximum impact. And it worked. Why? Not because they undermined the science...

December 10, 2009
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FTC's Hearings on Journalism: Why?

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As everyone knows, the nation's scam artists, monopolists and market-riggers have all gone into hibernation during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. This has given the Federal Trade Commission the breathing room it needs to intercede in an arena where its role is, at best, unclear. This week, the commission held a two-day workshop entitled How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? -- the purpose of which is "to explore how the Internet has affected journalism." There's been lots of blogging, Tweeting and journalizing about it. Some people think it was a valuable exercise. I question that, especially...

December 3, 2009
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2008 Knight News Challenge Winner Launches Open Media Foundation

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deproduction, a Denver-based nonprofit media and technology organization and Knight News Challenge winner, has reorganized as the Open Media Foundation. The nonprofit media and technology organization was founded in 2003, offering media and technology training and services to nonprofits and individuals in the Denver area. In recent years, the organization spawned Denver Open Media, the Open Media Project, and a number of web-based initiatives through the Civic Pixel web & design department launched in 2008. The new name and website were officially announced November 19 at a fundraising breakfast hosted by Ashara Ekundayo and featuring presentations from Amy Goodman, host...

December 1, 2009
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The New Era of Media Development, Part III

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spend your money wisely: this is the mandate given to program officers of philanthropic, government, and multilateral donor organizations. Each year they are given a certain budget, and they are expected to use that money as effectively as possible to further the objectives of their program. But how do these individuals gauge the impact of their investments? How can they cooperate with other donors to seek holistic solutions to complex problems? And to what extent should they be preparing for the likely challenges of the future, or focusing on the urgent problems of today? In part one of this series...

October 31, 2009
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Virtual Street Corners Connects Neighborhoods and People in Boston

by John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Virtual Street Corners, our Knight-funded project, is scheduled to be installed in Boston between June 8th and June 30th of this year. We have formed an exciting collaboration with the Boston Cyberarts festival, which will be our fiscal sponsor. I thought I would use my first post on Idea Lab to describe the project and fill everyone in on the work and thinking that has already gone into the piece. For those not familiar with the project, I'll offer a quick description. Large glass storefronts in two Greater Boston area neighborhoods, Brookline and Roxbury, will be transformed into video screens,...

October 16, 2009
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Mobile Phones Give Africans a Voice, Make Governments Nervous

The New Era of Media Development, Part 1

User-generated comments, and text messages in particular, are causing umbrage in Namibian government circles. Their unhappiness highlights the historic shift of media away from unidirectional, univocal information. This case underlines the politics entailed when the media becomes a platform for broader communication, which is exactly what's happening with mobile phones in some African countries. Things came to a head in Namibia in early October at a political rally held as part of the build-up to the country's November elections. A torrent of abuse and threats were issued at the event, and they emanated from the Namibian minister of justice,...

October 13, 2009
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by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Media development as a field within international development has existed for at least 30 years. Broadly speaking, media development organizations provide financial support, training, and resources to groups in developing countries that want build and sustain media organizations. An active and dynamic media ecosystem, the thinking goes, leads to greater government transparency, a more informed public, and greater civic participation. Some of the major players in the field of media development are: Internews, which was formed in 1982 during the Cold War dynamic of international relations. IREX, which was founded in 1968 and was similarly established to promote more free-flowing...

October 7, 2009
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Introducing Switch, A News Game About New York City's Energy Gap

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our latest (and last, for now) news game, Switch, is live. It is no Energyville but we think it is pretty awesome. Not only is it live, the source code and installation instructions are already available. With gadgets guzzling evermore energy, New York City faces a looming energy gap. New Yorkers will have to cut back on our electric use or start generating a lot more power. Our game lets people explore the options that are on the table, along with a few that aren't. Should the city ban air conditioning? Harness the tides? Go nuclear? Warning: the game is...

September 30, 2009
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Report from Gov 2.0: A Nerd, Suit, Spook, and Database Smoothie

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had not planned on attending O'Reilly's Gov2.0 conference, which is an exposition and dialog about new forms of government and information technology. But at last week's Foo Camp (another O'Reilly event) I met a number of people in the field, and I became pretty excited with what I heard. For example, I attended a session on government and data and sat next to a deputy CTO from the White House. I was surprised by the sincere and urgent dialog that was taking place with information activists and coders. The White House and geeks? What's not to like? As I...

September 10, 2009
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Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When he's not toasting escapism, our tireless editor Mark Glaser has been asking why reporting costs so much. I can't tell you much about investigative reporting (a $400,000 product of which started the conversation), except to say that six figure salaries do add up. But I can tell you that when it comes to local reporting, improved access to information could make a big dent in the expense of getting a story written. If you want to take a look at distribution of discretionary funds by the New York City Council, you have to start with a 400-page PDF full...

September 9, 2009
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When FM Radio Meets the Mobile Phone in Pakistan

by Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the United States, high-end smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry don't have built-in radios. But in Pakistan, even the cheapest cell phones, which don't have cameras or other features, come with the ability to listen to FM radio. Every day, and especially during cricket matches, people walk the streets with their phones pressed to their ears, tuned into their local stations, according to Huma Yusuf, a journalist based in Pakistan. In Pakistan and other countries in the developing world, mobile phones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. In June 2009, Pakistan had 94.3 million mobile subscribers, or about 58 percent...

August 19, 2009
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Liberian Bloggers Show Everyday Life in Monrovia

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

August 14, 2009
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No Newspaper Bailouts without Civic Representation

Nika System Brings Reader SMS Messages into Newspaper's Workflow

Government money to bail out newspapers is a rather "un-American" suggestion. It has been put forward by various commentators who feel that emergency circumstances call for drastic measures. After all, it's not just jobs at stake, but the survival of a key pillar of democracy. If newspapers go under, the argument goes, so too does the bulk of professional journalism. The same proposal has been roundly condemned by people whose knee-jerk reaction is that government money means government control. For this camp, government control engenders the oxymoron of "government journalism." Ergo, a bailout is not a solution for saving an...

July 23, 2009
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Inzwa: Listen up!

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, Kubatana launched Inzwa, Zimbabwe's experiment with Freedom Fone, providing audio information via mobile phones. We'll be updating our information every Tuesday, and we are interested in any feedback to help us improve the service. How does it work? Tune into Inzwa by phoning +263 913 444 321-8 and . . . - Press 1 for 60 seconds fresh bringing you current news and views - Choose 2 to enter the doorway to chibanzi for job vacancies, scholarships or resources - Press 3 to find out about everyday heroes and take a new look at Zimbabwean activists and activism...

July 15, 2009
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by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recent research support the idea that South Africans, 15 years after the heroic levels of participation that led to overthrow of apartheid, are becoming less engaged: Membership of religious groups, trade unions, political parties, and even of sporting associations are all decreasing, sometimes sharply, in the 21st century. Whether this is about a "growing dependence on the state to provide everything" or just people getting on with their lives -- getting involved takes a lot of time -- is not clear. Bowling Alone What has caused this South African equivalent of "bowling alone"? In Robert Putnam's 2000 book, "Bowling Alone:...

July 14, 2009
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How Law Enforcement Overreached in Lori Drew Case

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When public officials start talking about "protecting the children," watch out. Those are often code words for whacking civil liberties -- and in the Internet age, they go directly to core liberties such as free speech. A breaking-news example is the ugly case of Lori Drew, in which a federal judge is in the process of rescuing us from a prosecutor whose legal theories would have created criminals of just about everyone who ever signed up for just about anything online. The judge said last week he's overturning a jury verdict that prosecutors won by abusing the law while appealing...

July 7, 2009
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'Alive in Tehran' Lets Iranian Citizens Report Through Voicemail

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been following Brian Conley's work at Alive in Baghdad since October 2007, when I met him at the Networked Journalism summit at CUNY. Conley -- somewhat more commonly known as Baghdad Brian -- is one of the few supporters of citizen journalism with several trips to wartime Iraq under his belt. In this interview, Conley talks about his recent project, Alive in Tehran. Listen to the full interview here (15:35) or right-click to download the mp3. Full transcript follows, with links added: Ryan: Hey this is Ryan Sholin here, I'm recording this today for PBS Idea Lab, and I'm...

June 24, 2009
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The A Word: Information and Activism

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the central shifts implicit in user-generated information is that in many cases the user will be closer to the subject than a reporter may have been. Journalists, like ethnographers or consultants, are separated from their subjects by factors like structures of reward (salary) and professional codes (organized skepticism, systematic disinterestedness). These factors are sometimes driven by ethical positions and sometimes are byproducts of revenue structures, but have been seen as important to the neutrality and objectivity that characterize recent ideas of journalism. Citizen-created content falls in a different space; as I have said elsewhere, it starts to look...

June 5, 2009
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by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One pig, if only in the news topic logo*, usually gets a cameo in television coverage of swine flu. The lonely pig is out of context, though -- separated from the three-quarters of a million caged, crammed, and fattened pigs slaughtered annually at the massively polluting pig factory in the town with the first human case of the virus. There is not yet hard proof that the pigs half-owned by U.S. agribusiness giant Smithfield Farms evolved the virus in their literal cesspool conditions -- there isn't a single pig outed with having this flu anywhere -- but media are rarely...

April 30, 2009
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Maps for Social Change and Community Involvement

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

2008 was the year of aggregating data related to local communities and displaying that information on maps. Knight News Challenge grantee EveryBlock, for example, labored to convince city governments to make their data more open and accessible, and then created a beautiful map interface to display what is happening where in real time. Map of the 132 calls made to police on April 22nd in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. Other examples of projects which have set out to add geographic locations to information found on the internet, and to display that information on map interfaces, include outside.in, WikiMapia,...

April 24, 2009
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How Can We Improve Information Needs of Local Communities?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

With some fanfare, the Knight Foundation and Aspen Institute announced a new Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy a couple years ago, with the idea of finding out just what needs were being served -- and what was lacking. The problem with many of these types of "commissions" is that a lot of important people go behind closed doors and decide what's best for us, the public, and then we can complain afterward just how wrong they are. In this case, the Commission decided to do the opposite, and get input from the public...

April 21, 2009
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As Newspapers Implode, Diverse Voices Move Online

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a few weeks the American Society of Newspaper Editors will release its annual census. The census, created to capture an accurate picture of the industry's diversity, will also tell us how many jobs were lost in this year of layoffs, buy-outs and shuttered newspapers. As newspaper companies struggle with advertisers and audiences continuing to migrate to the web, the horrifying and at times mind-numbing rate at which the industry appeared to be imploding has take the question of diversity virtually off the table. As one newspaper CEO said to me a while back, "Diversity isn't only off the front-burner,...

April 1, 2009
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Social Networking and Political Movements

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

An upcoming event caught my attention as something I thought other Ideas Lab bloggers and readers might be interested in: Using Social Networking to Marshal the Youth Vote: Online discussion with Rock the Vote director Heather Smith - Tuesday April 7 Very significant elections are coming up in South Africa on April 22, and for the first time in the country's history, there is relatively strong opposition to the governing party. So each party has to campaign hard, and they're reaching out to young voters using Facebook, YouTube and other online media. Join us for a global webchat on April...

April 1, 2009
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Where Citizens Gather: An Interview with The Future of Public Media Project's Jessica Clark (Part Two)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, we continue our discussion with Jessica Clark, co-author of Public Media 2.0, an important white paper recently issued by American University's Center for Social Media. What does your research suggest about the relative roles of professional media producers and Pro-Am media makers in the new ecology of public media? Professionally produced content is central to public media 2.0--right now, more people than ever are consuming and linking to newspapers and broadcast news sources. Some forms of public media are expensive to produce and difficult to make using only volunteer energy and resources: investigative journalism, long-form documentary, international coverage. Those...

March 31, 2009
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Where Citizens Gather: An Interview with The Future of Public Media Project's Jessica Clark (Part One)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amidst all of the dire talk these days about the fate of the American newspaper, the Center for Social Media at American University has issued an important white paper exploring the future of public media more generally. When most of us think about "public media" these days, we are most likely to be talking about Public Broadcasting, where the Public refers as much to Public Funding as it refers to any conception of the Public Sphere. The report, Public Media 2.0, embraces the affordances and practices of an era of participatory culture and social networks to identify strategies for public...

March 31, 2009
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The Intelligence is in the Network, Social Media and Local Public Life Gathering in Boston Thursday

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Join me this Thursday evening at Harvard's Berkman Center for a discussion of Social Media and Local Public Life. It should be an interesting conversation, particularly if you bring examples with you. On a related note, I am getting ready to speak on Saturday at the Newout.Org conference in Boston which is described as: _NEWSOUT: What to do when the newsroom lights go out: _ _In the last 18 months, some 15,000 U.S. working journalist have lost their jobs through retirement, buyouts or layoffs. New England newsrooms have not been immune. _ _If independent, watchdog journalism is critical to participatory...

March 18, 2009
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NY Attorney General Should Practice Transparency He Preaches

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo made news headlines by coming down hard on American International Group (AIG), the company that has paid out millions of dollars in bonuses to some of the people thought responsible for the billions of dollars in losses that preceded government bailout money that continues to flow to the insurance giant. In a letter to AIG Chairman Ed Liddy (PDF), Cuomo requested a "list of individuals who are to receive payments under this retention plan, as well as their positions at the firm" and "a list of who negotiated these contracts and who developed...

March 17, 2009
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The Community Radio Movement in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

India has been quite a latecomer to this promising channel of people empowerment through community media. Until late 2006, only educational institutions were allowed to set up campus radio stations having a transmission range of 10-15km. The scope was only recently expanded to also include non-profit agencies, agricultural research institutes, and schools, to set up community radio stations that would involve local communities in the content production process. The progress has been steady since then, although arguably somewhat slow. As of now, there are four stations that are broadcasting, and around six stations that are in advanced stages of their...

March 10, 2009
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Change Tracker

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This one is for the "wish I'd thought of that" files. Brian Boyer at ProPublica got the bright idea to write a wee widget that uses Versionista to track changes to a handful of White House websites including whitehouse.gov. Since I heard about Change Tracker on Twitter I've been following it on Twitter. They're still getting their bearings: I was surprised to see that the biography of Andrew Jackson was edited on March 4. and couldn't resist looking up the edit, which turned out to be a change to the site navigation. Not all that interesting. Luckily, ChangeTracker had a...

March 6, 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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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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Messages From Hot Places

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I got to go to the MIT Media Lab to sit in on a gathering of researchers and graduate students involved with the Center for Future Civic Media. It's hard not to get all fangirl when going to the Media Lab. I mean, I used to read about this place in issues of Wired back before they adopted rational typography! We all got brief presentations on three projects at different stages of development. One, Virtual Gaza, took eyewitness testimonies from people living in Gaza and overlaid them on a Google Virtual Earth layer. Another, called Between the Bars, was...

February 27, 2009
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House Exploded? Try Software for Community Collective Action.

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've written before about the extrACT suite of software tools we have been developing at MIT: information and communication technologies that promote community collective action. We have started to introduce the first of these tools, Landman Report Card, to communities in Texas and Ohio that are being confronted by the impacts of natural gas extraction. The experiences that citizens are recording with it are as remarkable as they are heartbreaking. Residents out west, in some of the most scenic and (until recently) unspoiled parts of the US have called their regions a "national sacrifice zone" where their health, welfare, and...

February 25, 2009
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Convergence and Disturbance: New Media, Networked Publics, and Pakistan

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The above video is one of a large number posted via YouTube by students in Pakistan to share what was happening in their country during the 2007-2008 political emergency. During a time when the government was tightening its control over traditional media, citizen journalists took on vital functions in fostering public debate, insuring the spread of important information, monitoring elections, and helping the outside world understand what was happening. Huma Yusuf, a recently graduate Comparative Media Studies student, has shared an important analysis of the role which grassroots media played during the crisis through the Center for Future Civic...

February 4, 2009
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Obama's Open Government Imperatives Must Trickle Down to Cities

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today President Obama issued two eloquent orders with the following subject lines: "Freedom of Information Act" and "Transparency and Open Government". Published on the first full day of his presidency, they constitute a sweeping manifesto about how he wants to govern at the Federal level. Those leading municipal government in this country-- mayors, commissioners, and department heads-- would do well to read closely. Change is coming. In the first memo, he writes that "the Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." He goes on to "direct the Director of...

January 21, 2009
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Local Press Subsidies Are Not The Answer

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are a growing number of voices from within the media and politics in the UK who are suggesting the government should subsidise local newspapers. This is not, IMHO, a good idea. The government can set parameters - particularly fiscal parameters (i.e. tax) that incentivise people to collect and publish public interest news. But this is fundamentally different from providing a subsidy, however arm's length, that organisations can apply for.

January 16, 2009
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Gates Foundation Invests $2 Million in Chilean Social Web

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in March last year I pointed to Contenidos Locales ("Local Content"), a program of Chile's national library network, as a model example of how public institutions like libraries can foster more civic participation by training their local users how to take advantage of new media tools: Examples include Buscando Mis Raices ("Looking for my Roots") by Rosa Tromilén, which offers a personal history of the Mapuche-majority community Juan Calfumán; Conjunto Folklórico Renacer de Cucao, a youth-group on Chiloé Island dedicated to preserving local folkloric traditions; and the website of the Asociación de Artistas Plásticos de Puerto Montt ("Association of...

January 13, 2009
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Digital Community Builders Can Roll Their Own Economic Stimulus Package

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I come from the "citizen" side of citizen media and work a lot with community building online. Everyday, I an privileged to live in a neighborhood with a vibrant online community far from the wretched shores media hosted mostly anonymous and frequently disturbing online reader comments. So, from my non-profit perspective, when I look at all the money the U.S. government might be throwing into cement, I figure we digital folks need to come up with similar job-creating ideas that provide real value to community infrastructure. So below is my proposal. (Also in PDF format.) Community Infrastructure Builders - The...

January 13, 2009
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Inaccessible Pothole Data in Chicago

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently in Chicago, as the weather warmed inordinately from a deep freeze, with a 70-degree swing in temperature, the attention of the media and the municipal workers turned to potholes. The two daily newspapers sent writers to a press conference at the city's "Pothole Command Center," where Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), Tom Byrne, and his top spokesman, Brian Steele held forth on the problem of holes in the street. From the Chicago Tribune story: "Byrne said a computerized map that tracks work crews and unfilled potholes will speed the patching process and added that an estimated...

January 12, 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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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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Extract: Civic Defense 2.0

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week our development team announced the release of the LandmanReportCard (LRC), the first of our experiments in designing tools for community understanding and self-defense. We've chosen one of the most difficult community contexts imaginable: neighborhoods, mostly rural, that stand in the path of some of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world. In the mix are weak and compromised governments, a lack of local media, mutant baby goats, a toxic soup of industrial byproducts, unmatched potential for profits, flammable tap water, and a clean burning source of energy that may be central to national security. It is...

December 7, 2008
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Toward a National Journalism Foundation

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amid so much talk of federal bailouts for the banking and auto industries, what would a national bailout plan for journalism look like? If you were given $700 billion to save journalism, how would you use it? How would you fix the system? The End of Commercial Media Several months ago I watched Roger Alton, the new editor of the Britain daily, The Independent, get absolutely skewered by Stephen Sackur on the BBC evening talk show, Hard Talk. Their 30 minute discussion boiled down to 15 minutes of Sackur asking how The Independent planned to stop losing money and 15...

November 17, 2008
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Bloggers Demonstrate the Difference Diversity Makes

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two days after the election both UNITY and the National Association of Black Journalists sent out open letters urging the media to redouble their efforts to diversify staffs in the aftermath of the historic election of Barack Obama. At the same time, others privately wondered if there are some people who would argue that the election of the first African-American president signaled the country has moved past the need to be concerned about racial equity. It is true that some television networks put on air more African-American commentators during the campaign. Those additional voices, however, were not numerous enough to...

November 13, 2008
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Twittering the Minnesota U.S. Senate Recount

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Politicos and media-types are crowd sourcing the continuous change in the unofficial count between Al Franken and incumbent Senator Norm Coleman. By coalescing around the tag #mnrecount on Twitter, a dynamic conversation and exchange is developing. You can see the national reaction with simple searches of franken and coleman as well. Also, on E-Democracy.Org's MN-Politics forum (an e-list/web forum dating back to 1994) you can see some old skool exchange as well. Oh, and here are posts across the blogosphere. Here are just the last 18 minutes on the Twitter channel: # wabbitoid: #mnrecount Coleman, 5 Nov: "I would step...

November 6, 2008
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UCLA Students Got Election News from Social Media

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

An exit poll conducted Nov. 4 by the Daily Bruin suggests, unsurprisingly, that UCLA students received a substantial amount of information about the election from the Internet and social media sites. Eight hundred sixteen students were polled at five locations on and around campus, and we ended up with a margin of error of 3%. This was one of the questions and our results: Please circle the following places where you received a significant amount of information regarding the current election? Please circle all that apply. Television Debates ----------------------- 71% Television News -------------------------- 66% Word of Mouth ---------------------------- 56% Other...

November 5, 2008
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What Bloggers Are Saying About the U.S. Election

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tomorrow's American election stands out for many reasons; among them that a large percentage of the world's 6.5 billion people will have something to say about who wins. Never before have so many individuals shared so many opinions about any other single topic in the history of humanity. Thanks to the constant curation of Amira Al Hussaini and her team of contributing authors, the Global Voices' project Voices Without Votes has become a one-stop shop to discover what bloggers from other countries have to say about America's presidential election. Like for so many others, I found Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic piece...

November 3, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 7
Vote For Losers!

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Includer is the voting machine for ones dreams.(There are no apostrophes on this Bosnian keyboard.) I am blogging thanks to last years Knight News Challenge. November 1 is the last day to apply this year. What I really like about this contest is that everybody can see your entry. Here is mine: Help Room. Please rate my entry and add your comments! Paul Bradshaw (Birmingham City University), Stefan Lewandowski (3form media) and Nick Booth (former BBC journalist) have teamed together to propose Help Me Investigate. Com, an online iterative open-source investigatory community. I was hoping to draw attention to...

October 29, 2008
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Who's Watching the Elections?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Every election, Gotham Gazette publishes a last minute voters guide. We almost always include every local race along with a round up of our coverage of the issues in that district and the race itself. From Surrogate Court and judicial convention delegates to NYC congressional races; and sometimes we're the only publication in town that can tell you whether there's a race in your precinct. Every election, we also provide a roundup of basic information for voters: how to find your polling place, voting rights, special instructions for first time voters. And, who to call to report problems at the...

October 24, 2008
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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
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Framing the Candidates: The Daily Show Parodies

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the past two posts, I've suggested ways educators could use the campaign bio videos produced for the two national conventions as a way of encouraging civic literacy. I've suggested that they are powerful examples of the different ways that the parties "frame" their candidates and platforms. The focus on personal biography brings to the surface what linguist George Lakoff calls the GOP's "Strict Father" and the Democrat's "Nurturing Parent" models, both of which see the family as a microcosm for the way a president will relate to the nation. I've also suggested that the videos surrounding the Vice-Presidential candidates help to broaden the appeal by bringing in aspects of the other party's "frame" so as to speak to swing voters.

Today, I want to turn my attention to the parodies of these videos produced for The Daily Show.

September 28, 2008
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Framing the Candidates: The Vice Presidential Videos

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last time, I discussed, for example, how the McCain video uses images of his mother, even the phrase "mother's boy," to soften his tough, military-based persona, and how he was able to use images of personal suffering to express both vulnerability and toughness. We see many more such contradictions -- or appeals across party -- when we look at the videos for the Vice Presidential candidates.

September 26, 2008
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U.S. Government Should Publish All Mortgages It Buys

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It appears that the United States government is going to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad mortgages in an effort to prevent the collapse of the world's financial system. If they do, I'd like them to publish a list of all of the mortgages they purchase -- the loan number, the address of the property, the lender, the amount of the loan, the status of the loan, the plaintiffs and defendants in any associated foreclosure cases, and so on. As far as I can tell, it's not currently possible for the public to determine the underlying assets...

September 24, 2008
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Framing the Candidates: A Closer Look at Biography Videos

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over my next three posts, I will look more closely at first the videos for the two Presidential candidates, then the bios for the two Vice Presidential candidates, and finally parodies of these videos produced for The Daily Show. I am hoping that this will provide inspiration for educators who might want a way to talk about the campaigns, the differences between the parties, and the role of media in the process.

September 24, 2008
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Mobile Reporting Gave Raw View of Political Conventions

by Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The most dramatic example of how our mobile coverage played out was on the final night of the Republican National Convention. While thousands were preparing to cheer McCain’s speech inside the convention center, our Wisconsin reporter, Charlie, was hot on the trail of an anti-war protest gearing up outside. His “tweets” began…

September 23, 2008
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Can the Political Press Self-Correct? Spinewatch Hopes it Can

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Fellow IdeaLabber Jay Rosen, an NYU journalism professor and PressThinker, mounted a campaign this weekend to encourage the political press to grow a spine. Rosen and others are calling for journalists of all stripes (professionals, amateurs, citizens, bloggers, etc.) to use a #spinewatch tag on Twitter and elsewhere to call attention to whether or not the professional press covering the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election is standing up to stonewalling candidates or sitting back and repeating their talking points. In an IM interview today, Jay said: "The premise behind spinewatch is more this: It's hard for me to...

September 15, 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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Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

During the 2004 presidential election season, I ran a column in Technology Review Online which described the way that average citizens were exploiting their expanded capacity to manipulate and circulate images to create the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. These images often got passed along via e-mail or posted on blogs as a way of enlivening political debates. Like classic editorial cartoons, they paint in broad strokes, trying to forge powerful images or complex sets of associations that encapsulate more complex ideas. In many cases, they aim lower than what we would expect from an established publication and so they are a much blunter measure of how popular consciousness is working through shifts in the political landscape. Many of them explore the borderlands between popular culture and American politics.

September 10, 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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Street Team Exclusive: Palin Liked Romney, Paul In Primaries

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in February, on Super Tuesday, MTV News/Knight Foundation Street Teamer Dani Carlson did a Flixwagon mobile phone interview with Alaska Governor -- and now presumptive Republican vice-presidential candidate -- Sarah Palin, who had some interesting things to say about energy policy and the "party machinery." In this interview, Palin calls controversial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul "cool." "He's a good guy," she added. "He's so independent. He's independent of the party machine. I'm like, 'Right on, so am I.' " She also spoke about feeling allegiance with former presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. "He said all the right things about...

September 2, 2008
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Gustav Information Sources

Government Data: File Not Found

There is a great selection of new media information channels already to go even before Gustav has touched down in the U.S. These include: A Gustav Information Center on the social networking site Ning: A government Gustav Twitter feed A Gustav Wiki with centralized information: And a whole slew of live video feeds and news broadcasts on LiveNewsCameras.com Please help spread the word to those who can benefit from the resources now in place, many put together by volunteers....

August 31, 2008
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by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

August 25, 2008
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Resorting to Interviews When Conversation Stalls

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we started the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project, we believed what local people involved in this effort told us -- that they'd be happy to contribute to this public conversation, speak up with their ideas and observations. Since we're dealing with a fairly niche topic mainly involving local government in a small city, we were relying on some initiative from people involved in what the city is doing with the carbon tax money. The kind of engagement we envisioned was people speaking up, having a public conversation. But when it came down to it, most of the people "in...

August 11, 2008
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Can Bloggers Shape Health Care Policy?

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

M.D. Leaves Profession to Blog Last week one of the most emailed stories on the New York Times website was about a medical doctor who traded in his profession for a more lucrative one: blogging. No, Arnold Kim M.D. does not blog about kidney diagnosis, his specialty, but rather, rumors about future Apple products. His blog, MacRumors.com is listed as the second most valuable blog ($85 million) on the internet right behind Gawker Media and ahead of The Huffington Post, according to 24/7 Wall St., a financial news blog. But what if Arnold Kim M.D. did decide to blog about...

July 29, 2008
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How a Hyperlocal Site Can Sway Elections

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Every political campaign, whether local, state or national, is a battle of competing narratives. The role of the media in general - this includes editorial, advertising and in the case of hyperlocal news/social sites conversation - is to serve as vehicles for the competing narratives. Candidates attach themselves to these narratives and voters choose. The conversation on Paulding.com, a hyperlocal media site, was decisive in the local primary election in July 15th with the site being credited as being a key influence in the landslide victories of three candidates that rejected incumbents, including a well-funded two-term incumbent commission chairman who...

July 24, 2008
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Reforming a Mean World: Hero Reports

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in the position of having to play detective" --Walter Benjamin 1938 In the research on media effects, one of the most fully developed findings is what is known as the "mean world syndrome." Research finds that the average citizen grossly over-estimates how dangerous her neighborhood is because she reads the newspaper and assumes that the crime reports are actually a sample of the whole and thus amplifies them accordingly. In practice, a higher portion of violent crimes get reported than most people assume, although there...

July 21, 2008
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Huang Qi, Journalist, Formally Arrested

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Huang Qi, the Chinese dissident who had been working to uncover information about school buildings that collapsed during the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, China, was formally arrested last week for illegally possessing state secrets. He had been in detention for weeks. Huang had already served five years in prison on charges of inciting subversion after publishing many articles critical of the government on his Web site, http://64tianwang.com/. He claimed that he was badly beaten in jail, and suffers headaches and depression. The parents of children who died in collapsed school buildings have been considered a possible threat to the...

July 21, 2008
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We Always Needed Something New: Journalism Meets World

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Where will today's journalists will find tomorrow's jobs, Amy Gahran asks, and partially answers, in a recent Idealab post. She opened by quoting Alan Abbey, a commenter on her Poynter blog, discussing journalists' job losses: this downturn does feel similar to the widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago. What can we do with our outdated skills? If we in the media had covered the economic downturn and widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago with more care, respect, and investigation into how economic and political systems affect people, we would have...

July 15, 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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NYC Police Deny Press Passes to Online Reporters

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

July 8, 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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Independent Government Observers Task Force Non-Conference, August 4 - 5 in Chicago

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I wrote earlier about the IGOTF, a "non-conference structured around three sets of working group activities": 1. Case Law (Working Group Chair: Carl Malamud, carl at media dot org). This working group brings together individuals groups involved in the day-to-day work of putting the courts on-line. Topics that will be considered include markup of citations in cases, "universal resolvers" for mapping citations to URLs, recycling of PACER and other documents, and other subjects as appropriate. 2. Municipal Governments (Working Group Chair: Daniel X. O'Neil, danx at everyblock dot com). This group will focus on issues involved in citizens attempting to...

July 7, 2008
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Life in a Failed State Certainly Isn't Boring

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

July 7, 2008
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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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Three Obstacles to a Truly Global Conversation

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

July 4, 2008
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Hyperlocal Media Meets Negative Campaigning

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If all politics are local, then hyperlocal media of sorts should be in tall cotton when it comes to local politics. No so and not now; rather hyperlocal media is at best a big thorn in the side of the key group that determines where the big buck political money goes. That key group is the political consultant. This group controls spending for most big-dollar local races such as state house, senate, commission chairman and sheriff in most mid-size to large counties in the nation. Today a serious candidate for commission chairman in Paulding County will spend upwards of $100,000...

July 3, 2008
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Street Team Honors Young Vets for July 4

by Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Throughout the primaries, a number of issues have recurred with young people, whether it be gas prices, the environment, education or the war. Yet, one statistic has broken through, and it is that MTV Research recently reported that nearly 70% of 18-29 year-olds personally know someone who has fought in Iraq, a staggering number that uniquely defines this generation. So we believed that it is of vital importance to hear the stories of our young soldiers returning home from war.

July 3, 2008
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Glimpsing the Worlds of Neighbors Online

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

July 1, 2008
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Sidewalks for Democracy Online

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Government websites don't have sidewalks, newspaper racks, public hearing rooms, hallways or grand assemblies. There are no public forums or meeting places in the heart of representative democracy online. The question that this essay will ask and answer is not what can we do to redesign democracy for the Internet Age, but, rather, why have we decided to delete democracy from the most visited interface citizens have with "their" government? And what are we going to do about it? After almost two decades of "e-democracy," we seem content with simply accelerating online what's already wrong with politics. We raise money...

June 22, 2008
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Covering the Democratic Convention

by Ardyth Broadrick Sohn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

any other students there?

June 18, 2008
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Twittering from the Future of Civic Media Meeting

African Cell-Phone Media: Hostage to Policy Delays

Opening panel at the conference is talking from local media (as civic media), ranging to macro political level. Tweeting the debates....

June 11, 2008
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Election Day Could Be Our Own Pangia Day

There are a couple of delays in implementing our Iindaba Ziyafika - the news is coming project around cellphone journalism, supported by the Knight Foundation - but the tardy policy context in South Africa is also a constraint. At present in South Africa, at least six out of ten adults have access to cellphones, but their main use is for interpersonal conversation. The notion that these are devices that can also be used to receive, and contribute to, journalism is not well-developed beyond sms comments sent to the mass media. What could begin to change this culture is free-to-air television...

June 11, 2008
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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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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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Killing Trees and the Future of News Online

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Seth Godin on the news buiness versus the paper business: Jason wrote in to ask why I thought that the newspaper industry was in a Dip. In my book, I point out that with classified ads disappearing and the web thriving, the days of newspapers as we know them are clearly over. That shouldn't mean the industry is in trouble. In fact, there are more people reading more news every day than ever before--without the cost of printing and distributing a costly piece of newsprint every day. Happy days... But (many of) the people in the industry have built their...

June 4, 2008
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EveryBlock Does Special Report on Corruption Case

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've launched our first EveryBlock "special report" -- an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation "Operation Crooked Code." As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We've been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web. However, over the past few months as we've been building the site, we've come across a number of types of information that don't exactly fit the EveryBlock mold....

June 3, 2008
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Sean Bell Illustrates Lines that Divide Us

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Blaring red headlines on the Drudge Report announced to the world that the three New York City Police who shot Sean Bell 50 times, killing him, were found not guilty. Drudge, with his right wing reputation, it turns out was one of the only mainstream white blogs to prominently play the Bell verdict. In fairness, the Huffington Post did have a small headline about the verdict. Things were different in the black blogosphere. It wasn't just that the black interest sites carried the coverage, it was also that many included rich texture and context in which to look at the...

May 12, 2008
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Insights into News Games through Eyetracking / Usability

by Nora Paul
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eyetracking and usability studies of online news games reveal the issues of creating these kinds of approaches.

May 5, 2008
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Finding Local Community Online

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been thinking a lot about just how "local" most people want to be online. The greatest myth about the Internet is that people only want to go to world online. That they only care about creating social networks with friends or people like themselves with similar interests from thousands of miles away. It is as if the cross-dressing organic gardener from Sweden connecting with those like themselves on the other side of the world (someone I met once who shared his tipping point experience with the power of the Internet) has more virtue than enabling a plant swap online...

May 2, 2008
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Open Government Data and the EveryBlock Project

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At EveryBlock, where my main role is to work with municipal governments to uncover new data sets, we're experimenting with a new form of journalism where we treat freshly updated public records as block-level news. It's a big job to acquire ongoing feeds of government data, and we have a broader goal of spreading the gospel of open data. The two objectives: Get more datasets for EveryBlock so it can be a better Web site Convince governments to share that data with everyone, not just us can lead to some cognitive dissonance in the minds of government leaders. They have...

May 1, 2008
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MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 - Leaning Local

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The premise of our MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 is that the path to civic participation and becoming a voter is different for everyone, particularly among today's youth. Frequently, young people disconnect the issues that concern them most, from the act of voting - on the premise that their individual vote won't make a difference, or that the news media nor the political candidates NEVER speak about the issues THEY care about most. The job of each Street Team '08 member is to determine what is important to youth in their states, and get young people engaged in...

April 22, 2008
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'Digital New Deal' Needs Real Life Counterpart

Using a Database to Track NY Politicians

An interesting piece appeared in the Friday, April 11 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, calling for a New Deal-like investment by America in youth and technology. The basic argument is that a new generation of technology savvy youth could be put to work leveraging their digital skills to create socially useful tools and engage in 21st Century public service. The OpEd sites a study listing the US as much lower down in rankings for broadband penetration (24th among industrialized countries), and uses this as reason to put millenials to work bettering our nation's online offerings. What such studies often...

April 18, 2008
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by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago, I asked a question that I'm still chewing on: what good is all this data ? Sitting the programmers down with reporters is a great advance over abandoning them to some cold dark dungeon, but I think we've got a ways to go to come up with really smart uses of data and database driven content. So, here's one idea: what about a database that tracks local representatives and their plans once they've been pushed out by term limits: the next election will see the first term-limits enforced turnover on New York's City Council. Here's what...

April 17, 2008
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A Blogger Posse in Israel

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been busy the past two weeks readying for a last-minute trip to Israel. I'm honored to be past of a blogger/citizen journalist delegation heading to the Holy Land. The trip was arranged and paid for by the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest, which covers California and the greater West, though we'll be paying for some items. The goal is to meet and mingle with some of the best and brightest in Israel's tech field. Here's who's going: Robert Scoble, Craig Newmark, Susan Mernit, Cathy Brooks, Deb Schultz, Jeff Saperstein, Brad Reddersen, Renee Blodgett, Sarah Lacy...

April 9, 2008
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What Drives News Decisions (What Are They Thinking)?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Senator Barack Obama mischaracterized statements of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. To be charitable, there's only so many media narratives any one person or even campaign can try to change at one time. That's my question for today: how are these media narratives formed in the first place, and why? Easier question: Did you see the videos below? The seven and ten minute versions, not the seven and ten second versions? Obama, in his speech, chose to defend Wright as a person and a leader, but he denounced the statements as divisive and reflecting a static view of progress in history. In...

March 25, 2008
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How Would You Engage People in Public Policy?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The one million figure is my number, but seriously, the UK government wants advice on how to engage lots of people online. Engage is the key word, the British Prime Minister already receives e-petitions online (nothing like that with the White House, Congress, or even one U.S. governor despite our constitutional right to petition) which is more about political expression than engagement. From the UK-based OpenDemocracy site you can learn about UK government's "desire to hold a national debate on a British Statement of Values as part of the Governance of Britain Green Paper." You can read a summary of...

March 25, 2008
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Nuestra Ciudad, Nuestras Voces

by Gabriel Berrios
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Versión en español más abajo. Greetings all, for some time now we have been deeply involved in developing our project and carrying out the audiovisual production workshops with the immigrant population in Philadelphia. The workshops have had a good turnout, and as you may know already from my colleague Todd Wolfson, the first 20 participants finished the course successfully and are now in the process of making their videos. The first round of workshops was directed at the Spanish-speaking immigrants who came to Philadelphia looking for a better quality of life; soon we will be screening the videos they have...

March 20, 2008
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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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Is Citizen Media Skipping Small Town America?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am on a hunt. While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic "user-generated" content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America. As part of E-Democracy.Org's Rural Voices project in Minnesota we seek to discover bloggers, social networking groups, wikis, online community forums, etc. from rural/Greater Minnesota. This map of 200 blogs aggregated by MNSpeak, shows just three outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area....

March 19, 2008
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How Far Should Transparency Go?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Government Technology reported on public employee protests to seeing their names and salaries online via a database on the Sacramento Bee. What about public employee salaries - should all be publicly posted online? Should only management level and above be listed specifically with others displaying the salary range per pay scales for various classifications? I have a hard time imagining a democracy where any and all legally public government information is not on the Internet for all to see in a decade or so. This means the ethics filings of public officials will be liberated from the dusty paper files...

March 18, 2008
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Fragmentation of Media is Democratization of Media: Retaining Reach

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 17, 2008
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Boulder's ClimateSmart Lacks Online Community

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Why the journalistically independent Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker fills a gap that local government web sites cannot.

March 12, 2008
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The San Jose Mercury News and Gary Webb

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The San Jose Mercury News' location in Silicon Valley is not the first reason it should have become the newspaper of record in the Internet age. Reading about this year's round of layoffs and cutbacks, I think about the journalist the Mercury News cut off twelve years ago during boom times. In 1996, a series of articles by Gary Webb showed the Central Intelligence Agency's complicity in bringing crack cocaine into Los Angeles. Profits from the new, highly addictive, and illegal drug supported the U.S.-backed Contras' war of terror against the people of Nicaragua during the 1980s. In those first...

March 11, 2008
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Crashing the E-Politics and E-Democracy Gates

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My focus tends to be the "citizen" in citizen media. Over the last few years I've increasing found myself at conferences like Public Media and the Online News Association. I always feel a bit out of place, because despite the adoption of online interactivity in online news and media, I am still pretty much viewed as a "consumer." Someone to be captured and delivered to advertisers or to become a donor to public broadcasting. Interactivity is often viewed in the context of news be it reacting with reader comments or creating "news." True conversation, the heart of being a citizen...

February 21, 2008
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WikiLeaks Block Hurts Anonymity Everywhere

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Anonymous communication online is becoming quite a theme here on Idea Lab. The web site WikiLeaks.org (if you're in the United States, right now you'll have to access it through their IP address) reports that it has been censored by U.S. court injunction (it is also banned in China). The point of the web site is to allow people to post anonymously information - in large quantities - that governments and corporations don't want people to know. This is bad. Taking down a domain name is a drastic measure for suppressing information on the Internet. If this is not pushed...

February 18, 2008
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Super Tuesday Wrapup: the MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 & the live mobile to web experiment

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Super Tuesday was an historic day with incredible youth turnout at the polls (doubling, tripling and even quadrupling turnout from 2000 & 2004!) and so we were making our own history at MTV covering the youth vote in a whole new way - in this case, capitalizing on a new achievement in mobile technology, delivering real-time high-quality Internet-ready audio and video reporting from the campaign trail.

February 17, 2008
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Public Notices 4.0: Time to Upgrade Public Meetings

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the years my work has brought me to Rome a few times. The Roman Forum as well as the Athenian Agora have always intrigued me as a model for envisioning online public spaces. Surrounding a public space you have major public and religious institutions, a commercial market in one corner, a place for public speeches, and in Roman Forums the "Albus" or a white notice board with public announcements written in black. Today we often experience institutions (online and off) without a town square or commons in the center, which I try to counter with Issues Forums. However, today...

February 13, 2008
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We the Media, How Have We Failed: "Re: Fwd: Who is Barack Obama?"

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 6, 2008
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Lessons from the Garbage Game

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

February 5, 2008
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When Frames Go Bad: My Apology to NYT Reporter Jens Erik Gould

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A previous post of mine had an inflammatory headline unjustified by the text: "Lies about Venezuela: If NYT.com ran Related Content". I was guilty of looking at Jens Erik Gould's article, "Venezuela's Fateful Choice," through a frame: that major media coverage overwhelmingly seeks to portray the Venezuelan government as illegitimate and bad. My own view (frame) that the New York Times has that overall frame overrode a good analysis of the article. I apologize specifically to the reporter. Gould's article, while (despite the headline) primarily about accusations that the Venezuelan government lacks financial transparency, was not by itself part of...

February 1, 2008
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National Night On(line)!

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The other night it was -10F with a windchill of -40F here in Minneapolis. When things get that cold, we Minnesotans start thinking about ways to get warm. I think this is why we have a reputation for public innovation, we have a lot of indoor time to think up schemes when the rest of the country is out on their deck enjoying a beer. So I started thinking about ways to better connect with my neighbors despite the cold. I am a huge fan of National Night Out when neighbors around the U.S. put up road blocks and hold...

January 31, 2008
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Kenyan Bloggers Innovate to Heal Country

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The post-election crisis in Kenya has received a good deal of blogger coverage, both at Global Voices as well as the wider blogosphere. Some say the ensuing violence boils down to ethnic animosity. Others insist that such a viewpoint is overly simplistic. Kenya's post-election crisis has taught us that cell phone airtime can become currency in times of need and that bloggers on opposite ends of the earth can collaborate on a moment's notice to push the limits of online innovation and usefulness. There has even been a meta-conversation in the U.S. tech blogosphere about whether or not tech bloggers...

January 31, 2008
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Questioning Candidates on Government Openness and Transparency - Pick your Top 5

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the mainstream media community raises awareness about open government each year during Sunshine Week, we need to push local up strategies that promote greater government transparency online so local citizen media has access to the raw "info" materials we need to improve democracy. We need to take a lesson from OMBWatch's Open Government online survey and ask questions of state and local candidate. Here is the survey introduction from OMBWatch: Open Government: What We Need to Know We deserve a more open and honest government. Elections are the time when politicians pay the most attention to people and issues,...

January 29, 2008
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Political Blogs Engage; Steve Jobs Doesn't

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had a contrarian reaction to Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld Expo last week. Sitting in the convention center, tapping away at my laptop once again, I couldn't help but think that some of the magic of Apple had left the room. Jobs, now on the board of Disney, has been slowly morphing into a creature of Hollywood, more interested in doing deals that let consumers view streaming blockbuster movies than in helping to revolutionize Web video for users to take the next great leap forward. It wasn't a sell-out -- Apple answers to its shareholders, after all -- but...

January 22, 2008
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Ubiquitous Networks: The Trails Of Our Digital Identities

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For a while now I've been describing the locative process as overlaying a virtual landscape on the physical world. I've been describing locative media as embedded content in place. Some people do ask, "in place of what?" In the end, it's all a way of saying Locative Media is the hybridization of the virtual world and the physical world relying upon location-enabled mobile devices (eg, 50% of cellphones) leading to the formation of ubiquitous networks full of cultural content. Sounds good. The only part of that statement that's a bit tricky is the "ubiquitous networks." Not being a particularly dedicated...

January 15, 2008
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Online Voter Guides and Election Coverage Down the Ballot?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I was pretty amazed last night with the multiple live feeds CNN.com provided to the different Iowa Caucus candidate parties. Each Presidential election, the major media sites and a gazillion .com ventures ratchet up their online coverage of this signature race. My question to blog readers - is there any sign that this creativity has any momentum down the ballot? Please share any links in your comments. In 2006, I was the host of a unique asynchronous two week online candidate debate among all the candidates on the ballot for Minnesota Governor. Beyond basic online voter guides and article packages,...

January 4, 2008
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MTV Taps 51 Citizen Journalists for Election

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MTV, as part of its Emmy-winning "Choose or Lose" campaign (www.ChooseorLose.com), unveiled "Street Team '08": a specially recruited group of 51 citizen journalists - one from every state and Washington, D.C. - who will cover the 2008 elections from a youth perspective and tailor their reports for mobile devices. The members will contribute weekly, multi-media reports (short form videos, blogs, animation, photos, podcasts) that will be distributed via a soon-to-launch WAP site, MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and to the more than 1,800 sites in the Associated Press Online Video Network.

December 20, 2007
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Lies about Venezuela: If NYT.com ran Related Content

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Lara, Venezuela, lacks widespread internet access, cutting off Agaric Design Collective from our sysadmin. If you want to tell us Hugo Chávez's administration in Venezuela is doing a bad job developing the country, we have reason to listen, with prejudice. But the accusations slipping unchallenged into news articles that Venezuela is anti-democratic, that Chávez is unpopular, and that the proposed constitutional reforms up for approval tomorrow are unlikely to pass - these are lies with consequences. These unsourced and poorly sourced claims, dripping like acid rain showers on the informed public's understanding of Venezuela - are lies where the truth matters....

December 1, 2007
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When Mobile Media Becomes Political

Open Journalism Challenge: Can Paid Media Report on Plan Mexico this Well?

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

November 23, 2007
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by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Immigration, military contractors, fiscal responsibility, foreign policy, domestic policy, trade policy, business, labor, crime- this story has it all, plus underlying themes about access to information and democracy (optional, if you care to report on those kinds of things). And all with a presidential race coming up! Is your favorite news source keeping up? The Bush administration is trying to get Congress to approve what it calls the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion aid package to Mexico in order to fight drug cartels. The plan is more commonly known as Plan Mexico because of its inevitable similarities with Plan Colombia,...

November 20, 2007
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Announcing: The Garbage Game

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

November 14, 2007
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The Media's Opportunity to Promote Democracy Online - Get Government to Do It

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I noted in my IdeaLab introduction, my background is in online citizen engagement. Specifically, I run a non-profit, E-Democracy.Org, that promotes both government and media accountability at the local level through online town halls we call Issues Forums. (Note our Minneapolis discussion of changes at the StarTribune here and here.) In the mid-90's I managed the main website for the State of Minnesota and staffed the Minnesota Government Information Access Council. I am passionate about government's responsibility to play a lead role as the supplier of information "raw materials" for democracy. The media can and should do a much...

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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Advertising and Information Asymmetry Online

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mark Andrejevic: Living through the '90s, there was this euphoric set of predictions about the empowering and democratizing capacity of the new medium. I read that against what the current political and economic situation looks like today. [...] What concerns me is the way in which the celebration of the potential so quickly slides into a claim that this potential is being actualized. An interview with the author of iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Well worth the read. As long as the funding model for journalism is advertising-based, these issues will frame our work and - in...

October 31, 2007
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What's Not News? Unflattering Trivialities, Opinions on Planet's Shape, and Fake Press Conferences

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We can make some easy progress defining news by instead listing what's not news. Paul Krugman interviewed by Rory O'Connor: several major parts of the news media that are for all practical purposes part of "movement conservatism" -- Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Times -- and [...] other news organizations are intimidated, at least to some extent. I sometimes talk about what I call "asymmetrical intimidation." If you say a true but unflattering thing about Bush or in fact about any other prominent conservative, oh, boy! People are going to go after you. I mean, I've got...

October 30, 2007
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FCC's Short-Notice Localism Hearing

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin announced the upcoming hearing on localism with less than a week notice. Though there's still time to speak up for local news and localism in media, this short notice shortchanges the public. Don't take my word for it- here are two of the five FCC members stating their view: JOINT STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONERS MICHAEL J. COPPS AND JONATHAN S. ADELSTEIN IN RESPONSE TO FCC'S ANNOUNCEMENT OF LOCALISM HEARING WITH ONLY ONE WEEK'S NOTICE Tonight's Public Notice doesn't bode well for the future of the Commission's localism and media ownership proceedings. Over two weeks ago, we agreed...

October 27, 2007
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10Questions Offers a 'Netroots' Presidential Debate

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

On my Democracies Online blog I shared my dismay about the so-called online candidate debates thus far this election cycle. With E-Democracy.Org we hosted the first online candidate debate back in 1994, so I am looking for innovations that involve the public in determining the questions and would be satisfied without real candidate rebuttals online. E-Debates have a long way to go, but 10Questions.com is a huge step in the right direction. 10Questions, with scores of netroots and some media sponsors as led by TechPresident, allows you to upload you video question to various video services. You simply tag your...

October 19, 2007
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To What End? Introducing Democracy Online

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the next year as a Knight News Challenge "ideas blogger," I'll be blogging a bridge between my world of online citizen engagement and the world of online news/citizen media. As far as I can tell, both areas overlap as hosts of extensive expression. The end goals differ with media folks looking at news generation as the primary objective and online citizen engagement focused on participation and public problem-solving. I look forward to poking and prodding the online news world to exercise their power to move people and ideas online. As the number one destination websites in local communities, media...

October 16, 2007
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Young Americans Want New Kind of Election Coverage

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We listened. More than any time in human history, young people have more tools at their avail to consume - and create - information on the issues that are most relevant to them. So to figure out exactly what MTV's approach would be to truly engage young people aged 18-30 during this Presidential election cycle in this new, Wild West era of self-publishing and self-organization, we first had to listen to what young people themselves said they wanted. The results were simultaneously disheartening and hopeful, in the way only young people can express themselves about their future. The MTV/CBS News/New...

October 15, 2007
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Social Networks or Social Bubbles?

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

First, the Jena 6 story lived on the Internet. Bloggers, many of them black, members of list serves such as the National Association of Black Journalists and members of social networks like Facebook, used the Internet to spread the story before it took off with mainstream news organizations like CNN, The Washington Post, and NPR. The fact that the "afro-sphere" has largely received credit for driving this story is important to keep in mind when we think about what is going on in cyberspace. At a time when "the digital divide" is still code for "people-of-color-don't-have-access-or-know- how-to-use-the-Internet," Jena 6 reminds...

October 15, 2007
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A New Way to Tell a Story

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

October 15, 2007
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Baghdad...By the San Francisco Bay?