Idea Lab

A Talk with the Creator of Drupal

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here at the IdeaLab, we've been hearing a lot over the past year about Drupal, the open source content management system that is now powering tens of thousands of websites, including Ourmedia, The Onion, Sony Music artists (I really like myplay.com) and a host of citizen media sites.The other night I had dinner with Dries Buytaert, the self-effacing founder and creator of Drupal. Buytaert chiefly credits the tens of thousands of volunteer programmers who contributed to the platform's code base over the years. (Ourmedia is about to relaunch on Drupal 6; here's our beta site.) In this 11-minute interview,...

• October 8, 2008
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iamnews: A Global DIY Newsroom

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As one of the very early members of the Online News Association, I've attended my share of ONA conferences over the years. This year, I wasn't able to attend the annual gathering that ended in Washington, DC, over the weekend. Instead, I spent most of last weekend at TechCrunch50, a technology conference in San Francisco now in its second year put on by TechCrunch, one of those upstart startups that may put the San Jose Mercury News out of business some day. Reviews of the ONA conference have been mostly positive, especially for the keynote delivered by my friend...

• September 15, 2008
• 2 comments

ReelChanges Aims to 'Audience-Fund' Documentaries

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

ReelChanges.org, a nonprofit venture that promises to herald an era of viewer-funded documentaries, launched May 1. Since that time, the site has gained considerable traction, partly driven by the  tenacity of its founder, Hal Plotkin (a former journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle), and partly because of the sheer power of the idea. Last week Hal wrote a post about the positive reception to the site in the documentary filmmaker community and the site's partnership with Spot.us, an even newer effort that aims for the audience to financially support community and investigative journalism. Spot.us founder David Cohn has written...

• August 13, 2008
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Visualizing the News

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• July 21, 2008
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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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People-Funded Journalism Budding

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• July 1, 2008
• 1 comment

Takeaways from the Future of Civic Media Conference

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• June 14, 2008
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Civic Media Innovation Camps

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• June 11, 2008
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Smart Mobs for News Participation

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Following is part 3 of my 3-part series on open APIs and crowdsourcing community news. Part 1, Part 2.At the NetSquared conference for nonprofits in San Jose on May 27-28, one of the most intriguing projects I heard about was Social Actions, a project to tie together disparate cause movements through an open API that would aggregate information about dozens of different campaigns and allow users to take action to further a cause. "Our mission is to put actions in front of people who are most likely to take part," Peter told me. A few hours after our chat,...

• June 8, 2008
• 2 comments

Give the Public Access to Public Records

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm on an open API kick here at IdeaLab, so here's the second of three entries on the potential of application programming interface for news organizations. (I'll post a final video interview on Monday.) This is a way to give the public true access to public records. Oddly, that rarely happens now, with media organizations playing gatekeeper and releasing stories through the editorial process -- but not the raw data itself. In this 8-minute video interview I conducted yesterday at the NetSquared conference -- notice the venue: Cisco, not a media company -- founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle discusses Louisville-based YourMapper.com,...

• May 29, 2008
• 1 comment

NY Times to Test Crowdsourcing Its Data

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

News about a potentially big deal in the newspaper industry broke just before the holiday weekend. No, not another story about a chain swallowing another chain, or news about the formation of yet another online advertising platform that's doomed to underperform. Instead, this was a kind of news that only a geek would love: MediaBistro reported, and Read/Write Web republished, word that the New York Times is planning to release an open API this summer. Huh? An API, as Wikipedia reminds us, is short for application programming interface. Those of us in or near Silicon Valley are well aware of...

• May 27, 2008
• 1 comment

Can Newspaper Classifieds Be Saved?

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Steve Outing -- who's been trying to prod the newspaper industry to embrace its digital multidirectional future for the past decade -- asked me what the future holds for newspaper classifieds. He's behind the site ReinventingClassifieds.com, an initiative aimed at bringing experts together to revive newspaper classifieds by finding a new business model that's relevant in the Internet age. I left the Sacramento Bee 12 years ago to work at various Internet startups, and the contrast between newspaper culture and tech startup culture couldn't be more stark. If newspapers are to revitalize their revenue streams in the online medium,...

• May 12, 2008
• 1 comment

Web 2.0: Blogtropulus vs. the Legacy Press Room

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the most telling juxtapositions at this week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is taking place on the third floor of the Moscone Center, where the traditional press lounge and the bloggers lounge (dubbed Blogtropolus, above) were set up side by side. As someone who inhabits both worlds, I was fascinated by the study in contrasts. Both rooms have wireless access, but there the similarity ends. Enter the press lounge and it's akin to stepping into a public library: about 18 tech reporters are hunkered down at their laptops, sitting around small tables with nary a whisper....

• April 25, 2008
• 6 comments

Tools the Power Geeks Use

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We just wound up our Innovation Israel tour of Israel's tech community, and I'm in awe of the Silicon Valley alpha geeks I traveled with during the week. (Here's our group blog: Travelinggeeks.com.) Anyone in the media, publishing or tech business should be interested in the software applications and Web 2.0 tools (on the Web and on the desktop) that these folks use on an almost daily basis. Robert Scoble Scobleizer Firefox (web browser)FriendFeed (social media sharing) Google Reader (RSS news reader)Techmeme (a tech news dynamic link aggregator)Twitter (social network) GoogleTalk (live chat on Windows) Gmail (email) WordPress (blog software)Flickr...

• April 18, 2008
• 1 comment

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
• 1 comment

No Returning to the Cult of the Expert

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• March 19, 2008
• 3 comments

The State of the News Media Is Troubled

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

On Monday the Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report. It's worthwhile reading for anyone who's interested in the major trends affecting not just the news industry but the culture of information dissemination in this country. I've been reading the report since last night and find myself agreeing with just about all its major observations. Here are some especially noteworthy snippets. From the Introduction: The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago. And the problems, increasingly, appear to be different than many experts have...

• March 18, 2008
• 1 comment

Newspapers Must Innovate or Die

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• March 9, 2008
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Open Media Publishing: One New Option

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

EngageMedia, an Australia-based open media organization that promotes social justice and environmental issues, has just released a major open source software package called Plumi. Based on the Plone content-management system, it's designed to let citizen publishers create their own video-sharing communities out of the box. Given that websites like YouTube and Yahoo Video retain extensive rights to your video while keeping their own distribution platforms under lock and key,  Plumi is one of the important new forces pushing toward democratic, independent and open media. For the announcement and technical details, head here. To download Plumi, head here. A demo...

• February 14, 2008
• 4 comments

NewsTools2008 to Bring Geeks and Journalists Together

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One truism that has remained constant over the years is that journalists and technologists rarely cohabit the same physical plane. Even when they cross each other's path, they rarely speak each other's language. And yet, any great leap forward in the new media space requires great technology. As much as journalists like to imagine that careful reporting, balanced writing and the oldtime verities of the craft are what matters most in the new digital world, upstart startups like Digg, TechCrunch and Facebook are proving otherwise. So it came as welcome news that MediaGiraffe's Journalism That Matters project will be...

• February 11, 2008
• 2 comments

Toward a Community Media Toolset

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the past three years, since I co-founded Ourmedia.org, a lot of would-be community publishers have asked me the same question, which more or less is this: How can I get a site up and running without investing a lot of time or resources into building a content management system and technology infrastructure from scratch? There's good news and bad news, I tell them. The good news is that there are now hundreds of free, open source content management systems to run your publication or social network on. Some of the more popular ones include Drupal, Plone/Zope, Joomla, Ruby...

• February 11, 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
• 2 comments

2007: The Year of Social Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few thoughts about the pivotal year in media just behind us, and a look at some of the trends that will extend into 2008 and well beyond. Social movements and cultural trends rarely fit into neat chronological packages, and that's true here as well. A year ago, you'll recall, Time named "You" as the Person of the Year, chronicling the rise of the personal media revolution best exemplified by the spectacular growth of YouTube. It's become a truism that we're all now part of the media, and more of us have grown comfortable in that role, as cell...

• December 28, 2007
• 1 comment

Twitter Posse for Reporters

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jon Funabiki of SFSU and Steve Chen, CTO and co-founder of YouTube The just-ended Roundtable on Mobile Media and Civic Engagement, held by the Aspen Institute and San Francisco State University in San Francisco, was more than a two-day brain jam attended by mobile industry execs, academics and reps from civic and social justice organizations. Sessions were structured to come up with recommendations regarding mobile's emerging role in the news media, politics and e-governance. One snippet worth sharing here was an idea embraced by the editor of Wired News. I mentioned to my breakout session that in1996 I wrote...

• December 13, 2007
• 5 comments

Rethinking Newspapers

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been reading with fascination the email threads in the Rethinking the Mercury News project, which launched a Google Group discussion this month. In news circles, the San Jose Mercury News is considered one of the top-tier mid-size papers in the country. after its sale to MediaNews last year, the paper has been undergoing a series of cost reductions, resulting in staff reductions, slimmed-down sections and less original news coverage. In other words, like almost every other paper in the country, it's feeling the pain, both financially and journalistically. Not sure if MediaNews breaks out finances by newspaper, but...

• November 19, 2007
• 4 comments

Report from Digital Hollywood Confab

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When my book Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation came out in 2005, the Hollywood studios were still doing everything in their power to resist the onrushing wave of the personal media revolution. These days, it's a far different story. Hulu, the online video portal backed by NBC and News Corp., is about to launch, and talk in the hallways at Digital Hollywood this week is all about how to embrace our digital destinies. Talk during the panels is not about how to build a better Facebook but how to build a widget that gains traction on Facebook. Will...

• October 31, 2007
• 6 comments

Curley's New Directions in New Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 26, 2007
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Getting Down and Practical

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 19, 2007
• 3 comments

Community Media Toolset

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few months back I proposed a project to the Knight News Challenge around community media tools. In a nutshell, the thought was to start a project to provide publishers, editors and developers at community media/citizen media sites with a suite of social media tools to enable a much richer degree of participation by the public on these sites. Now, plug-ins, scripts, guides and tutorials may sound pretty unsexy. But if you're just starting out in this field and want to add your voice in a meaningful way, what can you do besides start a blog? A community media effort,...

• October 15, 2007
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New Media Reality Check

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight News Challenge folks will be heading off to the Online News Association conference in Toronto on Tuesday (Oct. 16) for a few days' worth of new media reality checks. As a member of this merry troupe of experimenters, I'll be moderating a panel on Becoming a Community Evangelist, which is perhaps the term du jour for citizen journalist, with Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, and Rob Curley of the Washington Post. But mostly, I'll be listening and comparing notes with old friends and new colleagues. Every year seems to be a pivotal one for the news industry, but 2007...

• October 13, 2007
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