Idea Lab

4 Lessons for Journalism Students from the Digital Edge

by Brian Moritz

This past semester, I flew a drone. I helped set up a virtual reality environment. And I helped print a cup out of thin air. Nice work if you can get it. Working as a research assistant to Dan Pacheco at the Peter A. Horvitz Endowed Chair for Journalism Innovation at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, I helped run the Digital Edge Journalism Series in the spring semester. We held a series of four programs that highlighted the cutting edge of journalism technology. Pacheco ran a session about drones in media; we had Dan Schultz...

• May 15, 2013
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How Journalists Can Use Vine

by Joanna Kao

Ever wanted to watch someone get a face full of pie over and over again with audio and from multiple angles? Thanks to Vine, it's possible. The unofficial NICAR13 "pie-ing" event above was part of a Kickstarter reward for a project to create data journalism educational materials. For the $150 reward level, someone could "smash a pie in Ken Schwencke's face at NICAR." Lam Thuy Vo, Sisi Wei, Dave Stanton, Lauren Rabain, and Katie Zhu captured the moment on Vine. Vine is a mobile app for iOS that allows users to create and share 6-second videos. Acquired by Twitter in...

• March 29, 2013
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How One Student Went Mobile-Only for a Day on Campus

by Lincoln Pennington

Recently, Reese News Lab students have conducted experiments in living without a smartphone and social media. But because the lab is working on a project on producing media for mobile devices, I thought it was time that someone tried a computer blackout. I'd give up my laptop for a day, navigating the UNC campus with just an iPhone and an iPad (with a Bluetooth keyboard). I figured that way, I could find out how mobile-friendly the world really is. Before I could attempt this task, though, I knew I had to plan carefully. I had to make sure it wouldn't...

• March 25, 2013
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Beyond Foursquare: Geolocation Services Proliferate, Mature

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the second in an ongoing series on the state of geolocation apps, sites and services. Also see: "How the geolocation revolution has evolved" In part one of this series, we looked back at the early days of geolocation, with Platial kicking off the geoloco revolution in the practically prehistoric year of 2005. Since then, a number of paradigm-shifting startups have already come, gone or been sold, among them fwix, Loopt, Ditto, Blockboard, Everyblock (shut down this month) and the late lamented NextStop and Whrrl. On Sunday, Josh Williams, former founder and CEO of Gowalla and now a...

• February 28, 2013
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As Data Collection Grows, so Does the 'Data Divide'

by Sean McDonald
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Do you remember when grocery stores didn't know you were pregnant before your parents? Or when newspapers couldn't find naked pictures of you by looking through your phone? Boy, those were the days (When did I get this old?). Still, there's no escaping it. Things are digitizing. Everywhere. Whether you're registering to vote in Washington state using Facebook or banking on your mobile phone in Kenya, there are, all of a sudden, a bunch of third-party organizations involved in the most intimate parts of your life that weren't there before. And, for the most part, that's a good thing. Services...

• February 15, 2013
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How the Geolocation Revolution Has Evolved

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the first post in a series on geolocation startups and services. For years, entrepreneurs, tech observers and journalists have known two things about the geolocation space: It holds an enormous amount of promise, and it's taking an awfully long time to get there. Geolocation startups are hot in Silicon Valley right now, from Zkatter, a San Francisco-based startup from British young gun Matt Hagger that wants you to capture and share moments in real time through mobile video, to Findery, the venture-backed San Francisco startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake that wants you to leave notes, media and...

• January 29, 2013
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Knight News Challenge Winners Rethink Mobile News

by Desiree Everts

The Knight Foundation today announced the winners of its News Challenge round that focuses on mobile. This round of the contest, which seeks to support innovation in media, included projects ranging from using mobile to disseminate news in developing countries to helping newsrooms manage mobile content. Eight winners received a portion of the $2.4 million total prize. The way in which people consume news is undoubtedly shifting, as more people flock to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. That, too, has transformed how media organizations need to think about mobile content. For this reason, several mobile players have already been...

• January 17, 2013
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5 Reasons SMS Is Here to Stay

by Trevor Knoblich
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

SMS remains the most popular two-way communications platform on the planet. In most cases, it's inexpensive, casual, and discreet for users. It also represents one of the more profitable features offered by mobile network operators. And while SMS does face an increasingly fractured market, largely from the growth of messaging apps, it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Here are five reasons why: 1. SMS is growing, not shrinking Indeed, SMS is continuing to grow at an incredible rate globally. In 2011, more than 7.8 trillion SMS were sent worldwide. That vastly outpaces every other messaging platform combined. Over-the-top (OTT) messaging...

• January 14, 2013
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Rethinking Mobile News Design: Speed for Phones; 'Lean Back' for Tablets

by Brian Moritz

The demise of The Daily in late 2012 raised questions about the future of news consumption on mobile devices, about whether or not tablet-only journalism could possibly survive. But a different way to look at this would be to view The Daily's failure as being due to certain problems in a specific case, not one that's general to mobile news. According to Pew data, 66 percent of adult users of smartphones or tablets get news on their devices. Pew also found that reading news is the second most popular activity on smartphones and tablets, behind only reading/checking email. Tablet ownership...

• January 11, 2013
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During Hurricane Sandy, News Participation Starts at 'Home'

by Trevor Knoblich
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Seemingly every major news event worldwide is heightening participation in news. People are eager to share updates and photos of an unfolding news event, ask questions of media outlets, and share important information. But there are two important aspects to this type of participation: 1) people are most interested in sharing news about the community around them, specifically with others in their community and 2) the mechanism by which they choose to share information is dependent upon personal habits and access. In other words, people write about their immediate world using their "home" or go-to platform. Recently, Hurricane Sandy here...

• November 28, 2012
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Our Picks for the Most Innovative Election Coverage

by Brian Moritz

Election Day is always one of the most exciting days in any newsroom. The rush of breaking news, the crunching of data late into the night, and covering stories that matter to the country and to your community make it one of the most exhilarating days to be a journalist. And with the growth of digital news, it's become one of the most exciting days to be a news consumer. Following on our post about the most innovative coverage of Superstorm Sandy last week, we're gathering a list of the most innovative and interesting Election 2012 coverage. This list...

• November 6, 2012
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So How Is Circa Different from Writing Articles?

by David Cohn

I had the opportunity to discuss Circa today with PBS MediaShift's Mark Glaser, Skift founder Rafat Ali, and PandoDaily's Sarah Lacy on the Mediatwits podcast. It's an honor to be able to discuss a project you are working on and passionate about with folks who I consider friends, colleagues or both. Circa is a new type of mobile news app that collects the "atomic units" of stories -- facts, quotes and images -- and puts them into running stories with alerts to updates. Lacy, who has many good things to say about Circa, also detailed one thing she thinks we...

• October 19, 2012
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53 Semi-Finalists Reach Next Round of Knight News Challenge

by Desiree Everts

The Knight Foundation recently announced that 53 semi-finalists have been chosen to move onto the next stage of its News Challenge on mobile. The Knight News Challenge now offers three rounds instead of one competition per year. This round focuses on funding innovators who are using mobile to change the face of the media industry. "We know that we (and our kids) have grown attached to our mobile devices," Knight's John Bracken and Christopher Sopher wrote in a blog post announcing the round, "but we have less clarity about the ways people are using them, or might use them, as...

• October 10, 2012
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Social Media's Role in the Evolution of FrontlineSMS

by Ken Banks
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's Social Media Week this week, and in recognition of this and our seventh anniversary next month, we'd like to reflect on the role that social media has played in the history and development of FrontlineSMS. 'Democratization of Development' In a recent BBC Future article, I wrote about the "democratization of development." In it, I argued that the dual rise of the world wide web and mobile technology had opened up the opportunity for everyone to contribute to solving some of the world's bigger problems. Today, someone with an Internet connection and a software development kit can write a health-,...

• September 26, 2012
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NextDrop Starts Small to Make a Big Impact on Water Supply in India

by Anu Sridharan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

When smart people tell us that NextDrop's isn't making the social impact we really hope to be making, we usually tend to listen. NextDrop informs residents in India via cell phone about the availability of piped water. So then the next obvious question is: What's our next move? Well, after talking to some other really smart people from Unitus Capital, we realized that we are straddling the social and the non-social. We've found a product that people (across a whole lot of economic levels) really like (for various reasons). Which is great -- we're all for people loving us. But...

• September 19, 2012
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Behavio: Opening Up the Power of Mobile Sensing

by Nadav Aharony
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

What three things do you always take with you when you leave your home? Most people would say their keys, their wallet, and their mobile phone. But what if your phone wasn't just a phone? It already isn't. At Behavio, we want to help small developers, researchers, data gatherers, and end-users lower the barrier of tapping into the signals and sensors accessible via mobile devices. Today's smartphones have evolved into incredibly rich sensing and computing devices, that oh-by-the-way can also make phone calls. They are jam-packed with on-board sensors for things like location (GPS), movement (accelerometer), temperature, atmospheric pressure, and...

• September 11, 2012
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The Unheard Millions: A New Audience Joins Global News Conversations

by Trevor Knoblich
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The field of journalism has faced a number of technology-driven changes in the past decade, including the advent of blogs, the generating and sharing of news via social media, and the tentative move by many governments to provide open data. So many elements of news have evolved that many experts think we're on the verge of a revolution in digital journalism, including Google's director of news and social products, Richard Gingras. "The media landscape is in the process of being completely transformed, tossed upside down; reinvented and restructured in ways we know, and in ways we do not yet know,"...

• August 31, 2012
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Next Knight News Challenge Calls for Mobile Visionaries

by Desiree Everts

The Knight Foundation, which now offers three rounds of its News Challenge instead of one competition per year, just announced the theme of its next contest: mobile. This round focuses on funding innovators who are using mobile to change the face of the media industry. Considerable growth in mobile Internet usage over the past few years has meant the way in which people consume news is undoubtedly shifting -- so it's not much of a surprise that mobile would be the theme of one of this year's rounds. In fact, several mobile players have already been the recipients of past...

• August 17, 2012
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How User-Centered Design Powers FrontlineSMS, Version 2

by Amy O'Donnell
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm going to be honest: When I first joined FrontlineSMS, I had no idea how much goes into the design of software. Every screen, every button and every function has principled thought behind it. In 2011, we worked alongside Gabriel White, a user experience designer from Small Surfaces, to help translate FrontlineSMS users' needs into the new design of Version 2. I came to realize that no matter how advanced and amazing a piece of software might be, it has no relevance if users can't access it or work out how to use it. I think that the user interface...

• August 9, 2012
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How the Knight Lab's Babl App Helped Lollapaloozans Deal with Storms

by Knight Lab

This post was written by Jordan Young of the Knight News Innovation Lab. This past weekend marked the annual music carnival known as Lollapalooza" held in Chicago's Grant Park. As you'd expect, close to 100,000 people attending a large event can generate a lot of hot conversations on social media outlets. The Knight News Innovation Lab recently released a mobile application, Babl, which gives users a unique way to share and discover news. This iPhone app offers a visual alternative to reading through a scrolling list of tweets. Babl users can create their own conversation topics by entering a title...

• August 8, 2012
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FrontlineSMS Version 2 Provides Intuitive, Scalable Messaging

by Laura Walker Hudson
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mobile phones are everywhere. There are now 6 billion active mobile phone connections across the world, an increasing number of which are in emerging markets, in communities that have previously been hard to reach. Recognizing this potential, our founder, Ken Banks, envisioned FrontlineSMS six and a half years ago as a means to harness the power of mobile to lower barriers to social change. Since then, our open-source SMS-messaging software has been downloaded more than 25,000 times, and helps organizations in more than 80 countries overcome their communication challenges to reach millions. Over the last two years, we've focused on...

• June 14, 2012
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How FrontlineSMS Users Could Monitor Kenya's 2013 Elections

by Florence Scialom
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The FrontlineSMS user community has seen a growing number of user meet-ups across the world in recent months. It's exciting to see community members come together and share opinions and experiences on our software. This is a guest column by FrontlineSMS user Joseph Owuondo, who attended a recent meet-up in Nairobi hosted at the FrontlineSMS offices. The FrontlineSMS meet-up held in Nairobi at the beginning of April brought together a number of organizations, individuals and experts who focus their work on elections and conflict resolution-related issues -- and who all have an interest in the potential use of FrontlineSMS for...

• May 10, 2012
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Mobile Security Survival Guide Helps Journalists Understand Wireless Risks

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Mobile Security Survival Guide for Journalists from SaferMobile helps reporters better understand the risks inherent in the use of mobile technology. The guide covers both local journalists and those on assignment in another country. As someone working with sensitive information, mobile communications are inherently insecure and expose journalists working in sensitive environments to risks that aren't easy to detect or overcome. This guide is designed to help navigate these challenges. (It should be noted that this guide does not guarantee safety. Rather, it's a foundational resource to understand and minimize the risks of mobile communication in the field.) The...

• May 1, 2012
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Minmini News Uses FrontlineSMS to Share Women's Social Knowledge in Sri Lanka

by Florence Scialom
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post is a guest column written by FrontlineSMS user Ananda Galappatti, editor of Minmini News, a women's news network in Sri Lanka. Minmini News is a local SMS news service for women in the Batticaloa District of Eastern Sri Lanka. Batticaloa is the poorest district of Sri Lanka, still slowly emerging from the destruction of a three decade-long civil war that ended in 2009. Throughout the war, and following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that struck Batticaloa's coastline, women played a crucial role in responding to the difficult circumstances that their families and communities had to endure. The same...

• April 16, 2012
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How Media-Savvy Activists Report From the Front Lines in Syria

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Syria, many activists and citizen journalists fill a media void and contribute to the global conversation on the uprising there by capturing and sharing their own footage. They're organized, trained, smart, strategic, and promote media -- much of it mobile -- with a purpose. Mass demonstrations and state violence continue in Syria. Authorities are largely banning foreign reporters and have arrested Syrian journalists and bloggers. Outside of the country, many news outlets that report on the major events there cite "Syrian activists" as the source of information. Day-to-day events in cities around the country come to our attention largely...

• March 27, 2012
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SMS Builds the Radio Star

by Amy O'Donnell
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Radio's history has spanned over 100 years and it continues to reach billions -- even in remote and underserved regions. So when UNESCO announced that the inaugural World Radio Day was to be celebrated on February 13, one question on many people's lips was: Why now? A diverse World Radio Day panel gathered in London last month to demonstrate that, if anything, radio is growing in importance. Discussions about radio are more relevant than ever because innovations are rejuvenating radio programming, particularly in opening up channels for participation. Technology to spark this change need not be on the cutting edge...

• March 14, 2012
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How Video Volunteers Created a Network of Community Correspondents in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The state of technology today means that nearly every village in the developing world could have someone -- a local changemaker -- who broadcasts his or her issues to the world. It's commonplace today to hear people say the world is flooded with content and that "everyone" can now be a producer. At every community video training that Video Volunteers conducts for people from marginalized communities in India, more and more people are showing up with $15 Chinese-made video-enabled cell phones. It's now possible for rural people without data connections to send tweets via SMS. In India, the government has...

• February 1, 2012
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How Journalists Are Using FrontlineSMS to Innovate Around the World

by Florence Scialom
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

So much can be said in 160 characters. As we've started to look at tailoring FrontlineSMS software for journalists, we've realized just how much potential there is to use text messaging as a news source. As FrontlineSMS's community support coordinator, I interact every day with people and organizations that are using SMS in innovative ways. Increasingly, I've come across uses of FrontlineSMS as a journalistic tool, and this is particularly exciting for us as we embark on building new mobile tools to help increase media participation in hard-to-reach communities. FrontlineSMS is a free and open-source tool, so its most interesting...

• January 27, 2012
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Pew Studies the Power of Text-Based Donations After Haiti Quake

by Anne-Ryan Heatwole
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A simple text message can have a big impact. Mobile giving makes it easy to donate almost instantaneously after disaster strikes -- users authorize a mobile donation by texting a keyword to a specific short code, and the donation is then billed to the donor's mobile phone bill, eventually ending up with the nonprofit of choice. Following the devastating Haitian earthquake of 2010 that left more than 200,000 people dead and more than 1 million Haitians homeless, mobile donations to Haiti totaled more than $43 million -- the first time mobile giving went mainstream in the United States on a...

• January 12, 2012
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NextDrop's Dashboards Look Great, But Mobile Content Would Be Better

by Ari Olmos
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

One year ago, when we were just a team of graduate students with a big idea, our teammate Thejo Kote came to Hubli, India and demoed a web-based dashboard to the executive engineer and commissioner here. The dashboard uses Google Maps to show the status of valves and other system components in real time, using information provided via voice or SMS. Building that dashboard marked a turning point for NextDrop, which informs residents in India about the availability of piped water in order to help them lead more productive, less stressful lives. It was our first real "pivot," as we...

• January 11, 2012
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FrontlineSMS Shows News Foo Why Mobile Innovation Matters

by Ryan Jones
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

With new smartphone apps making headlines daily, it's too easy to overlook the innovative potential of more basic technology like SMS on low-end phones. At FrontlineSMS, we're leaders in helping organizations around the world realize that potential, and we build tools to help turn SMS into an effective and ubiquitous channel for communication and data collection. One of the most exciting contexts for our work is among community journalists who are using SMS to create participatory news environments and deepen the reach of their work. We had the chance to provide our perspective on mobile innovation in journalism at News...

• December 20, 2011
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SwiftRiver Throws a Lifeline to People Drowning in Information

by Erik Hersman
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's a problem that constantly plagues us in this day of information overload, and that is the ability to sift the stream of incoming information into the bits that are valuable from those that aren't. It's a tough issue that we've been working on at Ushahidi for a while now. Our solution is called SwiftRiver. SwiftRiver is a free and open-source intelligence platform that helps people curate and make sense of large amounts of information in a short amount of time. In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as SMS, email, Twitter and...

• December 9, 2011
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Public Media Should Mind the Developer Gap

by Jake Shapiro

Early on in PRX's history we faced a critical decision. Do we outsource the development and maintenance of our main web application, or take the plunge and bring all coding in-house and become a technology-driven company? We took the plunge, and since then have grown an award-winning tech team, responsible not only for PRX's web-based services but for a growing portfolio of successful mobile apps. I'm not myself a developer, have not written a line of code, and other than being a super user and obsessive early adopter, I have little claim to true tech skills. But as a non-profit...

• November 30, 2011
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Mobile Phones Are Key to a Free Newspaper in Mozambique

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

MobileActive recently posted a call for guest posts on its site. A version of this guest post, which was written by Janet Gunter, originally appeared on MobileActive.org's Mobile Media Toolkit blog. MobileActive chose to highlight this piece because it demonstrates how a free newspaper in Mozambique is using mobile tech to inform and engage readers, and help shape the paper's identity. For three years, the @Verdade newspaper in Mozambique has been delivering the news for free to Maputo's outer neighborhoods, mostly large, informal settlements. The idea, according the paper's founder, social entrepreneur Erik Charas, is to bring information to those...

• November 22, 2011
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Open Source Meets Mobile in Ashoka's Citizen Media Competition

by Desiree Everts

As world events like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the Japanese tsunami disaster have shown, YouTube and social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook have the capacity to turn just about anyone into a journalist. It's a trend that leaves some traditional media outlets skeptical, or even downright disgruntled. But when media has the chance to spread out to include more voices, particularly in regions where it's a challenge to get the news out, citizen journalists can offer news and insight on critical events that would otherwise go under-reported. That's why Ashoka Changemakers came up with a...

• November 10, 2011
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What Community Builders Can Learn From Gay App Grindr

by Cody Shotwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Unless you're a gay man with a smartphone, I'll forgive you for not having heard of Grindr, a social-networking application for gay men which has seen an epic rise, becoming one of the most visible and popular apps of its kind in the gay community since its launch a year and a half ago. Recently, I was dismayed to see Grindr described in a Slate post as a "gay hookup app." I was dismayed not because it's a wholly inaccurate description, but because its an incomplete one. It is true that gay men, as a community, are connected in broadest...

• November 8, 2011
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Live Chat: How Journalists Use SMS + Radio in Developing World

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Text messages are becoming an important medium in parts of the world where less people have Internet access and smartphones. There are various services, projects and radio programs that are using SMS as a way to interact with their audiences in places like Afghanistan, Uganda and Zimbabwe. So we decided to host a live chat on Twitter about the use of SMS and texting technology by journalists, news organizations, radio shows and more around the world. Many projects are using SMS to help connect communities to important news and information, and to create a feedback loop for programs. On Nov....

• November 3, 2011
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FrontlineSMS Gives Radio Listeners a Voice Through Text Messages

by Amy O'Donnell
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Almost everyone who has listened to the radio within the last few years has heard a DJ call for the audience to send in a text message -- whether to request the next song, respond to the latest news or to comment on the needs of their communities. Media outlets everywhere are using SMS to engage audiences in innovative and creative ways, especially as they are increasingly reliant on audiences to be their eyes and ears. The combination of broadcast and interactive, text-driven response is being used to affect a wide range of reporting and audience engagement practices. FrontlineSMS, which...

• October 19, 2011
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How Mobile Phones Could Bring Public Services to People in Developing Countries

by Miguel Paz

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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Mobile Tech Brings Hope to Children in Zimbabwe

by Tina Rolfe
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Zimbabwe, it's common for people to receive information over their mobile phones rather than using email or the Internet. That's why Kubatana, a non-profit that aims to improve the accessibility of human rights and civic information in Zimbabwe, teamed up with Freedom Fone to broaden access to information about Operation of Hope. Freedom Fone provides a voice database with which users can access news and public-interest information via land, mobile or internet phones. In August, Operation of Hope arrived in Harare, Zimbabwe. Operation of Hope is an American volunteer surgical team that travels to developing countries each year to...

• August 19, 2011
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FrontlineSMS: Engaging the Audience to Transform the News

by Sean McDonald
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

If some projections are correct, the world is only a year or so from a major milestone: some time in 2012, there will be one active mobile phone connection for every person on the planet. The question is no longer whether mobile phones will transform, well, everything, but how. At FrontlineSMS we've worked with our users to transform everything from health care, to banking, to journalism. After nearly 6 years and more than 16,000 downloads, our open source software, FrontlineSMS, has been used to connect millions of people to vital information using perhaps the most widespread communications medium we have...

• August 2, 2011
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Reporting from Your Mobile Phone? The Mobile Media Toolkit Can Help

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Drumroll, please! MobileActive.org is pleased to introduce the Mobile Media Toolkit, the newest project that's all about Making Media Mobile. The Mobile Media Toolkit helps you make sense of the growing role of mobile tech in media. The Toolkit provides how-to guides, wireless tools, and case studies on how mobile phones can (and are) being used for reporting, news broadcasting, and citizen media. We cover it all, from basic feature phones to the latest smartphone applications. It's an exciting week for us here at MobileActive.org as we launch the Mobile Media Toolkit. We have been interviewing people, researching projects, and...

• July 29, 2011
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Find the 'Big Carrot' in Your Mobile App

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the past, I've talked about some of the nuances in creating a location-based mobile app. Now I'd like to share some techniques for how we decided what to include in version 1 of the CityCircles mobile app, and how we accomplished what we did, to help you narrow your focus for any future apps you may be thinking about launching. We had one year to complete the project under the Knight Foundation's guidelines. We spent the majority of that deploying and testing, deploying and testing, adjusting, then deploying again to see how the audience responded. We did this on...

• June 20, 2011
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Tanzania Media Copes with Wild Success of Feedback via SMS

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the largest civil society media platform in Tanzania, back talk is good. 

 In fact, talking back is the objective of a new service at Femina HIP called Speak Up! The service aims to increase access of marginalized youth and rural communities and promote a participatory, user-driven media scene in Tanzania.

 Femina HIP is the largest civil society media platform in the country, outside of commercial mainstream media. Products include print magazines, television shows, a radio program, and an interactive website. Fema magazine, for example, has a print run of over 170,000 copies and is distributed to every rural...

• June 15, 2011
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What Augmented Reality Can Do for the Media Industry

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

I attended the second annual Augmented Reality Event conference in Santa Clara, Calif., in May and it was ... interesting. OK, it was a huge geekfest. The opening session was interrupted by people dressed in hazardous waste -- or maybe they were supposed to be pseudo-astronaut -- outfits, yelling about "free space," while wrapping the audience in yellow caution tape. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, composer, visual artist and free thinker best known for coining the term "virtual reality," opened his keynote speech by playing the khene, a traditional Laotian wind instrument that he says was the earliest conveyor of...

• June 14, 2011
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CityCircles Explains How to Make a Killer Mobile App for Transit

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

What a difference a year makes. Last year, the CityCircles team was solely focused on building an audience for our unique, web-based publishing platform for the Phoenix light rail community. CityCircles has one of the slickest, easiest experiences for posting geo-tagged content (at least we like to think so). That said, think about everything that has happened in the past year from a technology and user experience standpoint. Safe to say that if we had a crystal ball when we filed our Knight Foundation News Challenge application in 2008, we'd have put our focus on the mobile space instead...

• June 2, 2011
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Why Isn't the Public Radio Player App on Android? Let Us Count the Ways

by Rekha Murthy
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

We know, we know. Android users want the Public Radio Player, too. We've received plenty of comments from our feedback page: "Patiently waiting for bliss..." -- Stephenmm "hurry up please. i love your app and i want it on my phone!" -- ryan "Enjoyed this on my wifes Iphone but was disappointed to find out it isnt on my new Android device. Ohh How will I survive without it? Please hurry up and release it." -- Ben " I cannot help but wonder if this project has actually been...gulp...abandoned!" -- Dan D Oh, the drama. Here's the deal. Public Radio...

• May 23, 2011
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SaferMobile Helps Protect Your Cell Phone Data from Threats

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Activists, rights defenders and journalists use mobile devices and communications for reporting, organizing, mobilizing and documenting. Mobile gadgets provide countless benefits -- relatively low cost, increased efficiencies, vast reach -- but they also present specific risks. Mobile communication is inherently insecure and exposes you to risks that aren't easy to detect or overcome. SaferMobile is a project that aims to help people, including journalists and citizen reporters, assess and better protect themselves from mobile threats. The project launched with content and announced tools (currently in beta) in April, and development began in January. SaferMobile is a project of MobileActive.org. Understand...

• May 18, 2011
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Ushahidi's Online Toolbox Helps People Understand the Service

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

[Post written by Melissa Tully and Jennifer Chan. This post is the third in a series of blog posts documenting a 9-month Ushahidi evaluation project in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative supported by the Knight Foundation.] We have made great progress on the Ushahidi Kenya evaluation. Jennifer has been back at the iHub continuing to build the 3-part assessment and self-evaluation tool. The goal of this toolbox is to help interested organizations learn about the Ushahidi platform using a web-based interactive tool. There's also a low bandwidth and no bandwidth option as detailed in our earlier post. In Nairobi,...

• April 7, 2011
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Freedom Fone Helps with Election Monitoring to Agriculture

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The eagerly awaited Freedom Fone Version 2.0 has been released this March 2011. The innovative platform, initiated by The Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe and funded by The Knight News Challenge, was inspired by the desire to reach out to the burgeoning number of ordinary mobile phone users in developing countries. The all-women management team of information activists from Harare, Zimbabwe, came up with the concept in response to the frustrations of trying to communicate in a highly controlled media landscape, where 90% of the population does not have Internet access. There has been a great deal of hype recently around...

• April 5, 2011
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How Grahamstown Now Combines Mobile Content, Daily Deals

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Giving African newsrooms, particularly community media and non-profit organizations, the ability to leapfrog into the mobile era is at the core project of Iindaba Ziyafika's work in South Africa. As Anne-Ryan Heatwole reported last year on this site, our Knight-funded NIKA Content Management System, which was designed and coded in South Africa using Drupal as its base, provides powerful SMS and IM "in and out" service. When combined with the largest citizen journalism program in Africa at Grocott's Mail, it has allowed an unprecedented level of interactivity between our newsroom and our community of about 100,000 people. Last year, we launched...

• March 22, 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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VoIP Drupal Kicks Off at Drupalcon

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Voip Drupal, a plugin that allow full interaction between Drupal CMS and phones.

• March 13, 2011
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Drupal Now Accessible Via Any Phone

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MIT's Center for Future Civic Media has done a variety of breakthrough civic systems with phones. Examples range from Leo Burd's What's Up platform to the Call4Action class and its cool student projects. We at C4 love these projects, but working with phones has always been a bear. A lot of programming is necessary. In many cases, people start with the phone and end up building custom infrastructure that begin to represent an actual content management system. Projects like Ushahidi or our earlier txtMob are really just simple CMSs with a few custom features for texting inputs. So Leo...

• March 4, 2011
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People of Color Must Innovate or Die in Digital Media

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In December in this space I asked about the lack of minorities at new media conferences -- both as participants and as speakers. The blog post generated a lot of comments; a Twitter discussion, and the start of a list of wonderful experts -- all persons of color -- who can help make your next new media conference a success. I heard privately from a dozen or so white digital media leaders who confessed that they often wondered why new media seemed to be getting off on the wrong foot when it comes to diversifying staffs at operations and speakers...

• February 11, 2011
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iPhone or Android? Key Tips for Publishers Considering Apps

by Jake Shapiro

2011 is already seeing Android and Apple battle it out for ascendancy in sales of smartphones and tablets and, more interestingly, in the world of apps and app makers. Media organizations navigating this terrain have a lot of factors to weigh before taking the plunge and creating a serious presence on these increasingly important platforms. Thanks to some hard-won experience from PRX's own successful iOS and Android adventures, I'm going to tackle common questions and concepts related to media apps. (This post is Part 1 of a two-part story.) For a deeper technical dive I recommend visiting labs.prx.org, where our...

• February 3, 2011
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Sudan Radio Service Solicits Feedback via Text Messaging

by Anne-Ryan Heatwole
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

From January 9 to 15, Southern Sudan held a referendum to decide if the region should become an independent state. Although results have not yet officially been announced, estimates indicate that the referendum will pass with an overwhelming number of pro-independence votes. (Read MediaShift's recent report from Simon Roughneen on the ground in Sudan.) It's essential to keep citizens informed of new developments during the voting period -- and one of the best ways to reach large numbers of people is through radio. The Sudan Radio Service, which has been operating since 2006, recently began incorporating mobile technology into its...

• January 28, 2011
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How WNYC Used Texts from Citizens To Map Snowstorm

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The radio station WNYC is creating on-air and online stories using two things that are very familiar to people in the Northeastern United States: mobile phones and snow. A snowstorm over the holidays was the heaviest December snowfall in six decades. It dumped up to 20 inches in many parts of New York City. The story quickly became one of snow removal and how the city was not removing the snow as quickly as people had hoped. Jim Colgan and the WNYC newsroom wanted to get a sense of what was happening on the streets. Problem was, there was no...

• January 27, 2011
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Radio Azadi in Afghanistan Delivers News to Mobile Phones

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is three months into an interactive SMS service with its Radio Azadi service in Afghanistan that allows listeners to access content and participate in the program via mobile phone. Through the interactive SMS service, Radio Azadi is now able to send and receive SMS messages from subscribers. As a news organization, the main goal of RFE/RL is reaching an audience, according to Julian Knapp, RFE/RL's deputy communications director. "We want to make sure our content is available on whatever platform Afghans want to consume it on," Knapp said. The service allows listeners to become texters,...

• January 11, 2011
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How to Add Location Information to Mobile Content

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Prabhas Pokharel contributed research and writing to this post. If you're a journalist or blogger, adding location information to your content can add value to your work. This kind of data can be of particular help to journalists who report on specific communities, reporters who create venue-specific multimedia, or citizen journalists who cover events in which location is relevant. Adding location information has many advantages. It provides more context. It also helps journalists and publishers find an interested audience because makes content more accessible for users searching for information regarding specific locations. Location information lends itself to aggregation, and content...

• December 22, 2010
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A Guide to Delivering Audio Content to Mobile Audiences

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Prabhas Pokharel contributed research and writing to this article.

 For this post, we'd like to detail the different ways people and organizations are delivering audio content to mobile phones. Distributing audio content in this manner can help you reach new and increasingly mobile audiences. It can also be a great way to reach illiterate populations or others for whom written content is not suitable. 

 There are many ways to deliver audio content to mobiles: Calling listeners, providing numbers for them to call, having mobile web- or app-accessible radio, or leveraging the radios that are included in many mobiles. This...

• December 17, 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 To Capture High Quality Video on Your Mobile Phone

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Prabhas Pokharel contributed research and writing to this article Many of today's mobile phones can capture video footage. This has enabled both trained journalists and citizen reporters to more easily capture footage and images that would have otherwise rarely been seen. The Polk Journalism Award in 2009, for example, was awarded to a video from Iran that was captured on a mobile phone. Today, more and more journalists are using mobile phones to record video and quickly transfer content to their newsrooms via mobile data connections. 

 The good news for all of us is that you don't need a...

• November 19, 2010
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Building a Successful Technology Venture for the Bottom of the Pyramid

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a long overdue update from our end! We were awarded a grant in the 2008 News Challenge for developing low-cost technologies for community radio stations in India. We have come a long way since then. Our systems are now in use in 9 stations in India, and growing steadily. But we have also realized that there is a lot more that needs to be done to push the community radio movement in India. Thankfully the Knight Foundation has given us considerable flexibility to tackle various problems as and when they arise. Let me first give you a context,...

• November 17, 2010
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Overcoming the Challenges of Using Ushahidi in Low Bandwidth Areas

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the increased adoption of Ushahidi around the world, we are finding that one problem (which we anticipated in the very beginning of the initiative) is that of low bandwidth regions. In the early days of testing the platform in Kenya, we found that the map would take ages to load, and so the development team worked very hard to change this. This was of course before the installation of fiber optic links in Kenya, which make connection speeds much better after September 2009. Our current solution for integrating SMS in areas with low bandwidth (but good wireless service coverage)...

• November 9, 2010
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Balancing Positive and Negative of New Media for Political Activism

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my previous post for Idea Lab, I began examining how new media has and hasn't proven effective in helping push political change in countries around the world. That was in advance of the "New Media: Alternative Politics" conference at the University of Cambridge. This post follows after my participation in the conference. What qualifies as new media? After all, what's new today is old by tomorrow. And, as Firoze Manji, founder of Pambuzuka News, said at the New Media: Alternative Politics conference held recently at Cambridge, is it really new or is just old wine repackaged in new bottles?...

• November 8, 2010
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Blimee Brings Local News, Engagement and Instant Offers to Digital Signage

by CJ Cornell
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

New ideas, new ventures, new visions: They never turn out quite the way the entrepreneur expects, and often the path to success comes from walking backwards into a great idea. That's what happened with an innovative digital media journalism venture that emerged from the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The founder wasn't even a journalism student. He was a film student with an idea for a better way to get people interested in watching movies. In fact, his idea was nearly a product with a customer and investor lined...

• October 30, 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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Innovative SMS-Driven News Project Takes Root in Afghanistan

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Afghanistan, a documentary media company and an independent news agency have teamed up to integrate mobile phones and SMS into news reports. From election-day text messages to stories of homemade airplanes, they're demonstrating how a willingness to adapt mobile platforms to the landscape can contribute to a successful intersection of technology and media. Small World News is a documentary and new media company that provides tools to journalists and citizens around the world to tell stories about their lives. Pajhwok Afghan News is an independent news agency headquartered in Kabul with eight regional bureaus and a nationwide network of...

• October 26, 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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'Sourcing Through Texting' Brings Public into Radio Investigations

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

If a large truck illegally barrels through a neighborhood and no reporters are around to see it, does it make the news? It does if local residents with mobile phones can text truck sightings to a local public radio station. This is the premise behind a new pilot project called Sourcing Through Texting from a team at "The Takeaway" radio program. Sourcing Through Texting provides a way to connect citizens with journalists via mobile phones. The Takeaway is a co-production of Public Radio International and public radio station WNYC in collaboration with the BBC World Service, the New York Times,...

• September 23, 2010
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SeedSpeak To Sprout Community Improvement Projects in Phoenix

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The excitement continues to build in the Phoenix community over a new mobile and web platform that will help people sow positive change in the community. Since the June Knight News Challenge funding announcement, my development partner Cody Shotwell and I have fielded dozens of calls and emails from local people. They can't wait to help us put together the project that will allow users to plant the seed of an idea for a community improvement project, allow others to add on or grow that idea toward maturity and, finally, join neighbors and local officials together to harvest the idea...

• September 20, 2010
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SeenReport Helps Citizens Report on Floods in Pakistan

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The devastating floods in Pakistan have been covered by trained reporters and mainstream media outlets around the world. Citizens, often on the front lines of the flood, have also been contributing thousands of reports though mobile phones, in part enabled by the citizen journalism service SeenReport.com. SeenReport (a name derived from "see 'n report") is a citizen journalism service through which users can submit photos, videos, and text accounts of news as it is happening via SMS, MMS, or email. SeenReport won a 2010 mBillionth award, a first-ever contest which recognizes mobile content in South Asia. (This YouTube video...

• August 30, 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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How Freedom Fone Helped Create Participatory Radio in Africa

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two years ago, Bev Clark, the co-founder of Kubatana.net, was awarded a large grant in the Knight News Challenge for Freedom Fone, an open-source software platform for distributing news and information through interactive voice response (IVR) technology. Freedom Fone was officially launched (version 1.5) in late February of this year and has since been downloaded about 200 times, according Amy Saunderson-Meyer of Freedom Fone. (She blogs for Idea Lab and her most recent post, about Freedom Fone version 1.6, is here.) Freedom Fone leverages audio as a mobile function using IVR, a technology that allows a system to detect voice...

• August 10, 2010
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Freedom Fone Succeeds with Call-in Soap Opera; Plans Activism

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone version 1.6 is now available for download. This version builds on existing core features and adds some useful new functionality, and we hope it will inspire new deployments. Freedom Fone provides a voice database where users can access news and public-interest information via landline, mobile or Internet phones. Users can call in and then dial specific numbers to find the information they need. Deployments of 1.5 Since the public launch of version 1.5 six months ago, there have been over 230 downloads of the software from the website, hundreds of email enquiries and thousands of visits to the...

• August 4, 2010
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Ushahidi Racking up Downloads, Available in New Languages

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Ushahidi platform's growing use has been astounding to say the least. The platform has been download almost 4,000 times. On top of that, our mobile applications (including the Android Oil Spill reporter by Henry Addo) have been downloaded more than 3,700 times. As an organization that is barely two years old, it is encouraging to see adoption of the platform in various countries and for diverse uses. Be it election monitoring in Burundi, Snowmaggedon in D.C., or preventing forest forest fires in Italy, it is very encouraging to the development team to see people around the world using the...

• July 12, 2010
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Great Citizen Media Projects That Use Radio, Audio and Mobile

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over at the Mobile Media Toolkit, we recently have been looking at voice- and radio-based citizen media projects that incorporate mobile phones. In an Idea Lab post last fall, I collected a series of examples that primarily used the voice functionality of mobile phones; however, this new set of projects integrate voice and radio with data-based services like SMS and web. Below are some of the projects we think you should know about.Projects to WatchVoices of Youth in Nepal is a free text message channel that enables people to interact with a weekly radio program. The radio announcers pick a...

• July 6, 2010
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Mobile Phone Gathering Outlines Successful Projects

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- A catalog of pioneering mobile phone projects for news and information was the centerpiece of an informal discussion on the topic at the Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT on June 17. And while successful approaches appear to remain relatively few, with most overseas, the two dozen participants at the barcamp gathering left with an array of models to explore. Among the U.S.-based examples cited by participants was VoteReport, which used Twitter and eight volunteers to gather some 17,000 user accounts of conditions at U.S. polling places on Election Day 2008, and Mobile Voices,...

• June 18, 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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Freedom Fone Adopted by Bulawayo's Pioneering Voices

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had visions of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe being a sleepy little hollow, and perhaps in some ways it is. But last week, after arriving at Radio Dialogue offices in Pioneer House in Bulawayo's central business district, I was very pleasantly surprised. We were in the City of Skies to run a practical two-day workshop with six local organizations on using Freedom Fone. Pioneer House seemed to me to be pioneering the way! Radio Dialogue is a community radio station that opened nine years ago and resides on the ninth floor of Pioneer House. Like all community radio stations in Zimbabwe, it...

• June 7, 2010
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South African Paper's Mobile Site Focuses on 'Nowness'

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are no magic wands in the digital transition. Everything has to be built slowly and surely, as with legacy media. And failure is as likely, maybe even more likely, than in the analog world. But you have to keep trying because cell phones, the first true mass digital channel in Africa, are getting faster and smarter; if you don't exploit the power of the new channel, you're toast because others will and are. Grocott's Mail has been serving the small community of Grahamstown, South Africa with local news and information for a long time (140 years precisely on May...

• May 24, 2010
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The (Unrealized) Potential of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had the pleasure of attending the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile earlier this month. The summit brought together bloggers, activists, and thinkers working to advance citizen media all around the world. While the discussions that took place were informative, most presentations and panels fell short in recognizing the role mobile phones have played and exploring the potential mobile phones can play in citizen media. I'd like to highlight some of the potential for mobiles in citizen media that were not adequately discussed.The Potential of Mobiles in Citizen MediaMobile phones have already played a significant role in advancing citizen...

• May 21, 2010
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Ushahidi-Based Voice of Kibera Aims to Map Kenyan Slum

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Melissa Tully is a PhD student at UW-Madison who is researching the use of social/new media in social justice work in Kenya. She has been volunteering with Ushahidi for the past two and a half years. In this post, she highlights a workshop that she organized in Kibera. On April 23 I, along with the Map Kibera team, organized a focus group on the Voice of Kibera (VoK) platform, which is designed to be a place for residents of Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, to post reports and information relevant to them and their community. VoK is a recent initiative...

• May 5, 2010
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Freedom Fone Answers Questions on Zimbabwe Constitution

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two weeks ago the latest version of Freedom Fone, affectionately known to his handlers as "Fred," was set loose. Inspired by the cockney rhyming slang "dog and bone" (meaning phone), the Freedom Fone dog logo and quirky character of Fred was born a few years ago. Fred is still young, but after a few years of software development (and dog training!), and thanks to Knight News Challenge funds, he's now ready to go out into the world on his own. This is a report on his recent adventures since the launch of Freedom Fone version 1.5. To learn more about...

• May 4, 2010
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How 'This American Life' Attracted Donors with Mobile Giving

by Anne-Ryan Heatwole
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Those of us at MobileActive have written before about mobile giving during disasters, and the dramatic results these campaigns can have. But mobile giving can also be used for non disaster-related fundraising drives, and the popular public radio show "This American Life" is one of the latest organizations to embrace this trend. The weekly radio show tells stories about the experiences of everyday people. It's distributed by Public Radio International and attracts 1.7 million listeners each week. Its free podcast generates 600,000 weekly downloads, creating significant bandwidth charges. As a result, "This American Life" holds twice-yearly pledge drives in order...

• April 29, 2010
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A Real Watershed Moment for Citizen Journalism in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ever heard of load shedding? It's one of the cleverest bits of Orwellian double speak the south African government (or in this case the government-owned electricity company ESKOM) has ever cooked up. It means, in plain English, power cuts -- as in cutting off electricity to whole areas. Not because there is any extra "load" (i.e. a surplus) of electricity that needs to be "shed," but rather because there is too little electricity to go around. So different chunks of the country have to take turns having no electricity. In 2008, we dealt with the grim reality of load shedding,...

• April 21, 2010
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Printcasting Plans Mobile Expansion With FeedBrewer

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

About two years ago, I wrote up an idea for how to leverage standardized web content to create locally-targeted publications with less time, money and software than ever before. The technology and content would be digital, but the output would be optimized for physical distribution as printable PDF magazines. That concept became Printcasting and it earned us a Knight News Challenge grant. We're still extremely busy with Printcasting and are working on multiple tracks over the next six weeks before our grant ends. We're finishing up version 2.0 of the Printcasting system on Drupal 6 and preparing to open-source everything,...

• April 20, 2010
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The Namibian Turns Text Messages into Letters to the Editor

by Anne-Ryan Heatwole
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many news organizations use SMS to send out news alerts, but the Namibian, a daily paper in Namibia, has set up pages in its print edition and on its website to publish text-message letters to the editor submitted by readers. The Namibian is an independent newspaper with newsstand sales of 27,000 a day (with an estimated 10-person pass-along rate), and a popular web edition. It launched the SMS pages in August 2007. The SMS program originally started as a way for readers to respond to specific articles. The editors would place an image of a mobile phone beneath certain stories...

• April 13, 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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News Service Uses Mobile Voice Messages to Inform Rural India

by Anne-Ryan Heatwole
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

One call can bring news to hundreds in rural villages in India. Gaon Ki Awaaz, which means "Village Voice" in the Avhadi language, sends out twice-daily news calls to subscribers directly over their mobile phones. Launched in December 2009, the project recently expanded to 250 subscribers spread over 20 villages. What Does Gaon Ki Awaaz Do? Sunil Saxena, dean of the International Media Institute of India that launched the project, said that Gaon Ki Awaaz was developed in order to meet the needs of rural populations. Gaon Ki Awaaz has two reporters, Divyakar Pratap Singh and Priya Gupta, who produce...

• March 25, 2010
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Boosting Citizen Journalism with Training, Payment, Editors

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've been going through the recent Knight Commission report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, and finding a lot of insights useful to our Iindaba Ziyafika project here in South Africa. Although focused on the U.S., the ideas explored under the commission's three core topics: "Maximizing the Availability of Relevant and Credible Information," "Enhancing the Information Capacity of Individuals," and "Promoting Public Engagement" are helping refine some of our project's approaches. As I outlined in my previous post, when you are small and local, and don't have much money to invest in investigative journalism, it's essential to have...

• March 22, 2010
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Crowdsourcing Crime Information In Kenya

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hatari.co.ke is is a website that allows anyone in Nairobi, Kenya, to submit reports about crime and corruption in the city. ("Hatari" means "danger" in Swahili.) It will provide the growing city and its inhabitants with a repository of public information about incidents such as carjacking, corruption, police harassment and others. This initiative builds on other crime maps such as SpotCrime and MapATL. The idea of crime mapping is not new (see EveryBlock, an Idea Lab success story), but it's unlikely that law enforcement officials and the general public in Kenya previously had a tool to visualize crime information. This...

• March 17, 2010
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Freedom Fone Promotes Information for All in Africa

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) strategies are viewed in many contemporary business circles as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. BoP refers to the 2.6 billion people who live below the $2 a day breadline and many business strategists argue that if targeted correctly, these consumers can offer businesses access to one of the fastest growing markets. Even if the price of products and services has to be reduced, profit can be made up in volume. A more neutral view of BoP strategies is that they are not simply a means to make millions. Instead, they...

• March 12, 2010
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Pew Report Shows Mobile News Use Spreading in U.S.

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) released a important new report this week, Understanding the Participatory News Consumer. It presents many insights on how Americans stay informed, and highlights the fact that many of us are already accessing news on our mobile phones. For those considering producing news for mobile phones, or debating whether or not to venture in the news-on-the-go space, here are the key points from the extensive report. Mobile News Spreads A quarter of all American adults are reading news content on their mobile phones. This is only likely to grow, and hopefully...

• March 3, 2010
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How Mobile Voices Enables Day Laborers to Tell Their Stories

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the second of two articles about Mobile Voices, a project based in Southern California. The first post can be found here. Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices, a Los Angeles-based citizen media project, a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (ASC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA). Mobile Voices describes itself as "a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. [The project] helps people with limited computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere."...

• February 25, 2010
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Using Text Messages to Combat Identity Theft in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Information access is on the move in Africa. Let me paint you a picture. The person is fictitious, but the process isn't. Patience Ndlovu, a 24-year-old woman living in Soweto, South Africa, sends an SMS to a cell phone number she has scribbled on a scrap of paper. Her text reads "L," followed by her ID number, and the destination number for the message is 32551. She got these details from a friend who in turn learned about it from a discarded newspaper that she picked up on a bus the week before. The phone beeps. Ndlovu clicks a...

• February 10, 2010
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How Mobile Voices Developed a Citizen Media Platform

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the last eighteen months, three programmers have been working on Mobile Voices. I talked to Sasha Constanza-Chock, one of the developers of the project, about the process that went into building the Mobile Voices platform. I asked why Mobile Voices built a custom platform for the project, why they chose to use multimedia messaging for content delivery, and the lessons they have learned about using MMS.

• January 26, 2010
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Trying to Create the Stickiness Factor for CityCircles

by Aleksandra Chojnacka
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

CityCircles is a website and mobile app providing hyper-local news, events, promotions, fix-it projects, and other information for stops along Phoenix's light rail system. As we progress towards launching our full site (we're currently in beta), we face the challenge of making sure our site has the "stickiness factor." We need people to visit -- and to keep coming back. Our site is a collaborative enterprise that incorporates an aspect of social networking, and relies on user-generated information for news and events. We're taking care of the stop-specific promotions by working with local merchants, and we hope this creates an...

• January 22, 2010
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Centralizing a People Finder for Haiti, Plus an SMS 911

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The information activist community has been rushing to respond to the Haitian earthquake. What I find remarkable is the capacity that has been built up in the last few years; from software standards, like the pfif standard generated after Katrina, to early systems like the Ushahidi engine designed during the Kenyan election violence, to larger organizations and resources like the Crisis Commons wiki and the Crisis Camps. First on the scene were a variety of technologists who were addressing the problem of people finding -- how to bring separated people back together, both for peace of mind and for social...

• January 17, 2010
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Free Kiswahili Synthetic Voice for Freedom Fone a Possibility

by Brenda Lynne Burrell
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking with Etienne Barnard at Meraka Institute in Pretoria, South Africa. To my delight he indicated that work already done in Kenya on text-to-speech for Kiswahili by a team led by Dr Mucemi Gakuru at the University of Nairobi some years ago, might be updated and made available in time for our July release of Freedom Fone version 2.

• January 15, 2010
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Molo and Kubatana's Partnership Helps Get Information to Zimbabweans

by Brenda Lynne Burrell
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The value of Molo’s support cannot be measured in dollar terms – it goes well beyond that. Our expedited productivity gave birth to an innovation called ‘Inzwa’ which means ‘to listen’ in the vernacular. For the first time in many years in Zimbabwe, the general public were able to call-in, at their convenience, and access non-state controlled audio information via their phones.

• January 14, 2010
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Reviewing "The Big Thaw" - Where is Media Going?

by Anne-Ryan Heatwole
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In July 2009, The Media Consortium published Tony Deifell's The Big Thaw -- Charting a New Future for Journalism. The comprehensive review not only examines the current state of journalism, but also maps out potential ways the media can adapt for the future. Written in three volumes ("Dissonance and Opportunity," "New and Emerging Realities" and "The Future"), the report dissects the problems of current media organizations and explores solutions. Through interviews with dozens of media and technology experts, Deifell attempts to explain not only where the media industry is today, but how it got there and where it might be...

• December 10, 2009
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Freedom Fone Comes to Dar es Salaam

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amanda and I have just returned from Dar es Salaam. We were on the road with Freedom Fone. Last Tuesday it was 9 degrees at 9am in orderly Johannesburg and 28 degrees with sweat inducing humidity at 7pm in chaotic Dar. After negotiating the jam-packed arrivals hall we smiled in relief when we discovered John holding up a torn piece of cardboard with Freedom Fone scribbled on it. We couldn't speak Swahili and he couldn't speak English but we made our greetings and jumped into his car for the ride of our life to a lodge off the Old Bagamoyo...

• November 26, 2009
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The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The New Journalist in the Age of Social MediaView more documents from JD Lasica. I'm at Day 2 of a remarkable two-day conference that is bringing nonprofits, citizen journalism and social media together in ways I've never seen before. I'm jazzed, hopeful and intrigued by the challenges ahead. The passion in the room is palpable. The 40 people who convened at the Visioning Summit yesterday in San Francisco, and the 30 participants who are steering the program today, consist of some of the most talented and forward-thinking innovators — nonprofit execs, strategists, journalists — that I've come across in recent...

• November 24, 2009
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Gearing up Citizen Journalism in Grahamstown, South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Low literacy environments, and multi-lingual areas, like Grahamstown, South Africa, face particular challenges when it comes to encouraging citizen journalism. More than 80 percent of the population speaks English as a second language. While most people are able to speak and understand English, writing is not always a comfortable experience (and some are unable to read or write). That's partly why we've launched Izwi Labahlali (The Voice Of The Citizens), Grahamstown's first radio show with content that's largely produced and presented by citizen journalists and transmitted mainly in iziXhosa, the dominant local language. The show, which airs on Radio Grahamstown...

• November 16, 2009
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Reporting with Mobile Phones: The Experience of Voices of Africa

by Katrin Verclas
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

(This story was written by Anne-Ryan Heatwole of MobileActive.org.) Mobile phones are the tool of choice for a new group of young reporters in Africa. Voices of Africa Media Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit, trains young journalists in Africa to create news videos for the web using mobiles. The foundation currently has programs in Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa, with plans to expand to more countries in 2010. The training program for the young journalists lasts nine months and teaches the trainees how to create video news reports with cell phones. At the beginning of the program, the...

• November 13, 2009
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Using Mobile Phones to Map the Slums of Brazil

by Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, unnamed streets meander through the hillsides. There are hospitals, coffee shops and restaurants, none of which appear on a map. Mail carriers struggle to deliver letters to homes without addresses.A new project by Rede Jovem, a Brazilian non-profit that loosely translates to "Youth Net," seeks to change that. With the help of five young "wiki-reporters" and GPS-equipped mobile phones, the non-profit is building a map of five Brazilian favelas: Complexo do Alemão, Cidade de Deus, Morro do Pavão-Pavãozinho, Morro Santa Marta and Complexo da Maré.  Mapping the Unmapped By uploading...

• November 9, 2009
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The New Era of Media Development, Part II

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is a telling sign that Wikipedia has no entry on media development. Rather, the search results suggest that perhaps you are looking for "ICT for development". Indeed, what is the future of media development when we're still unsure about the future of media in general? And, for that matter, where should funders invest their money to ensure that the same social benefits associated with traditional media (a sense of community, good governance, an informed citizenry) remain while journalism increasingly moves beyond broadcast, and beyond financial sustainability. In part one I looked at the history of media development, the major...

• October 25, 2009
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Mobile Phones Give Africans a Voice, Make Governments Nervous

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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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New Citizen Journalism Newsroom Launched in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

During the massive Highway Africa conference, two Knight Foundation funded projects, the Iindaba Ziyafika ('the news is coming') Citizen Journalism newsroom and the Nika content management system, were launched. The Iindaba Ziyafika newsroom has 10 computers and the ability to download photos and content from any cellphone (both wirelessly and through the most amazing collection of cables!). This means anyone can walk in, write a story, download a photo and get it published on the Grocott's website, or in the twice weekly print edition of Grocott's Mail. You can watch this great SoundSlide show which captures the vibe and importance...

• September 24, 2009
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Journalism Teachers Get Mobile-ized in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Most Africans don't have computers or access to the Internet. Cell phones are a different story. So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places -- even in places with access to computers and the Internet. Answers to this challenge were provided in Grahamstown, South Africa last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas, a Knight grantee, ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University. Participants were brought together under the auspices of another...

• September 21, 2009
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Mobile Projects Shouldn't Overlook 'Dumbphones'

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, CityCircles (formerly Daily Phoenix) attended a lunch event at Arizona State University that allowed us to have one-on-one conversations with college seniors who were interested in our project. (The event is summarized here.) This was a crucial event. ASU has a huge footprint in the Phoenix area because it has 69,000 students. They buzz around the Valley in cars, on bikes, on foot and yes, on light rail. This makes them a huge group for us as potential users and collaborators. As we talked to them, we realized that an assumption we made early on -- one that...

• September 14, 2009
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How Talking into a Mobile Phone Can Help Change Lives

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The pre-cursors to mobile phones were two-way radios, also called Walkie-Talkies, that transmitted voice signals. The first generation of mobile phone networks were similar in that they also only supported voice communications. Second generation networks, and a happy accident, gave us SMS, and third generation networks provide even more advanced mobile data services. Most mobile phone applications now use these newer channels of communication -- SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a major part of mobile phone communications. And when it comes to performing social work, voice communication is actually the most important feature...

• September 3, 2009
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The Power of Proximity: Possibilities for Hyperlocal Journalism in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Whether it focuses on hyperlocal crime, hyperlocal pollution and health issues, local economies (market matching information) and information about the provision of local services, this approach provides an arguably essential missing link between what citizens might find useful to know, and ways that citizens might use the information and analysis to create pressure and increase participation in efforts to change things.

• September 1, 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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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
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Saving (or Destroying) Public Radio on a Mobile Phone

by Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Is the iPhone app Public Radio Player the good guy or the bad? The critics aren't so sure. Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on ReadWriteWeb, "How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio" took the super-hero stance, but Rafat Ali opted for the villain with "Public Radio Dangerously Close To Making Public Radio Obsolete" on PaidContent. Public Radio Player, the new version of the old Public Radio Tuner, is a free application that allows users to access more than 300 radio stations across the country. With a few swipes to the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch, users can listen to...

• July 27, 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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Nika System Brings Reader SMS Messages into Newspaper's Workflow

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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VLink Offers Robust, Low-Cost Internet Service for Rural Areas

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Internet penetration in rural areas, especially in developing countries such as India, is generally poor. Telecom companies do not find it economically viable to deploy wired broadband such as DSL; satellite connectivity is expensive and often slow; dial-up (if available) is always flaky; and cellular data services such as GPRS or EDGE are quite costly to use. Newer technologies for wireless broadband such as WiMax do promise higher bandwidth, but infrastructure costs for deployment in rural areas remain high. How then can Internet connectivity be provided in such areas in a robust and low-cost manner? One could, of course, ask...

• June 26, 2009
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First Release of the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System Is Here!

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

After working countless weekends and days and nights, we are very happy to announce that Gram Vaani's platform for community radio stations is now available for download. We call it GRINS, standing for the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System. GRINS is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations. Built on Gram Vaani's MINP platform, the current release of GRINS allows radio station operators to schedule broadcasts, preview programs, record live transmissions, and maintain an extensive semantically searchable library. In future releases, GRINS will be enhanced to handle telephony calls, sending and receiving SMS messages, and Internet connectivity to...

• June 11, 2009
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Student Journalists, Technologists Collaborate on News Innovations

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eight computer science students and 11 journalism master's students -- including the third "programmer-journalist" scholarship winner, whose Medill journalism education was paid through a Knight News Challenge grant -- are putting the finishing touches on five innovative new products that combine journalism and technology. One product is a tool for working reporters, one is a new way of organizing content for mobile delivery, two leverage the growing power of Twitter and one generates baseball game accounts from box scores. All of the projects demonstrate what's possible when journalists and technologists collaborate. Details of the new concepts will start rolling out...

• June 8, 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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Rethinking Community Information Needs

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Following up on the Knight Commission's work and musings on "community information needs in a democracy", Mark glaser poses a much more targeted question which has yet to be fully addressed: "What is missing in terms of local community needs"? Most of the discussion in this area focuses on what you and might want in our own communities - things like crime reporting, new local ordinances, and hyper local happenings and events on your block. As David Sasaki points out Everyblock and Oakland Crimespotting are great tools to address these needs. But what about the folks that are not at...

• May 5, 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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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
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Going Beyond SMS for Cheaper Cell Phone Journalism in Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Although newspapers have gone through 150 years of evolution away from popular contributions and towards fully professional writing, technology is rapidly re-empowering non-professionals. Anyone who has rudimentary access to technology can blog or Twitter, take cell phone photos and video of dramatic moments, and quickly get them 'out there.' But does the input method matter when it comes to encouraging cell phone journalism, and particularly journalism for a 'formal' publication, like a community newspaper? Does slow bandwidth dampen amateur reporters' enthusiasm, and if cell phones are going to become significant input devices, what input medium -- short message service (SMS),...

• April 14, 2009
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Freedom Fone at W3C - Maputo

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone's Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, is currently at the W3C workshop in Maputo: Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development. The workshop has organised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), particularly the Mobile Web Initiative, and its Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group. As the organisers put it. "There are today more than half of the population living with less than 3$ a day, and lacking all kind of services (health, education, government...). The incredible growth of the mobile penetration rate last few years is providing a new hope. The potential of...

• April 2, 2009
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Community News as a Livelihood for the World's Poorest

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can a Community Producer like Samata, from a slum in Mumbai, ever become fully competitive in a mainstream market? In thinking about Video Volunteers' future work, I'm realizing we need to develop new models of community video that are scalable and allow for video to be a livelihood for thousands of the world's poor. We've developed a new idea for a program - a fellowship program where up to 200 community members across india (and when we have the resources, many other countries) would be trained in using flip cams to produce very short, very simple advocacy videos on different...

• March 7, 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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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
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Cell Phone Journalism and Better Democratic Decision-Making: What Do We Measure?

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do you build a culture of participation? What does it mean to empower people to participate in projects and politics that might improve their own lives? How do you seed participation in a way that promotes sustainability after the initial impetus? 15 years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, following decades of political mobilization by anti-apartheid movements and organisations, these questions are still burning brightly in South Africa. Since 1994 'belonging to something' has fallen off significantly in South Africa. Religious affiliations, belonging to a sports clubs, even union membership is down, often sharply. Many lament the...

• February 25, 2009
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Using Technology in the Fight Against Cholera in Zimbabwe

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week we gave our first targeted demonstrations of Freedom Fone, aimed at encouraging local health organisations to use Freedom Fone as one of the communications tools in the response to Zimbabwe's cholera crisis. We believe that given the rapid spread of the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe, greater use should be made of the country's most ubiquitous communication tool - the mobile phone - to share information that can help address the suffering and limit the number of deaths. Since August last year, WHO reports there have been over 80,000 cases, and over 3,615 people have died. This is an...

• February 21, 2009
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Digital Migration For a Small-Town Paper in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

No, this article is not about broadcasters shifting to digital transmission. But it's about something that's also a huge change -- uprooting from known territory and heading for the unknown complexities of digital country. Switch-over in the sense of convergence is the challenge facing South African community paper Grocott's Mail. The publication is at the heart of a Knight Foundation project to exploit new technologies in order to build a participative public sphere within a small town. The paper serves a town that's divided spatially, linguistically, racially, and along class lines. There are also divisions between youth and adults, and...

• February 19, 2009
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Strategizing Media Software Development: Some Lessons Learned

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a story showing the extent of complications in getting a system going, so I'll tell it simply. It's my non-geek experience of work for a community newspaper that aims to produce world-class code for community papers that is singing-dancing, super-portable and open-source. The history started in the buzz around the World Summit on Information Society which helped to move OSS into the mental horizon of non-techies like me. When the Rhodes journalism school where I work acquired Grocott's Mail, the local newspaper in 2004, we had to install a load of new PCs to accommodate students who would now...

• February 5, 2009
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Freedom Fone Interviewed on the BBC

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone's technical director, Brenda Burrell, was recently interviewed by Digital Planet, the BBC's weekly world technology update. Read the article, or listen to Brenda speak about Freedom Fone, and the potential of mobile phones as a vehicle for voice based information services....

• December 17, 2008
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Iindaba Ziyafika: The News Is Coming

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The news has started to flow. It's a trial-trickle from township teenagers, through to other social groupings in Grahamstown. With the kick-off of phase one during 2008, citizen youth content has crossed the chasm of age difference to reach the older readers of the Grocott's Mail newspaper. This is an early manifestation of the Knight Challenge project titled Iindaba Ziyafika, which aims to use cellphone technology to deepen a local public sphere in which Grocott's Mail is the primary place for a meeting of minds and formulation of public opinion. It's not just age differences being spanned, but a legacy...

• December 11, 2008
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When a Cell Phone Is Bigger Than a Yacht

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Despite the global warming reports snow covered the Moscow roads and rooftops just on time this year, preluding to the urban installation of the New Year trees all around the city, bringing romanticism into the hearts of the Muscovites, and inspiring citizens to upload new Christmas-related videos (along with those featuring car crashes) at the http://mreporter.ru/, a citizen journalism project recently launched by the Rossiya TV channel. 'Mobile Reporter' is similar in its concept to the CNN iReport. A cell phone is called mobile phone in Russia, and videos are often taken by the mobile phone cameras, and the most...

• December 7, 2008
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Freedom Fone Goes on the Road

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone had its first public debut at the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) 2008 Forum in Cape Town, 14-17 November. The event was a great opportunity to deploy Freedom Fone -- even in its software prototype state. We prepared different content for each of the four days of the conference, and ran four "channels," or options which users could access when they phoned in: Highlighted Sessions, Interviews with Presenters, Culture and Inspiration, and the Feminist Tech Hunt, which was run in association with Take Back the Tech. We took advantage of South Africa's deregulated VoIP and rented...

• December 1, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 11
$100 Solar Project

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Peter noted that many people are weak from HIV/AIDS and they need alternative work to laboring in the fields. He also notes the great need for electricity because, for example, people in his part of rural Kenya typically turn off their mobile phones after 6:00 pm because they are saving the battery power because they have to walk a long ways to recharge their batteries.

• November 21, 2008
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Plans for Beanstockd Mobile

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently we've been getting a lot of emails from people seeking advice on applying for the Knight News Challenge. We're excited to see so many of our friends and fans of Beanstockd applying to the contest! Good luck, and for some advice writing the full proposal, be sure to check out this article by Amy Gahran. This week, I wanted to give some insight into our plans for a mobile application and how this feature fits into the game. The mobile app will actually be an integral aspect of the project from a conceptual standpoint. The overall goal of the...

• November 3, 2008
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The Challenge of Bringing Net Access to Poorest Areas

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, I've given a lot of thought to how poor communities on the other side of the digital divide are able to connect. The Internet is now only accessible for a tiny portion of humanity. Probably less than 20% of humanity has regular internet access, and in rural India, where 700 million people live, it must be a far, far smaller number. When all of us English-speaking urbanites have forums to share and learn and grow, but vast numbers of people don't, it only increases the inequality of the poor. In addition to their financial poverty, they are becoming...

• November 3, 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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MobileActive in South Africa

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brenda Burrell, technical director of Kubatana.net has attended the two previous MobileActive conferences and has found them very useful. It was at the 2005 MobileActive Conference in Toronto that Brenda first discussed the idea of Freedom Fone and where she was able to meet developers to help her make her idea a reality. In 2007 Brenda traveled to Sao Paulo as a participant at MobileActive. In 2008 Kubatana submitted a request to MobileActive to facilitate a presentation on Freedom Fone with a live demo. We were pleased to be accepted and three members of Kubatana attended MobileActive in Johannesburg. The...

• October 22, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 4
Phone + USB = Brilliant

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the ability to connect to peripherals, the phone becomes an open, expandable system. People can use phones as the heart of a computer system, in a similar way to a laptop or PC. They can write emails more easily, type messages for discussion groups, enter text into web-forms, etc. The ability to download information from the web and print it out will benefit the wider community.

• October 12, 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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Start with the Low Hanging Fruit with Software Development

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A key component of Freedom Fone is the software development we will undertake over the next two years. Last weekend Brenda and I met with a handful of people who have experience with open source development projects like those we'll be undertaking. We got to share our ideas and experiences to date developing the Freedom Fone prototype, and we benefited from their contributions and suggestions. Much of what they recommended resonates with some of David Cohn's blogs and the importance of being iterative. See for example: Eliminating the Fear of Being Open Growing a Community and The Importance of Being...

• September 15, 2008
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The Travails of Taking a CPU Tower from Zimbabwe to France

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brenda and I went to Paris recently for a development launch and brainstorming meeting for Freedom Fone. In addition to picking the brains of a small handful of experts in the field, we thought it would be a good opportunity to have some of our equipment assessed. So in my bag I packed my own laptop, and digital audio recorder, a Voice Blue 4-SIM card GSM Gateway, and a full sized CPU tower, as well as the various power cables and USB connectors for this equipment. The tower didn't fit in the elegant, cabin sized roller bag we'd hoped it...

• September 15, 2008
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Listen and Learn: Recording in Harare's Cafes

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Even though we're still a few months, and a telephony server with a PCI slot, short of our first deployment, the Freedom Fone creative team has been hitting Harare's arts scene. In an effort to train our ears and give our digital audio editing fingers a work out, we've been recording some audio at a few public events. A few lessons we've learnt along the way: 1. If you're at a public event with a sound system, make friends with the sound engineer At a discussion evening at Harare's Book Cafe on 21 August, we were able to get right...

• September 3, 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

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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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Barcamps in Bolivia and Madagascar

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tellingly, when you search for "barcamps" on Google, the first location-specific reference is not San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle. No, it's Bangalore, once known for its large British military station, and today the so-called Silicon Valley of India. BarCamp Bangalore has already held six events over the past couple years, starting in April of 2006. Barcamp Bangalore 7, held once again at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, will take place on September 13 - 14 and include a "hack night" to develop web applications using open web frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails. In February I wrote a...

• August 27, 2008
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What's a Good Challenge for a J-School Innovation Class?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I noted in my last post, the first two programmer-journalists (whose journalism education was financed via scholarships from the Knight News Challenge) will be among the students enrolled in a Medill School "innovation project" class. Between now and when the class starts (Sept. 23), we have to decide what the focus of the project will be. In my experience with previous projects, the key is to come up with an interesting challenge or question for the students to explore. Right now there are two competing ideas, neither of them yet specific enough to organize the class around: Civic engagement...

• August 25, 2008
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An Olympic Moment for Mobile Media?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There has been a lot of hype in mobile media circles about how the Summer Olympics are signaling a watershed moments in broadcasting and media access on the fly. According to Nielson, 23 per cent US and 17 per cent of UK mobile internet users will be tracking the games through their phone browser, and 45 of US mobile video users will watch the Olympics on their handsets. Are those significant statistics and if so HOW significant? Depends on who you talk to. Based on the fact that only 3 of US cell phone users regularly watched video via...

• August 19, 2008
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Partner With a University to Jump-Start Innovation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dan Pacheco and Chris O'Brien wrote recently for IdeaLab about ways newspapers (or other media) can innovate successfully. One approach that wasn't mentioned (yet): partner with a university. Academic institutions are full of smart faculty members, including experts on innovation, technology, audience behavior, journalism and the business of media. Even more important, they are full of young people who are "wired" for the contemporary media world and can do amazing things if given an interesting challenge and the right amount (not too much, not too little) of coaching and direction. At the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where...

• August 15, 2008
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From iPhone to Facebook to Live Photo-Blogging

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On some level I was live photo blogging (plogging?) from that party, complete with comments on some of the images. If we could create an application, which wouldn’t be hard, to upload iPhone pictures automatically to a blog or to the front page of a newspaper website the possibilities are endless.

• August 14, 2008
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Is There a Marketplace for Local Storytelling?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently took another look at Organic City, a project launched in 2006 to provide residents of Oakland, California with a place to listen to and share stories about happenings in their respective neighborhoods or to take audio and video tours of the city - all created by locals. The stories are tagged to specific locations in the city via a Google map, and the site also offers a special mobile version allowing stories to be uploaded and downloaded via a cell phone or other mobile device. Organic City is one of thousands of locative media projects created over the...

• July 24, 2008
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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
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Hero Reports Website

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The "Hero Reports" website project turns the anti-terrorism "See Something, Say Something" campaign on its head, to visualize security as civic connectedness.

• July 17, 2008
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Getting Closer to SMS Journalism

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In August, we start some initial workshops with high school learners, to discuss with them what it takes to be "citizen journalists" - contributing content that the mainstream will publish. What's more, the content is constrained by being 140 characters long - sms is the method of communications for now. Over the course of 8 workshops, 80 learners in their penultimate school year will be trained about optimum Cit-journ in this way ... all over two months. The workshops, to be run by university journalism students and co-ordinated by colleage Sipho January, will cover the skills of contributing opinions, news...

• July 10, 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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$100 Laptop Redesign

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A new laptop design for the one-laptop-per-child project is being worked out. They have removed the keyboard and replaced it by a touch screen. This turns into a touch sensitive keyboard during normal operation, and the laptop can be used as an e-book reader otherwise. The price is $75, which sounds too good to be true. I used to be very critical of the OLPC project during its earlier stages because I could not understand the rationale behind giving a personal laptop to each child, instead of having them access a shared PC in a kiosk for example. The kiosk...

• July 3, 2008
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Empowering Poor Communities through Mobile

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is one vision of the mobile future aimed at one of the most (technologically) overlooked segments of the U.S. population...low income and ethnic communities. Imagine a Latino youth living in East Oakland, California - one of the toughest urban neighborhoods in America: "My name is Jose Gutierrez. I am 18 years old and live in East Oakland, off of International and 24th Streets. We don't have a computer in my house, and other than Spanish language TV and radio we get all of our information on our mobile phones on LOCOBEAT (fictional). -On my cell phone I have my...

• June 22, 2008
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Live-Blogging Future of Civic Media Gathering

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- I am in the swanky Stata Center at MIT for the conference on "The Future of Civic Media," put on by the new Center for Future Civic Media. Nearly all the Idea Lab bloggers are here in attendance as the Knight Foundation is using this gathering to help all News Challenge winners get to know each other and collaborate more. It's also a chance for this new Center at MIT (which got $5 million in funding from Knight) to show some off some of its early work and thinking. Mitch Resnick, another Idea Lab blogger who...

• June 12, 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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African Cell-Phone Media: Hostage to Policy Delays

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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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Election Day Could Be Our Own Pangia Day

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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Will 3G iPhone Help Push Geo-Based News?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Apple's announcement yesterday of a GPS-enabled iPhone is further fanning the flames of excitement around location based services and mobile social networking. Being able to connect with friends (and strangers), and to interact with your immediate environment via your smartphone is the new new thing. But we still have a ways to go with all of this mobile-enabled location activity... The economic opportunity is a big one, which is precisely why so many services are coming on line, and why so much attention is being paid to open mobile platforms (i.e., Android and LiMo) that will fertilize the space. In...

• June 10, 2008
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From GeoGraffiti to GeoJournalism

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently began playing around with a new service called GeoGraffiti, which allows you to post or access voice notes or "markers" while at a specific physical location using any cell phone. I like the idea of localized, user generated information which GeoGraffiti is a platform for. Everything from getting traffic tips to the real time reviews and tips on local restaurants or places of interest. Think of it as a kind of mobile Yelp (user generated reviews on business services, entertainment, and events) using voice instead of just text. The other nice feature of GeoGraffiti is that is allows...

• May 25, 2008
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Any There at Where 2.0?

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Where 2.0 happened May 12-14 at the San Francisco Airport Marriot just south of the city. This annual event, now in its 4th year, is a strange mix of grassroots geo-enthusiasts and entrepreneurial geo-hackers. Where 2.0 is primarily a developer's conference, so the majority of time and certainly the focus was on tools and how they function and less on how these tools are being used. (Or not being used. For the most part, location apps are in beta.) There was definitely the Field-of-Dreams-feeling, "build it and they will come." The exceptions were the tools and apps in the social...

• May 19, 2008
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Knight Announces News Challenge Winners

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hello from sunny Las Vegas! I am here for the E&P Interactive Media Conference at the Rio Hotel, but also to welcome the next round of winners in the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge. These folks will soon be blogging here on Idea Lab, and it's quite a group of winners. (To see the whole list of winners, go here, and for Knight's press release on the winners, check this out.) Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibarguen (pictured below) announced the winners at the conference this morning. I think the most exciting aspect of the next round of winners is...

• May 14, 2008
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Medill Grad Students Study Locative Journalism

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At least once a day I ask myself how locative media can be used to more fully engage and connect folks to their communities. The question for this blog is a bit more focused: how can locative media and geo-localized content find form in the art and craft of journalism. And then to my surprise and excitement, LoJo, a new voice, enters the frey and expands the discussion. From www.lojoconnect.com: Shorthand for locative journalism, LoJo is the name of a project launched by a team of Northwestern University graduate students to study the intersection of journalism and emerging location-based technologies....

• May 12, 2008
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Locative Media in the Newsroom

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a short sampling of some of the ways that mainstream media in integrating locative (location-based) technology tools - some of which already been discussed on this blog. The folks at LoJoConnect are also conducting a survey of how newsrooms are using locative media. Take the short survey here and pass it along...they will be sharing the results. For folks intersted in locative media and news, it will be one of the topics covered at this weeks NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley. Hope to see you there!...

• April 27, 2008
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Seero Makes Location the Center of the Story

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Seero, a new startup, is a "live on location," geo-broadcasting online app that mixes gps and video streaming by broadcasting and mapping in real-time. With the service, you broadcast live video, geo-tagging the content in real-time as you go. If folks are logged on to the site, they can follow in you in real-time; or if they aren't online at the moment, the content, including the geo-tag is archived and accessible. The application highlights exploration. And to date, their most prominent geo-broadcasters are those journeying the world, but as with any broadcast, it's only as good as the content. I've...

• April 27, 2008
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Tell Me You Hear the Writing on the Wall?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Microsoft's Tell Me subsidiary announced the launch of a new audio service for the BlackBerry which allows the user to conduct local business search, get directions or traffic information, etc. using voice commands. Apparently, by uttering a singe word like "coffee" your GPS enabled Blackberry will do an automatic search (in this case via Microsoft Live Search) and provide you with the nearest cafe links, directions, phone numbers, etc. That's a cool feature to have, especially as our "smart" phones get smaller and their screens way too damn small to read. Of course voice activated software has been around for...

• April 24, 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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Early Adapters Don't Conform to Conventional Use

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a recent meeting, a representative from Verizon and a former BET executive were discussing the seeming contradiction between the fact that African American males were early adapters of mobile technology, yet have a very low rate of posting videos on internet sites such as BET.Com and Youtube. BET tested the waters with two experiments. One involved fashion/entertainment and the other involved politics. Neither resulted in a flurry of posts, such as the ones MTV receives when it puts out a call for videos. What makes this interesting is that by all accounts African American males are not only early...

• April 8, 2008
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Fire Eagle and the Future of Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Buenos Aires Leads the Way Two months ago I was back in my old stomping grounds, Encinitas, California. It had been several years since I last coasted along Highway 101 as it sucks in its asphalt belly between San Elijo Lagoon and the near-perfect surf break, Cardiff Reef. I pulled off the side of the highway, rolled down my window, and inhaled the salty air tinged with the sweetness of coastal sage scrub. More than anywhere else, this was home. I still knew the names of the best surfers bobbing up and down in the Pacific as they waited for...

• April 7, 2008
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Maps That Bring Issues & Places to Life

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent seminar I helped to facilitate, health organizations and online mapping experts came together to discuss how mapping could be used to address health disparities in California and the U.S. Some current examples of useful online mapping tools in the health arena include: Healthy City: Gathers census and other locally relevant data in Los Angeles and overlays that information on maps to provide insight on health, education, and social issues. Health Map: Tracks global outbreaks and provides up-to-date information on diseases via a mapping tool Whoissick: A user-generated site that allows anyone who has the flu, etc. to...

• April 6, 2008
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My Brief, Torrid Affair with the Nokia N95

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mobile media isn't just the future -- it's the present, big time. Recent research from the Pew Internet and American Life project shows that mobile devices (especially cell phones) are already the can't-do-without-it media tool of choice for many US demographics, especially among Hispanics and Latin Americans. (Read more analysis of this research, and what it can mean for community media at the Knight New Media Center.) Mobile is becoming a key channel for all kinds of content and communication -- so it should be a key focus for anyone providing news and information to almost any community. So why...

• April 2, 2008
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"Navigating Life" is No Longer a Metaphor

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Once upon a time, four travelers began a global quest... So says the video that launches, Urbanista Diaries, the second phase of the Nokia's advertising campaign for its N82 series phone. The first phase of the campaign followed four of Nokia's favorite bloggers on a trip around the world armed only with, "their wits, guile, and a Nokia N82 multimedia computer." (Two of the four were already blogging on Nokia and mobile devices, and all four skew toward mobile geekiness, although with a fair amount of the artiste sprinkled on top.) Their mission? Capture the stories and the beauty of...

• March 30, 2008
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Gaming, Seriously.

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I crossed paths with "serious gaming," in a serious way twice in one week. First at the Knight Digital Media Center's Editorial Writers seminar in Los Angeles last week. Later in the week, I attended a gaming session at the Computer Using Educator's conference in Palm Springs. Both of the gaming presentations were intriguing and relevant for my work. Much of locative media work I do is with HP proprietary's Mediascape software. It's been in beta for a couple of years, but finally HP landed in a partnership with the UK's Futurelab in Bristol to put a friendly face (and...

• March 14, 2008
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Going Beyond Point A to Point B

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Phones use one of two methods to figure out where they are (and if you happen to be carrying it, where you are). The first is built-in gps. Nokia is leading the way with these smart phones, having announced four new phones earlier this month at the Mobile World Congress 2008, where 50,000 people (including keynote Robert Redford) gathered in Barcelona to talk all things mobile (but mostly about devices and less-than-innovative uses of these devices). The second way to locate your device is how Apple is doing it. Late to the game and experimenting with workarounds, location-based applications found...

• February 26, 2008
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How Do You Know When to Take Mobile Seriously?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How does mainstream media know when to take mobile seriously as a distribution platform? 1) When the New York Times unveils a mobile-to-PC application? The NYT's new ShiftD application allows you to move its content from one device to the other, insead of having to save and move them separately. A bit of a time saver perhaps, but not all that exciting really. 2) When key online social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook develop their own mobile applications? We're getting warmer here. When we can seamelessly do all the social stuff on our cell phones that we really like...

• February 25, 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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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
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Place-Based Video Games Could Transform Education

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After reading Paul Grabowicz's post Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games, I thought I'd chime in and riff off of that statement and ask: What is the value of video games in education, formal and informal, and in the delivery of information. Paul makes great point about who determines perspective. In my field of digital storytelling, we often talk about what I call "the fading glory of the third person editorial overlay." Just look at community-created content; it's a form whose hallmark is the lack of editorial overlay, which may or may not be appropriate, but often the lack of...

• February 11, 2008
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News That Moves

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

More and more cities are begining to offer digital maps to help tourists navigate their way around and locate points of interest via a mobile device. The city of Stuttgart, Germany for example, rents Stuttgart2Go - a Pocket PC device with GPS capabilities that allows a visitor to locate and map tourist attractions while on the go. As you physically approach a particular point of interest more historical information appears on your device about that site. Such devices and software like PocketMap are very useful for tourists and others needing to find their way in an unfamiliar environment. But wouldn't...

• February 10, 2008
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A Discussion of Mobile Technologies and News Making

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is an interesting academic review of how mobile technoligies are changing the news landscape. A number of important points are made, including... 1) The notion that mobile technologies in the hands of the public may be resulting in event-driven news overtaking institutionally based news. See this monster of a study on this topic. but here are some interesting stats from the BBC on how the public is engaging news organizations directly: "...In the aftermath of July 7 (2005) bombings, [14] BBC received 20,000 written accounts via e-mail, 1,000 photos and 20 videos from citizens. Similarly, in the summer floods...

• February 2, 2008
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A Private Picture is Worth How Many Words?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For those of you who attended the Consumer Electronics Show last week, you may have seen this new "TV Glasses" gadget that allows you to watch a movie played on an MP3 player or cell phone. It appears to be the next evolution of what began with the Walkman and personal digital devices toward the further privitization of the public media space. While old schoolers might compain that the "iPodization" or tuning out of our culture is bad enough as it is, others might argue that such devices are no worse than someone reading a book or checking their blackberry...

• January 19, 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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When Phones Become Reporters

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent post I shared some thoughts about the trend toward mobile phones being used to connect people in the real world - so called mobile social networking. Applying that same idea and tools to news reporting, some interesting possibilities appear on the horizon. First, a little context. Experts on the social and anthropological aspects of mobile phones, like Jan Chipchase, talk about how these devices give us the power to transcend space and time, and how our mobile devices allow for our identity to become portable and not merely attached to a particular place like our home or...

• January 13, 2008
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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
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The Year of Mobile Media Ahead?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many are already proclaiming 2008 to be the year of mobile media. (Apparently 2007 was the Year of Social Media?). That means that more people will be using their cell phones and other mobile devices to access the Internet, view content, and make purchases, respond to ads, do banking, etc. Here a good discussion 7 major mobile content headlines for 2007 that helped to push or delay the mobile trend. One of the most interesting bellweather points raised in this posting is that "in just five months since its commercial debut, the iPhone has secured a 0.1 percent share of...

• December 28, 2007
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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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Categorizing and Contextualizing Locative Media

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's holiday time, no projects to speak of, so we'll talk a bit about the theory. No doubt we'll leave a lot out, but I'm considering this a first discussion and will return to talk more about where and wither locative media. Recent discussions in locative media at the Center for Locative Media around the next-step need for categorizing and contextualizing locative media. As I mentioned before, locative media got its start in the art world. Avant-garde and conceptual artists, grasping early the potential that new and emerging technologies enabled, wanted to use the landscape as a material and to...

• December 19, 2007
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Google and OLPC's Move to Create Global Pen Pals

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Google, UNICEF, and One Laptop Per Child recently announced the launching of the Our Stories project. The effort records the stories of children from different parts of the world and places them on a Google Map. But more than just an oral/video history project combined with geotagging, the effort claims to be: A joint initiative to preserve and share the histories and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using laptops, mobile phones and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends....

• December 17, 2007
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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
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Why the Slow Uptake on the Mobile Web?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

According to a just released report by Jupiter Research, only 16% of U.S. subcribers are browsing the mobile web. According to the report, the low uptake is due primarily to lack of interest (73%) and the high cost (47%). Messaging remains the major non-voice mobile activity, with about about one-third of subscribers surveyed having used either text or picture messaging once in the last six months. The report also indicates that mobile video had only a 1% adoption rate in the mobile market. Jupiter recommends that content providers need to offer easier access to things like news and video through...

• December 8, 2007
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Finding Overlap Between Locative Media and Location-Based Games

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I should disclose upfront I'm not much of a "gamer." When I was younger, I found myself in a few endless games of Risk, never did understand the appeal of Monopoly, and always wanted to overlay a romantic narrative on Chess. (How did the Queen convince the knight to battle the Bishop to death?) But I did like sports. Not so much because of the gaming aspect, but because sports are generally played outdoors. Whole summers playing running bases, hide and seek, and any number of make believe games. Like locative media, location-based games take place outside. Due to this...

• December 5, 2007
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More Than Just Finding A Toilet

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A recent article on a service in London and several U.S. cities that allows you to locate nearby public toilets by texting "toilet" on your mobile phone got me to thinking about the practical applications of locative media. Many mobile advertising companies are hard at work creating platforms and services to push customized ads and real time "specials" to your mobile device as you walk by a store or drive down the street. But what about services that help you to connect with your neighbors, and enhance your community, or keep you safe. Aren't those practical too? For example, what...

• December 3, 2007
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"Locating" the Mississippi Blues in 3 Platforms

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

lat 33.4043 long -90.3055 Mississippi Blues Trail Tour in Google Earth (download Google Earth for free, then launch the kmz file) ScreenCast of Mississippi Blues Google Earth Geo-Tagged Project (a screencast is a video capture of what happens on the computer monitor.) Friday night arrived, our round-the-clock week's worth of work was done and it was finally time to present to all the participants and guest of the National Black Programming Consortium's New Media Institute. Prominent leaders in the Public Broadcasting world and NGO filmmaking community had participated in panels all week: Notables from PBS, CPB, NPR, PRX, ITVS,...

• November 22, 2007
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Old World Meet New World: Exploring History with New Media Tools

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's an interesting post about a mobile game called Amsterdam 1550 that was designed to teach local students about the old city of Amersterdam. "The game uses 3G cell phones and network to allow students to compete in finding answers to questions about the old city of Amsterdam, for history class excursion and assignment. Frequency 1550 explores the social potential of location-aware devices, inspired by the use of tracking technology and wireless media, human relationships, movement and identity; the project seeks to extend and re-appropriate the functions of locative technologies by exploring ways in which they can be socially constructive...

• November 18, 2007
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'Cheatin' Mamas and Dirty Lowdown Papas'

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're half way through our geo-tagging of three of the markers on the Blues Trail here at the National Black Programmers Consortium's New Media Institute in Jackson, MS. Yesterday, wheels up at 7 am to Hickory Street in Canton, MS to start the locating part of locative media. Our job is to investigate the question, "What happens to meaning and understanding when you locate content in a relevant place?" Hickory Street, once a thriving black neighborhood, now houses only a few dilapidated buildings and a sandwich shop. Given that, we were astounded how many people stopped to share their memories...

• November 16, 2007
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Google at the Gaspump and Other Forays Into Locative Media

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the ongoing integration of virtual and real worlds, Google announced last week that 3,500 Web-connected gas pumps nationwide will incorporate Google Maps on a touchscreen to give out directions and advertise local businesses. This is just one of many up and coming experiments to imbed interactive digital data in physical locations and to localize advertising...right down to the street level. A variety of non commercial locative media projects are also being attempted in this space - typically focusing on enhancing community and neighborhood interactions and causing people to think differently about their physical spaces. You can view a number...

• November 12, 2007
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Apple and Google Agree: It's All About Mobile, It's All About Location

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can't have missed the news of Android, an open source, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. Android is the flagship product and raison d'etre for the Open Handset Alliance. Many major players, including telcomms, handset makers, and chip folks. Respectable group and a full service offering...everything you need to make the gphone, without having to make it. One of the major problems with using, and certainly developing, robust apps for mobile devices is the lack of a consistent operating system or basic standards of any sort. Nothing moves forward without standardization, and with such a nascent technology, it's like the...

• November 8, 2007
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A Big Week in Mobile and What It Means for Media

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week VOIP provider Skype announced a new free phone to be available in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere (not yet the U.S.). Meanwhile, Google is hard at work on its own open software platform for mobile phones (code named Android) likely to be available soon. It is reported that the Google standard platform will be made available to anyone who joins their Open Handset Alliance. This means you aren't necessarily locked into the features that come with a phone, but can download any number of new features and even develop your own. Apple will be releasing its own freely available...

• November 4, 2007
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Locative Media and Geo-tagging the Delta Blues Continues

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our geo-tagging of the Blues Trail in the Mississippi Delta continues, albeit from afar. We've been deep in research. Using new media/online research tools, mostly archives and libraries that have been digitized--giving us the opportunity to spend all night wandering through history with unstoppable imagination, horror at the deeds of the past, but also with a renewed sense of excitement and wonder. The images I am most drawn to are the old maps. Our amazing project researcher, Ann Bennett, is deep into the process, leading us to sources such as * Archives of African American Music * Blues Archive at...

• November 2, 2007
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Local News + Local Maps = YourStreet

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

An interesting new site called YourStreet will be launched tomorrow, allowing you to get hyper-local news and comments tied to Google maps. Apparently the site detects where you are located and then provides local news stories, as well as comments from other YourStreet members nearby. According to TechCrunch, "The startup has developed an algorithm that extracts geographical information from stories, such as street names, neighborhoods, and cities. It then geo-codes the articles against a longitude and latitude database so that it can place them on a map. The site will start off with regular Google AdSense ads, but that same...

• October 31, 2007
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Locative Media and Embedding Stories in Place

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are a little more than a week away from heading down to the Mississippi Delta to start our project: geo-tag 3 markers on the Mississippi Blue's Trial - a trail that stretches from Jackson, MS up to Memphis, TN. One of the teams was given the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale. In techno talk, we'll be using geo-spatial technology to embed stories, sound and relationships to locations. We're hoping that this re-visioning of geographic space will help visualize the invisible and/or imaginary realities, helping us to see the present in a new light...and maybe even to help forecast the future...

• October 29, 2007
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Reuters' Mobile Journalism the Wave of Future?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Reuters has been experimenting with mobile journalism, testing out a way for reporters to file stories from the field using videophones. The news service has given reporters a Mobile Journalism Toolkit, including a Nokia N95, a fold-up keyboard and directional microphones. The idea is that reporters could do video, photo, audio and text reports without having to use a laptop. This effort mirrors an initiative by Ganett to outfit "mojos" with gear to report in multiple media from the field. But if you peruse Reuters' special website to see the early reports from Reuters mojos, they are uneven, with blurry...

• October 29, 2007
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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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Southern California Fire Updates on Twitter

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the more interesting and practical uses of Twitter (a mobile phone text message service that allows you to connect with other users) is instant updates during emergency situations. Right now at this moment, as fires rage across southern California, you can get up to the moment information on the latest both from individuals and from local news organizations like KPBS in San Diego. These kind of tools are particularly useful and important when landline phone and even cell services become congested and unusable, and may indeed save lives....

• October 24, 2007
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Lost Connection Opportunities...

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Once again, another conference that didn't fully leverage technology tools to help people connect, make new friends, and collaborate instantly and on the fly....I am speaking of this week's Online News Asscociation Conference in Toronto. Here's how it might have been different: • Conference attendees provide some basic profile information and tag key interests using one of many web based tools like Confabb.com or intronetworks.com. • Rather than having to go around the room and make introductions or describe projects, those introductions/project descriptions could have been available on the Web or on your mobile device as a session was in...

• October 19, 2007
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Locating Ourselves in the New Media Landscape

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm not at the conference. I'm at home. I live a half a mile from where I went to high school, a mile from where I went to junior high school, and within 5 miles of every where I've every lived...except a brief exile to Berkeley for college. I lasted one semester, returned to the City, and spent the next 4 years commuting across the Bay. I missed the cool, moist air of home. What is it about place that runs so deep and holds so tight? Take a minute to think about one of your treasured places. And yes,...

• October 19, 2007
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If You Aren't Thinking Mobile...You Don't Get It!

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am surpised how little of the discussion at the Online News Association conference going on today is around mobile media like cell phones and other handheld devices. The fact that we are approaching 3 Billion mobile users (compared to 1 Billion computer users), and that mobile use globally is growing rapidly while PC usage is flattening, should be on media minds everywhere. Just this month in India, for example, it was reported that the total number of fixed line Internet connections dropped to 9.22 million between April and June from 9.27 million the previous quarter. It may be that...

• October 18, 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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Baghdad...By the San Francisco Bay?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine your city as a war zone...like Baghdad. This project called Shadows from another place, by Professor Paula Levine at San Francisco State University, involved the transposing an interactive map of Baghdad on San Francisco using GPS mapping - complete with a warzone audio track. How does this impact our understanding of and feelings about the Iraq war...or any war? This is an early example of locative media projects that will eventually move such computer based experiences into your own neighborhood and direct reality. Imagine, for example, the ability to point your cell phone at your post office in your...

• October 15, 2007
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Political Action in Egypt Using Mobile Devices

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Using cell phones to organize protests and share information during demonstrations is not a new idea...but it is one that is changing how news is made or "unmade" - instantly. Check out this interview with Noria Yunus, who agitates against violence against women...note: the first couple of minutes are images of Israel/Egypt leading up to the interview......

• October 15, 2007
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Center for Locative Media Launches Beta Site

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Center for Locative Media has launched its beta site. Leslie Rule, co-director of the Center quipped, "I've birthed babies and that was less painful than launching this site. OK, not really, but almost." The mission of the Center is to engender civic engagement, develop shared community goals, and develop new models of democratic participation using place-based narrative and emerging technologies. At the site, you'll be able to review completed projects, watch on-going projects evolve, stay on top of new gadgets, delve into the theory of place-based media, and investigate mobile learning. We are always looking for content, so if you...

• October 14, 2007
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