Idea Lab

SochiReporter Launches with Time Machine, Wiki Guidebook

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm glad to say that SochiReporter, my Knight-funded project, launched on October 27. This was a very important day for me, and for our team. We tested SochiReporter for about two months before the public launch, inviting both web experts and users to comment on various aspects of the site. In the days before the launch, I didn't sleep a wink. But this is natural. I was very excited about the launch, and did my best to convey how cool and innovative SochiReporter is to the journalists and students that gathered on launch day in the hall of one of...

• November 20, 2009
• 3 comments

Why it Matters that Pierre Omidyar is Launching a News Startup

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is launching a for-profit news startup in Hawaii, where he and his family live. This is important news, and not just because he's involved. A few months ago Pierre and Randy Ching founded Peer News. Their first project was a Twitter-related experiment called Ginx, which didn't get critical mass and is being closed. Now they've announced Peer News' more important move -- a project aimed at creating the kind of local journalism that brings accountability and value to a community. Pierre, in a note on the company blog, says he and his team are launching...

• November 18, 2009
• No comments

Beanstockd Class Field Trip to NC

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's the start of the fall semester at UNC and Beanstockd has just taken a trip down to visit the class, present on Beanstockd, and answer all their questions. Prior to our arrival, the 20 students in the class had already done their preliminary research on us. They were very engaged, asking insightful questions throughout the class, and after our presentation proceeded with a 45-minute Q&A session. In December, at the end of the semester, we will go back for the most exciting part of this course: the final presentations! Each team of 5 will present to us their step-by-step...

• October 9, 2009
• No comments

The Shocking Truth About Journalism, Activism, and the Healthcare Reform Debate

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago, I spotted a link to something called deathpanels.org getting passed around Twitter, and quickly traced its origin to Matt Thompson, Knight Foundation interim online community manager and general champion of contextual journalism. (Note: deathpanels.org is an independent project of Matt's, and not affiliated with the Knight Foundation.) Remembering a conversation that I had with Matt and others at a recent conference, I realized the idea had been brewing for some time. A few minutes after I looked at the site for the first time, I called up Matt to talk about the idea. Listen to...

• September 4, 2009
• 2 comments

IOC to Include Citizen Contributions with Virtual Olympic Congress

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Olympics is a special brand that boasts a bottomless marketing potential. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) admits that it has to be careful in positioning the Games' name online. Even so, it's clear that, because of its social nature and enormous global outreach, the Olympics have terrific potential to develop on the web. I decided to look at what the IOC is doing to promote the Games today. In the early fall 2007, IOC announced the start of the Virtual Olympic Congress with an attractive tagline: "Taking the Pulse. Make your Move. Join the debate. Voice Your Opinion." Generally,...

• August 4, 2009
• 1 comment

Help Us Rename the Daily Phoenix Light-Rail Publication

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been 42 days and counting since the Knight Foundation announced that Daily Phoenix, our hybrid platform to deliver news and information to urban audiences by light-rail stop, won startup funding. Back here in the scorching confines of Phoenix, the interest was immediate. Local TV station KTVK-TV Channel 3 interviewed us on their signature program, Good Morning Arizona. It was an incredible opportunity and an enlightening experience that really helped us out. For those of you who are thinking about doing a new media project or are already working on one, the TV interview format can be a boon as...

• July 31, 2009
• 4 comments

Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A fierce and fascinating debate has broken out over the cover photo on Time magazine's April 27 print edition. Time paid a pittance for the picture -- at least a pittance next to what big magazines normally pay for cover art -- and that's made a lot of professional photographers furious. They should get over it. But they and their gifted-amateur and part-timer peers -- especially the ones capturing breaking news events -- should start agitating for some better marketplaces than the ones available today. More on that below, but first some background: The marketplace for photography in the...

• July 29, 2009
• 2 comments

Printcasting Goes National, Partners With MediaNews Group

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm very excited to announce that Printcasting.com, my 2008 Knight News Challenge project that democratizes print magazine publishing, is expanding to more U.S. cities. And I'm equally excited about the first partner: Denver-based MediaNews Group. Here's a link to the full press release about our arrangement with MediaNews. We're in discussions with other newspapers and organizations and will add more partnerships throughout the year. So what does this mean for the average person? Up until now, the Printcasting site was focused on Bakersfield, California -- in keeping with the geographic focus objective of the Knight News Challenge. The site has...

• June 28, 2009
• No comments

Pounding the Pavement and Planning Ahead for Printcasting

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been about a month since Printcasting launched in Bakersfield, and our local grassroots outreach is well under way. Every week our marketing evangelist meets with several new groups and individuals. Many of them see immediate uses for Printcasts, and we're starting to see a stream of new activity. As of today, 180 Printcasts have been set up that have published 734 editions (You can peruse them all in the Printcasting directory ), and 144 registered content feeds. Because we're seeding the market with our own content and magazines some of these are ours, about half of this comes from...

• April 20, 2009
• No comments

Waiting for the Bill (Gates) in Qatar

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It has been an exciting few weeks for Freedom Fone. We finally got back a version of our prototpye software which works with SIM cards, so we can use it here in Zimbabwe. We've been having focus group discussions with a range of people to help inform our first local deployment. And our Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, has been at ICTD 2009, giving a demo of Freedom Fone. She sent us this feedback: Here I am in Doha, Qatar with my jacket on inside a spectacular building on the Carnegie Mellon campus. I'm seated amongst hundreds of others listening to...

• April 20, 2009
• No comments

Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week we publicly launched Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. While our focus is on outreach to the 330,000 people who live there, anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine. I invite you all to give it a try at http://www.printcasting.com and let us know what you think. The more early usage we have the better. One easy way to get started is to browse through a list of recently updated Printcasts and subscribe to a few. For those of you who haven't followed the progress of our Knight News Challenge funded project, the...

• March 17, 2009
• 16 comments

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
• 4 comments

Printcasting in BusinessWeek Story about Newspaper Innovation

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Printcasting is mentioned in a BusinessWeek story about "online experiments that could help newspapers". The story leads with Bakotopia.com, the social networking site I started for The Bakersfield Californian back in 2005. This is fitting, as Bakotopia's later success with a printed magazine helped inspired the Printcasting concept. The story also cites other good examples of things newspaper companies are doing to change with the times, including collaboration with Outside.in and Yahoo and the upcoming Plastic Logic e-reader. This is great timing for us, as we recently opened our beta site to the public and are putting the final pieces...

• March 9, 2009
• 5 comments

Breaking Even While Staying True to the Margins

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We recently applied to present Freedom Fone: Dial-up Information Service at an upcoming ICT for Development workshop. Our application was eventually accepted, but not before concerns were raised that Freedom Fone might be on its way to becoming a for-profit entity, which would be inconsistent with the conference sponsors' objectives. This was an ironic obstacle for us to encounter, particularly at a time when we're beginning to think through what our business model is going to look like as we move toward self-sufficiency. We are committed to making information accessible to people at the margins of society. And Freedom Fone...

• February 27, 2009
• 3 comments

Сthulhu, Dr. Zoidberg & the Teacher of English to Symbolize the Olympics

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On the web, choosing the mascot of the Sochi Olympics was probably the most discussed topic around the 2014 Winter Games. What is great with the Olympics is that being a global, international affair, each time it presents the local quintessence of the hosting city. Simply put, the symbol reflects the local Olympic dream as well as the local customs and traditions and the soul of the place where they are held. That's why choosing the symbol of the Olympics usually stirs vibrations and high response from people. When I just arrived in NYC as a Fulbrighter from Moscow in...

• February 13, 2009
• No comments

Putting Our Plane on the Runway

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing, entered closed beta last week. An open beta is just around the corner, and we're doing everything we can to officially launch in Bakersfield in early March. To make that happen, two camps -- development and marketing -- are busy getting everything into place for a successful launch. In development, all of our focus is on completing a few last critical features, including the creation of automatic, self-updating Printcast editions. And we're making great progress! In the marketing camp, we're busy tweaking messaging, writing FAQs, giving live demos and building...

• February 12, 2009
• 2 comments

Building a Social Entrepreneurial Garage Startup in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Moving from ideas to execution is an ultra cool feeling. Gram Vaani is finally on the go and we are all extremely excited to see our dreams taking shape. The garage startup mode I always used to wonder what a Silicon Valley garage startup would feel like. Well, here's what it looks like -- a social entrepreneurial garage startup in India. This is Bala in his pyjamas, with dozens of audio cables and connectors strewn out on his desk in a manner that only he understands. Bala spends part of his day reading Kafka, and the rest of his day...

• January 24, 2009
• 8 comments

Choosing a Domain Name: Getting to Know Cyber Squatters (Starbucks Scene 1)

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's not the case when you can remain unnamed. At this stage - when working out the site structure and drawing graphic schemes, you can't stop thinking about the domain name. Soon after the Knight Foundation announced that my proposal made it and I was selected one of the winners of the '08 Knight News Challenge, I registered several domain names which could alternatively be the site address. In case with Sochi, most of the domain names bearing a word 'sochi' or a combination of words 'Olympic' and 'sochi' were purchased in a wholesale format by cyber squatters several hours...

• January 19, 2009
• 5 comments

Preview the Printcasting Local Ad Tool

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tonight is literally the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, so first I want to say Happy New Year to all of you. We've learned a lot since winning a Knight News Challenge grant 9 months ago, and are extremely grateful to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for making it possible for us and so many others to continue to experiment at a time when so many companies are eliminating into their research & development budgets. Even though it's the holidays, the Printcasting team is not slowing down. All we can think about is March...

• December 31, 2008
• 3 comments

End of the Year Radical Transparency for Spot.Us

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is the end of the year and I received some questions from the TIdes Center who are doing due-diligence reports for the Knight Foundation. I've been meaning to do a public "where is Spot.Us" post for some time and since I'm answering all these related questions I thought - why not just go crazy and blog the questions and my answers. If I have to update Knight Foundation - I should update everyone, since in the end I view this as a project owned by the community of people who take interest in it (everyone who has been following...

• December 22, 2008
• 1 comment

Inspiration: The Secret Sauce for Printcasting

by Mary Lou Fulton
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're underway with alpha testing for Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge-funded project at The Bakersfield Californian. It's great to see everything coming together! The alpha period will give us feedback on how well we've done in presenting the basic functionality of the product. But even if every single thing about Printcasting is perfect, that won't mean it will be embraced. The secret sauce for all online self-expression is inspiration -- why would you want to become a Printcaster, anyway? Getting people to try a new online product is an uphill battle, given how many web sites and social media tools...

• December 9, 2008
• 6 comments

The Includer
Episode 2
Year 2

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ricardo and I agreed on four priorities, in the order below, for our work on the Includer and marginal Internet access: What would you like to share online? What is our business value? What are new technical solutions? What technical skills might we encourage?

• October 3, 2008
• 3 comments

Self-Promotion Becomes a Prerequisite for Online Journos

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Scott Rosenberg, a former editor at Salon Magazine who's writing a book on blogging, takes aim at a fact of life for people creating new media online: They have to find ways to be noticed: This is the way the Web works. If this (or any) blog were my primary focus, I'd be out there rustling up readers for it, because that's what you have to do. I think a lot of journalists still see this as a grubby, low, self-promoting activity that is beneath them. Of course, it can be done in a grubby way (and often is) --...

• August 16, 2008
• No comments

None of Your Business Model

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"What's the business model?" It's a question I hear again and again at meetings and events. The existing model for newspapers is quickly unraveling, so we need a 'new new thing' to serve some of the vital functions that newspapers used to. Whatever that new new thing may be, it is supposed to have a business model: a business model is what separates the well-meaning amateur from the sustainable enterprise. It is vital for securing loans or venture capital. You can't be serious about sustaining a venture unless you have a plan for a business that will sustain that venture....

• August 10, 2008
• 6 comments

The Blogosphere Needs to Mature -- But How?

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm leaving Chicago, physically tired but mentally invigorated. 1. I was inspired by the loft and good natured vibe of Knight's mission. 2. Took time to rethink my personal blogging motivation and experience. 3. Worked more on pushing spot.us into existence. (latest design work here). But in this post I want to take a moment to examine the evolution of technology reporting, particularly from large/mainstream technology blogs (think TechCrunch). I am in part inspired by a blog post from Robert Scoble on how tech blogs have failed. The reason I'm interested in this space isn't just because I'm a huge...

• July 29, 2008
• 1 comment

It's Time for a Revenue Revolution

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Chicago this week, I had a conversation with fellow News Challenge winner David Cohn (creator of the very cool Spot Us community-funded reporting system) that got me thinking. David is skeptical of relying too much on advertising to fund journalism. He has various reasons for this which he can explain much better than I, and he has some good points. One thing that we can both agree on 100% is that advertising that is not fair and honest is incompatible with the goals of journalism. But where we don't completely understand each other yet is over the idea of...

• July 24, 2008
• No comments

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
• No comments

Virtual Voting: Finding Our Audience Where They Roam

by Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now that we are several months into the project, we thought we had conquered, or at least tackled, most forms of new media. Our Street Teamers’ work appears regularly on mobile video carriers, a mobile wap site, several websites, and on-air via MTV’s broadcast networks.

Then, a few weeks back, I was approached by an MTV colleague about a whole new area of distribution that, I have to admit, I had hardly considered before: THE VIRTUAL WORLD. I’m talking about something right outta web 3.0: a 3-D, interactive, virtual reality experience where one can have a “second life” via their avatar persona—a walking, talking, digital version of their better selves--online.

• July 18, 2008
• No comments

What Gets Talked About Most on Idea Lab

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rather than trying to talk about what is being talked about and covered most on this blog, here's another way of representing it: The above is a "word cloud" created on Wordle, a tool that sorts through text on a webpage, blog, or document and spits out a visual representation giving prominence to the most frequently appearing (source) words. Not surprising that words such as "news" are large and prominent on IdeaLab, but look at the size of "data" and such words as "can" and "will".BTW, it appears that Wordle only indexes current discussion, a kind of snapshot in time,...

• July 10, 2008
• 2 comments

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
• No comments

Still Seeking Coders Interested in Journalism

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• May 26, 2008
• 13 comments

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

Newspapers Suffer from Marketing Myopia Online

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've attended a few conferences and it appears to me that most folks in journalism hate advertising. Maybe that comes from seeing the last eight inches of their story end up on the composing room floor to make room for another two column by four-inch ad or just distrust of business. I wouldn't hazard a guess. Regardless, it would seem some journalistic purists are using the current situation to seek wholly different business forms to fund journalism in general. While the national practice of the craft has been benefited by foundations, the idea that anything approaching hyperlocal can be funded...

• May 11, 2008
• No comments

Newspapers Struggling Online, Not Just in Print

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As disturbing as the recent numbers on declining print circulation and plunging advertising revenue at newspapers have been, less attention has been paid to ominous signs of a slow-down on the online side as well: - Most newspaper chains reported online revenue growth in single or low double digits this quarter, compared with growth rates of 15-20% or more a year ago. - The amount of time the average visitor spent at most newspaper web sites declined in February compared with a year ago, according to an Editor & Publisher report on Nielsen Online data. E&P reported similar data for...

• May 4, 2008
• 4 comments

Finding a Good Domain Name

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Are all the good Internet domain names already owned by someone? No -- only the obvious ones are taken. Every new enterprise, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, needs a domain name -- the identifier that shows up in a brower's address field. For example, the MediaShift Idea Lab blog lives inside the Public Broadcasting Service's pbs.org domain. The absolutely perfect name for your new project or company, or at least the simplest one, may well be owned by someone else. In fact, it probably is. The odds are definitely slim that you'll get a domain name that a random person would...

• April 28, 2008
• 3 comments

Hyperlocal Sites Can Deliver More Than Display Ads

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mark Glaser, our host on Mediashift, asked: " ... is there something (hyper-local news sites) can offer the businesses beyond just a display ad or a place in an online directory? Is there a more creative partnership they might have, where reader/contributors could give the business honest feedback on the site -- positive and negative? Paulding.com, for those who are aware, is based on a simple message board shtick. We have a front page with news but the majority of the action - some 2200 posts a day - occur within the forums. These posts are typically viewed by members...

• March 30, 2008
• 3 comments

How Can Ads Support Community News?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm going to be posting weekly questions here on Idea Lab to spark discussion by the various authors, as well as our community of readers. This week I'd like to follow up on the recent theme of new business models for local news sites. Many small hyper-local community sites start up with Google AdSense ads and other automated, quick ways of bringing in a small revenue stream. Eventually, though, they need to make more money than that, and must turn to local businesses to advertise. But it's difficult to entice small businesses online, as they are more likely to employ...

• March 26, 2008
• 3 comments

The Case for Local Ownership of Newspapers

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Beating the street looking for a job in journalism is not a pleasant thought these days. As the firing of editors at places like the LA Times over newsroom staff cuts demonstrates, out-of-work journalists are totally divorced from the decision making that affects their lives. This is because the big decisions in this industry are being made by corporate management types whose primary goal in life is a seven figure bonus. These titans of industry are not just in the media companies; they are also in advertising and marketing. That the opinions of a few carry such weight is simply...

• March 26, 2008
• 2 comments

Markets Fail News

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Thanks to Chris O'Brien's challenge, serious talk of business models for journalism have come to the IdeaLab blog. Let's pause a moment for an overarching view. Turn off the bright lights and stare into the empty studio. Markets - selling and buying at prices set by supply and demand - don't work for news and information. Valuable news is a public good. All right, if you care about journalism, you already believed that. But news is also a public good in the sense economists use the term: once one person comes into possession of it, everybody can have it. Expensive...

• March 18, 2008
• 3 comments

Dealing with Privacy Issues in Hyper-Local Media

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Chances are you'll be getting a notice regarding changes in privacy policies from the various web sites from hgtv.com (Home and Garden) to myspace and other publishers and advertising related businesses associated with the Internet Advertising Bureau. These changes in privacy policies are the result of a new marketing approach endorsed by the Internet Advertising Bureau establishing tighter integration of data collected by media sites with databases of advertisers and others who serve ads to the public on the Internet. Members of the IAB are a who's who in the Internet industry including Google, Yahoo!, double-click, AOL, the NYTimes, Cox...

• March 4, 2008
• 1 comment

What Did You Call Me?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Marketing guru Seth Godin urges companies to start calling "potential customers" and "targets" instead citizens. He means this term to be inclusive of those who have a relationship with the marketer and those who do not and to bring about a mental shift toward respect and humility. Nice to know that journalists are ahead of the marketers on this. Every self-respecting journalist I know cringes a little when some business-side person at a conference calls readers/viewers/listeners consumers. Indeed, many of us have lept over readers/viewers/listeners to pay "the people formerly known as the audience" a great mark of respect (from...

• February 22, 2008
• 5 comments

Wearing Your Media on Your Sleeve

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some really interesting experimentation is being done with "wearable media" these days. Wearable media is simply clothing or other accessories that allow for the transmission or display of digital information. Some examples... Wearable Resistance a dress adorned with LED that can be programmed to depict images or text. Check out some of the other work being done by Dutch artist collective De Geuzen, "a foundation for multi-visual research". The Internet of Things: The University of Washington is conducting an experiment to understand the next step in social networking by connecting objects and people in a wireless, monitored network. Beginning in...

• February 17, 2008
• No comments

Why I Love Forums -- and Not Blogs

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I have an admission to make. I really don't like blogs. They are not conversational and they don't build a community. I love forums because they are conversational and with a little nurturing, they can blossom into a full-blown on-line community. This is true whether the common interests are cars, collectibles or a geographic community. Another reason I love forums is that, unlike a blog, I could have stopped writing at the end of the last paragraph. On an active forum that assertion would have been enough to effectively start a conversation that possibly would be just as informative as...

• February 5, 2008
• 4 comments

When our Phones Do the Social Networking

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the more interesting mobile media trends we may see more of this year is mobile social networking. Simply put, that means the ability for one person to connect with another via a mobile phone or other device while on the go. Think of your cell phone saying "hello" to another cell phone within a certain geographic proximity, based on identified shared interests on publicly available profiles. Typically one must sign up for or opt in to a service designed for this purpose, set up a profile, and make one's cell phone available via wireless technologies like GPS or...

• January 5, 2008
• 2 comments

It's The Sales Stupid!

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is the sales stupid! No it is not ... it is the network (Check the companion entry It is the network stupid) that determines if you attract a viable audience that generates monetize-able journalism ... I.e. journalism that attracts a salable audience. My belief has always been that sales will come when you have a viable audience. I'm here to report that it does even when you're barely competent at sales. Yep, I've had sales ... although any reasonable businessperson would say that sales I've generated so far are lackluster. The secret of good sales is a good salesperson...

• December 30, 2007
• No comments

My, What a Pretty Face[book]

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been ignoring Facebook for as long as I can. And most other social networking applications, too. I already get several dozen e-mails a day. Add to that a dozen or so phone calls, voice mails and letters, and I begin feeling like I need to be less networked, not more. But I finally sat down and looked at what the site has done with its publicly available APIs -- programming features that let web developers like me build stuff on Facebook. Yes, it is cool. Cooler than I'd imagined. It took me about three hours to slap together the...

• November 15, 2007
• 2 comments

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
• No comments

"Now" Trumps "Me" by Putting Us All in the Newsroom

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This scene took place at the Journalism that Matters conference in DC and it relates to one of those little epiphanies we all wish we experienced more often. It was in one of the breakout sessions at the conference where the future of the media was being discussed. There was one of the blindingly bright twenty-something man of Asian descent that seems destined to get $20 million in backing from an equally inscrutable venture capitalist. When he spoke, people listened and it is a vision of the future we've all heard. The narrative is that we'll all have our little...

• October 30, 2007
• 2 comments

Baristanet Book Club Launches with Jay McInerney

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Debbie Galant of Baristanet has launched the Baristanet Book Club, opening with an author interview conducted by Jay McInerney: So, why is Jay McInerney writing for Baristanet? It starts with the precipitous decline in book reviewing by mainstream media, a trend documented here and much fretted about by authors, reviewers, and publishers. As an author, I knew about this. But who thought I could be part of the solution? Well, Paul Bogaards, a Glen Ridge resident, avid Baristanet reader and executive at Knopf, did. In mid-September, he invited me to a lunch with representatives from the Association of American Publishers...

• October 19, 2007
• 3 comments