Idea Lab

hNews Microformat for News Adopted by AOL and TownNews

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are on the cusp of something exciting. Thousands of news articles marked up with with hNews, a microformat for news content funded by the Knight Foundation, will soon start populating the Internet. Last week, hNews became an official draft microformat. Having been proposed as a new data format and then discussed within the microformats community, it is now in draft 0.1 at Microformats.org. This means it has reached a stage where the microformat community believes it is stable enough for widespread adoption. This also reaffirms hNews as an open standard, free for anyone to integrate to their news content,...

• October 22, 2009
• 3 comments

What Both Sides Are Missing in the Pay Wall Debate

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Arguments about paywalls around news content are becoming increasingly dogmatic and ideological. As a result, lots of sensible ideas about how to make money from new models of journalism are being obscured. Not least, how to add value to existing content so it becomes more identifiable, more searchable, and helps lead people "back home" (that's where the Hansel and Gretel theory comes in). On one side of the fence you have pro-pay-wallers, led by the Murdochs, for whom pay walls seem to answer the question, "How are we going to solve the economic crisis in news?" They're in the process...

• September 25, 2009
• 1 comment

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
• 1 comment

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
• No comments

Making News More Transparent

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With our Knight News Challenge grant we (the Media Standards Trust and Web Science Research Initiative) are exploring and developing ways in which to help the public find and assess news on the web (for which we have also received a MacArthur Foundation grant). Part of this initiative includes developing tools for making online news more transparent. What does that mean? It means enabling journalists, and people creating journalism, to embed basic information to their online news articles which helps the public establish an article's authorship and provenance (the same methodology applies to photos and video but I'll stick with...

• December 11, 2008
• 1 comment