Idea Lab

Public Lab's 'Spectral Challenge' Promotes Open Source Spectrometry

This past November, I made the trip for the second year in a row to the Mozilla Festival in London, a three-day technology binge fest that brings together some of the world's top thinkers to consider and shape the future of the web. It's awesome. This year, however, I found myself sneaking away early on the last day of the conference at the coaxing of my friend, a London local. As an aside, in my experience you should always be open to coaxing from locals while traveling -- it generally results in the best stories. He didn't tell me much...

March 11, 2013
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by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was co-written by Public Lab organizer Chris Fastie. During the BP oil spill in 2010, as aerial mappers walked coastlines and boated waterways to document environmental impacts, we encountered tarry clumps in the sand or reddish clayey masses floating around the boat. We often weren't sure whether these objects were crude oil from the oil spill, other contaminants or harmless natural products. This is when the idea for the Public Lab DIY spectrometer was born -- with the hope of being able to quickly identify environmental contaminants. Would an inexpensive spectrometer be able to identify crude oil and...

March 7, 2013
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Nate Silver on Baseball, Online Poker, Politics and NY Times

by Rodrigo Davies

Statistician and political polling analyst Nate Silver recently came to MIT's Communications Forum at Comparative Media Studies to discuss his career -- from student journalist to baseball prognosticator to the creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, one of the world's most influential political blogs. He was in conversation with Seth Mnookin, a former baseball and political writer who co-directs MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing. Below are some live notes of their conversation. These are not verbatim notes, so please don't quote directly without checking the podcast. Additions and corrections are welcome. You can find further commentary at #mitnatesilver. And you can also...

March 6, 2013
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How Journalists Can Think Like Programmers

by Phillip Smith

I'm working on a fun little project at the moment that involves pulling data out of a Google Spreadsheet that is being curated by a team of journalists. The interesting thing about this project is that it so clearly illustrates the difference in thinking between people who regularly work with databases (herein called programmers) and those who use them less frequently (herein called journalists). In this particular case, the spreadsheet was initially developed by a more technically inclined editor, but -- nonetheless -- it exhibits some humorous and illustrative shortcomings, which we'll explore here. What is a column, what...

February 21, 2013
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How Do We Bridge the News and Information Gap?

by Latoya Peterson

Information is currency. But, just like cash, it can prove elusive for some and plentiful for others. In our increasingly digital era, the ability to access the Internet is the key to greater opportunities. And yet, the digital divide persists, meaning that citizens from different groups are missing out on the Internet revolution. So how do we start to bridge the divides? And can technology be leveraged to find users who are not in the market for news and information? I dedicated my Knight year to exploring the problem and finding a solution. how it began Inspiration struck when...

February 19, 2013
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How OpenNews Is Building a Community of Fellows

by Dan Sinker

I'm still reeling from the amazingness that was the 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellowship Onramping we held at the MIT Media Lab three weeks ago. Our fellowships are different than many because our fellows spend most of their time apart -- they're embedded in their host news organizations, working alongside reporters and newsroom developers -- so we wanted to make sure that before they got swept up in the hustle of the newsroom, that they first learned more about each other and start to etch pathways of collaboration that will deepen over the course of the year. We decided on the Media...

February 5, 2013
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Storytelling With Social Audio: How AIR Cultivates New Media Life Forms

by Jessica Clark

San Francisco makers and hackers recently packed SoundCloud's SF office to the gills for the Making Of...Zeega event. Co-organized by veteran audio producers The Kitchen Sisters, Zeega, AIR and KQED, the event marked the launch of The Making Of...Studio: a digital sandbox for users to experiment with the Zeega platform, and share their strange and beautiful creations. After learning how to mash social audio, animated gifs and text up into their own Zeegas, the crowd got straight to work. See what they made by clicking through this audiogif -- a collaborative, immersive work of poetry. Hacking Storytelling One Station...

January 24, 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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From High-Fives to the Fetal Position: The Emotional Highs and Lows of a Startup

by David Cohn

Circa is not my first tango with a startup. Even before Spot.Us, the startup I am perhaps still best known for, I have been part and parcel to various projects that were "starting up" even if their aim wasn't to build a company (i.e., conference organizing or experiments that had sunset dates like Assignment Zero). People talk all the time about the skills journalists need in the world of media entrepreneurship. I've written some lessons and ideas in the past. What is often left out of the conversation: the mental traits journalists need in the world of media entrepreneurship. The...

January 15, 2013
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A Look Back at the 2012 Knight News Challenge and What's Ahead for 2013

by Chris Sopher

A version of this post originally appeared on the Knight Foundation blog. Knight Foundation's John Bracken, director of journalism/media innovation, contributed to this post. Now that 2012 has come to an end, we want to give you an update on the Knight News Challenge. For 2013, we’re planning two News Challenges. The first will focus on tools for open government and will open in February. The second will open in the fall, on a topic we’ll announce in early 2013. We ran three contests last year, on Networks, Data and Mobile. We’ll be unveiling the third set of winners Jan....

January 9, 2013
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Major Lessons Learned by News Publishers in 2012

by Emily Harris

In early 2012, just about a year ago, the Journalism Accelerator invited a half-dozen people with a range of unique roles in the news production mix, to identify the most crucial challenges facing publishers at that moment in time. No enormous surprise: Money was the top concern. More specifically, a collective sense emerged that publishers could benefit from a road map of the many small steps needed to increase and stabilize revenue across the industry. As 2012 drew to a close, we once more turned to these insightful people, asking each to share what he or she learned over...

January 7, 2013
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Innovative Journalism Projects from 2012 That Will Shape 2013

by Ryan Graff

This post was written by Ryan Graff of the Knight News Innovation Lab and originally appeared on the Lab's blog. While the Knight Lab spent last week looking back at 2012, what we're really excited about is 2013 and beyond. Nieman Journalism Lab has a whole series on what to look for in 2013, from a not-so-shabby group of journalism and technology gurus -- Amy Webb, Matt Waite, Erin Kissane and our own Miranda Mulligan among them. At the Knight Lab, we saw glimpses of the future in many projects that launched this year. the rise of algorithms Summly's...

January 4, 2013
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Are You a Hacker Who Likes Poderopedia? Help Us Release Our Code

by Miguel Paz

A week after Poderopedia launched its public beta, the response it's been getting has been huge. So far, close to 800 users have registered on the website; it's receiving an average of 26 new facts and connections per day; there are request to create local Poderopedia chapters from people in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Canada and Mexico; and there's interest in using its code and platform in a few newsrooms that we can't disclose yet. OPEN, CLEAN, UNDERSTANDABLE AND REUSABLE CODEReleasing code and a platform is something that's in Poderopedia's strategic 2013 road map. To do so, we want...

December 27, 2012
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How 'Unity New U' Minority Fellows Parlay $10,000 Grants Into Startups

by Emily Harris

Doug Mitchell brings ideas to angels. He is co-director of the UNITY New U Entrepreneur Fellowship program. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the program aims to help minority journalists get the business training, support and connections they need to launch businesses. The initiative offers $10,000 grants, training and mentorships. Last year, New U launched a new partnership with the National Minority Angel Network to provide fellows with further mentoring and pitch opportunities. The Journalism Accelerator's Emily Harris talked with Mitchell about the business landscape minority journalists face, the particulars of this journalism business training program, and how to get involved...

December 21, 2012
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EcoHack Highlights: Sewage, Pedal Power & Cotton Candy

by Liz Barry
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

What happens when you introduce biologists who want microbial samples from 500 feet up in the air to the Public Laboratory community of balloon mappers? Or play matchmaker between entomologists with global biodiversity records dating back to the 1700s and data scientists who are jonesing to visualize? How about getting 30 people in a room who all want to power a microprocessor from a bicycle wheel? Answer: Fast development on far-out strategies and tactics for the environment. On November 9, a Friday night, 130 people gathered in the former Pfizer manufacturing plant in Brooklyn, N.Y., to kick off EcoHack3. Fueled...

December 19, 2012
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Student's 'Meltdown' Blog Post Leads to Deeper Look at Student Stress at MIT

by Chris Peterson

As my bio below says, in a former life I directed web communications for MITAdmissions. A big part of my job was running the blogs. While many colleges now have student blogs, the MITAdmissions blogs, founded by Ben Jones, are famous for being honest, uncensored avenues of student expression. On October 29, a junior named Lydia wrote an blog called "Meltdown," in which she wrote a heartrending account of what it's like to be a stressed-out MIT student. I don't think many people understand what we mean when we say that MIT is hard. It's not just the workload. There's...

December 18, 2012
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Poderopedia Launches Public Beta with Crowdsourced Data Journalism

by Miguel Paz

That's right: The world did not end when we launched Poderopedia's Public Beta this Wednesday at 12:12 p.m. in the Chile time zone. So please come in, check out the menu, and grab a bite of our editorial and crowdsourced data journalism website that uses public data, semantic web technology, and network visualizations to map who's who in business and politics in Chile. We are pleased to invite you to Poderopedia, a project backed by Knight Foundation through its News Challenge 2011. We believe that Poderopedia will save reporters time in their reporting and will help citizens understand the...

December 14, 2012
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Infographic: Finding the Value in News Resource Listings

by Emily Harris

Where do you turn when you're looking for tools or know-how to do your work better? There are many excellent resources for journalists gathered by specialty organizations or as periodic blog posts. The Journalism Accelerator takes a different approach. To help news providers search more efficiently across various networks, and find what they need, the JA searches scores of sources and curates its resource collection with an eye toward practical value or proven success. Organized in an easy-access index, the collection is designed to help journalists, publishers and others who are looking to find new, sustainable ways to do...

December 7, 2012
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Poderopedia Uses Public Data to Take on Powerful Interests in Chile

by Miguel Paz

The last months for the Poderopedia team have been full of learning, making mistakes, correcting them, and learning again in a never-ending iteration process. In the beginning of November, we started our private beta testing with friends and family, fixing bugs and updating the platform in order to release our public beta in December. When we launch, we'll include feedback tools on our website to gather your ideas and suggestions. We'll also include basic guidelines on how to create a local chapter of Poderopedia in other countries. For those of you who haven't read our earlier posts on Idea Lab,...

December 5, 2012
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Community News Startups Should Think About Exit Strategies

by Emily Harris

In late October in Los Angeles, more than 30 community and investigative publishers came together for a weekend of intensive, hands-on business training. The Community Journalism Executive Training (CJET) program, funded by the Knight Foundation, The Patterson Foundation and the McCormick Foundation, hosted by the Knight Digital Media Center, and organized by the Investigative News Network, aimed to equip people running startup community and investigative media outlets with highly practical coaching and ambitious, but realistic, 100-day action plans. You can take advantage of what CJET participants learned -- takeaways, insights and tips have been compiled by the Journalism Accelerator, including...

December 3, 2012
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Can QR Codes, Social Engagement Boost Christian Outreach?

by J. Nathan Matias

A few weeks ago, I received a fascinating package in the mail. It was a copy of the gospel of Luke interleaved with graph paper and QR codes. Uncover, designed and printed by UCCF: The Christian Unions, is a digital campaign within a well-established tradition of gospel distribution that goes back to the 19th century. U.K. Christian Unions hold annual "missions," week-long campaigns involving extensive PR and talks from notable Christian speakers. Students also coordinate semi-formal gatherings ranging from Q&A pub nights to dinner invitations with friends. The distribution of gospels always supports a broader initiative to highlight Christianity, answer...

November 29, 2012
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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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Highlights from the Mozilla Festival in London

by Miranda Mulligan

This post was written by Miranda Mulligan, executive director of the Knight News Innovation Lab, and originally appeared on the the Knight Lab blog. A significant portion of the Knight Lab team was fortunate enough to join the Mozilla Festival in London, November 9-12. This incredible event, hosted by the Mozilla Foundation, is in its third year and intends to motivate an entire generation of web makers. As far as we can tell, they are doing this job well. In fact, during the Sunday morning keynote, Mozilla's executive director, Mark Surman, shared an anecdote that an attendee had likened #MozFest...

November 21, 2012
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Meograph: The Future of Storytelling is 4D (with Context)

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Meograph, new storytelling startup that launched in July, gives online journalists and storytellers an added dimension that too often has been missing: context. With Meograph, you can create what co-founder and CEO Misha Leybovich calls "4D storytelling" through a simple interface that lets users add images, video and text to a story they want to tell. It's free. "The big vision is that we want to democratize the creation of interactive video storytelling," Leybovich said over coffee at ING Cafe in San Francisco earlier this month. Today if you have a story to tell, you can publish a video to...

November 20, 2012
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Lessons Learned From Sandy 'HurricaneHackers' Projects

by Denise Cheng

This post was co-written by Pablo Rey Mazón. A day before Hurricane Sandy touched down, netizens began to congregate via etherpads, Google Docs and IRC, assuming the name "HurricaneHackers." HurricaneHackers teamed up with Sandy CrisisCamps -- a series of hackathons organized by CrisisCommons around the world -- to host a hackathon here at MIT Media Lab. About 30 participants worked together throughout the day to figure out how a remote set of volunteers could support Sandy relief with communication technologies. We were the main facilitators for the hackathon. With Pablo's experience organizing OccupyData hackathons and Denise's participation in hackathons, we...

November 16, 2012
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Public Lab Taps Into Community With Annual Barn Raising in Louisiana

by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the weekend of November 2-4, Public Lab held the second annual barn raising in Cocodrie, La., at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium facility. The concept of an organization focused on science and technology holding a barn raising sounds strange. But we borrow the term to signify the collaborative spirit that's at the core of these gatherings. Rather than come together as a community to raise a structure (as in a traditional barn raising), the Public Lab community comes together to collaboratively discuss, build and create Public Lab -- the organizational infrastructure, the tools, the processes and methods that are...

November 15, 2012
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OpenNews Announces the 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellows

by Dan Sinker

When talking about the OpenNews project, I describe it as an ecosystem. All of our programs are interdependent: Hack Days and Code Sprints and Source -- they all work together to build, implement and document new experiments at the intersection of journalism and code. But the living, breathing heart at the center of it all is our fellowship program. Much of our game plan for 2013 is more, more, more. We have plenty more Code Sprints and Hack Days to fund, and we've just announced the names of the eight fellows we're placing in newsrooms around the globe. When the...

November 13, 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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The Most Innovative Digital Coverage of Superstorm #Sandy

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Updated Nov. 5, 2:15 p.m. EDT. While I've been blogging on Idea Lab since 2008, this is my first post since starting my new job as the Peter Horvitz Chair of Journalism Innovation at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School. In that role, I'm adopting an Idea Lab "beat" that I call "Journovation" that seeks to put the spotlight on innovative ways that journalists, and the people formerly known as the audience, do their jobs. You can read more posts like this at our Journovation site, and JournovationSU on Twitter. First up: natural disaster reporting thanks to Superstorm Sandy. Disasters bring...

November 1, 2012
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The Top 5 Ways to Help Survivors During a Disaster

by Caitria O’Neill
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

#Sandy #OMG #disaster Now that I've gotten your attention with the hurricane pulping the East Coast, I want to talk to you about smaller disasters. Face it -- not every disaster is as fun to follow as a mega-storm. Ice storms aren't generally live-blogged on HuffPost. Apartment fires rarely trend on Twitter. But these disasters are no less devastating for the people they affect. The aftermath of a small disaster might be less sensational, but always follows the same path. Disaster anatomy is pretty simple. Damage. Needs. Assistance. The complicated bit is making sure that we devote as much...

October 30, 2012
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The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates on How Writers Can Nurture Civil Commenting

by J. Nathan Matias

A version of this post originally appeared on the MIT Center for Civic Media's blog. How can writers nurture great commenting communities while still engaging with the tough questions? Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor and blogger at The Atlantic and author of the memoir "The Beautiful Struggle," spoke recently at MIT's Media Lab. Before The Atlantic, Coates worked for The Village Voice, the Washington City Paper, and Time. Coates is a visiting researcher here at MIT this year. Coates' series of posts about the civil war are a great example of great community conversations online. Recently, Coates posted letters from Dangerfield...

October 25, 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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Announcing 'Source': Where Journalism and Coding Collide

by Dan Sinker

I sent an e-mail from a hotel room in Berlin in September of last year, while completely blitzed out from jet lag. In it, I mentioned the idea of putting together a site that could serve as a center-point for a lot of the amazing code being written in the journalism community. The response I got from the couple people I ran the idea by was, "Yeah, that sounds great, but who's going to do it?" Earlier this year I decided the answer was Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, and I assembled a team to build it. And now, after many months of...

October 18, 2012
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A LocalWiki for Antarctica

by Philip Neustrom

Many months ago, we were approached about helping start up a LocalWiki project in Antarctica. In. Antarctica. Antarctica! The project, named "Open Antarctica," would aim to initially document a region of roughly 2 miles surrounding the Palmer Station United States base on the Antarctic Peninsula. Our first question was: wait, there's Internet in Antarctica? And yes, there is Internet access on the Antarctic bases -- access that's provided over an awesome-looking, though incredibly slow, satellite uplink. So slow, in fact, that we briefly thought about sending our contact down to Antarctica with a plug-in computer running a little LocalWiki server...

October 15, 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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FEMA Offers $35,000 Grants for Community-Run Disaster Recovery Programs

by Caitria O’Neill
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

"Whole Community Resilience" is an incredibly complicated way of saying "getting locals involved with disasters." It is the most basic, intuitive, and neglected part of the American system of disaster management. Why is this? Why do we acknowledge the importance of community efforts and then leave them completely out of our plans? Well first, we ignore it because it is messy. For a long time, we separated official efforts and community response into two neat boxes: those with walkie-talkies and those without. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and regional emergency management concentrated their efforts on streamlining the coordination of...

October 5, 2012
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Have a Global Story to Tell? Apply for a Grant from PRX, Open Society

by John Barth
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

U.S. attention to the rest of the world runs in cycles: When we're at war or global tensions run hot, naturally our ears are alerted to foreign news and we check global maps to see if Pakistan is East or West of Afghanistan. (The answer is East.) In an election year or after a protracted overseas engagements, American interest swings the other way: Jobs, not Jihad grab attention; bailouts, not Bosnia end up on the front page. No wonder that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently lamented on Reddit: "...For a decade or so after 9/11, the U.S. was...

October 2, 2012
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What Data Can Tell Us About Gender Representation in the News

by J. Nathan Matias

Can high-resolution data and innovative technology help us create better representation of women in the news? I believe so. Over the next year, my thesis project is to design a series of articles, artistic pieces, and technologies for gender equity. I'm going beyond mudslinging and hand wringing to apply technology in constructive ways that can make a difference. And I need your help. In the Guardian Datablog, Lisa Evans recently shared some initial results from software I created to track gender in the news. This post explains my vision for the larger project, describes our research methods, and points to...

September 24, 2012
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MapSurvey: Start a Map-Visualized Survey in 1 Minute

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few months ago, we became the largest crowdsourced journalism project in Latvia to date. We reached 2% of the general population and gathered unique data. However, to generate the data and launch the survey we had to program, design and test the system for weeks and invest several thousand dollars in it. The experience made us feel that there must be another way for journalists, and it inspired something novel and powerful ... We call it MapSurvey! LAUNCH A CROWDSOURCED SURVEY IN 1 MINUTE To create and launch a crowdsourced survey in just 1 minute, you'll simply need to do...

September 21, 2012
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Knight Announces Winners for News Challenge on Data

by Desiree Everts

The Knight Foundation today announced the winners of the second round of its News Challenge, a contest aimed at funding innovators in the media industry. In this round, which focused on data, Knight awarded six grants totaling $2.22 million. Knight announced earlier in the year that it was changing the rules of the News Challenge and offering three rounds instead of one competition per year. Because the contest is now three times per year, each cycle lasts 8 to 10 weeks, and winners receive a portion of a total of $5 million in funding. Here's the full rundown on the...

September 20, 2012
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The State Decoded Debuts Version 0.4

by Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Version 0.4 of The State Decoded was just tagged on GitHub and bundled up for download, the result of six weeks of work. The State Decoded is a platform that displays state codes, court decisions, and information from legislative tracking services to make it all more understandable to normal humans. This release is dedicated (almost) exclusively to enhancements to the dictionary system. Eighteen issues comprise the changes in this release, sixteen of which pertain to the built-in automatic, custom dictionary system, which finds defined terms within legal codes and stores them in a dictionary, using that data to embed contextual...

September 18, 2012
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Public Lab Uses Kickstarter to Bring DIY Spectrometry to the Masses

by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Public Lab community has been working on a cheap, open-source spectrometer for detecting environmental contaminants for some time now. Since the last spectrometry post, one year ago, a lot has happened, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to write an update on the project. Most importantly, we've just launched a Kickstarter campaign to actually get spectrometers into people's hands -- lots of them. For as little as $35, you can now get your own kit and start scanning different materials in your backyard, neighborhood, or household. With one of our latest prototypes -- a spectrometer that attaches...

September 13, 2012
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Data Journalism Takes Center Stage at OKFestival, Hackathon in Helsinki

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

OKFestival, the world's largest open knowledge and data event, will take place September 17-22. We're pleased to announce that streams on three whole days of this year's festival (two festival days and a satellite event) will be dedicated to the topic of data journalism and visualization to encourage more journalists from around the globe to engage more deeply with the topic. So what's in store for visualizers and data journalists at the event? Satellite Events and Hackdays Monday, September 17 - Data Visualization Day A seminar on making information visible, with lots of great speakers with backgrounds in science, art,...

September 12, 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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Lessons Ushahidi Learned From Knight, Crowdglobe Reports

by Heather Leson

Ushahidi and our community is known for broaching new ground. To accompany this, we are also keen to encourage more research. With that in mind, we're excited to share two important reports from the Knight Foundation and Crowdglobe Funded by Internews. For the past few months, I have been summarizing Ushahidi community successes and best practices into sound-byte form for those TLDR (Too Long Didn't Read) people: 5 T's to a successful Ushahidi deployment Team Time Training Tenacity Trust Now for the readers This is going to be a long post, because the lessons learned highlighted in each report are...

September 10, 2012
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How to Ditch Big Cameras And Make Films (and Edit Them) with an iPad

Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Announces 'Code Sprint Grants'

The Tiziano Project recently launched our new platform for collaborative storytelling, StoriesFrom. We debuted the platform at the Dokufest International Film Festival in Kosovo, where we simultaneously led a two-week filmmaking workshop taught entirely on the iPad. While The Tiziano Project has been completing field training programs since 2007, this was first program we have completed using the iPad. During the program, our students produced five short films that were actually screened at the festival and can be viewed here on StoriesFrom. Here are a few lessons learned from the process. A Weight Off Our Shoulders ... Literally First off,...

September 7, 2012
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by Dan Sinker

2012 has been a pretty incredible year for the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project. We received 165 applications for our 2013 Fellowships (we were expecting around 80) and are now actively interviewing semifinalists. By the end of the year, we will have sponsored at least 20 hack days around the world. Our website Source, a destination for information about the code being written in journalism, is almost out of development (and being updated regularly while still in dev). By every measure, it has been a hell of a year. And now we're adding something new to the OpenNews project: Code Sprint Grants....

September 6, 2012
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Tor Project Offers a Secure, Anonymous Journalism Toolkit

by Karen Reilly
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

"On condition of anonymity" is one of the most important phrases in journalism. At Tor, we are working on making that more than a promise. The good news: The Internet has made it possible for journalists to talk to sources, gather video and photos from citizens, and to publish despite efforts to censor the news. The bad news: People who were used to getting away with atrocities are aware that the Internet has made it possible for journalists to talk to sources, gather video and photos from citizens, and to publish despite efforts to censor the news. New digital communication...

September 5, 2012
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LocalWiki Releases First API, Enabling Innovative Apps

by Philip Neustrom

We're excited to announce that the first version of the LocalWiki API has just been released! What's this mean? In June, folks in Raleigh, N.C., held their annual CityCamp event. CityCamp is a sort of "civic hackathon" for Raleigh. During one part of the event, people broke up into teams and came up with projects that used technology to help solve local, civic needs. What did almost every project pitched at CityCamp have in common? "Almost every final CityCamp idea had incorporated a stream of content from TriangleWiki," CityCamp and TriangleWiki organizer Reid Seroz said in an interview with...

September 4, 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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Post-Disaster, We Can Do More Than 'Feed It to Fix It'

by Caitria O’Neill
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

Did something go wrong? Bring a casserole. While the type of barbeque may vary regionally, if you're standing near storm damage, there's likely a home-cooked meal on the way. Following a disaster, competent ladies fill church and school kitchens, turning out hundreds of sandwiches. Restaurants donate buffet trays of wings and lasagna. Community organizations host spaghetti dinner after spaghetti dinner, feeding survivors and volunteers alike. Quite simply, we live in a casserole culture, and we can harness this tendency for a better local response. Why, exactly, our knee-jerk reaction as a culture is to bake a pie in the face...

August 30, 2012
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PANDA Development Wraps Up

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

September 6 will be both the PANDA Project's one-year anniversary, as well as my last day as a full-time developer. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. To celebrate the end of primary development, we've spent the last few weeks on spit-and-polish tasks. We released version 1.0.1 to address bugs found in 1.0.0, updated the documentation, and created a series of three quick, one-minute videos to persuade you why you should get a PANDA right now. The Videos Welcome to PANDA: Welcome to PANDA! from PANDA Project...

August 28, 2012
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How Wikipedia Manages Sources for Breaking News

by Heather Ford
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Almost a year ago, I was hired by Ushahidi to work as an ethnographic researcher on a project to understand how Wikipedians managed sources during breaking news events. Ushahidi cares a great deal about this kind of work because of a new project called SwiftRiver that seeks to collect and enable the collaborative curation of streams of data from the real-time web about a particular issue or event. If another Haiti earthquake happened, for example, would there be a way for us to filter out the irrelevant, the misinformation, and build a stream of relevant, meaningful and accurate content about...

August 20, 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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Did Global Voices Use Diverse Sources on Twitter for Arab Spring Coverage?

by J. Nathan Matias

Citizen journalism and social media have become major sources for the news, especially after the Arab uprisings of early 2011. From Al Jazeera Stream and NPR's Andy Carvin to the Guardian's "Three Pigs" advertisement, news organizations recognize that journalism is just one part of a broader ecosystem of online conversation. At the most basic level, journalists are following social media for breaking news and citizen perspectives. As a result, designers are rushing to build systems like Ushahidi's SwiftRiver to filter and verify citizen media. Audience analytics and source verification only paint part of the picture. While upcoming technologies will help...

August 16, 2012
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What's Next for Ushahidi and Its Platform?

by Erik Hersman
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is part 2 in a series. In part 1, I talked about how we think of ourselves at Ushahidi and how we think of success in our world. It set up the context for this post, which is about where we're going next as an organization and with our platform. We realize that it's hard to understand just how much is going on within the Ushahidi team unless you're in it. I'll try to give a summarized overview, and will answer any questions through the comments if you need more info on any of them. The External Projects Team...

August 14, 2012
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Movement-Based Arts Inspire Public Lab's DIY Environmental Science

by Liz Barry
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Researchers at Public Laboratory pursue environmental justice creatively, through re-imagining our relationship with the environment. Our model is to rigorously ask oddball questions, then initiate research by designing or adapting locally accessible tools and methods to collect the data we need to answer those questions. We've found, perhaps not surprisingly, that innovation in tools and methods frequently emerges from creative practices. In the larger trend of art plus science collaboration, 2D graphics, illustration, and visualization get most of the glory. But sculpture and dance are also major drivers of environmental imagination -- and therefore scientific inquiry. taking back the production...

August 13, 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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From Japan to Burning Man, LocalWiki Heats Up the Summer

by Philip Neustrom

We want to let you know about some really fantastic stuff that's happened in the LocalWiki world over the past month. Tallahassee, Fla. The folks spearheading the TallahasseeWiki project held their first two in-person CampWiki workshops. The idea behind the workshops is to introduce community members to the TallahasseeWiki, get them excited, answer questions and start building out the project. Below are some photos of the CampWiki workshops: Their meetup even made the front page of the Tallahassee Democrat! Olympia, Wash. OlyWiki held its first little in-person meetup. Unfortunately, they didn't take any pictures, so here's a photo of Seth...

August 7, 2012
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ProPublica, NY Times, Others Explain the Benefits of Becoming a Knight-Mozilla Fellow

by Dan Sinker

Four news partners that will host 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellows recently made their pitch for why they're involved with the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship program, what they're hoping to do with their fellows, and why applying to become one may be the best thing you do this week. Aron Pilhofer outlines an ambitious vision for the New York Times' Knight-Mozilla Fellow. He hopes the fellow will help to devise new methods for measuring the impact a news story has. As he puts it: We are awash in metrics, and we have the ability to engage with readers at scale in ways that would...

August 3, 2012
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The Importance of NextDrop's Customer Cycle, and How to Improve Service

by Anu Sridharan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In our last post on PBS Idea Lab, NextDrop, which informs residents in India via cell phone about the availability of piped water, was trying to scale up in a very short period of time. How did we fare? Well, I think we discovered the first step to winning: Just get good data about yourself. Period. Even if it's ugly. Because after admitting there's something wrong, the second hardest part is wading through the mess and figuring out what exactly that is! Let me try to lay out everything we discovered about our service. Customer Side Goal: Bill everyone possible...

July 27, 2012
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How Recovers.org Helps Communities Bounce Back After Disasters

by Caitria O’Neill
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

You don't speak FEMA? That's OK -- you can still help your community bounce back from a disaster. Last June, a tornado tore the roof off my life -- but to my surprise, recovery did not end with a blue tarp patching the holes. Shortly after the EF3 passed through Monson, Mass., I was pulled into the local organizing movement that sprang up organically. People with needs, donations, axes, stories and casseroles began congregating at a church downtown that had sustained some damage in the storm. Unfortunately, no one knew where to send them, how to match needs with offered...

July 23, 2012
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A Look Back at News Hack Day SF

by Aine McGuire
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a guest column by ScraperWiki's Thomas Levine, an awesome data scientist who spends his time roaming the globe finding interesting data and doing stuff with it. Blogging about News Hack Day SF, which brought together journalists, developers and designers for several days of creative news coding and data reporting, is so three weeks ago, but indulge me nonetheless as I brag about what I did four weekends ago. Before the weekend I arrived in San Francisco on Tuesday and stayed with a friend in his crazy warehouse in Oakland until Thursday, attending a nerdy talk every night. On...

July 20, 2012
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SocMap.com Debuts Map App PublicConsultation

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we mentioned in a previous post, this spring we at SocMap.com discovered the best path for further development -- namely, by creating small, specialized map apps. The first application of this kind was our HotBills app, which allowed journalists to reach 2% of the population for their investigation and uncover facts which were mere hunches before. Now we've launched the second map app! PublicConsultation, like the name suggests, is a map app that allows one to hold public consultations on a city map online interface. We developed this app together with ManaBalss.lv, one of the most successful civic initiative...

July 18, 2012
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DocumentCloud Hiring a Developer to Work on Its Open-Source Software Platform

by Ted Han
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We have a lot of projects going on at DocumentCloud, and to serve those goals, we're looking for others to join us! For those who may be unfamiliar with our project, we've included the full details below. DocumentCloud is a web-based platform allowing journalists to upload, analyze, annotate, and publish primary source documents. We want give journalists the tools to show their audience their source material, not just tell them about it. In addition to the newsrooms worldwide that use DocumentCloud, our open-source software projects, such as Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Docsplit, and Jammit, are relied upon by companies such as LinkedIn,...

July 18, 2012
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Watchup's 'Lasagna Design' Creates a Newsreel on the iPad

by Adriano Farano
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's 7 a.m. You want to catch up with the news on your iPad, but you don't want to jump from one app to another -- tap here, tap there. You just want to discover the best and latest news videos in a snap. Meet Watchup. Available in Apple's App Store, Watchup lets you create your newscast in seconds with a unique tap-and-play interface. We pull up a lineup of your favorite news channels, and all you have to do is tap the clips you want to watch. They get all queued up in a beautiful playlist column, you get...

July 17, 2012
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The Tiziano Project Debuts StoriesFrom

At Datafest: Journalists, Scientists, and Engineers Face Off in Campaign Data Crunch

On Saturday, The Tiziano Project launched StoriesFrom -- a new, open platform for community-based storytelling. The site allows individuals and organizations to easily create immersive documentary projects that combine the work of both community members and professional journalists and filmmakers. The resulting projects display beautiful and engaging online packages. We launched at the Dokufest International Film Festival in Kosovo, where we are concurrently teaching a two-week video storytelling workshop entirely using the new iPad. The resulting work will be screened on the last day of the festival and used to populate a new showcase from Kosovo within StoriesFrom. StoriesFrom...

July 12, 2012
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by Teresa Bouza

Datafest, a two-day contest to analyze campaign finance data that I organized last month at Stanford, was one of the best experiences of my wonderful year as a Knight Fellow. The event was a lot of fun and a great opportunity to learn. It produced very interesting insights and illuminated possible ways forward for data journalism. It was also great to see how much can be accomplished in just a day and a half when you have the right people in the room. Ten teams of journalists, scientists and engineers worked incredibly hard and with a lot of enthusiasm, some...

July 10, 2012
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Behind the FrontlineSMS Redesign

by Laura Walker Hudson
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Three weeks ago, FrontlineSMS launched its first new full release in more than a year. Now, we're releasing Version 2.0.2, which includes useful bug fixes and small tweaks to the functionality that make it even easier to use. You can expect regular releases from us from now on, with new features coming out every couple of months. Check out our launch blog post, and our Version 2 microsite, for more information about the software. We'd also like to share more of the background to the decision to rewrite our software from the ground up, and some of the key principles...

July 9, 2012
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How Knight Forces Its Fellows to Think Outside the Box

by Masood Farivar

Of the many surprises that awaited the Knight fellows upon our arrival at Stanford University, none was more refreshing than the announcement during orientation week that we were not expected to feel beholden to the projects we'd proposed as part of our application. In fact, we were told we were expected to explore new ideas, to find new projects to work on, to collaborate. This surprised me. After all, the requirement to propose a journalism project as part of the fellowship application had been the most important change the Knight Fellowships had instituted as part of its refocus on innovation,...

July 3, 2012
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A Look Back at the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference

by J. Nathan Matias

If anything sums up this year's MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, it was MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito's argument for creativity and risk, encouraging us to pursue visions that we do not yet know how to describe. The Civic Media Conference is a new breed of gathering for networked thinking and doing: action research woven with creative diversity and energized by funding model innovation. Part SXSW, part BarCamp, the conference combined hackdays, funding announcements, panel discussions, and stand-up storytelling. As a flagship demonstration of Ethan Zuckerman's vision for the emerging field of Civic Media, the conference was spectacular. But for...

June 28, 2012
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How the Tulsa World Used AP's Overview to Report on 8,000 Police Department Emails

by Jarrel Wade

In May, I published a story which described how the Tulsa Police Department in Oklahoma purchased millions of dollars of under-powered and under-tested computer hardware, resulting in a multitude of problems. Emails showed complaints from the field in which officers were unable to get basic police information about dangerous calls when they were en route to scenes, or network dead spots around town that officers were completely avoiding. But leading into April, I had no idea how I was going to read all these emails by myself. Three weeks away from receiving the documents, I called my city records official...

June 26, 2012
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VIDEO: Knight's Michael Maness on Key Takeaways From the MIT-Knight Media Conference

by Desiree Everts

The MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference has just wrapped up in Cambridge, Mass., and Michael Maness, who leads Knight's Journalism and Media Innovation program, gave a closing presentation that highlighted key quotes and ideas that grabbed people's attention over the duration of the event. Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, started off the presentation by introducing Maness. Below is a video of Maness' talk, in which he discusses "moments of profundity" during the conference. (Knight-Mozilla's Dan Sinker jokingly suggested that it might be more profound if Maness were to come out on stage in a lobster...

June 21, 2012
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How Public Lab Drafts the Public With Its Open-Source Tool Development Process

by Sara Wylie
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Public Lab has spoken a lot on Idea Lab about building "recursive publics," in which people are knowledgeable about and can reshape the structures that bring them together. But how do you build such a public in practice? Is Public Lab succeeding in building such a project? How should one measure that? What is participation in Public Lab? Over our spring retreat, Public Lab staff began to ask ourselves such questions to formalize our goals for the next year of organizational development. This discussion circled around three main topics: the emerging structure of our organization, the structure of our website,...

June 20, 2012
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Knight-Mozilla OpenNews to Offer Source for Journalism Code, Community

by Dan Sinker

Way back in November, as the ideas that led to Knight-Mozilla's OpenNews relaunch were starting to be articulated, I wrote about the need for something to "shine a spotlight" on the code being written in journalism: I think that there's real work to be done in advocating for, shining a spotlight on, and helping to generate community around the code that's being written in journalism. Because the more community that can be built, the better the code is and the better off journalism is because of it. Well, since earlier this year, that's what we've been working on: a website...

June 19, 2012
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Knight Announces Winners for News Challenge on Networks

by Desiree Everts

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation today announced the winners of its first round of this year's Knight News Challenge contest at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference held in Cambridge, Mass. Networks is a theme you'll see running through the winners. That's because that was the focus of this year's first round. What sort of networks? "The Internet, and the mini-computers in our pockets, enable us to connect with one another, friends and strangers, in new ways," Knight's John Bracken wrote in a release when the round was first announced. "We're looking for ideas that build on the...

June 18, 2012
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iWitness Launches Tool for Exploring Social Media By Time and Place

by Jesse James Garrett
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are very excited to announce the launch of iWitness, a free tool created by Adaptive Path for exploring social media content by time and place. We designed iWitness to enable people to explore content in new ways. We wanted it to be a vehicle for discovering what's happening in the world, in cases where time and place really matter. But we didn't just want to create an interesting, new product. We also wanted to see what could be done with the latest web techniques and technologies. As a result, iWitness runs entirely in the browser -- it has no...

June 15, 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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Tiziano Project Walks a Fine Line Between Activism and Journalism in Israel, West Bank

How Upworthy Makes Important Content Sharable

For the last five months, I have been running a journalism training program in the West Bank and Jerusalem. We started out with the best intentions, a four-person team and 40 cameras strapped to our backs. Within three months, political activists had run us out of the West Bank, half our team was deported from Israel, and three out of the five people I brought to the region had to drop trou for Israeli soldiers. My time in the West Bank and Jerusalem easily presented some of the most interesting and difficult challenges of my professional career. As a result,...

June 13, 2012
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by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A talk by Upworthy's Sara Critchfield and Adam Mordecai at Netroots Nation (#nnupFTW) was less-than-standing-room only, so I've combined the parts we were able to catch with a similar talk by their colleague Peter Koechley at the Conversational Marketing Summit. Thanks to Deepa Kunapuli for her notes. Upworthy's goal is to amplify content worth spreading online. If you mixed the earnestness of a TED talk with the brevity of a LOLcat and Coca Cola's distribution network, you'd end up with something like Upworthy's network of crack content. They don't necessarily produce the content themselves, they just make sure it goes...

June 12, 2012
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Human-Assisted Reporting Made Easier With PANDA Search Notifications

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Wouldn't it be sweet if you just got an email when something newsworthy happens? Wouldn't that make your job easier? Well, have we got news for you. Today's release, PANDA beta 2, has an awesome new feature: search notifications. Think of it like a Google News search: Go to PANDA and search for something. Check the box that says you want emails, and your PANDA will send you an email when there are new results for your search! How does it work? Every night, PANDA looks at everybody's saved searches and checks for new results. New results may have arrived...

June 8, 2012
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How NextDrop Is Scaling Up in India

by Anu Sridharan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In January, we had 1,000 customers registered for NextDrop, which informs residents in India via cell phone about the availability of piped water. This month -- just four months later -- more than 25,000 people were subscribed to it. Ramping up in such a short period of time is challenging to say the least, but it's an exciting time -- and a great opportunity for us to learn a ton. Here are some of our most recent stats: We've signed up more than 25,000 customers for our service. We have started service for approximately 12,000 of those customers (i.e., they've...

June 1, 2012
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Next Knight News Challenge Is All About Data

by Desiree Everts

As the Knight Foundation gets closer to announcing the winners of its News Challenge on Networks, it's opening up its next round of the contest, which now occurs three times a year instead of annually. Round 2 of the 2012 Knight News Challenge will focus on data. Why data? "The world has always been complex, but we are now challenged with making sense of the rapidly increasing amounts of information that we are creating," John Bracken, director of journalism and media innovation at Knight, explained in a blog post announcing the contest. Plus, data journalism was a strong theme running...

May 29, 2012
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LocalWiki Now Speaks Portuguese, German and Russian

by Philip Neustrom

While LocalWiki's roots are in the United States, we've seen increasing interest in starting projects all over the globe. One barrier, however, has been that our interface is entirely in English -- at least it was until now. Thanks to the hard work of Pedro Lima and Nuno Maltez in Portugal, LocalWiki is now completely internationalized and can be easily translated into any language! Pedro and Nuno have started a beautiful LocalWiki project for the city of Porto, Portugal: por.to. So far, they've been using their LocalWiki to collect information about the remarkable architecture around the city. Porto residents are...

May 25, 2012
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How the AP's Overview Turns Documents Into Pictures

by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Overview produces intricate visualizations of large document sets -- beautiful, but what do they mean? These visualizations are saying something about the documents, which you can interpret if you know a little about how they're plotted. Same documents, different visualizations There are two visualizations in the current prototype version of Overview, and both are based on document clustering. The first is the items plot, which grew out of the proof-of-concept system we presented a year ago. Every document is a dot. Similar documents get pulled together to form visible groups, that is, clusters. All the dots start grey, but become...

May 24, 2012
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Top 12 Social Technologies from MIT Media Lab and Beyond

by J. Nathan Matias

During my work on Social Mirror, tablet tech for social checkups, I have been inspired by other amazing Media Lab social technologies. Here are 12 of the projects which I have found most inspiring, including one or two from other universities. Did I miss a project you love? Post your favorites in the comments. Social Empowerment through Networks Can social checkups empower marginalized teenagers? In 2001, Leo Burd, now a researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media, conducted several paper-based studies at Computer Clubhouse, with positive results. Leo is now an adviser on the Social Mirror software. Leo Bonnani's...

May 21, 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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ROFLCon Attendees Get a Memes Blast From the Past

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's 2012. Nerds are in, and Internet memes can actually make you famous IRL. But way back in 2000, things were different. YouTube didn't exist, and a video had to be sent around as an email attachment. (Remember RealPlayer?) Your mom yelled at you for tying up the phone line, and GeoCities plastered banners all over your creations. At ROFLCon, the past was well-represented during a recent presentation by Eric Wu of Eric Conveys an Emotion (founded in 1998); Zblofu of Zombocom; and Jonti Picking of Weebl's Stuff. They were all online in the '90s, but things really exploded in...

May 9, 2012
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How the Indie Audio Community Is Transforming Storytelling

by Jesse Shapins
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A version of this post also appeared in the Association of Independent's in Radio monthly AIRBlast. I first started working with independent producer Kara Oehler in 2005. Almost a day didn't pass without her telling me about something that happened on the "AIRDaily" listserve. I'd been on listservs before, but I had never actually talked to other people about them. These conversations with Kara were my introduction to the network of more than 800 makers brought together by AIR. At the time, I was living in New York but was partially still in Berlin, where I was completing the multimedia...

May 8, 2012
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At ROFLCon: The Spread of Memes in China, Brazil and Syria

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

ROFLCon returned recently to MIT, bringing together the things and people who are famous on the Internet. Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media and co-founder of the citizen journalist network Global Voices, was the moderator. He's probably best known for the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. There are all kinds of great Internet memes out there that we don't get to understand just because we don't speak the languages. Memes require an enormous amount of background contextual knowledge to understand what, exactly, makes them funny. Ethan referenced his previous ROFLCon appearance, where...

May 7, 2012
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Jonathan Zittrain Takes the Stage at ROFLCon

by J. Nathan Matias

Today with MIT Civic Media Center's Matt Stempeck and Stephen Suen, I'm live-blogging ROFLCon, a conference for things and people who are famous on the Internet. The livenote index is here. Christina Xu, the event organizer, starts off ROFLCon to cheers. It's an amazingly packed venue. "One out of eight people in this room have done something crazy on the Internet," she says. Zittrain on memes and society Jonathan Zittrain is an Internet phenomenon. Emerging from humble beginnings as a longtime CompuServe forum sysop, he is now professor of law at Harvard Law School where he co-founded the Berkman Center...

May 4, 2012
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How We Got Here: The Road to Public Lab's Map Project

by Stewart Long
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, Public Laboratory announced that public domain maps are now starting to show up on Google Earth and Google Maps. But how did the projects get there? Here's a timeline of a Public Laboratory map project. Making a map Public Laboratory projects take a community-based approach to making maps that differs depending on where you are and the reason you want to create a map. People map areas for a number of reasons, including because there's a need to monitor an area of environmental concern, a dynamic event is happening that there's a desire to capture, or you cannot...

May 3, 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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At the International Journalism Festival: Can Data Journalism Save Newsrooms?

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

PERUGIA, Italy -- Here at the International Journalism Festival the launch of three large initiatives have generated a lot of the buzz around the topic of data journalism. The School of Data Journalism, organized by the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation, is composed of three panels and five workshops and dives into some of the key issues that media organizations are currently considering: "Is it worth my while starting out trying to do data journalism?", "Will data journalism make us money?", "How do you get data that you can search, filter and analyze with a computer?" and...

April 27, 2012
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52 Applicants Move to Next Round of Knight News Challenge

by Desiree Everts

The Knight Foundation has selected 52 applicants that will move onto the next stage of its News Challenge. There's a theme you'll see running through the proposals that have made it thus far -- namely, networking. That's because networks are the focus of this year's first round. (The Knight News Challenge now offers three rounds instead of one competition per year.) What sort of networks? "The Internet, and the mini-computers in our pockets, enable us to connect with one another, friends and strangers, in new ways," Knight's John Bracken wrote in a release when the round was first announced. "We're...

April 25, 2012
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Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Sponsors Dual Journalism Hack Days

by Dan Sinker

There's no better example of the global scale of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project than the dualing hack days we recently sponsored in New York City and Buenos Aires. In New York, we gave money for travel scholarships to bring top-notch developers to town to take part in the Wall Street Journal's Data Transparency Weekend, which brought more than 100 developers and privacy experts to town to create tools to help people see and control their personal data online. The "hackathon" grew out of the Wall Street Journal's excellent ongoing series that looks at how your online footprint is being used...

April 24, 2012
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NextDrop: Water Utilities in India Need Good Data

by Anu Sridharan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In places like the United States, we have access to more data than we ever know what to do with. We measure everything from what the average historical temperature is on a certain day for a city, to how good a restaurant is, to how much energy we consume. Because of this access, we base many of our critical decisions on this data (or at least that's the hope). Essentially, because we have had access, we know how to use this data. However, this isn't the case everywhere. Fact: Just because you have access to data, it does not guarantee...

April 23, 2012
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Public Lab's Community-Created Maps Land on Google Earth

by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've just announced that community-generated open-source maps from the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) -- captured from kites and balloons -- have been added to Google Earth. The 45-plus maps are the first aerial maps produced by citizens to be featured on the site, and are highlighted on the Google Lat Long Blog. The Public Laboratory is an expansion of the Grassroots Mapping community. During an initial project mapping the BP oil spill, local residents used helium-filled balloons and digital cameras to generate high-resolution DIY "satellite" maps documenting the extent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in...

April 19, 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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SocMap: Why a Small Map App Can Be Better Than a Big Geo-Social Platform

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

We experimented with various concepts for SocMap.com for a whole year in an effort to create a map-based social network for connecting and informing people in local neighborhoods. The conclusion: Even though we can reach commendable levels of new user registration, our users don't create content and so the platform doesn't grow. Experimenting with usability didn't solve this, so we dug deeper. We came up with the idea of decentralizing SocMap -- creating small and useful map applications instead of a big geo-social platform. Creating applications are cheaper and easier than managing a large website, so we find them to...

April 12, 2012
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Knight-Mozilla Partnership Evolves, Seeks New Fellows

by Dan Sinker

It's only the start of April, and already it's been a big year for the Knight-Mozilla Partnership. We've placed four fellows at the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, and Al Jazeera. (A fifth fellow, at the Boston Globe, will be starting a little later this spring.) We've renamed and refocused the partnership under the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews name. We've begun sponsoring hack days around the world. (In fact, two are coming up this weekend!) And we've started having biweekly open conference calls with the larger journo-code community. (One is happening this Wednesday.) And we're only getting started -- there is a...

April 10, 2012
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'Water Hackathon' Aims to Understand Brooklyn's Water Pollution

by Leif Percifield
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

My arm was up to the elbow in water classified as unfit for human contact. I was staring down a double-barreled shotgun of pipes that release some 90 million gallons of untreated sewage and storm water annually into the very water I was canoeing in. This is the Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn, N.Y. I was there as a participant in a hackathon created to develop tools to better understand the nature of urban water pollution. The Water Hackathon, held March 23-25, brought together a diverse group of people all interested in better understanding the complex issues affecting water in urban...

April 9, 2012
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DocumentCloud: What to Do When Documents Are Challenged

by Mark Horvit
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, DocumentCloud received a complaint seeking the removal of a collection of emails posted by journalists with the Australian Financial Review. The emails involved a News Corp. subsidiary called NDS, which hired a law firm to try to have the documents pulled from public view. This kind of thing is rare, but it happens. This case in particular has a couple of wrinkles that make it unusual, and it presents a good opportunity to remind all of our members that DocumentCloud has policies and options in place that allow you to keep all documents processed through our service available...

April 5, 2012
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Spending Stories to Dive Into Data at the International Journalism Festival

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Spending Stories team's experience in leading data journalism workshops, such as the one last year on EU spending in Utrecht and EuroHack in Warsaw, has shown that there are still a lot of barriers hindering data journalists from reporting on spending. This month, April 25-29, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, we'll continue our mission to help journalists find, decipher, remix and report on spending data. In the Spending Stories workshop, Friedrich Lindenberg and I will be aiming to focus the participants on "following the money" by taking a closer look at EU spending data. In past workshops,...

April 4, 2012
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The Awesome News Taskforce in Detroit Grows Up

by Christina Xu
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Awesome News Taskforce Detroit recently had their very first deliberation meeting to choose the winner of their first $1,000 grant. I listened in from my room in Somerville, Mass., 718 miles away. We've come a long way since my first trip to Detroit in August to sow the seeds for the Awesome News Taskforce project. On that first trip, I met with as many people doing interesting projects as I could to tell them about our plans, get feedback, and also to learn more about the core issues that shape the city. On the next trip, I interviewed candidates...

March 30, 2012
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The Difference Between 'Invention' and 'Innovation'

Colorful City Tracking Maps Launch Under Creative Commons

Two and a half years ago, I co-founded Stroome, a collaborative online video editing and publishing platform and 2010 Knight News Challenge winner. From its inception, the site received a tremendous amount of attention. The New School, USC Annenberg, the Online News Association and, ultimately, the Knight Foundation all saw something interesting in what we were doing. We won awards; we were invited to present at conferences; we were written about in the trades and featured in over 150 blogs. Yet despite all the accolades, not once did the word "invention" creep in. "Innovation," it turns out, was the word...

March 29, 2012
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by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Maps.stamen.com, the second installment of the City Tracking project funded by the Knight News Challenge, is live. These unique cartographic styles and tiles, based on data from Open Street Map, are available for the entire world, downloadable for use under a under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, and free. takes deep breath There are three styles available: toner, terrain, and watercolor: Toner is about stripping online cartography down to its absolute essentials. It uses just black and white, describing a baseline that other kinds of data can be layered on. Stripping out any kind of color or image makes...

March 28, 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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A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Developing iWitness

by Jesse James Garrett
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

iWitness, our project to create a tool to aggregate social media by time and place, is now well underway, and we're looking forward to sharing some of our thinking about the design of the tool with you in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we've asked our development partners at EdgeCase to provide their perspective on the technical side of the process. Here's what Mike Doel, project manager at EdgeCase, had to say: the Process At EdgeCase, we use an agile development process to rapidly produce functionality with a minimum of waste. We combine elements of "Extreme Programming" and "Behavior...

March 26, 2012
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How Overview Visualized 4,500 Pages of Declassified Iraq War Documents

by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Reporting on an incident where private security contractors fired at civilians in Iraq is one thing, but reporting on all such incidents is something else entirely. That's the situation we were faced with when, in reporting on the role of private security firms in Iraq, we wanted to analyze 4,500 pages of recently declassified material -- the raw reports generated every time a security contractor working for the U.S. Department of State fired a weapon in Iraq, from 2005 to 2007. There was more material here than we could possibly read on deadline, so we used our prototype Overview document-mining...

March 21, 2012
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Four Women-Led News Projects Pick Up Prizes from McCormick Foundation

by Desiree Everts

The changing media landscape has closed a lot of doors for many journalists over the years. But, it's also opened them -- creating opportunities for people to build their own, new forms of media. That's particularly true for women, which is why J-Lab and the McCormick Foundation launched an ambitious effort in 2008 called the New Media Women Entrepreneurs grant program, which aims to fund women-led projects that are changing the media landscape. "As you look at newsrooms downsizing, a lot of women have taken buyouts, and those are very accomplished women," said Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab. J-Lab...

March 19, 2012
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LocalWiki Launches TriangleWiki

by Philip Neustrom

LocalWiki is incredibly excited to announce that our second focus community, the TriangleWiki, has just launched. Check it out! The TriangleWiki launches with over 1,000 pages -- more than three times the amount that the Davis Wiki had at its launch. Interestingly, the TriangleWiki wasn't spearheaded by college students like the Davis Wiki or the DentonWiki. The core group that's driven the build-out of the TriangleWiki met at City Camp Raleigh and is really far-reaching -- consisting of everyone from college students to City Council members. At more than 1,000 pages, it can be hard to get a quick...

March 15, 2012
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Introducing MapBox Streets, a New World Map Powered by Open Data

by Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

We recently released MapBox Streets, a zoomable web map of the world that's powered entirely by open data through the OpenStreetMap project. Our main focus with MapBox Streets was to provide a beautiful street map alternative to the ones normally seen online, primarily Google Maps, and to make it incredibly easy for people to start using it on their websites. We created a step-by-step tutorial on how to use MapBox Streets on a website and add data to it using our open-source map design studio TileMill or pulling from an external source, like a database or API (application programming interface)....

March 15, 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 SourceMap Reveals the Backbone of Civilization

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A longer version of this post first appeared on the MIT Center for Civic Media's blog. A recent lunch at the Center for Civic Media and MIT Media Lab featured a graduate of the program, Leo Bonanni, and his beloved SourceMap project. He channeled professor Hiroshi Ishii's description of the ideal Media Lab project being one that could go in a museum, an academic paper, and could be a business. SourceMap has checked all three boxes. SourceMap works as a business because there is a competitive advantage to knowing your supply chain and knowing your producers. There are two reasons...

March 13, 2012
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The Faces Behind Public Lab's Grassroots Research Community

by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was co-authored by Sara Wylie, a a Public Laboratory co-founder. Public Laboratory is an open-source software and hardware development community dedicated to producing low-cost tools for environmental research. The nonprofit portion of Public Lab grew out of using aerial mapping to address the BP Oil Spill. Since then, we've grown enormously as a community, expanding to more than 400 contributors. As part of a series, we'll be discussing contributions to open hardware projects by people other than the initial seven founders of Public Lab who write for the PBS IdeaLab blog. We're focusing on these individuals as Public...

March 12, 2012
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At SXSW: Poderopedia, Others Spotlight Civic Media in Latin America

by Miguel Paz

Citizen heroes who are recognized by their fellow citizens in Juárez City; how people from Panama fight corruption and denounce violence and crime; what we're building in Chile to show you who's who among the elite and their possible conflicts of interest -- all of these are part of the Latin American experience you'll be able to see and hear about at the Civic Media Projects in Latin America panel at SXSW. The panel takes place Monday at 3:30 pm in Room 5ABC at the Austin Convention Center.In this panel, you'll hear from Yesica Guerra, director and research affiliate of...

March 9, 2012
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How Designers Can Imagine Innovative Technologies for News

by J. Nathan Matias

A version of this post first appeared on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog. How can designers imagine innovative technologies for news and journalism? I think I know one answer. In this post, I propose the Journalism Innovation Spiral and demonstrate it by picking apart the "profile article" for innovative ideas. The resulting design is a browser plugin which can attach writers' tools to any text form on the web. I'm currently taking Ethan Zuckerman's MIT class on News in the Age of Participatory Media, a compressed intro to journalism for engineers. In principle we're a group of engineers...

March 9, 2012
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How the 'Keep Me Occupied' Game Taps Into the Occupy Movement

by Simon Ferrari
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the world of indie game development, Anna Anthropy is known primarily for three things: her encyclopedic knowledge of 2D level design; her ability to manifest personal and political thoughts on gender, sexuality, and kink through her own spatial and procedural designs; and a preternatural knack for being able to convey this knowledge and her design sensibility to others -- sometimes evocatively, sometimes angrily. It should come as no surprise then, to see Anthropy doing something for political game design that hasn't often been done before. Anthropy's "Keep Me Occupied" is a cooperative maze-navigation game where two players must hold...

March 7, 2012
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iWitness Aims to Aggregate News By Time and Place

by Jesse James Garrett
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Let's face it: The great promise of citizen media has not really been fulfilled. News organizations have struggled to find ways to supplement their coverage of news events with contributions from citizens -- and finding citizen media related to a news event is currently difficult at best. Keyword searches and hashtags provide partial solutions, but still do not differentiate between first-person accounts and other kinds of content. And although more and more services allow their content to be geotagged, few tools take advantage of this data in meaningful ways. That's where we come in. My company, Adaptive Path, is a...

March 5, 2012
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Triangle Wiki Day a Win for Open Source in Raleigh

by Philip Neustrom

This post is a guest column by Jason Hibbets, chair of Raleigh's South West Citizen Advisory Council (SWCAC). A version of this post first appeared on southwestraleigh.com. Almost 50 people collaborated on Saturday at Red Hat headquarters, currently located on Centennial Campus in Raleigh, N.C., to participate in Triangle Wiki Day. The event was a soft launch of trianglewiki.org, an effort to document the Triangle region and increase collaboration and knowledge sharing across the area. The wiki uses open-source software LocalWiki as a content management platform that includes wiki pages, images and mapping. The day started off with a brief...

March 2, 2012
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NextDrop Announces Its First Public Tap Pilot

by Anu Sridharan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

NextDrop's first 15,000 customers have been primarily middle class families. However, we wanted to see if our solution could be used for people who use a public tap as well (i.e., they have no in home connection). Our service informs residents in India about the availability of piped water in order to help them lead more productive, less stressful lives. To test this out, we recruited 37 families who used a local public tap, and gave them the NextDrop service (voice call instead of SMS) for one month, and then went back to see how they liked it. These were...

March 1, 2012
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How Knight Improved Its News Challenge Grant Process

by Desiree Everts

It seems so obvious that a contest to further innovation would itself innovate, so few were surprised when the Knight Foundation recently announced they were changing the rules of the Knight News Challenge and offering three rounds instead of one competition per year -- especially since we got the first whiff of it back in October. But as the first round gets underway, it's become clear that there's a whole lot more going on beyond changing the number of rounds. There's a new focus on speeding up and simplifying the whole process -- and that could be a good thing...

February 29, 2012
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Journo-Coders Take NICAR 12 to a Whole New Level

by Dan Sinker

I spent a rapid-fire 23 hours in St. Louis this weekend at the NICAR 12 conference. For those who don't know, NICAR stands for "National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting," and, as the slightly antiquated name might suggest, was founded long before the commercial Internet, back in 1989. Traditionally, the organization (which is run by IRE, Investigative Reporters and Editors), has been about helping reporters use computers to comb through data, but over the years, it has become the de facto organization and conference for news apps developers. And this year, it felt like the journo-coders in attendance took to it...

February 29, 2012
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What Will Bring More Attention to the Civic Value of Journalism?

by David Cohn

For this month's Carnival of Journalism I am going to invoke the rule of "no apologies" and change the question a bit. Host Steve Outing asks: "What emerging technology or digital trend do you think will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead?" I don't think it will be a technology, but an experience. And what will "save" journalism might not be the experience of consuming journalism. This is an ongoing thought that comes from the second (or third) time I met Michael Maness when he was at Gannett and he talked about human-centered design...

February 28, 2012
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As TriangleWiki Gets Ready to Launch, LocalWiki Reflects on Its First Year

by Philip Neustrom

Hey friends! Whew! A lot has happened since our last PBS Idea Lab blog update! Our first focus community, DentonWiki, has been doing great, and several of our other focus communities are close to launching. Just recently, nearly 50 people came together in Raleigh, N.C., to join a massive in-person content-building sprint to build up the soon-to-be-launched TriangleWiki.org. Folks from all walks of life joined in -- two city council members and Raleigh's chief planning director even came by to help out. Read more about the event on our blog. And our new software has been rapidly adopted by communities...

February 28, 2012
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How Spending Stories Fact Checks Big Brother, the Wiretappers' Ball

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This piece was co-written with Eric King, human rights and technology adviser at Privacy International, and comes as Privacy International launches a new data release about companies selling surveillance technologies. Today, the global surveillance industry is estimated at around $5 billion a year. But which companies are selling? Which governments are buying? And why should we care? The OpenSpending platform can be used to speed up fact checking, showing which of these companies have government contracts, and, most interestingly, with which departments. Behind the scenes Big Brother is now indisputably big business, yet until recently the international trade in surveillance...

February 24, 2012
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OpenCourt Reboots With Changes to Live-Streaming, Staff

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Loyal OpenCourt viewers, you've by this time noticed we haven't been live-streaming as often. We're sorry to disappoint you -- but very glad for your interest, as always. OpenCourt is entering a phase of transition, and our efforts have pulled us away from court more frequently than usual. Firstly (get your Kleenexes ready), I will be leaving OpenCourt soon to work on a new project for which I won a Localore public radio grant. While I'm excited about my new direction, it is with sadness that I leave the court and this important project which still has so much space...

February 21, 2012
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Your PANDA Is Here, and It Demands Data! (Beta 1 Launch Details)

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're excited to, for the first time, put PANDA into users' hands! After roughly six months of development, we are releasing our first beta version. This release implements nearly all of our "must have" features. We've written several times (1, 2, 3) about specific parts of PANDA in development, but until now haven't paid much attention to the user interface of the application itself. With this release we feel we've reached a level of usability that will demonstrate exactly why you need a PANDA in your newsroom. Store your datasets ... and find them again One common problem with handling...

February 16, 2012
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Why Collaborative Development Works in a Proprietary World

by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Public Laboratory is made up of a diverse group of contributors, some working from their homes or garages, some from their workplaces or even university labs. What brings us together is the idea that open-source, collaborative development can result in inexpensive and accessible environmental sensing. But to many, the way our community operates can be disorienting. We've approached these unique challenges in several ways. Most people are familiar with collaborative development of textual works, such as co-authorship, or even mass co-authorship in projects such as Wikipedia. Software development is textual as well, and such communities are made possible by carefully...

February 15, 2012
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Ushahidi's 'Disruptive Deployers': The People Behind the Stories

by Heather Leson

One spark and it happens: An individual or a team of people create a deployment using Ushahidi or Crowdmap. Their motivation and the inspiration are telling tales. These citizens, diaspora and a global community collaborate near and far to make change happen. Motivated often by the simple act of giving voice and building momentum for their ideas, most do so without payment. Who are these deployers? One thing connects all of them irrespective of location or topic: They want to do more in their communities and world. Ushahidi gives us a window into many varying disruptive movements, large or small:...

February 14, 2012
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Spending Stories Makes Progress Toward Fiscal Fact-Checking

by Martin Keegan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The people have a right to know, but sometimes they're a bit too busy to find out for themselves. Informed citizens have both the need and the desire to know about public affairs, whether public or of a more private nature. For as long as there has been democracy, there's also been a free press, with journalists carrying out the business of matching stories and information with the citizens interested in them. Now there is a firehose of information available, and some of the clearest is about how governments spend people's taxes; this is what Spending Stories concentrates on. A...

February 13, 2012
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Funding and the Future of Video Volunteers

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the final post in a 4-part series in which Video Volunteers is sharing what we've done over the last year, our experiences, and what we've learned. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here. After five years of doing community media in India, we've come to understand what Video Volunteers is good at. We're great at training -- the people we work with keep doing this for a long time after they're trained. And we're great at getting impact in the villages. We know how to produce the content that people in rural...

February 10, 2012
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How Poderopedia's Future Users Are Telling It What to Build

by Miguel Paz

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

February 9, 2012
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Knight-Mozilla Partnership Morphs into Knight-Mozilla OpenNews

by Dan Sinker

Change is awesome -- it's a necessary component to anything remaining vital and a required ingredient to facilitate organic growth. And so it's with real excitement that today I'm announcing changes to the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. Before we get to the changes, some quick background: Conversations around the original partnership began in 2010, with the program launching at the start of 2011. That means that the program design, by necessity, reflected 2010's problem sets. Two years is an eternity on the Internet -- it was time to rethink and retool for today. The community around code in journalism is...

February 8, 2012
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A Deep Dive into the Boston Globe Online and the Future of Print

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Like most things in Boston, the Globe has a rich history with many innovations throughout the years. Moriarty talked about Charles H. Taylor's prototypical content innovations in 1873, when the Globe added sports coverage, stocks, and many other sections that we now consider essential to a modern, family newspaper (and sections we may not expect today, like a separate section for women). Boston.com launched in 1997, and is one of the largest regional websites in the country. BostonGlobe.com launched in 2011 to great accolades for its use of modern code and responsive web design. The new design also came...

February 7, 2012
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OpenRural Takes Public Records Out of the Attic and Onto the Web

by Eliza Kern
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Storing paper records in the attic of a police station might sound like a practice from the distant past, but that's what I learned happens in at least one rural North Carolina county. In fact, good old-fashioned paper copies of public records are still common in rural parts of North Carolina. Part of our job here at the OpenRural project at UNC is to somehow get that paper out of the attic and onto the web, and do it in a way that's financially sustainable for the staff of small papers. To find out just how often records are stored...

February 6, 2012
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Video Volunteers Makes an Impact in India with Incentives for Media Makers

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As part of a 4-part series, Video Volunteers is sharing what we've done over the last year, our experiences, and what we've learned. Part 1, which you can read here, was a basic introduction to IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. Part 2 outlines new ideas we implemented into our training programs in 2011. For instance, we set incentives for our community correspondents in India. This triggered a series of valuable positive changes for the communities concerned. Incentives work In October, we held an advanced training session for our strongest community correspondents which focused on activism and getting "impact." (To...

February 3, 2012
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The Other Side of Entrepreneurial Journalism

by David Cohn

A version of this post first appeared here. It is yet another Carnival of Journalism (our one-year anniversary). The Carnival is a network of bloggers I reinvigorated who all write a response to a different question every month. This month's question comes from Michael Rosenblum: "Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?" A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak at the Cronkite School of Journalism in Arizona by my friend and mentor Dan Gillmor. It was a gathering of journalism professors from around the country who are going to build their own curriculum to teach entrepreneurial...

February 2, 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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After Crystal Cox Verdict, It's Time to Define Who Is a Journalist

by CJ Cornell
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last month, the Crystal Cox verdict re-energized a debate among journalism's most passionate and articulate thought leaders and professionals by begging the question: Who is a journalist? Just about anyone with a laptop or cell phone can use free technology to create quality media and reach audiences larger than any newspaper or television network. Indeed, we are all publishers now. But are we all journalists now, too? Never has technology unraveled an industry so fast that its professionals no longer agree on what it is that they do. It's not surprising; the sharp line between journalist and non-journalist is so faded that few...

January 31, 2012
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5 Keys to a Killer Presentation

Zeega + Localore = Innovative Local Storytelling for Public Media

Two and a half years ago, I co-founded Stroome, a collaborative online video editing and publishing platform and 2010 Knight News Challenge winner. There are a lot of uncertainties in the startup game. But one thing is for sure: When it comes to presenting your product to potential investors, customers and partners, you're always on stage. We first unveiled our platform at USC Annenberg's pioneering Program for Online Communities in the fall of 2009. Nearly three years -- and probably a hundred presentations later -- we're still showing off our wares. Recently, I was asked by Jason Nazar, founder of...

January 30, 2012
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by Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, I sat in a conference room in Dorchester, Mass., with some of the great minds of public media to recommend which 10 producers and public media stations should be supported for year-long projects to transform the industry. Localore is a new $2 million national competition produced by the Boston-based Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), with $1 million in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to catalyze producer-led innovation teams at local stations. Here at Zeega, this is particularly exciting because we'll be teaming up with several of the winners as creative technology partners. (For more info...

January 26, 2012
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Knight Lab to Help Illinois Publishers Cover Congressional Primaries

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When it comes to the mission of journalism, it's hard to imagine any function more fundamental than providing people with the information they need to choose their elected representatives. That's why the first major initiative of the Knight News Innovation Laboratory, announced this week, will focus on coverage of the March 20 congressional primary elections in Illinois. There are 25 contested primaries in Illinois' 18 congressional districts, the first elections under newly drawn district boundaries. As a result of the decennial redistricting process, many people will be choosing among candidates they know little about. Many of the districts are huge,...

January 25, 2012
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ScraperWiki Lets You Make Magic Out of Web Data

by Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's a wonderful magic wand that every member of a digital newsroom wants to get their hands on. Take control and you can work wonders, untangle the world wide web of information, and even decrease your workload to fit in that extra cup of coffee. "What is this wand?" you ask, and "How can I get my hands on it?" It's the wondrous API (application programming interface). At ScraperWiki, we provide the tools to custom fit your wand to your magical purpose. Learn a couple of incantations in either Ruby, Python or PHP and you can concoct an API of...

January 25, 2012
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Why Non-Profits Need a Powerful Tool for Finding Potential Allies

by Christina Xu
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we started work on Awesome News Taskforce Detroit, I knew that getting a diverse group of people involved from the get-go was our No. 1 priority. In the case of Detroit, that diversity must include not just gender and racial diversity, but also geographical, class and organizational differences as well. As an experiment, I asked all of the people applying to be trustees to give us their ZIP code so we could quickly identify if we were having trouble attracting geographical diversity. Now, near the end of our recruiting process, I am able to generate this useful visualization: Making...

January 24, 2012
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Pew Report: Tablet Ownership Doubles. What's Left for Print?

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The shift from print to mobile reading went into overdrive this holiday season, with ownership of e-readers like the Kindle and tablets like the iPad doubling in a single month. A new survey-based study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that the percentage of adults owning tablet computers went from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January, with the same growth rate seen among black-and-white e-readers like the Kindle. Source: The Dec. 2011 and Jan. 2012 Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life ProjectSo how should content providers and publishers react to this news? As the...

January 23, 2012
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How Public Lab's Thermal Flashlight Could Improve Home Insulation

by Sara Wylie
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In December, Public Laboratory members made themselves a "public lavatory." Six members of the online DIY science community gathered in the well-appointed, but small bathroom of staff member Liz Barry with the lights off -- for citizen science. Two staff members (Leif Percifield and Jeff Warren) stood in the bathtub lofting a laptop so the webcam pointed downward to capture the scene. Another (Chris Eichler) perched precariously on the sink with a camera, snapping photos of the path of light on the wall cast by the newest research tool -- a thermal flashlight. The thermal flashlight, still tethered to a...

January 17, 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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The Top 10 Data-Mining Links of 2011

by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Overview is a project to create an open-source document-mining system for investigative journalists and other curious people. We've written before about the goals of the project, and we're developing some new technology, but mostly we're stealing it from other fields. The following are some of the best ideas we saw in 2011, the data-mining work that we found most inspirational. Many of these links are educational resources for learning about specific technology. Some of this work illuminates how algorithms and humans treat information differently. Other are just amazing, mind-bending work. 1. What do your connections say about you? A lot....

January 10, 2012
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Al Jazeera, Ushahidi Join in Project to Connect Somalia Diaspora via SMS

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the Horn of Africa, Somalia makes headlines, but often only because of drought, famine, crisis and insecurity. Al Jazeera launched Somalia Speaks to help amplify stories from people and their everyday lives in the region -- all via SMS. Somalia Speaks is a collaboration between Souktel, a Palestinian-based organization providing SMS messaging services, Ushahidi, Al Jazeera, Crowdflower, and the African Diaspora Institute. "We wanted to find out the perspective of normal Somali citizens to tell us how the crisis has affected them and the Somali diaspora," Al Jazeera's Soud Hyder said in an interview. Added Souktel's Jacob Korenblum: "The...

January 6, 2012
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Idea Lab: Year in Review 2011

by Desiree Everts

It's been an eventful year on MediaShift's Idea Lab, marked by mergers, beta releases and site redesigns for the many innovators in digital media. This past year also saw the Knight Foundation announce 16 winners of its News Challenge contest, up from 12 grantees in 2010 -- and the total prize money hit $4.7 million, thanks in part to a $1 million contribution from Google. A couple of themes that ran big among the winners this year were data and mobile. We saw the rise of the hacker-journalist, and many projects were focused on making sense of the stream...

December 28, 2011
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What I Want for Christmas: A Frictionless Blogging Platform

by David Cohn

For those who don't know -- the Carnival of Journalism is something I restarted in January (coming up on a year!) where a bunch of journalism-bloggers get together and write about the same topic once a month. The question is posed by the host -- who rotates. This month's host is the Guardian's developer blog, and they ask: If you are a journalist, what would be the best present from programmers and developers that Santa Claus could leave under your Christmas tree? And, correspondingly, if you are a programmer or developer, what would be the best present from journalism that...

December 19, 2011
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Meet the 1% Who Call the Shots in Chile

by Miguel Paz

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

December 16, 2011
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Trust Me: Credibility Is the Future of Journalism

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My colleague Matt Stempeck said it best: "Dan, I know that your life has been a tornado wrapped in a hurricane wrapped up in a whole box of tsunamis this week, but you really need to start wearing pants to work." It turns out only part of that quote is accurate, but you'll never know which one for sure! This is why, before I can graduate from MIT, I have to create an automated bullshit detector. The basic premise is that we, as readers, are inherently lazy. It isn't just that we'll believe almost anything. (Remember that time in 1938...

December 15, 2011
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ScraperWiki: Wrapped Up in Time for Christmas

by Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Come the holidays, we all like to do ourselves up -- a new frock for the party season, or a post-Movember shave. We all like to look our best in preparation for the Christmas glut. This extravagance now extends to the web. But instead of adding a bit of snowfall, ScraperWiki has driven that further mile and added a whole host of UX features to our site! ScraperWiki is a developer platform that aims to liberate data from the web, build upon this information to make useful applications, and get journalists and developers working together in a wiki-like fashion. There...

December 14, 2011
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Grassroots Mapping in Butte Goes Analog

by Mathew Lippincott
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

December 13, 2011
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SocMap.com's Location-Based Data Maps Becoming Real

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

SocMap.com is pleased to announce that we've launched the "tweets" and "places" features on our site, and we hope to debut "local initiatives," "local questions," and a city-planning game on February 1st. SocMap, a 2010 Knight News Challenge winner, is building a map-based interface for location-related data such as tweets, local initiatives, local news, public hearings, city-planning games, etc. We want to turn a city into a neighborhood, a place where everybody can see and hear their friends, communicate with each other, and get involved based on their geographical location. The project was started on Jan. 1, 2011. Here's an...

December 7, 2011
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The Importance of Collective Memory, in Latvia and Beyond

by Victoria Fine
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the holiday season gears up around the world, we at the Tiziano Project are throwing ourselves into the festivities by kicking off three new programs on different continents. We just began the remote component of a new training in Palestine, as well as an after-school program in South Central Los Angeles. Finally, our team hit the ground in Riga, Latvia just in time for Thanksgiving. Our Latvia program is a dramatic change from our usual digs -- instead of teaching in rolling blackouts in 130-degree heat, we've had the delight of kicking off our program in two castle-cum-classrooms, to...

December 6, 2011
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NextDrop Makes a Leap of Faith

by Ari Olmos
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Starting a social enterprise is hard. As a startup, you face tremendous uncertainty. Your business is full of leaps of faith, fundamental ideas about your company that you hold but can't yet prove. Paramount among these is the following: Customers will like the service we're providing and will be willing to pay for it. NextDrop informs residents in India about the availability of piped water in order to help them lead more productive, less stressful lives. After three months of providing text message updates to residents in Hubli, using information sourced from utility employees who operate local valves, we believe...

December 5, 2011
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LocalWiki Launches First Pilot, Announces Major Software Release

by Philip Neustrom

Hey friends! We've got two extremely exciting announcements for you. Our first focus community, serving Denton, Texas, has launched. And we're making the first major release of the new LocalWiki software today! The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned, living information repositories that will provide much-needed context behind the people, places, and events that shape our communities. We were awarded a 2010 Knight News Challenge grant to create an entirely new sort of software to make our vision of massively collaborative local media a reality. Launching our first pilot The DentonWiki, serving the community of Denton, Texas,...

December 1, 2011
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Spot.Us Merges With Public Insight Network

by David Cohn

Spot.Us launched in November of 2008, making this our three-year anniversary. Counting the months of planning (and applying for the Knight News Challenge) that went into the launch, I've been working on Spot.Us, a journalism crowdfunding project, for almost four years. In that time, we've pushed boundaries, and have had many successes and shortcomings which I've tried to share along the way. As I've always said, Spot.Us will never be perfect. It will never be "done," and as long as we can strive for something, we're making progress.Today we are taking a big stride by formally being acquired by the...

November 29, 2011
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The Future for Non-Profit News: Build a Community of Members, Donors

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the past few years, foundations and philanthropists concerned about newspapers' declining fortunes have put up millions of dollars to launch non-profit online publications covering national affairs (ProPublica), statewide topics (Texas Tribune, Wisconsin Watch, MinnPost, California Watch) and metropolitan areas (the Bay Citizen, the Chicago News Cooperative, St. Louis Beacon). These new "watchdog" organizations have produced some distinguished journalism -- ProPublica, in fact, won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting earlier this year. But three separate research reports, released in the past two months, make clear that great journalism isn't going to be enough to keep most of them alive...

November 28, 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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DocumentCloud Shows Off Popcorn.js Plug-in at Mozilla Festival

by Ted Han
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

DocumentCloud visited London at the beginning of November for the Mozilla Festival. This year's festival focused on media, freedom and the web. DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web, fit comfortably alongside a variety of interesting participants and projects from the news space, software development and beyond. By bringing together open-source software developers, creatives, educators, activists and industry folks, Mozilla does a remarkably good job of facilitating collaborations on projects that serve the public interest. Best of all, the Mozilla Foundation holds weekly Drumbeat calls, open to the...

November 18, 2011
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Feeding OpenBlock: A New Newsroom Pet That Eats Elements

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

November 17, 2011
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Public Lab's 'Barnraising' Focuses on DIY Infrared Camera Development

by Adam Griffith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Stephen Debique, a student from Trinidad, carefully removed the screws from the digital camera, trying not to destroy it in the process. His hands shook a little as he hesitated just before popping the hot-filter off the heart of the machine with exactly the correct amount of pressure. After a few minutes of nervous reassembly, Stephen and several others had successfully modified off-the-shelf $49 cameras to take infrared (IR) images instead of regular images in the visible light spectrum. IR images are useful in determining how much photosynthesis is happening in an area and have traditionally been used by governments,...

November 16, 2011
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Journalism in the Open: Are Our Systems for Learning Making the Grade?

by Dan Sinker

This week on MediaShift, we're exploring the moving target that is teaching journalism. Stay tuned as we offer tips, tools and insights on educating tomorrow's journalists. "Beyond J-School 2011" is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers an intensive, cutting edge, three semester Master of Arts in Journalism; a unique one semester Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism; and the CUNY J-Camp series of Continuing Professional Development workshops focused on emerging trends and skill sets in the industry. I had a brief exchange on Twitter recently with ProPublica's Scott Klein about how high school poets end up as...

November 14, 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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With Tools, Tables and Tours, ScraperWiki Wants to Liberate Data

by Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

As part of the Knight News Challenge entry, we at ScraperWiki said we would roll out Journalism Data Camps across the U.S. We had done what we called "Hacks and Hackers Hack Day" events across the U.K. and Ireland, bringing journalists and coders together. This happened at the same time as HacksHackers in the U.S. -- great minds and whatnot! Now we're scaling up when it comes to exploring the data prospects of the new world. We are heading across the U.S. on a data liberation front. But where do we start, and where do we go? Well, firstly...

November 7, 2011
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Knight-Mozilla Announces 2011 News Technology Fellows

by Dan Sinker

This week I've spent a lot of time writing about the opportunities that lie at the intersection of open-source philosophies and journalism. Today the "thinking out loud" stops, and the "making it happen" begins. And that begins with the announcement of the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla fellows. But before I get to that, a quick background: In 2011, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership's pilot year, the goal was to place five technologists in partner newsrooms through a selection process that included an open-call design challenge that received over 300 applicants, a 60-person learning lab, and a 20-person hackfest in Berlin. At each...

November 4, 2011
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PANDA Project Releases a First Alpha

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In September, the complete PANDA team met at ONA in Boston to review our survey responses, organize them into features, and plot a development road map for the year. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. On our wiki, you can see transcribed versions of the documents we created during that planning session: Users, needs and use cases Features, prioritized Release schedule, with features The last link is particularly important, because it documents that today is an important day: Today is Alpha 1 release day! PANDA is...

November 4, 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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At WFMU's Radiovision Festival, Zeega Hacks the Future of Radio

by Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

WFMU is putting on a festival Oct. 28-30 to celebrate and probe radio's future. This gathering of folks brings together the medium's fans, tinkerers, futurists and broadcasters to talk about what might happen next. The opening night of the WFMU Radiovision Festival, featuring radio legend Joe Frank, sold out in a matter of days, but there's still room during the bulk of the festival on Saturday and Sunday. Participants will hear from a day of talks featuring radio host Tom Scharpling, comedian Marc Maron, Ira Glass of "This American Life," poet Kenneth Goldsmith, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, DJ /rupture, journalist and...

October 28, 2011
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OpenBlock to Help Rural Newspapers Get Access to Public Data

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

October 28, 2011
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TileMill Helps Activists Make Maps in Pakistan, Afghanistan

by Eric Gundersen
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week I'm at Innovation Lab Pakistan, helping train journalists and media activists from Pakistan and Afghanistan on how to better leverage technology in their stories and media advocacy. We've blogged before about how maps can quickly tell the story behind complex issues like the famine in the Horn of Africa and violence against journalists in Afghanistan, and it's thrilling to be working with media folks directly and helping them learn how to do this themselves. Specifically, I'm teaching folks how to use our open-source map-making tool TileMill, an easy-to-use toolkit for designing custom online maps with any available dataset....

October 27, 2011
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Public Lab Aims for Affordable Hydrogen Sulfide Gas Sensors

by Sara Wylie
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was co-authored by Shannon Dosemagen. In September, members of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) met with residents of Garfield County, Colo., to discuss the growing hydrogen sulfide problem in their small, rural community. Public Laboratory is an organization and membership community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. Hydrogen sulfide, a neurotoxic and potentially lethal gas, can be produced by bacteria growing in natural gas wells, or can natively occur within reserves of natural gas. Natural gas development is booming across North America, and with it, cases of hydrogen sulfide poisoning...

October 25, 2011
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How NextDrop Beat the Indian Bureaucracy to Get Back on Track

by Anu Sridharan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

I knew something was wrong when I got 28 text messages from the NextDrop system at 9:02 a.m. on Sept. 28. All 28 messages were supposed to go out between the hours of 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. to our residents (giving the different areas advance notice of water arrival as well as real-time water delivery information) but for some reason, they only got delivered to everyone at 9:02 a.m. -- which basically defeats the purpose of our entire business. NextDrop, winner of the 2011 Knight News Challenge, informs residents in India about the availability of piped water in order...

October 24, 2011
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No Internet? No Problem. Use SMS, Radio, Software, and Creativity

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Uganda, where many lack access to the Internet, people can engage with local radio stations to make informed choices and hold their leaders accountable. Using SMS and a new tool, TRAC FM, listeners can respond to poll questions such as: What service delivery should be a priority: health care, education, security, sanitation or transport? TRAC FM was the focus of a larger case study we did for the Mobile Media Toolkit. The Mobile Media Toolkit is a project of MobileActive.org. The Toolkit provides how-to guides, wireless tools, and case studies on how mobile phones can (and are) being used...

October 21, 2011
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Wikipedia Isn't Journalism, But Are Wikipedians Reluctant Journalists?

by Heather Ford
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Wikipedia articles on breaking news stories dominate page views on the world's sixth-largest website. Perhaps more importantly, these articles drive the most significant editor contribution -- especially among new editors. In the first three months of this year, English Wikipedia articles with the most contributors were the 2011 Tucson shooting, the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami articles with 460, 405 and 785 editors contributing to the growth of the article respectively. Interestingly, a number of Wikipedia policies discourage writing articles on breaking news. One of Wikipedia's 42 policies, titled "What Wikipedia is not" (or WP:NOT),...

October 20, 2011
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LocalWiki Builds Out Pilot Communities, Updates Software

by Philip Neustrom

Hey friends! It's time for another LocalWiki update! What's happened since our last update? Erg, a lot! Pilots The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned, living information repositories that will provide much-needed context behind the people, places, and events that shape our communities. We've selected our very first few pilot communities. So far, we've been working with folks in Denton, Texas; Sydney; and San Francisco. Do you (or did you) live in or near Sydney, Denton, or San Francisco? Shoot us an email at contact@localwiki.org and we'll get you involved in the pilot buildout! Several more pilots...

October 18, 2011
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What Would a Nutritional Label for the News Look Like?

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The standard U.S. Food and Drug Administration nutrition label is well-known here in the United States because it is both consistent (for better or worse) and ubiquitous: You'll find it on almost all packaged foods, excluding certain foods like fresh meat (until 2012) and fresh-baked goods (creating an opening in the market for cupcake detectives). As we consider the equivalent of a nutritional label for information consumption, I'd like to strike a balance between the consistent, widely recognized FDA label and the far more creative, dynamic approaches to visualizing information all over the Internet. The Center for Civic Media's MediaRDI...

October 17, 2011
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'Neighbor Connect' Space Heats Up as HuffPost Buys Localocracy

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Congratulations to Conor White-Sullivan and the team at Localocracy, which became a recent acquisition of the Huffington Post, as reported by Kara Swisher on WSJ's AllThingsD. Arianna Huffington said, "[Conor and team are] pioneers in using the web to empower citizens to improve their towns, and their unique vision and talents will enable us to deepen our users' engagement with our sites." This is further evidence of the "neighbor connect" online space heating up. In the past year, I'm aware of at least two dozen significant startups focused on facilitating conversation among people who live near each other. Some, like...

October 14, 2011
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How Tiziano Project Beat CNN and NPR in the New Journalism Paradigm

What If We Had a Nutrition Label for the News?

"The next category is Community Collaboration," says the emcee as we slowly sink down in our seats at the Online Journalism Awards. We're resigned to defeat against our formidable competition, which includes both CNN and Andy Carvin for his social media-infused orchestration of NPR's coverage of the Arab Spring. No way are we going to win this category. "And the winner is ... The Tiziano Project!" Cue music scratching to a stop. Wait. What? I'm still processing. How did our tiny organization complete a project in Iraqi Kurdistan, with an all-volunteer team, that actually beat both CNN and NPR? The...

October 13, 2011
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by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Alisa Miller's TED Talk brilliantly illustrates what news industry observers have been warning for years: Our news diet is distorted. We get very little news about places outside the United States, and that amount dwindles further when we remove Iraq from the equation. If you look at our supply of news from places outside the United States that the U.S. is not directly involved in, the effect is even more pronounced. Miller points out that demand for international news has actually increased in recent years. It's beyond clear that in this global era, we need to know what's happening...

October 11, 2011
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How Data Can Become an Evergreen Source for Newsrooms

by Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Newsrooms don't fear too much news. They fear not enough news. With news on demand 24/7, the stream of information that journalists work with is becoming the commodity upon which they rely -- which is why "evergreen" stories are becoming a staple for the modern newsroom. What they need now are evergreen news sources. So how can data be an evergreen news source? Traditionally, data was hard to work with. It had to be collected, cleaned, organized, and once the effort was made to produce something consumable, it was left to stagnate and rot over time. With ScraperWiki, we've structured...

October 7, 2011
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3 Key Reflections From Knight-Mozilla's Hacktoberfest in Berlin

by Dan Sinker

Last week, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership invited 20 developers, designers, and journalists to take part in a week of hacking and making in Berlin. I forget at what point in the planning one of the participants jokingly called it "Hacktoberfest," but the name stuck. And so now that the jet lag has worn off for the most part, I thought I'd reflect on three of my standout moments of Hacktoberfest and how they're influencing my thinking moving forward on the Knight-Mozilla project. Working in the open Sitting in a meeting with our news partners, I got to witness a...

October 5, 2011
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What You Need to Know to Win a Knight News Challenge Grant

by Desiree Everts

As the media industry continues to be upended and traditional publishers search for ways to survive, those of us who've chosen journalism as our craft are left wondering what the future holds. The Knight Foundation, as it happens, appears to be one of those entities exploring that very question. So it's no wonder that many in the industry look to Knight for answers. When it comes to the Knight News Challenge grants, of course, the first question that pops up is, so uh, how do you go about nabbing one? I get to read a lot about the winners, but...

October 4, 2011
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With Public Lab, a Camera Flies in Brooklyn to Monitor Pollution

by Liz Barry
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, N.Y., has inspired urban legends from the forensic to the ecotopian. In the year and a half since the Environmental Protection Agency bestowed its Superfund designation, the canal has become a site of even more intense re-imagination by several groups, some of whom are customizing Public Laboratory tools for deepening their work. Designers, developers, researchers and hackers are undertaking their own parallel efforts on issues that even a Superfund clean-up can't fix: the restoration of original watercourses and the mitigation of 330 million gallons of sewer overflow that continue to enter the canal annually. Newtown...

October 3, 2011
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DocumentCloud: Why Talking to People Matters

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I hopped down to New Orleans this week, to tell even more journalists about DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web, and had the opportunity to sit down with The Lens' Ariella Cohen and Steve Beatty. Steve is doing some great work on a charter school reporting project, covering every New Orleans parish school board and incorporating documents about many of them. Most of what we discussed is what I talk to most journalists about: how they approach their work, what they see as their mission, and the...

September 30, 2011
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Hyper-Local Heaven at UC Berkeley's Journalism School

by David Cohn

I've said this many times before: The driving force behind my career has been to increase the level of transparency and participation in the process of journalism. That driving force has taken my career in all kinds of fun and exciting directions, and now I'd like to announce a new one. This year I'll be working with UC Berkeley's journalism school. Specifically, I will be working with the school's three hyper-local sites (MissionLocal.org, OaklandNorth.net and RichmondConfidential.com) to come up with new products for their website. Some of these products might be editorial or service-related -- but the main thrust will...

September 29, 2011
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At Hacktoberfest, Forget the Ode, Show Your Code

by Phillip Smith

“The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership is all about producing kick-ass open-source code, recipes, and ideas to solve real problems, in real newsrooms, with real teams. We do this by tapping into communities of journalists and developers, and getting them to design, invent, and learn with us. And also by deploying fellows into news organizations that have a culture of innovation and resonance in their space.” — Dan Sinker, Knight-Mozilla Partnership program lead Twenty #MozNewsLab graduates are arriving in Berlin this week to take part in a four-day event that we’re calling #Hacktoberfest. This is the third stage of a...

September 28, 2011
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ONA Boston Succeeded in Diversity of Speakers

Better, Faster, Stronger: 5 Reasons for Smaller Grants

What a difference a year makes. The Online News Association Conference in Boston looked a lot more like America in terms of diversity than last year's Washington, D.C., gathering. People of color were included in most sessions, including timely discussions on elections and crowdsourcing. From the opening plenary with Vivek Kundra, the former U.S. chief information officer, to the Mini-Law School for Digital Journalists, where five of the nine presenters were women, to the workshop on Augmented Reality, the conference felt more inclusive. The Saturday morning plenary on Diversity was well-attended -- and as the moderator, I thank all who...

September 27, 2011
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by Christina Xu
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm occasionally asked by well-intended fans of the Awesome Foundation if there are plans to ramp up our granting efforts, to go beyond the measly $1,000 each of our chapters offers every month so that we can fund higher-impact projects, especially now that we are entering the arena of community development and revitalization. While it's certainly possible, I have come to strongly believe that the small size of our grants is, as software developers might say, a feature, not a bug. I'm not the only one. A quick survey of the revitalization landscape in Detroit shows an abundance of organizations,...

September 22, 2011
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PANDA Survey Shows Newsrooms Swimming in Data

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first PANDA task officially checked off our to-do list was the drafting of our Future Users Survey. We distributed a link to the survey via Twitter, the NICAR-L mailing list and email. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. The survey covers a range of topics that we felt were crucial to understanding our future users, including the technical aptitude of the staff in their newsrooms, the quantity of data they work with, and possible barriers to using the software. So far, we've had 77 responses...

September 21, 2011
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Knight News Innovation Lab Seeks Software Developers

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight News Innovation Laboratory at Northwestern University is seeking a director of software engineering and several developers interested in working on software that improves the quality, accessibility or distribution of local news and information. The Knight Lab, supported by a four-year, $4.2 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is a joint program of the journalism and engineering schools at Northwestern. It will develop, deploy and test software that fulfills the Lab's mission of "accelerating media innovation" in the Chicago region. The Knight Lab will partner with media organizations ranging from large commercial media companies...

September 20, 2011
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With Music Mine, PRX Aims to Reshape Public Media on the iPad

by Rekha Murthy
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Public Radio Exchange just announced the launch of KCRW Music Mine, an iPad app that gives you a unique, exciting way to discover new music. Music Mine is the product of a close partnership between PRX and KCRW, with design by Roundarch and music intelligence powered by The Echo Nest. Nearly a year in the making, the app developed from lengthy brainstorming sessions about what a next-generation station experience on the iPad should -- and could -- be. KCRW excels at a lot of things -- music, news, local Los Angeles culture, food, arts, film. But rather than attempt...

September 15, 2011
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Barriers to Failure

by David Cohn

At this year's ONA conference, I'll be on a panel called "I failed and so can you." I've always been a big fan of failure. I think journalism should hold a "fail camp" (inspired by Ethan Zuckerman). When I restarted the blog carnival, a site that I've organized where bloggers can convene to all write about the same topic, I dedicated a month toward failure. I'm working on a new project (details to come soon, promise) and I think/hope failure will be a big part of it. We talk a lot about barriers to success. But we also say that...

September 14, 2011
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Why News Organizations Should Follow HuffPost's Lead and Try E-Books

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, BookBrewer had the great honor to be chosen by The Huffington Post, which used our platform to create and distribute its first e-book: "A People's History of the Great Recession" by Arthur Delaney. They're already working on their second, "How We Won: Progressive Lessons from the Repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell" by Aaron Belkin, and they have more in the works under a new Huffington Post Media Group Publications imprint.On her blog, Arianna Huffington explains how "A People's History of the Great Recession" was written by a staff beat reporter who was assigned two years ago to...

September 13, 2011
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Taking Steps Toward DIY Spectrometry, So Citizens Can Test for Pollutants

by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Several Public Laboratory groups have emerged around the development of new tools for measuring contamination and quantifying ecologic issues. Among them is an informal spectrometry working group, which is attempting to create an inexpensive spectrometer. Such an instrument offers the possibility of detecting and even quantifying contaminants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs -- exactly the kind of toxic residue which has resulted from the BP oil spill, and identified in concentrations of up to 4.5 percent at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, N.Y. While this is an ambitious and even speculative project, the idea that...

September 8, 2011
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How to Produce Groundbreaking Journalism on the Cheap

by Victoria Fine
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at The Tiziano Project were shocked and honored last week to be named as finalists for the 2011 Online Journalism Awards in the categories of General Excellence in Online Journalism - Micro Site and Community Collaboration. The Tiziano Project provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to report their stories and improve their lives. We're nominated for our citizen journalism site, 360 | Kurdistan, a project that was produced on a shoestring budget, with a group of incredibly talented volunteers. When I say shoestring, I mean it -- during...

September 7, 2011
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Using Maps to Make Sense of the Unimaginable in the Horn of Africa

by Eric Gundersen
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Development Seed recently launched horn.wfp.org, a mapping tool that visualizes one of the worst famines in recent history that's unfolding in the Horn of Africa. We did this project in partnership with the World Food Programme (WFP), the food aid arm of the United Nations, to leverage data from the humanitarian community to better communicate about the story behind the crisis and relief efforts to the wider public. For many of us living comfortably on the other side of the planet, a famine is impossible to relate to. Putting the crisis on a map brings a sense of place to...

August 29, 2011
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Poderopedia Keeps Track of Chile's Most Powerful and Influential

by Miguel Paz

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

August 25, 2011
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Zeega Enables Communities to Create Interactive Documentaries, New Forms of Storytelling

by Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at Zeega want to enable anyone to create interactive documentaries and invent new forms of storytelling. For inspiration, we've looked to a figure who challenged the documentary form right when radio and film were being invented a century ago: Dziga Vertov. Best known for the remarkable film "Man with a Movie Camera," Vertov also created the first newsreel program in Russia, each episode a new experiment. This was a time when people were thinking about displaying news and telling stories in totally new forms, like rolling out a camera on a horse and buggy in the town center and...

August 24, 2011
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In Denmark, a Citizen Journalism Experiment Heads to the Soccer Field

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

For me, June has always been a conference month -- and this year was no exception. On my way to the annual MIT-Knight Civic Media meet-up in Cambridge, Mass., I made an essential stop in Aarhus, Denmark. Aarhus University, which is based in the Danish city, organized a major soccer conference in partnership with a European organization called Play the Game. Aarhus has amazing scenery -- it's a historic city with colorful, dainty houses. And while the buildings' walls speak of that history, also in the air during my visit there were innovation and a passion for technology. The conference,...

August 23, 2011
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The Awesome Foundation Fosters News Innovation, $1K at a Time

by Christina Xu
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The citizen journalism and new media movements have made it increasingly possible for anyone to be heard in the media, first as sources and then as writers. But what if these interested and informed citizens became builders and innovators as well? The Awesome News Taskforce wants to empower anybody to create and test out community information and journalism projects of their own -- $1,000 at a time. The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences was started in the summer of 2009 by Tim Hwang. During his undergrad years at Harvard, Tim was notorious for his long history of bizarre...

August 18, 2011
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Public Lab Helps Communities Do 'Civic Science' Investigations

by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently, a resident of Plaquemines Parish, La., made a striking comment to me about the importance of local involvement and knowledge in post-disaster projects: Listen to the people that have been down here, lived here, fished here, and camped here their whole entire lives and even their parents' lives, for generations. Because they know how these waters are, they know how the tides come and go, they know how the storms affect this area, they provide a lot of valuable information and a lot of valuable ways that people can accomplish what they want to do without destroying the things...

August 17, 2011
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ManaBalss.lv Gives Latvians a Voice in Legislation

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

August 4, 2011
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PRX Story Exchange Shows Power of Crowdfunding via Public Radio

by John Barth
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

PRX embarked on a local journalism experiment last fall with Louisville Public Media (LPM) and Spot.us with the support of the Knight News Challenge. We built a service that matches the pioneering crowdfunding work of Spot.us (itself a News Challenge grantee) with the public radio focus of PRX and LPM. The project is called Story Exchange, and it directs the power and reach of public radio to help drive listener support for ambitious local journalism. The early signs from Louisville, Ky., are encouraging. The news staff posted pitches for six different reporting projects starting in January. Each idea is more...

August 3, 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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VIDEOS: Should the MIT-Knight Civic Media Confab Get Supersized?

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the things we at MIT are very quietly considering -- quietly in the same sense that I first considered getting a creative writing degree, as in, seduced by the prospect while overawed by the reality -- is holding a large, public civic media conference as part of, or in addition to, our invitation-only Civic Media Conference with the Knight Foundation. We last discussed it as videos from this year's Civic Media Conference came online, and I'd like to share those videos, not just for their own sake, but for you to ask yourself: Would you travel to Boston...

July 21, 2011
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Stop Yammering and Start Hammering: How to Build a 'Maker Space' for News

by Phillip Smith

Over the next four weeks, a very interesting experiment is going to unfold. The most exciting part about it is that it’s entirely open source: You can observe it, interact with it, and improve it. We’re calling this experiment the “learning lab.” It’s the second stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, which kicked off in May with an online competition that solicited 300 news innovation ideas from people around the globe. With the competition complete, it’s time put on our mad scientist lab coats and start mixing things up. Our aim is to find an antidote to “yammering” about...

July 12, 2011
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At MIT Knight Confab, Public Activism Looms Large

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The smell of public activism wafted across this year's Knight Civic Media conference at MIT. Mohammed Nanabhay from Al Jazeera English (AJE) spoke about how Al Jazeera covered the Egyptian revolution. Political consultant Chris Faulkner spoke about Tea Party activism; Yesenia Sanchez, an organizer for the P.A.S.O./Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, talked about the "Undocumented, Unafraid and Unapologetic" campaign; NPR's Andy Carvin spoke about curating and verifying tweets from Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab Spring; and Baratunde Thurston, digital director of The Onion, gave a tremendous riff about his own -- and his mother's --...

June 30, 2011
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MIT Lesson: Change Happens Everywhere; Activists Need to Think it Through

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I attended last Thursday's afternoon plenary "Civic Media Mobilization," at the 2011 Knight Civic Media conference, expecting to hear discussion about specific activist technologies and techniques. I was also anticipating some juicy political friction between the Tea Party consultant and the immigrant law community organizer who were speaking at the event. Neither prediction came to pass. Instead I witnessed a far more situation-based analysis of what incentivizes action that concluded with a simple, summarizing message: The only thing technology can do is amplify a movement; to instigate actual change you need people on the ground. Hearing this summary launched dreams...

June 28, 2011
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Knight Announces 2011 News Challenge Winners

by Desiree Everts

Not so long ago, journalists were playing catch-up in the digital media space. But at this year's MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, it's become evident that journalism 2.0 is growing up. Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, today announced the winners of the Knight News Challenge at the annual conference held in Cambridge, Mass. This year, the contest focused on four categories: Mobile, Authenticity, Sustainability and Community, and winners ran the gamut from popular tools like DocumentCloud to a mobile platform that will help people in Hubli-Dharwad, India find out when water is available. The...

June 22, 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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Stroome Reels Filmmakers Into Online Collaborative Video Editing

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

While speaking in Tribeca a couple of months ago in front of a packed theater of New York independent fiction and documentary filmmakers, I introduced Stroome, a collaborative online video editing community, and was astonished to receive a standing ovation. One filmmaker explained to me that she had been sending clips back and forth with a collaborator in London, and having to take the time to re-edit a sequence to make slight changes or slowly upload finished segments was encumbering her entire filmmaking process. She, like many others in the room, envisioned how Stroome could vastly improve collaboration, and she...

May 26, 2011
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MIT Sessions Address Prison Blogging, Networked Revolt in Arab World

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

May 19, 2011
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Comments Are Dead. We Need You to Help Reinvent Them

by Phillip Smith

Let’s face it — technically speaking, comments are broken. With few exceptions, they don’t deliver on their potential to be a force for good. Web-based discussion threads have been part of the Internet experience since the late 1990s. However, the form of user commentary has stayed fairly static, and — more importantly — few solutions have been presented that address the complaints of publishers, commenters, or those of us who actually read comments. Publishers, for the most part, want software that will stamp out trolls and outsource the policing to the community itself (or, failing that, to Winnipeg). Commenters, on...

May 12, 2011
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Much Ado About Obama's Birth Certificate on DocumentCloud

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we watched traffic stats skyrocket last month as newsroom after newsroom uploaded President Obama's birth certificate to DocumentCloud and then embedded it, my reaction was hardly one of joy. Why on Earth is a birth certificate more interesting than, say, the pages and pages of receipts documenting some outrageous meals (15 steaks, two orders of fish and a lamb chop -- for five people submitted by National Grid to the Long Island Power Authority after their Hurricane Earl cleanup)? I like to think these are the documents we built DocumentCloud for -- that we're here to give a leg...

May 11, 2011
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Design Decision for Local Online News: What's the Secret Sauce?

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

An awful situation for any parent ... my wife suddenly needed to drive four hours to Boston Children's Hospital to shepherd our son through a medical emergency. He was already in Boston, but Valerie couldn't get out of the driveway. A freak blizzard had drifted four feet of snow across it. If she didn't get on the road soon, the childcare lined up for our younger kids would fall apart. I was out of state and no help at all. What to do? One simple posting to Front Porch Forum and a dozen neighbors materialized. Wielding snow blowers and shovels,...

May 5, 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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LocalWiki Codes, Talks, Searches for Pilot Community

by Philip Neustrom

Here's a summary of what we've been up to for the past month or so at LocalWiki: coding, coding, coding, coding, talking, coding, talking, talking, coding, coding, coding. Occasionally we take breaks for sleep and nutritional intake purposes. Want more detail? Read on! Code, code, code, code & milestone We've been hard at work on the software side of the project. In the past month, we've: begun serious work on our collaborative mapping system; made the basic functions of our page editor work better; and come up with a way to allow for plug-ins and dynamic content inside pages. We're...

April 4, 2011
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DocumentCloud Enables Public Searches, Embeddable Sets

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We quietly opened DocumentCloud's catalog to public searches in January, and we've been working since to do more with the great documents that reporters have added to our catalog. When Vancouver Sun investigative reporter Chad Skelton asked if there was a way to automate display of the growing cache of documents he was retrieving from the city's ferry authority, the best answer we could offer was to point his readers to a search for the DocumentCloud project he was stashing them in. Our goal from the outset has been to help news organizations make their own substantive reporting more engaging...

March 31, 2011
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Why the New York Times' Pay Model is Similar to NPR and Spot.Us

by David Cohn

From the launch of Spot.Us, I've always said the following: Anyone can tackle the crowdfunded journalism model. In fact, NPR could do it tomorrow and blow me out of the water. It's just about being transparent and giving up control over how donation money gets spent. This model would have more success at the national or international level. This model would have more success if a known brand took the lead. (Again, I always tend to cite NPR.) There has been much opining about the New York Times pay wall that went up this week. I was quoted in a...

March 30, 2011
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How Project Argo Members Communicate Across Time Zones

by Matt Thompson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Project Argo is an ambitious undertaking. It involves networking NPR with 12 member stations spanning three time zones with a different mix of bloggers and editors at each station. The stations cover a variety of regionally focused, nationally resonant topics that range from climate change to local music. Communicating effectively within these parameters has required creativity and experimentation. And we're still learning. I'll break down our various approaches -- what we've tried, what's working, and what we're still working on -- using the three tiers of communication: One-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. One-to-one communication These exchanges with the stations have offered...

March 29, 2011
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Lessons From Phase 1 of the Ushahidi Evaluation in Kenya

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was written by Melissa Tuly and Jennifer Chan. This is the second 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. The Ushahidi-Kenya evaluation is off to a strong start. Since returning from Nairobi in January, 2011 we have worked on the self-evaluation and assessment tool for individuals and organizations interested in using Ushahidi. The purpose of the tool is to help interested parties learn about the Ushahidi platform via a web-based learning tool, to provide access to community resources, and to actively...

March 28, 2011
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Female Entrepreneurs Hit Glass Ceiling for VC Funding

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Journalism is dead! Long live journalism! And so it goes as we continue on through the process of Schumpeter's gale of creative destruction. With pay walls that come and go and come again (or hacked with four lines of code) and linkbacks ever so briefly taking it on the chin, how is it that we continue to misunderstand the business of the news? We've got to get long past the "what, me tweet?" debate and must move on to a diversity of news-telling technologies that serve communities across the globe. News needs new monetization models; to get there, we must...

March 23, 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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Inside Shelbyville Multimedia's Ambitious Immigration Project

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Shelbyville project kicks off with a series of "Welcoming" videos Chances are you haven't yet heard of Shelbyville, a small rural community in Tennessee. If not, then you're probably also unaware of the upcoming "Welcome to Shelbyville" documentary or the online project that is forging a pilot, or prototype, for communities to tell and share their own stories. So let me share my initial impressions of this remarkable, ambitious effort. Last Monday I was lucky enough to be a part of a "digital brain trust" of 20 progressive media and non-profit representatives at the Bay Area Video Coalition headquarters....

March 21, 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

How Dotspotting Began with Colored Dots on Drains in San Francisco

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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by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 15, 2011
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MIT Produces a String of Civic Media Success Stories

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we wind the way toward the end of our four year grant, I thought it would be nice to describe some of what we've learned at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media (C4). In the coming weeks, I will call on a few of our researchers to offer similar blog reflections on our unique blend of communities, information, and action. First, though, I want to describe some of the exciting project highlights from the last few weeks. Because C4 is a multi-disciplinary institution, different projects end up affecting different audiences, so I wanted to put them all in one...

March 14, 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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Churnalism.com Reveals Press Release Copy in News Stories

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Editors' Note: Martin Moore is the director of the Media Standards Trust, which recently launched Churnalism.com -- a website that helps the public distinguish journalism from "churnalism," a news article that is published as journalism, but is essentially a press release without much added. Two weeks in, and the public response to Churnalism.com has been fantastic. Since we launched the site on February 23, we have had 50,000 unique visitors, over 330,000 page impressions, and hundreds of press releases pasted in and saved. According to Google Analytics the site has been visited by people in 134 countries. People have tracked...

March 9, 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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Councilpedia a Hit with New Yorkers, But Not Politicians

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 4, 2011
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DocumentCloud Passes Major Milestone: 1 Million Pages Uploaded

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

DocumentCloud's Jeremy Ashkenas collaborated on this post. It has been less than a year since DocumentCloud began adding users to our beta. Late Monday morning, a user uploaded our millionth page of primary source documents. The thousands of documents in our catalog have arrived in small batches: five pages here, twenty there. The vast majority of the 65,000 documents that those million pages comprise remain private, but we're fast closing in on 10,000 public documents in our catalog. Broad Appeal Journalists are using DocumentCloud to publish all sorts of documents, including these: Last week, the Center for Public Integrity launched...

March 1, 2011
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Ushahidi Takes First Steps in Evaluating Kenya Projects

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was written by Melissa Tully and Jennifer Chan. It is the first in a series of blog posts documenting a 9-month Ushahidi evaluation project in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and supported by the Knight Foundation. A version of the post below was originally published on the Ushahidi blog During the first two weeks of January, we traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, to begin phase one of a 9-month evaluation of Ushahidi's Kenya projects. Ushahidi is a web application created to map the reported incidents of violence during the post-election crisis in Kenya. As part of a team,...

February 25, 2011
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Help Spot.Us Find a Path to Financial Sustainability

by David Cohn

Spot.Us recently launched a new design, so this is an opportune time to write a "State of the Spot" post -- something we haven't done since the website was six months old. I hope to lay out how far we've come and what's on our plate and make a call to arms to the Spot.Us community and anyone else interested in the future of journalism. In the two years since our site has launched, we've funded over 160 projects with the help of 5,000 contributors, a fifth of whom contributed more than once. We've done this in collaboration with 95...

February 22, 2011
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MIT's Civic Media Session Explores Data in Cities

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

With a redoubled focus on the community in the civic media community, the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched a new series last week. These relaxed, informal conversations about civic media featured ground-level practitioners, activists, hackers, and local leaders. The first session, "Bustling with Information: Cities, Code, and Civics," brought good friends Nick Grossman, Nigel Jacob, and Max Ogden to our Cambridge campus. As you can see from the video clips below, these sessions are unique opportunities to talk about the amazing work that goes on in this sphere, intriguingly out of earshot...

February 18, 2011
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LocalWiki Tries "Open-From-The-Start" Development Process

by Mike Ivanov
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's time for another project update. We've been hard at work on the core of the software that will power LocalWiki. We've also been spending time running around meeting people passionate about local media and planning out many things to come. Basic groundwork laid Many of you know about the Davis Wiki, but what you may not know is that we developed the custom software that powers it ourselves. Back in 2004, there was just nothing else that could do everything you see on the Davis Wiki while being easy enough for most people to use. Developing the custom software...

February 17, 2011
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Will the Next Revolution be Stroomed?

'Data and Cities' Conference Pushes Open Data, Visualizations

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

February 15, 2011
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by Jordan Salinger
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

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

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 7, 2011
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Why Huffington Post's 'Predict the News' Game Is No Galaga

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Fellow Knight News Challenge winner Chris O'Brien recently posted on this site about "gamifying" the news. The idea behind the movement O'Brien is speaking of, which Brad Flora touched on in another recent Idea Lab post, involves adding incentives -- pop-up achievements for tasks completed, progress bars to fill, badges to display, online leaderboards for score comparison, and virtual goods -- to activities. The idea is to reward repeat patronage and reframe participation as if it's like a playing a game. A Brief History of Videogame Scoring Videogames have long used scores to track player performance. In 1976, Sea Wolf...

February 2, 2011
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U.S. Local News Experiments Leagues Ahead of U.K.

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is easy to overestimate the similarities between the U.S. and the U.K. As Oscar Wilde wrote back in 1887, ''We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language." But one of the unfortunate recent similarities has been the parallel crisis in local news, especially at newspapers. In both countries existing local news providers have been the hardest hit by the structural changes in news provision and consumption, each having relied so heavily on classified and recruitment advertising. Yet the reactions of the two countries have been very different, particularly in the last couple of years....

February 1, 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 Can We 'Gamify' the News Experience?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the biggest emerging conversations over the past year in Silicon Valley is around "gamification." Simply put, this is the idea of applying game mechanics, particularly those found in videogames, to all sorts of non-game experiences. After following this conversation for many months, I've come to believe that over the next decade gamification will profoundly reshape the way we experience the web, to the same degree that social media and networks redefined the web last decade. To that end, I've been thinking in the broadest terms what that could and should mean for how we can reinvent digital news....

January 19, 2011
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Which Metrics Matter for Measuring User Engagement?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gail Robinson's recent post on traffic in a post-loyal era got me thinking about measures of web traffic and, more broadly, how to measure the impact of non-profit journalism. I certainly don't disagree with Gotham Gazette's decision to pass on providing Yahoo with free content. There's no good reason that Yahoo can't create a lively community without wholly reprinting Gotham Gazette's excellent original reporting free of charge. There are probably good reasons that it would complicate Gotham Gazette's work to license stories to a commercial outlet like Yahoo Local, too: As a non-profit, the local policy publication regularly livens up...

January 18, 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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Spot.Us Survey Shows Support for More Diverse Public Media

by David Cohn

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy made 15 recommendations on how America can have a bright info-future. One of those recommendations was for increased support for public media predicated on public media efforts to "step up," for lack of a better term.Public media has been on the minds and lips of a lot of Americans. Certainly the last few years have seen a growth in public media across the board from Corporation for Public Broadcasting entities (PBS, NPR) to less formal public media entities like PRX and PRI. Recently, as a follow-up to the...

January 10, 2011
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LocalWiki: Laying the Groundwork

by Philip Neustrom

A few of you have been wondering what we've been up to since our Kickstarter pledge drive ended, so we want to give you a quick update on our Knight-funded project, LocalWiki. For those of you who are more technically inclined, we hope to also provide an insight into these early stages of our process. To follow our updates in the future, please sign up with your email address at http://localwiki.org, follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/localwiki, or follow our blog directly. Or if you're a huge geek, join us on IRC in Freenode's #localwiki. Right now, we are ramping...

January 6, 2011
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Combining Radio, Mobile, Web for Local News in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

People in Grahamstown, a small town in South Africa, now know about 300 things we would never have known if it were not for citizen journalists. Some of what we know comes via big breaking news stories, while other information comes from small blog-like posts. Some of the stories are moving and some have clearly made a difference. Perhaps all of them made something of a difference to someone. That's one of the great things about journalism -- you never know! What these stories have in common is they were all reported and written by citizen journalists, all of whom...

January 5, 2011
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Neighborhood Sites Can Awaken Community Involvement

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

"When I was first on my own I used to bemoan that my fellow renters could hardly be bothered to return a wave but someone kept stealing my newspaper...," wrote author Laura Grace Weldon in a recent blog post, What Makes A Street Into A Neighborhood?. "Then we moved to a little house. It was silly how hard it was to meet the neighbors. They'd wave but that's about it." Along the same lines, Sarah Byrnes wrote in YES! Magazine that "In the past, neighbors knew each other and engaged more naturally in mutual aid, sharing common resources and helping...

January 3, 2011
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NPR's Project Argo Creates National Content at the Local Level

by Joel Sucherman

Jason and the Argonauts were the mythological Greek heroes who set off on a quest for the Golden Fleece. Like its namesake, NPR's Project Argo is off on another noble quest -- to strengthen local journalism, particularly on digital platforms. Project Argo is a partnership between NPR and member stations, funded by the Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Its focus is building and launching niche, topic-focused websites for NPR member stations that can be models for the rest of the system. We're proving the notion that a news organization can quickly build authority, engagement and traffic...

December 20, 2010
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Introducing Sourcerer: A Context Management System

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you want to follow the news, the web has a lot to offer: a wide variety of information sources, powerful search tools, and no shortage of sites where people can voice their opinions. At the same time, though, the web can be overwhelming. Hundreds of links turn up in a Google search. Relevant information can be scattered across dozens of sites. Online conversations often generate more heat than light. And if you have a question about a news topic, it's hard to find the answer. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a website that made it easier to...

December 15, 2010
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How OpenStreetMap Helps to Curb Haiti's Cholera Epidemic

by Robert Soden
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In order to respond to the current cholera epidemic in Haiti, it's essential that citizens, aid groups and others are aware of the locations of functioning health and sanitation facilities. The challenge is that maps showing this information don't currently exist -- at least not in a comprehensive and up-to-date way. Guensmork Alcin is attempting to change this. He is working with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to expand OpenStreetMap, a free and open source map of the world that has one of the most detailed GIS data sets in existence on Haiti. Guensmork, known as Guens, is training...

December 13, 2010
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Video Volunteers Launches 'IndiaUnheard' for Rural Issues

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers recently launched IndiaUnheard, a new project (and website) attempting to create a bridge, through community media, between disconnected rural communities and web audiences who are interested in news on issues of human rights, development and corruption. You can see the result and watch the community videos here. As this is a relatively new venture -- it's only about 4 to 5 months old -- I'd love feedback from the highly knowledgeable Knight and MediaShift Idea Lab community. Here are some videos to show you what it's about: The village of Natpura, featured in this video below, in rural...

December 7, 2010
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CNN Fails to Correct Mistaken Identity for New Zealand PM

by Mark Follman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

CNN's broadcasts are packed with cheerleading for the network's viewer participation opportunities. You're encouraged to "share your story" at CNN iReport or "join a live chat" at Anderson Cooper's blog or check out CNN Heroes on Facebook or follow one of the network's nearly three dozen Twitter feeds. Welcome to the brave new world of interactive news! But what if you notice an error in a CNN broadcast and want to tell the network about it? Welcome to the jungle. Email Black Hole Back on October 28, a MediaBugs user filed a bug pointing out that a CNN broadcast had...

December 6, 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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Graduating Programmer-Journalist Wants to Help Underserved Communities

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When a Knight News Challenge grant made it possible to award journalism scholarships to people with backgrounds in computer science, no one -- not even the first scholarship applicants -- knew what career opportunities would be available to "programmer-journalists." One of the first two Knight scholars wrote a guest post for Idea Lab suggesting eight different career paths for people who, as I like to put it, are bilingual in journalism and technology. Five Knight scholars will graduate from Medill in December. Here's the first of a series of posts describing them and their career goals and plans. Geoffrey Hing's...

November 22, 2010
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How Spot.Us Doubled Its Grant Money with Community-Focused Ads

by David Cohn

There are many things that excite me about Spot.Us. One in particular, which I believe is part of our pathway to sustainability is "community-focused sponsorship" (CFS). It is the main thrust of my fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. My evolving view of advertising is becoming a passionate topic. In some respects CFS gave me a needed shot of adrenaline into the Spot.Us project. If I'm not pushing boundaries and trying something new, I get bored. To date I still know of no other media entity trying anything exactly like it. So what is community-focused sponsorship? The quick version: We...

November 16, 2010
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The Pros and Cons of Using Kickstarter to Fundraise

by Philip Neustrom

We recently ended our first big fundraising drive for the LocalWiki project and wanted to take a moment to step back and reflect. In particular, we'd like to talk about the funding platform we used, Kickstarter, and its advantages and disadvantages. While we already had a grant from the Knight Foundation to develop the LocalWiki software, we need to raise more money to go beyond just the software and help us do community outreach, coordination and education to ensure our project's success.What is Kickstarter?Kickstarter describes itself as "a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors." It works like...

November 15, 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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MIT Project Helps Prisoners Blog From Jail Through Snail Mail

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Though we were the top winner in the inaugural Knight News Challenge back in 2007, MIT's Center for Future Civic Media took as our mandate something rather "un-news": Applying our tech expertise to information needs, broadly defined, rather than what we'd traditionally call news. This focus has had a big impact on the kind of work we take on. It's pushed us to identify key needs left unmet by traditional news outlets, even ones otherwise adjusting well to the transition online. We've worked on urban signage, open-source grassroots mapping, natural gas drilling databases, and much else with big, ground-level...

November 4, 2010
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Why MediaBugs Won't Take the Red or Blue (State) Pill

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

MediaBugs.org, our service for reporting errors in news coverage, has just opened up from being a local effort in the San Francisco Bay Area to covering the entire U.S. We're excited about that expansion, and we've spiffed up various aspects of our site, too -- check it out. But with this expansion we face an interesting dilemma. Building a successful web service means tapping into users' passions. And there's very little that people in the U.S. are more passionate about today than partisan politics. We have two very distinct populations in the country today with widely divergent views. They are...

November 1, 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

DocumentCloud Users Make Ballot Design An Election Issue

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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by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

October 27, 2010
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5 Ways to Improve the Non-Profit Journalism Hub

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Voice of San Diego, one of the oldest of the new guard of non-profit news orgs that have been popping up, has teamed up with some academics from San Diego State University to launch The Hub, a handy database of information about non-profit community news organizations. If you're looking to start your own non-profit news org or want to learn more about what's already out there, this is the place to start. Megan Garber over at NiemanLab has a detailed rundown on the who's and what's involved. I'm a big fan of things that solve problems, and The Hub clearly...

October 25, 2010
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Journalists Should Play and Discuss Newsgames Like 1378(km)

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Evangelizing newsgames is not just about convincing journalists that they should create and use games to express ideas and inform the public. It's also about getting journalists to recognize newsgames that are created outside of professional institutions as works in dialogue with their field. Even if a person cannot produce a game on his own, newsgames can still be shared and discussed. Expending a modest amount of effort in this capacity would go a long way toward the adoption of newsgames as a form. 1378(km) Last week we wrote on our project blog about the media's reception of a German...

October 21, 2010
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OpenStreetMap's Audacious Goal: Free, Open Map of the World

by Robert Soden
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In our previous posts on TileMill, we’ve focused on how open data can be used to create custom mapsand tell unique stories. One question we run into a lot is, “Where does open data come from?” One exciting source is a global mapping project called OpenStreetMap (OSM). Founded in 2004 with the goal of creating a free and open map of the world, OSM now boasts over 300,000 contributors and has comparable or better data for many countries than the popular proprietary or closed datasets. The premise is simple and powerful: Anyone can use the data, and anyone can help...

October 20, 2010
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The Marriage of Social Media and the Olympics Is Inevitable

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've just returned from England where I spoke at the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) event, an independently funded festival of new cinema and digital culture. It was held in the Cornerhouse, a 25-year-old arts and media space located in the heart of Manchester. My presentation was part of the #media2012 session dedicated to the growing importance of social media in covering the Olympics, and during the preparations for the Games. The event drew artists, designers, researchers and new media folks from many corners of the world, including the U.S., Canada, Brazil, and Scandinavia. Social Media and the Olympics A special...

October 15, 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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Student Team -- Including Five "Programmer-Journalists" -- Seeks Hyperlocal Solutions

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In December 2008, a class of Northwestern University journalism master's students -- including two Knight "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners -- unveiled a prototype news Web site called News Mixer. The site, one of the first to integrate Facebook Connect as a system for identity management, got a fair amount of attention for its novel approaches to user interaction around local news. Almost two years later, another team of students from Northwestern's Medill School is hard at work in another "innovation project" class. Once again, the class focus is on local news and information. And once again the class includes Knight scholars...

October 13, 2010
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Mixing Citizen Journalism and Live Radio in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In developing countries, and particularly in Africa, radio can be the key media channel in the local public sphere -- that is, of course, in public spheres are allowed to be local and public! Iindaba Ziyafika, our Knight News Challenge project in South Africa, has focused a great deal on training citizen journalists for print and digital media. The project is now branching out even more into community radio. We formalized a partnership with Radio Grahamstown, the local community radio station, to create about five hours of programming each week and to help the station stabilize itself. In South Africa,...

October 7, 2010
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LocalWiki to Create Collaborative, Community-Owned Local Media

by Philip Neustrom

So much of the unique knowledge and experiences we acquire through years of living in a community gets spread only by word of mouth, or worse it just stays "locked up" in our heads. But this is great stuff, valuable expert knowledge that can benefit everyone. After all, when it comes to the communities where we live, we are all experts! What if everyone could share and collaborate on what they know about their local community? What would local media look like if everyone in the community was creating it? The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned,...

October 5, 2010
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Spot.Us Users: Public Media Higher Quality Than Commercial

by David Cohn

This post was written by Jonathan Peters. The data comes from the Free Press sponsorship on Spot.Us, part of our experiment with the Reynolds Journalism Institute in Community-Focused sponsorship. Profits are killing journalism. Publishers and editors care more about the bottom line than the quality of their reporting. Newsrooms are shrinking, as a result, and good stories have gone untold. The public is worse off because of it. So goes one argument, at least, in the debate about public funding of journalism. It's a hot topic that appears immune to any clear-cut solution, and it's shaking the foundation of what...

October 4, 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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An Anaylsis of Six Journalism Startups

by David Cohn

In the last few weeks there has been some interesting and exciting news in the journalism startup world. I wanted to take some time to highlight new players and provide my own personal analysis. Collaborative Storytelling: Three New Startups Kommons.com Kommons was founded by the young Cody Brown who busted into the conversation with some epic blog posts last fall. Brown and his co-founder taught themselves how to code (this is a bootstrapped operation) and iterated like mad. For that, my hat is off. Disclaimer: I've had the chance to chat with Brown a few times and find him to...

September 21, 2010
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SeedSpeak To Sprout Community Improvement Projects in Phoenix

PRX Story Exchange, Spot.us Bring Crowdfunding to Public Radio

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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by Jake Shapiro

Story Exchange (formerly Story Market) is a way for local public radio stations, producers, and listeners to pitch, find and fund documentaries and stories on important local issues. We're also one of this year's winners of a Knight News Challenge grant. Here's how we envision it working: Let's say that in Kentucky the issue of mountaintop mining needs a deeper investigative look. On Story Exchange, the Louisville public radio WFPL station can invite producers to bid on reporting the story, ask listeners to contribute funds as well as ideas, and see the story through to completion for broadcast and digital...

September 15, 2010
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English-Language Content a Boon to SochiReporter in Russia

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On Monday, September 27, SochiReporter will begin publishing in English. From that point on, every Monday will see us publish new exclusive stories about ongoing preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics, and about life in four of the Big Sochi main areas: Central Sochi, Adler, Khosta and Lazarevskoye. (We will be translating the Russian posts submitted by our citizen journalists.) Vancouver Test Case As I previously wrote on Idea Lab, we began testing an English version of SochiReporter during the Vancouver Olympics. We then hired Yuliya Talmazan, a Russian-speaker from Vancouver who worked as an editor at NowPublic, to cover...

September 14, 2010
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What the Spot.Us Community Thinks of Objectivity

by David Cohn

The following post comes to us from Sameer Bhuchar, who is helping Spot.Us from Austin. It has been said a thousand times before: The landscape of the modern media is changing. With today's more complex, active Internet ecosystem, the accepted norms of journalism are constantly being rewritten or tossed out all together. The Internet has bypassed the once highly regarded norms of gatekeepers at a news desk, and it now seems to be challenging the long held model of objectivity in journalism. If there is an underlying theme to Spot.Us it is the idea that we expect our community...

August 31, 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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One-Eight, Afghanistan: Social Media + U.S. Marine Corps

by Teru Kuwayama
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

As the saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for." In my case, I won a Knight News Challenge grant to launch an online, social media reporting network that follows a battalion of U.S. Marines throughout their deployment to southern Afghanistan. (Congratulations! You've won a year in Helmand Province, roadside bomb capital of the world...) Although recently upgraded from "forgotten war" to "central front," the Afghanistan conflict exists on the periphery of the American consciousness. We're nearly a decade into the longest war in U.S. history, but most Americans still have a pretty fuzzy idea of what we're actually doing...

August 23, 2010
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Stroome Helps Journalists Collaborate via Online Video Remixing

How Can Civic Media Help Cover 'Slow-Motion Disasters'?

This post was co-authored by Nonny de la Peña Stroome, a winner of the 2010 Knight News Challenge grant, fosters a social network that allows journalists to collaborate together by sharing content and stories that can be edited right in a browser and then pushed across the web. Prototyped at USC Annenberg's pioneering Online Program on Online Communities in the fall of 2008, the idea was strikingly simple: Create a place where journalists can efficiently work together to create a culture that offers accurate, contextual news in real-time. The result was Stroome, an online video editing platform crossed with a...

August 20, 2010
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by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm helping MIT's Center for Future Civic Media put together a talk on how better to cover slow-motion disasters, and I'd like your thoughts. The bursting of the housing bubble, for example, cost the American economy $8.3 trillion. Yet for a decade, national media missed signs of the coming disaster, acting instead to simply keep pumping. While we can cover hurricanes and terrorist attacks, we – the media, Americans, humans – seem to be terrible technologically and rhetorically at covering disasters that unfold slowly, stories like oil spill cleanups or health care policy that take months or years to fully...

August 19, 2010
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How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently attended the Walkley Media Conference in Sydney, Australia. It is run by the Walkley Foundation, a very interesting outfit that I'm learning more and more about. The Foundation aims to encourage professional and ethical journalism in Australia, and they run the country's main media awards. They also publish the the Walkley Magazine every two months, which anyone interested in journalism should read. The conference had a lot of great speakers and led off with Peter Fray, the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, who spoke about Who moved my pyramid?. Speakers from the U.S. included John Nichols, Washington...

August 18, 2010
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SocMap.com (GoMap) Helps Communities Map Local Events, News

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

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

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

August 13, 2010
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Front Porch Forum: Connecting Strangers in the Neighborhood

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mention the Internet, and most people think of the World Wide Web, of reaching out across the globe for news, long-lost friends, or low-price bargains. But in dozens of Vermont towns, residents are using the web to connect with their back-fence neighbors. In an era where national and global information is broadly available online, it seems that few of us know our neighbors and what's going on down the street. My name is Michael Wood-Lewis, and my wife, Valerie, and I saw an opportunity four years ago and created Front Porch Forum (FPF) to serve our home region in northwest...

August 6, 2010
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How News Organizations Should Prepare for Data Dumps

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Soon every news organization will have its own "bunker" -- a darkened room where a hand-picked group of reporters hole up with a disk/memory stick/laptop of freshly opened data, some stale pizza and lots of coffee. Last year the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph secreted half a dozen reporters in a room for nine days with about 4 million records of politicians' expenses. They were hidden away even from the paper's own employees. Now we learn that reporters from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel did the same with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks somewhere in the Guardian's offices in...

August 2, 2010
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Creating a Participatory, Open Source Map of an Entire Country

by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the past few weeks I've been working from Tbilisi, Georgia -- the other Georgia -- with a fascinating organization called OpenMapsCaucasus (OMC for short), which has been hard at work creating the first participatory, public domain road map of an entire country. Created by JumpStart International, and building on previous mapping work in the West Bank and Gaza, OMC employs dozens of GPS-wielding mappers who work in teams across Georgia to collect, process and publish map data. The OMC office in Tbilisi is abuzz with tech-savvy students, GIS wizards, and a fun-loving and coffee-fueled atmosphere. The sheer amount...

July 30, 2010
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Bloomberg Circles the Wagons on Misleading Gulf-Spill Poll

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

News organizations' default response to criticism is to circle the wagons. "We stand by our story!" is a stirring thing to say, and sometimes it's even the right thing. But in the web world of 2010, where everyone has a public platform, ignoring critics can also squander a news outlet's credibility and alienate its audience. The basic premise of MediaBugs -- which I laid out in this video -- is that news organizations can begin winning back the public trust they have lost by engaging civilly, in public, with people who criticize them about specific errors. Whoever is right...

July 29, 2010
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'Life in a Day' Collaborative Film Echoes in Hyper-Local Projects

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I think about my project, SochiReporter, I often recall the seminal 1961 book by Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." This book challenged the conventional wisdom of city planners of that era and celebrated the vibrancy of the urban streetscape. It also encouraged citizen involvement in the development of neighborhoods. I wonder if Jacobs ever looked at the cities and the changes they undergo to host the Olympics, as Sochi will in 2014? Life in a Day Along the lines of citizen participation, July 23 was the day when anyone worldwide could make a short...

July 28, 2010
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Spot.Us Goes National, Gets Clay Shirky as Sponsor

by David Cohn

Anyone that has followed Spot.Us from the beginning knows we've tried to remain iterative and agile. In the earlier stages of Spot.Us I thought this was one of the larger lessons for journalism-entrepreneurs. I went through the iterative and agile process and tried to document it so others could repeat. I hope to continue this tradition as I get ready for an academic fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Indeed, the heart of this post addresses two features of Spot.Us (expansion and community-focused sponsorships) which will be my focus while in Missouri. Inherent to this mindset is the ability to...

July 27, 2010
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An Ethical Argument for Transparency in Journalism

by David Cohn

In a recent post on my website I examined an ethical argument for transparency. I will continue this internal dialogue with the caveat that I am not a journalism academic. I do not prescribe my beliefs to anyone but myself. This is a disgustingly theoretical post (I promise the next one will be practical up the wahzoo). I should also note the inspiration behind these two posts was a discussion at FOO Camp: Philosophy and Technology - Tim O'Reilly and Damon Horowitz. The First Chapter The first post on this topic hinged on the idea that transparency is necessary for...

July 22, 2010
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Help MediaBugs Make News Sites Track, Correct Errors

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine you're sitting at the back of a classroom. The lecture is on a fascinating topic -- the American Civil War, say. The professor has started a riveting back-and-forth with students in the front about the Union's initial motivations for fighting. The professor says, "And then Harriet Jacobs wrote 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' which galvanized many northerners in the cause of abolishing slavery. What role do you think Jacobs' book played?" You cock your head. Harriet Jacobs? It was Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin." You raise your hand to ask for a clarification, but the back-and-forth between the...

July 14, 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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Newsroom Collaborations: The New Culture of Sharing vs. Competing

by David Cohn

At last week's Future Civic Media conference at MIT there was a barcamp session on "collaborations in the newsroom" led by Josh Stearns from Save The News. (See his excellent list of journalism collaborations.) In many ways, this was a continuation of a conversation in San Francisco where Josh took fantastic notes. I hope to return the favor here. Collaboration is a buzzword in journalism. As a result, some of its meaning gets lost, similar to how "social media" can mean just about anything and nothing. Scott Rosenberg summed up the problem very well: There is a professional transition in...

June 22, 2010
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Live-Blogging #FNCM: Moving from Crowdsourcing to Crowdbuilding

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- After the announcement of the Knight News Challenge winners came the first "plenary session" at the Future of News and Civic Media Conference. The topic is "Crowdbuilding," with the following panelists: Chris Csikszentmihalyi is director of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who studies the ethics of online collaboration. Karim Lakhani is an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who studies distributed innovation systems. Chris Csikszentmihalyi, MIT: The term crowdsourcing has been to the detriment of the news business. "Debian" is a collaborative GNU/Linus release that is powerful enough for...

June 16, 2010
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Teaching Ushahidi 101 in Kenya

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post is written by Melissa Tully and Rebecca Wanjiku. 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. Rebecca Wanjiku is a project assistant for Ushahidi in Kenya. She interfaces with many organizations and individuals who have inquiries about Ushahidi. This month and last month saw the first ever "Ushahidi 101" events held at the iHub in Nairobi. The first Ushahidi 101 gathering took place on May 12 and attracted 16 people from different organizations...

June 15, 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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Pondering Online Communities and Fluid Social Groups

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A friend once told me that if I were a superhero I would be called "The Includer." She was right, I'm usually the one trying to get more people involved in whatever is about to happen. Superhero or not, my crowd-mongering has taught me one thing: Groups are complicated. I'm sure you know what I mean. Sometimes people only feel like hanging out with the "core." Or maybe someone has decided that they like the group, but can't stand a few of its members which causes a rift. The dynamics of even a small group can drastically shift with a...

June 9, 2010
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Community Centered Ads Boost Engagement, Funding at Spot.Us

by David Cohn

The beauty of starting something from scratch is the iterative and agile process I've talked about since before Spot.Us began. In this post I'm going to discuss two new developments at Spot.Us. One is an exciting feature and revenue stream. The other is in relation to our expansion into new regions. For almost two years now, Spot.Us has been growing and evolving. I'm very happy to say that the last month has possibly been the most exciting since our launch. We grew almost 30 percent in terms of users. Even more exciting is that the technology behind Spot.Us is starting...

June 8, 2010
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How a Test Suite Can Help Your Open Source Project Grow

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

At CityCircles, we've been fortunate to work with a local developer who is passionate about our project's goal of developing hyper-local communication tools for mass audiences. Our first implementation of that is a platform for light rail passengers in Phoenix, Arizona. That said, one person can't carry the entire load, especially as the project inevitably evolves from its humble beginnings and wire frames. One solution that's worth considering is sinking some funds into a test suite -- a closed environment where other developers who share a vision for the project can develop new features with the approval of the "master"...

June 4, 2010
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The Future of News: Not So Bleak, Not So Rosy

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

What's the future of news? I'm tempted to say "not very much" since no one really knows too much about the future of news right now. You know this is true because senior news folk have given up on the doom and gloom stuff and are starting to talk about "the golden age of journalism" and how it's a "bright dawn" and that sort of thing. This would make sense if there had been any structural change in the economics of news, but there hasn't; so their optimism has the hollow twang of hope over reason. Still, the optimists have...

June 3, 2010
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Hacks and Hackers: The Time Was Right

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"Hacks and Hackers," our young organization focused on bringing journalism and technology closer together, seems to have struck a chord. Over the weekend of May 21-23, 80 journalists and technologists in San Francisco participated in the group's first "Hacks/Hackers Unite" gathering, where they developed 12 iPad applications. Meanwhile, our "question-and-answer" site, Help.Hackshackers.com, launched less than two months ago, is becoming a thriving online community for people interested in computer programming for journalism and media applications. Here's the latest sign that Hacks and Hackers is meeting a need: the RSVP list for our first New York City event tomorrow night...

June 1, 2010
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SochiReporter Helps Transform Sochi in Preparation for Olympics

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently spoke with a friend of mine here in Sochi, Russia. She is a specialist in modernizing the technological infrastructure of sanatoriums, which were the places where lucky Soviet working class heroes would be sent to rest and relax. (Think of them as health spas.) It's a challenge to transform the Soviet-era sanatoriums. For example, her job entails computerizing the files and data and modernizing the registration of new clients. But she said it's exciting work. For her, the most enjoyable part of the job is organizing courses for the staff (doctors, waiters, janitors) who at first seem dazed...

May 27, 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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Balloon Mapping the Oil Spill Proves Responsive, Open Source

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent Idea Lab post from the Center for Future Civic Media, Jeff Warren wrote about using inexpensive balloons and cheap cameras to make pseudo-satellite imagery of a given area. He had been using it to help people in poor areas establish title to their land (Google Maps satellites don't map poor areas as fast as these areas actually grow). But then the Gulf oil spill happened... Phone calls and emails started coming in from suddenly out-of-work fishermen who were frustrated with British Petroleum, and also flummoxed by the lack of imagery explaining how and where the oil slick...

May 19, 2010
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Virtual Street Corners Adds Journalists, Places Ads for Launch

DIY Mappers Offer Remarkable Images of Gulf Coast Oil Spill

We are just two weeks out from the install date of Virtual Street Corners and our publicity campaign is gaining momentum. The project will connect two neighborhoods in Boston via live video connection in public places. We've been picked up a lot on the blogosphere, on CBC radio in Canada, and The Atlantic magazine came out today with a feature that put Virtual Street Corners on the front page of its website. Within hours I had an email from Israel offering me money and assistance to set up the same project between Tel Aviv and the West Bank. That...

May 18, 2010
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by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, as the mainstream press reported on the worsening environmental and economic crisis that is the British Petroleum spill in the Gulf Coast, I and a small group of DIY mappers flew down to New Orleans to coordinate a grassroots, citizen effort to map the spill. Instead of helicopters and satellites, we deployed a new generation of low-cost tools, including weather balloons and kites with cameras attached. Since arriving, we've managed to mobilize small teams of Gulf Coast residents. Thanks to the fishermen and charter boat captains whose livelihood is at stake, we've been able to get teams...

May 12, 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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Volcano Disrupts Plans, But SochiReporter Soldiers On

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The eruption of a volcano in Iceland affected the travel plans of thousands, and inspired an outpouring of Iceland- and ash-themed jokes ("Dear Iceland, we want your cash, not your ash. Thanks, Europe") -- almost enough to fill a separate post. But I wasn't laughing about the fact that there was no way -- except for a 38-hour train expedition -- to get to London this week to attend a lecture by Andy Miah, a well known Olympics scholar and professor of the University of the West of Scotland. His speech, "Sport and Society: the Summer Olympics through the Lens...

April 28, 2010
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Community Journalists to Push Neglected Rural Stories in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A big question that we deal with when thinking about the future of locally produced media is how will it ever become financially sustainable? As of right now, Video Volunteers has been supporting local media units in India and Brazil whose basic job is to make video stories about their local issues and then screen them locally -- so locally that most videos are seen in between 25 and 50 neighboring villages. As is obvious by that sentence, geography has played an important part in the manner in which we have built these programs. We believe that national (and to...

April 26, 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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Serving the Community of Programmer-Journalists: Help.HacksHackers.com

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For many years now, the NICAR-L email list has been the online home for journalists doing data analysis -- the people doing "computer-assisted reporting" or "precision journalism." Though email lists are an old technology, this one continues to thrive -- just in the past week, there have been 277 posts to the list. Beyond the numbers, I can personally testify to the importance of NICAR-L as a place to get practical problem-solving advice and to meet and interact with professional peers. When Aron Pilhofer and I proposed a "Hacks and Hackers" community -- for people doing software development relevant to...

April 19, 2010
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Designing a True Community Tool for the Online World

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last December I wrote about digital community and social media tools in a post titled, In Search of a Community That Takes 'Me' Out of Social Media. My ultimate argument was that although community tools exist, they are underpowered and unpopular compared to modern networking systems like Facebook and Twitter. That post sparked a lot of interesting comments, and it's clear that online community is something people care about. Within the comments I noticed two distinct camps: People who found the article through Facebook, and people who found the article through Twitter. Let's just say that I was surprised to...

April 15, 2010
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A New Battle Cry: Release the Raw Data for Better Visualization

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The most elegant, user-friendly data visualization program is useless without data to visualize; and, historically, those who possess data are reluctant to share it. Massive data has been dominated by a thin layer of elites, and sophisticated data-visualization tools -- such as heat maps, motion charts, time maps, and tag maps -- generally have remained within the domain of those elites. This monopoly has allowed very few to decide which data were important to visualize. They've created some dazzling digital narratives, but it was a one-way street -- very high-tech, but also very news 1.0/web 1.0. Data Visualization For All...

March 26, 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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How Mark Luckie Created 'The Digital Journalist's Handbook'

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's an increasingly common story in the news business: Young journalist roars out of graduate school at Berkeley, gets a great job at a magazine in New York, works like mad, gets laid off when the economy tanks, turns to his blog and Twitter to brand himself a rock star in his field, publishes a book packed with the tips, tricks, and tutorials he's been blogging about, then gets a great gig with a non-profit news startup back in California. Okay, so maybe it's not all that common a career path, but it's the way things have unfolded for Mark...

March 15, 2010
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Hacks and Hackers: A New Community for Technojournalists, Journotechnologists

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last June, at the annual Center for Future Civic Media Conference, I got to talking with Aron Pilhofer (an old friend, leader of the New York Times news applications team and a Knight News Challenge winner for the DocumentCloud project) about the growing number of people who are now doing computer programming to serve news organizations or the larger goals of journalism, such as informing the public about what government is doing. The conference featured a small grant competition to reward new forms of collaboration. Aron and I put together a winning proposal to create a a new organization and...

March 10, 2010
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How Virtual Street Corners Fits with History of Art-Telecom Projects

Councilpedia Uses Crowdsourcing to Link Money, Politics in NYC

Below is a guest post from George Fifield, director and founder of Boston Cyberarts Inc., an organization that is a fiscal sponsor of Virtual Street Corners. He and I are working closely together on the project, and here he helps contextualize Virtual Street Corners from a curator's perspective. Fifield is a distinguished curator in new media, a writer about art and technology, and a teacher at Rhode Island School of Design and Massart. Read more about his work and view more of his writing here. Art and Telecommunication Throughout time, Artists have greeted new communications technologies with great enthusiasm. With...

March 8, 2010
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by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As Gotham Gazette gears up to launch a pilot version of its Knight-funded Councilpedia project, we are confronting a number of interesting issues. To step back first, though, Councilpedia will provide information about New York's 51 City Council members and two citywide elected officials, including their campaign finance information, the bills they introduced, and the groups they gave "member items" -- the parlance here for pork or earmarks. (Our third citywide elected official -- the mayor -- only takes contributions from one person: his billionaire self.) Readers will be able to search this data and tag it, providing information and,...

March 2, 2010
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Can Citizen Journalists in South Africa Help Open up Government Data?

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 27, 2010
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So You Want to Try Crowdsourcing?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is no secret that I'm always on the hunt for great crowdsourcing projects. We're still learning a lot about what "the crowd" can tackle and what it can't, but turning to your readers (listeners, community, neighbors) is a great way to foster civic participation because it gives people a stake in the news. What I really want to know, though, is what makes crowdsourcing sing? Sunlight's Transparency Corps project to slice Kentucky legislative voting records has been sitting less than half complete for months now, while the Brooklyn Museum's "posse" is madly tagging, flagging and organizing projects digital photos...

February 26, 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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Faint Praise for Citizen Journalism Misses Point

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

John Darnton is a good novelist, and was a superb journalist in a long career at the New York Times. Now he's curator of the Polk Awards, one of only a couple of journalism prizes that means anything. (Journalists have a tedious tendency to give themselves prizes, more so than any other business I can name.) The Polk awards have been ahead of the game in recent years. Two of its recent honorees, notably, have recognized that journalism has moved squarely into the Digital Age, even though most of the kinds of journalism achievements that win big prizes -- notably...

February 24, 2010
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Spot.Us Adds Assignments, Widgets, Story Updates in Revamp

by David Cohn

Since Spot.Us first launched in late 2008 as a simple wiki, I've wanted this to be a learning and growing endeavor both for myself and for journalism as a whole. There are so many lessons in starting a non-profit news project, especially one that is unique in its scope and mission like Spot.Us. I hope to share some insight below, but first the news. Today Spot.Us takes a huge step forward with a new design and new features. This was made possible by lead designer Lauren Rabaino and the excellent development team of Erik Sundelof and Dan Newman. Please join...

February 23, 2010
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Truly Serving the Public -- With Web Tools

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We journalists are fond of saying that journalism is constitutionally protected because of our critical role in providing information that people need to be citizens in a democracy. Which makes it all the more shameful that most newspapers -- in print and online -- have historically done such a lousy job of helping people navigate the core functionality of democracy: elections. The Chicago Tribune's Election Center, developed by the team that includes the first two programmer-journalists (whose journalism educations were financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships), is a great example of what's possible. The site provides an essential guide to...

February 1, 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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How Could News Organizations Manage Documents Better?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

How are you handling primary source material on your website? OaklandLocal is summarizing a new report on a shootout in March that left five people dead. They use Scribd to embed reports directly on their site, but can't provide annotations. California Watch is looking at what campaign season generosity bought for agribusiness in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. They put together a great Flash widget that highlights noteworthy portions of the documents they reviewed, but they had to sit down with a highlighter, circle relevant passages, and then scan each document for the site. ProPublica, the Los Angeles Times, ABC...

January 21, 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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Finding Common Ground Between Citizen Art and Citizen Journalism

Q&A 2.0: There's More Than One Way to Answer a Question

Comparisons are rarely drawn between the fields of art and journalism. But most of last month's work on my Knight Challenge project, Virtual Street Corners, was spent networking and conducting research into these areas. Since I will be hiring several citizen journalists, I've been reading up on that topic, and thinking about the similarities with the art world, which is something I'm much more familiar with. I've been contemplating whether there are lessons that can be transferred from one to the other. One of the most obvious connections between citizen journalism and community-based artists is the shared desire to create...

January 15, 2010
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by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since ReportingOn launched with a new Question & Answer format in July 2009, a few new entries in what I'll call the Q&A 2.0 space have popped up and grown their base of users. Here's a look at three Q&A 2.0 applications with wide appeal. Aardvark Aardvark allows users to ask questions via instant message, the website, Twitter, and an iPhone app, among other ways. I've used IM for the most part, answering questions about Twitter, iPhone apps, and journalism from time to time, while fending off questions about SEO, and using my favorite Aardvark feature to refer questions to...

January 14, 2010
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Big Apps Are Here

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've already voiced my own suspicion that New York City's Big Apps competition is a deft end-run on an actual open data bill in New York City. Nonetheless, some 85 applications built on the city's currently public data sets are available now to explore and vote on through early January. They include a handful of legislator lookup tools and an unexpected number of park spot finders. There's also a graffiti finder designed for the curious dual purpose of helping steer both Wildstyle fans and the city's Anti-Graffiti Unit paint trucks straight to new throw-ups. Other gems that I've been watching...

December 18, 2009
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Looking Back at a Year of Training Citizen Journalists in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you want to see citizen journalism in action -- not to mention provoking action -- take a look at this collection of stories by citizen journalists who have completed a six-week course in the Grocott's Mail Citizen Journalism Newsroom. That page features 12 stories about a critical but little-covered topic that goes to the heart of the divergent experiences of living in Grahamstown, South Africa. The topic? Waste management. Perhaps it's hardly a prepossessing topic, but it's one that was embraced by the first group of adult Citizen Journalists to be trained in the Iindaba Ziyafika ("The news is...

December 18, 2009
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How the Olympics Can Thrive in the Digital Age

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm honored to share that an essay I wrote was selected by the International Olympic Committee for inclusion in the official book that was distributed at the Olympic Congress held in Copenhagen from October 3 to 5. This was a great opportunity, especially given our work on SochiReporter. Here's an image of the book's cover: I submitted my essay in March as part of the Virtual Olympic Congress, an open international competition that was announced by the IOC in the early fall of 2007. Here's what the IOC said about the competition: Via the "Virtual Olympic Congress," a dedicated website,...

December 16, 2009
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In Search of a Community That Takes 'Me' Out of Social Media

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As someone who aspires to be a new media expert, I don't actually use many popular social media services. I dislike Facebook, I rarely tweet, and before winning the News Challenge I had never written a blog post. It would seem like I'm downright un-hip; yet I'm a young technologist who has been communicating online for more than half of my life. Why the disparity? Simple: I care more about community than myself. I'm sure you've heard people talk about the ego-centric nature of today's social media, which tend to focus on one-to-one and one-to-many communication. Not only does the...

December 15, 2009
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Case Study in Collaboration: Spot.us, Public Press, and McSweeney's

by David Cohn

I spend a lot of time talking about the notion of "collaboration." So whenever I have a good example of the value of collaboration, I try to highlight it. Only one month after a Spot.Us-funded project was also published in the New York Times, we have another great example of what happens when various partners come together. I like this one in particular because it includes several media entities. I'm talking about The Bay Bridge Explained pitch on Spot.Us, which has been published online by the SF Public Press and distributed in print through McSweeney's San Francisco Panorama and the...

December 8, 2009
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Democratizing the Geography of Information

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As little as a year ago Google Maps had no geographic information about San Javier La Loma, a small working class neighborhood on the outskirts of Medellín where the ConVerGentes group of the HiperBarrio citizen journalism project is based. Some progress has been made, but as you can see from the satellite imagery, most of the streets are still not mapped, much less the parks, buildings and footpaths. Now, compare that to the map of San Javier La Loma created by HiperBarrio and freely available with nearly unrestricted use on Open Street Maps: There is clearly an aspect of amateurism...

December 5, 2009
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2008 Knight News Challenge Winner Launches Open Media Foundation

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

December 1, 2009
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Virtual Street Corners Aims to Engage Public, Connect Neighbors

The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media

One of the primary challenges of any community art project is how to engage the audience. If no one is lured to participate, the dynamism of the piece is lost. Virtual Street Corners, my Knight-funded community art project, benefits from the fact that there is an element of symbolism due to the respective histories of the two neighborhoods we are trying to connect. As I noted in my grant overview, "The Greater Boston neighborhoods of Brookline and Roxbury are 2.4 miles apart, yet there is little interaction between them because of divisions of race and class." This helps create interest...

November 30, 2009
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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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SochiReporter Launches with Time Machine, Wiki Guidebook

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

November 20, 2009
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Why it Matters that Pierre Omidyar is Launching a News Startup

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

November 18, 2009
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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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How the Spot.Us Garbage Patch Story Got to the NY Times

by David Cohn

Today in the New York Times science section you'll find a piece written by Lindsey Hoshaw about the Pacific garbage patch and an accompanying photo slide show. This piece would not have been possible if Spot.Us and a community of over 100 people hadn't come together to fund her trip. It is a great case study for Spot.Us, and arguably the best of the 40-plus projects we've undertaken in the past year. Despite its ambition, and the mound of publicity it generated, the story went off without a hitch. It involved almost every facet of how I imagined Spot.Us could...

November 10, 2009
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I Wouldn't Want to Belong to Any Twitter List That Would Have Me as a Member

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Networks are funny. As soon as they get big enough to have a lot of value, it gets harder to separate the signal from the noise. That's obvious enough -- just ask anyone using AT&T in an area densely populated with bandwidth-hogging iPhone users like me. Or ask any Twitter user. But with the launch of Twitter Lists in recent days, it's now theoretically easier for users, news organizations, bloggers, and companies to create little tributaries off the main river of news. Bu building these subsets out of the main stream, you can find tweets from a group of users,...

November 6, 2009
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The New Era of Media Development, Part III

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

October 31, 2009
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Hyper-Local a Hot Topic at All Russia Media Forum

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The SochiReporter team recently presented our project at the 14th All Russia Media Forum, held in Dagomys, Sochi, in late September. This annual forum for Russian print and online media is organized by the Russian Union of Journalists. Among the participants this year were more than 1,000 journalists from local and regional Russian newspapers, as well as European and U.S. editors. The gathering discussed many global issues, such as the decline of trust in the press, measures of responsibility in journalism, and the social weight of the printed word. There were discussion groups, creativity contests, meetings with politicians, celebrities, scholars,...

October 30, 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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Printcasting Bridges the Digital Divide for Hyperlocal Coverage

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've had a busy few months with Printcasting, launching some significant new features and engaging in a number of partnership discussions. I'll get into the features and partners later in this post, but what I'm most excited about right now is that people are using the service to bring previously all-digital content into the physical communities that they serve. Andynoise: Citizen Sports Journalist The best example so far is a sports enthusiast named Paul Anderson in Bakersfield, California who goes by the online moniker "Andynoise." He's now one of 400 publishers who have collectively created 1,500 editions since we launched...

October 23, 2009
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Virtual Street Corners Connects Neighborhoods and People in Boston

Mobile Phones Give Africans a Voice, Make Governments Nervous

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

October 16, 2009
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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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Ten Points on Funding Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week the Salzburg Global Seminar organized two back-to-back meetings which brought together passionate enthusiasts in the field of new media for three days, and then traditional funders of media development for another three days. Josh Goldstein of UNICEF Innovation and Erik Hersman of Ushahidi each blogged about the gathering. There has also been a flurry of blogging by Anne Nelson and Susan Moeller on the Strengthening Independent Media blog. During the first meeting I gave the following presentation about my experience funding citizen media projects over the past two and a half years. HiperBarrio began when a Colombian media...

October 11, 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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AP News Registry Aims at Most Flagrant Infringers

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry. The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components: • All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc. • The wrapper also will carry a built-in "digital beacon," or tracker, to monitor use of the content by others to track usage and compliance. (As I understand this, the content is not encrypted...

September 21, 2009
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For News Organizations, Transparency is the New Objectivity

by David Cohn

Back in the spring, I made an analogy about journalism being a game of chess. On the chess board of journalism, content is King (the most important piece) but collaboration is Queen (the most powerful piece). To extend the analogy further: transparency is the board itself. Unfortunately, freelancing is a horribly antiquated system. It works behind closed doors. Independent freelancers are left out in the cold and have to build personal relationships with editors to get any paid work. These relationships are always one-to-one. This make it an outdated model. It made perfect sense 30 years ago, but now it...

September 15, 2009
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Got a new way to talk green? Go digital.

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Weekly, the Beanstockd team peruses the online world for websites that share a unique perspective on environmentalism. Weekly, we are consistently surprised with the variety we find. The world of traditional media provides a limited scope on the voice of the green generation - digital broadens that view, significantly.

September 14, 2009
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Community Media's Path Out of Obscurity

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Times of great change represent an opportunity to shift power, and the power shift many of us are working towards here is the democratization of the media. We seek to establish truly effective alternatives to the commercial media system, alternatives that are not relegated to obscurity. To build an effective alternative, we must begin by identifying the needs that are neglected by commercial media. Then we can capitalize on the competitive advantages that non-commercial media institutions have over our corporate media counterparts. Today, the media serve three primary needs: The media facilitate consumerism: The media informs consumers about products and...

September 9, 2009
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Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

September 9, 2009
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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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Future of News & Civic Media: The Motion Picture

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last June we held our Future of News & Future Civic Media conference, here at MIT, with many recipients of the Knight News Challenge meeting, speaking, and demoing their work. We chose to use the "barcamp" un-conference technique for most of the sessions, where all participants to the conference were able to host a session. This flat, democratic style turned out to be perfect for a group of citizen journalists, social software hackers, information activists, and researchers. Here is a brief video (by film makers Paula Aguilera and Jonathan Williams) that gives a sense of the flavor of FNFCM09....

August 31, 2009
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How Citizen Journalists Can Learn from Work of 'Citizen Scientists'

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I visited Carnegie Mellon University's website for the first time as an alumnus. The front page, often dedicated to highlighting faculty work, had a picture of an iPhone screen displaying brightly colored data visualizations. I didn't have to look past the first two words of the title -- "Citizen Scientists" -- before I knew that it would be worth my time to keep reading. The article described how Eric Paulos, an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, is equipping "everyday mobile devices" with sensors used to collect reliable scientific data. The point of all this effort is...

August 27, 2009
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Blogging Positively Guide Encourages Open Conversations About HIV/AIDS

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices is pleased to announce the release of "Blogging Positively," a collection of case studies, interviews, and best practices about citizen media related to HIV/AIDS. You will be introduced to some of the leaders and veterans of the HIV-positive blogging community, and also to citizen media projects which aim to spread more awareness about the pandemic. The guide contains tips for workshop facilitators and teachers, and points readers to helpful resources for new bloggers just getting started. The Blogging Positively project began two years ago when Kenyan blogger Serina Kalande, volunteered to lead a working group to discuss how...

August 25, 2009
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HuffPost Social News Helps Close the 'Awareness Gap'

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in December, as a team of Medill students (including the first two Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalists") was developing the News Mixer project, I wrote an IdeaLab post called "The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here." It captured my thoughts based on my experience of working with the students on the News Mixer project, which offered new approaches to news commenting driven by the capabilities of the Facebook Connect service. News Mixer was one of the first Web sites to take advantage of Facebook Connect to build an engaging social experience around news. It won praise from people interested...

August 21, 2009
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Students Get Blogging Seminar, Digital Cameras for SochiReporter

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've just returned from helping deliver the first seminar about blogging and citizen journalism ever held in Sochi, Russia. Just weeks away from launching my Knight News Challenge project, SochiReporter.ru, I organized a seminar for third, fourth and fifth year students from the five leading Sochi-based universities. Thirty-five journalism and IT students participated in the two day seminar called "Web and Journalism: The New Trends." We received press coverage in over 30 online publications, in newspapers and from three of the city's leading TV channels. Clearly, this city, which will host the 2014 Olympic Winter Games, is ready to embrace...

August 20, 2009
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Liberian Bloggers Show Everyday Life in Monrovia

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

August 14, 2009
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Making Progress Toward Launch of Phoenix Light Rail Pub

by Aleksandra Chojnacka
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Daily Phoenix is a website and mobile app for Phoenix metro residents who use or live around the light rail. We are providing news and information per stop. Information includes business and services, events, promotions, gossip, networking opportunities, etc. all on a stop by stop basis. Where are we today? It has been an incredibly busy couple of months! As Adam mentioned in his last post, we were featured on "Good Morning Arizona" last month. They want to have us back when we finally launch the project and have us demo it on live TV. Very exciting! We've made lots...

August 11, 2009
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Community Radio in India Includes Report on Eclipse, 'Bundeli Idol'

by Balachandran Chandrasekharan
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gram Vaani successfully launched its first pilot a few days back with Radio Bundelkhand! Radio Bundelkhand is a community radio station operating in the small town of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh (India), and was the first community driven CR station to start broadcasting after the new policy. It is being run by Development Alternatives, one of the largest NGOs in India. This pilot has been an excellent experience for us. We saw the folks at the radio station produce Bundeli Idol, a strong competitor to the American and Indian Idol (!!), and a program on the recent solar eclipse,...

August 7, 2009
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The Leadership Vacuum in Journalism

by David Cohn

Ideas are cheap; execution is everything. There are several factors that come into play to make the difference between a successful and a failed execution. One of those factors is leadership. There are different kinds of leaders. Some lead from the front. (William Wallace comes to mind.) But, in war at least, we haven't had a general lead from the front since Alexander the Great. It simply drains a person too much to lead from the front, especially on a modern battlefield where too much is happening all at once. Some lead like ants, working hard and getting others to...

August 5, 2009
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IOC to Include Citizen Contributions with Virtual Olympic Congress

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

August 4, 2009
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No Newspaper Bailouts without Civic Representation

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

July 23, 2009
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The People Formerly Known as the Audience Need a New Name

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm not one for semantic arguments. There's little-to-no practical value in deciding the names of things. ("User-generated content," anyone?) But if you spend your days and side projects talking to journalists about interacting with their readers, you tend to look for the right words to get your message across. Or at least I do. Because they're not really "readers" anymore, are they? The people formerly known as the audience? Accurate, but wordy -- and maybe a little too professorial for my usual purposes. So what do we call the human beings who both consume the journalism we produce and participate...

July 21, 2009
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Crowdsourcing Keeps Coming

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Gotham Gazette, we're gathering our bearings and preparing work on a pretty great crowdsourcing project (though this business of talking something up before its even in beta testing does make the developer in me nervous) and I'm increasingly interested in really understanding what makes crowdsourcing work. It is everywhere these days, and it certainly is one way that we can be turning the Internet into a really effective reporting tool. Two new projects I'm watching? Adopt-a-Stimulus -- which I first caught wind of on Twitter -- asks individuals to pick one TARP project and track it. Steve Katz tried...

July 15, 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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Lessons Learned in Rollout of ReportingOn 2.0

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Those of you who have been keeping score surely noticed that I've saddled the iteration of ReportingOn that launched late on July 1 with a "2.0" label when I talk about it. Many of you might remember what the backchannel for beat reporters looked like before the clock struck "late" on July 1: That's what it looked like, and it did some interesting things, but not as much as I would have liked. And so began the process of building 2.0. And with it, the cataloging of lessons learned from the first run. Here's what it looks like now, almost...

July 14, 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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Getting the Daily Phoenix Off the Ground

by Aleksandra Chojnacka
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Before I dive in, I'd like to give readers a brief overview of what exactly our project, Daily Phoenix, is. This past December, Phoenix debuted a new light rail system which has changed the physical and social landscape of the city. We will use print, web and mobile technology to cater to these new commuters, offering news and information, games, social networking features and promotions on a stop-by-stop basis so that they can interact with the city on a more meaningful level. The idea developed in a digital media entrepreneurship class at ASU and now here we are almost a...

July 13, 2009
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Bump: Getting on the Ballot in NYC

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette released our fourth game in our Knight-funded game series this week. Bump, which revisits the maze theme from our Budget Maze sends players through a whole new labyrinth: ballot access. If you can't imagine how ballot access is even remotely interesting, I suggest playing the game! Seriously: we knew we wanted to do two things: to build a game that would stay relevant through the New York City campaign season and to find a topic that would fit nicely into the existing code base for one of our earlier games. Ballot access is an important and relatively obtuse...

July 8, 2009
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ReportingOn 2.0 Launches Next Generation of Backchannel for Your Beat

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions. And answers. It's still the backchannel for your beat, but it's an absolute re-imagining of the network. For those of you who haven't been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it's a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source. (You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts right here at IdeaLab.) The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that...

July 2, 2009
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Knight Rewards On-the-Spot Competitors at MIT Meetup

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last Thursday, I returned to Moscow from the Future of News and Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass. Organized by the MIT Center of Future Civic Media and the Knight Foundation, this is the annual meeting where all the Knight News Challenge Winners discuss the future of civic media and talk about the digital tools to build local communities. This year, nine new exciting projects joined this community of innovators, raising the total of Knight News Challenge projects to 45. The conference was also a good chance for the past Knight News Challenge winners to talk about their progress on...

July 1, 2009
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Printcasting Goes National, Partners With MediaNews Group

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

June 28, 2009
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'Alive in Tehran' Lets Iranian Citizens Report Through Voicemail

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

June 24, 2009
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An Update on ReportingOn 2.0 Development

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's an eight-minute tour of ReportingOn 2.0, as it stood on our development server on Tuesday June 17, 2009. I'm extremely psyched to report that we're on track for a July 1 launch of the second phase of this Knight News Challenge funded project. As a quick refresher, ReportingOn 1.0 launched back in October 2008, as a rather Twitter-like backchannel for beat reporters to connect based on common interests. Some pieces of the first iteration worked out well, and some of them -- well, we learned a lot. What's next? Launching version 2.0 on July 1, releasing the open source...

June 19, 2009
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What Are The New Obligations Of Readers?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago, I was reading an interesting story about the state of the Columbia Journalism School that appeared on the New York Magazine website. In short, the story tried to examine concerns about how well Columbia was making the transition to the digital journalism era. After reading the story, I dutifully tweeted a link to it to those following me through my Next Newsroom account: Columbia J-School struggles to adapt to the digital age: http://is.gd/mY0s "F--- new media," says one prof. A short time later, I received this reply from ajsundby: @nextnewsroom That @nymag post has many reporting...

June 17, 2009
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Twittering Away the Jobs of Journalists

How My 6-Year-Old Became a Citizen Journalist

Jon Steward did a funny bit last night, referencing how the major news networks were forced to rely on the "hearsay" of Twitter and Facebook postings to understand the events unfolding in Iran. But with the State Department requesting that the good folks at Twitter delay their scheduled site maintenance to keep Tweets flowinng from Iran, you know we have turned a corner. So in all seriousness, in the era of twittering and crowdsourced journalism, are journalists themselves still relevant? Obviously I am not the first person to ask this - or to piss people off by asking it again....

June 17, 2009
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by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been involved in the social media revolution for years now, having started "citizen media" brands like Bakotopia that depend completely on social networking and user-contributed content, and various community tools in the late 1990s at AOL that opened media participation up to the average Joe. But it wasn't until a wave of tornadoes went through my hometown of Denver this week that I realized just how far the revolution has come. A confluence of inexpensive, accessible consumer technology, and microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, has lowered the barriers of entry so far to make me think we're witnessing...

June 15, 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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Citizen Journalism Networks Stepping Up Editorial Standards

by David Cohn

I tend to avoid the "professional vs. amateur journalism" debate, saying "I have constructive criticisms for both sides." As we've hit a flash point for traditional news organizations, the evolution of citizen journalism networks like NowPublic, AllVoices and others may shed light on how the media space will resolve. Perhaps the two "opposites" will meet somewhere in the middle or, as I suspect, find out that they are more alike than they ever thought. Recent news in the space has included Orato and Ground Report making shifts to require higher editorial standards in the submissions they accept and publish. Alfred...

June 10, 2009
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To Save Journalism We Need More than New Software Programs

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the recent edition of Times Magazine Matt Vilano looks at the role computer nerds can play in saving journalism. The piece details the forward looking work of the Knight Foundation and allied journalism schools like Northwestern's Medill, which have created specialized degrees in journalism for software programmers, in order to find solutions to the crisis in journalism. The assumption is that whiz kid programmers are going to develop software, like Everyblock, that will make journalism both relevant and financially solvent in the age of the Internet. While this article is definitely worth a read, and there are some important...

June 8, 2009
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How Video Volunteers Improved Women's Rights, Sanitation in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do you teach creativity and critical thinking to people from very disadvantaged communities, with little formal education? Doing this is a major goal of Video Volunteers' work in training community producers. If organizations don't develop these training tools, the world could find itself in a situation where technology allows the poor to produce content, but the vast expressive potential this could release is still left untapped. VV gives writing exercises to community producers to help them develop their ability to think through an argument. I am sharing below two recent pieces of writing by community producers. These were written...

June 7, 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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Help Me Investigate: Paul Bradshaw on Crowdsourcing Investigative Reporting

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On June 1, Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog and Birmingham City University in the U.K. announced that a project he's been working on for 18 months called Help Me Investigate won funding to build a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism. I spoke with Paul via Skype about the goals of the project, the nature of the funding, and what he calls "slow journalism." You can find Paul on Twitter or follow the project's progress at the Help Me Investigate blog if you have questions for him, or leave a comment here....

June 3, 2009
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Making Uruguay's 300,000 Laptops Count - Part I

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Engineering a single laptop to serve the educational needs of young students throughout the developing world is no easy feat. Designers at MIT's Media Lab needed to keep the cost of the machine well below $200, and yet it required many of the same features that owners of traditional laptops have come to expect: a wireless internet connection, USB ports, a color display, a built-in webcam, and a processor powerful enough to record and render video files. There were also special needs to take into account: a durable case that wouldn't crack when dropped, a waterproof keyboard designed for young...

June 3, 2009
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Community Journalism in Times of Economic Crisis

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Media Mobilizing Project recently started a new initiative: Community Journalism in Times of Economic Crisis. The initiative is a response to both the economic crisis, which is hitting Philadelphians hard, and the growing problems with the for-profit journalism model, which is making it difficult for local newspapers to cover stories about the struggles of everyday people during the economic downturn. The goal of this project is to report on and collect the real stories of Philadelphia and beyond on MMP's community blog, so we can begin to get a picture of the economic crisis from the ground up. Here is...

May 28, 2009
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YouTube Orchestra Brings Together Musicians Around the World

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Well, it's Susan Boyle again singing "Now you say you're lonely," being not at all lonely with her 61 million YouTube viewers. That number makes the appealing British singer 61 times more popular than the YouTube Symphony Orchestra Global Mash-up musicians with their 1.1 million views. But the YouTube Symphony, a unique experiment uniting musicians from around the world, may be the one to watch (you can view the video embedded below). Ms. Boyle is singing a jazz standard and the YouTube Orchestra is playing the Internet Symphony #1 Eroica composed and conducted by the Chinese maestro Tan Dun. Both...

May 28, 2009
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Open Media Project Sprints to Half-Way Point

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With two months remaining in the first half of our Knight-funded Open Media Project, we've got a busy few weeks ahead. Last month, we brought many of Drupal's top video and media developers together with the staff from the 7 OMP Beta-Test sites for the Open Media Camp in Denver. Next week, we're presenting the model at SCAN NATOA, hoping our user-automated model can be part of the solution for the endangered status of public access in LA. The following week, its up to Davis Media Access, where we'll assist them in the implementation of the Open Media tools. In...

May 15, 2009
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How Crowdfunding at Spot.us Has Worked -- and Fallen Short

by David Cohn

It has been a year since Spot.Us was officially announced as a project and six months since our website launched. So it is time to reflect back on what we have accomplished, where we have succeeded and failed. It is amazing what can happen in six months! It is far easier to look at one's own project, their baby, and gleefully point out where it has surpassed expectations. Don't worry, I will probably do that in this post. At the same time, however, I feel an obligation, perhaps with an extra critical eye, to point out where it can improve....

May 12, 2009
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Bringing Hyper-Local, Citizen-Driven News to South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Is hyper-local journalism interesting enough to engage its own audience? And is the prospect of being more "in the know," and more connected and more involved in one's community, attractive enough to inspire people to take the time out to do citizen journalism? The old adage that "all news is local" does hold a great deal of truth. News can be locally generated or outside news can be made local. The implications of any big news story - like H1N1 virus, a.k.a. swine flu - can almost always be localized to create stories about how this impacts on you, where...

May 8, 2009
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The ReportingOn Roadshow: Feedback and Notes from San Jose and Philadelphia

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been a busy few weeks for ReportingOn, with development of Phase 2 continuing behind the scenes, and a lot of public conversation about the network's start and continuation as I've traveled to San Jose and Philadelphia in recent days. In San Jose, I gave a short talk on ReportingOn as part of my requirements at San José State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communications, where I've now finished up a graduate degree. The audience, mostly made up of my fellow grad students and the faculty, had some great questions and feedback for me, much of it focused on...

May 6, 2009
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Rethinking Community Information Needs

The Bustling Tech Scene at the Russian Internet Forum

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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by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am entering the large movie theatre hall where the conference dedicated to the social networks is just about to start. A prominent web expert is commenting on the Russian President's decision to launch a Livejournal account and the first post on the Internet development in Russia. Someone is talking about the recent You Tube Success of Susan Boyle and the hot-spot detecting WiFi sneakers invented by the Canadian designer Stefan Dukaczewski. The atmosphere is properly wired. Six panelists representing the leading Russian media outlets are about to report on how social networks are being used by their marketing departments...

May 2, 2009
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Maps for Social Change and Community Involvement

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

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

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

April 21, 2009
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MTV Iggy and Community Video Coming Together

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers has partnered with MTV Iggy to produce videos in Kashmir about life in the refugee camps of Jammu. Here's a link to one of the videos, about a boy who watched his entire family be slaughtered: mtviggy.com | desi MTV igg is a new channel/show of MTV that is focused on Diaspora youth. The partnership unfolded as follows: in December, I did a small fundraiser in NY for Video Volunteers. At events like that, when people as ask how they can help and what we need, one of our appeals is, 'we need connections with the mainstream tv...

April 17, 2009
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Cultivating a Community Garden, not a Public Toilet

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently attended the Integrated Media Association conference in Atlanta and sat in on a panel of web content providers addressing public radio folks about online content. Jesse Thorne moderated a great discussion about how to provide content your audience wants to hear, how to listen and how to foster online communities around your content. Online community building is of particular interest to our project as it is a key feature Radio Engage will provide. The Sound of Young America Merlin Mann made the following observation about how to handle community and conversations: Creating community is not as simple as...

April 16, 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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As Newspapers Implode, Diverse Voices Move Online

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

April 1, 2009
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Social Networking and Political Movements

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

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

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

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

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 31, 2009
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How Many Homegrown News Stories Are in Your Daily Paper?

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Let's try a simple count of locally produced news stories in your daily newspaper. Yes, the print edition. The whole news system feeds off the flow of newspaper content, right? Lots of people asking, what's going to replace newspapers if they can't make it? Expecting amateurs to step in is dumb, and it won't happen. But before we can face this matter of "replace" head on we at least need some current numbers. Let's find out what the printed newspaper on the local level has been able to deliver recently, so we know in rough, round terms what we have...

March 27, 2009
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Peace Blogging Along the Colombia-Venezuela Border

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

View Larger Map Map of El Nula, a small village in the Venzuelan state of Apure along the Colombian border. One of the world's lesser-known conflicts has endured for over a decade along the Colombia-Venezuela border. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants' latest report: Colombian guerrillas and paramilitaries, together with the Fuerzas Bolivarianas de Liberación (FBL), a Venezuelan irregular armed group, exercised de facto control over the border states of Táchira, Apure, and Zulia, where most Colombian asylum seekers arrived. Kidnappings, contract killings, forced recruitment, and arms smuggling were common in the border areas. During the year,...

March 26, 2009
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ReportingOn: Phrased in the Form of a Question

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I last wrote here to report on ReportingOn's progress, I talked about the work I was doing with my development and design team to define the terms of the RO pitch. A dozen or so whiteboards later, the Lion Burger team is actively putting together mockups and the beginnings of the database for what we're calling "Phase 2" of the project. And it's a huge rethinking of what a "back channel for your beat" looks like. While it's been easy to tag the initial version of ReportingOn as simply "Twitter for journalists," journalists already have a Twitter. It's called...

March 26, 2009
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School Media Clubs and the Question of Incentives for Citizen Journalism

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Getting your photo published by CNN, or having the BBC follow up on a story lead you've emailed or sent in by short message text (or Twitter) is often its own reward. Whatever your motivation might have been - civic duty, anger, impressing your friends, ambition - it's a kick for many just to see their name in pixels. But what if your publication is not as famous as these giant attractors of User Generated Content? Or if the news sent in by citizen journalists is only going to be published on-line in a small town web site? Is the...

March 26, 2009
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Second Implementation of the Open Media Project Complete

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ten members of the Deproduction team traveled to Austin this month to implement the Open Media tools at the second of 6 Beta sites, ChannelAustin. We traveled down in two RV's and scheduled the visit to coincide with SXSW, where we hosted a core conversation as part of the interactive festival. Austin is the first of the large Access Stations that we've worked with in this Knight News Challenge project, and it presented a whole new slate of challenges in comparison with the comparatively simpler implementation at Urbana Public TV. The entire process was documented, and the new ChannelAustin dev...

March 24, 2009
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Good News as a Business Model?

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

In his "Are We Home Alone?" OpEd today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says "I've never talked to more people in one week who told me, "You know, I listen to the news, and I get really depressed." I feel the same way. It's something I've wondered about for years...why people are willing to accept a constant barrage of bad news? And not just recent Chicken Little reporting about the economic meltdown, but the endless reports on murders, shootings, natural disasters, bombings, etc. Not that we should ignore the real state of affairs in the world, but if you...

March 22, 2009
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by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 18, 2009
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Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 17, 2009
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Ease of Use Matters

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We spend a lot of time talking about why people don't comment more on Gotham Gazette stories. By "a lot of time," I actually mean about 20 minutes every three weeks, but nonetheless as a project with a mission to improve public discourse and engage New Yorkers in public policy conversations, we gauge our impact in part by how many people are reading and responding to our reporting. When popular blogs reference our reporting we see lively and contentious conversations. But rarely do we get much discussion on our own site. This week, though, I made an interesting discovery. After...

March 11, 2009
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The Community Radio Movement in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 10, 2009
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5 New Rising Voices Grantees in Ivory Coast, Liberia, China, Mongolia, and Yemen

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In January we received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGO's all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities - long ignored by both traditional and new media - to the conversational web. Of the 270 project proposals, the following five are most representative of the innovation, purpose and goodwill that Rising Voices aims to support. It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects.

March 9, 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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Change Tracker

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 6, 2009
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Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Two of Four)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

(Part one.) Henry Jenkins: Thanks for this really rich provocation, Dayna. These are questions which we need to be discussing as a society and they should be central to our understanding of "civic media," "social media," whatever we want to call it. As a media scholar, my first response to any request to develop new "tools" is to ask what we are really looking for. As I review your language in the closing paragraph, you variously call for "media technology," "new spaces," "tools and platforms," "venues and mechanisms." This range of terms suggests the degree to which it is not...

March 4, 2009
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Using Social Media in the Newsroom

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm working with the Poynter Institute to put together an online class for senior newspaper executives on how to use social media in the newsroom. From what I can discern, it's one of the least understood concepts in traditional media. For the Knight Digital Media Center program conducted through the Poynter, I'll likely be giving a webinar and taking part in online instruction around how journalists are already using the tools of social media. So I'd love to see some specific examples of how you're using social media (aside from blogs), or examples of how other sites are using...

March 4, 2009
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Army of Geeks

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As communications change and the demand grows for local networks, our mission becomes clear: we are being called upon to organize an army of geeks to accomplish the tasks that lie ahead. The Background Joaquin Alvarado presented the plan for National Public Lightpath to public broadcasters at the Integrated Media Association conference last week in Atlanta. He called on the audience to actively build partnerships in their local communities and apply for economic stimulus grant money to make the network a reality. This is a common goal to be shared by NPR, PBS, CPB and all the stations. Doc Searls...

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

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 25, 2009
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Social Networks for Doing Good

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Rising Voices we are getting ready to announce the newest grantee projects. We received over 270 proposals from non-profits, NGOs, and activists from around the world who want to use citizen media tools to bring new and under-represented voices to the conversational web. In addition to seeking small amounts of funding for digital cameras, internet access, and related workshop costs, many of the proposals we received also expressed a desire to connect with like-minded groups, reach new funders, and spread information about the work they are doing. Fortunately, a number of social and project-based networking platforms have arisen over...

February 25, 2009
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How Can Disadvantaged Citizens Learn to Be Journalists?

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do I even have the gall to write here? I do not have any special knowledge of the media to impart. I am not a journalist with a degree or newspaper experience. I am just an everyday person who has realized... I have to be a journalist. This might be a strange dilemma, but it is one that has become increasingly common. Many everyday people have looked at their communities and tried to answer for the lack of information that exists. This is especially important when such a lack is a root cause at the persistence of many other...

February 22, 2009
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Turning Print Upside Down and Inside Out

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Scripps executive and media consultant Jay Small has a shout-out to Printcasting in his Small Initiatives blog. Here's what he says about Printcasting in a post about decapitalizing printing. "Watch Dan Pacheco's Printcasting developments closely. My read: This project attempts to cut cost, waste and inflexibility out of producing printed periodicals, while adding customization and speed to market for publishers of most any scale. I don't know if it will work -- Pacheco doesn't either, I'd guess. But it represents a creative, logical and valiant effort, with realistic chances of success." And later ... "I imagine, therefore, that Pacheco's experiments...

February 20, 2009
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Janet Robinson's Remarks at TimesOPEN

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, the New York Times is hosting TimesOPEN, their first developer conference. We're now listening to tech book publisher Tim O'Reilly, but just a few minutes ago Janet Robinson, President and CEO of the New York Times Company, concluded her remarks. As a nonjournalist, I never developed the skill to take shorthand, but I did my best to transcribe her remarks: We're encouraging you today to be part of our past, part of our present, and definitely part of our future...Today we are asking you to be part of our future and to shine a spotlight on what our future...

February 20, 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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It's 'Bring a Professor Night' for a Conversation About Journalism Education

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This Sunday, February 22, at 8 p.m. EST, it's "Bring a Professor Night" at CollegeJourn, a weekly live online chat about student media and journalism education. I spoke with Suzanne Yada today about the chat, why it's so important to bring the faculty to the table, and what she thinks they can learn from their students. Suzanne is one of the CollegeJourn moderators, and a student at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University. (Full disclosure: I'm still finishing up my graduate degree in the same department.) (Help transcribe or translate this video at dotSub.)...

February 18, 2009
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Spot.Us Deals with the Good and Bad of Limitations

by David Cohn

Long-time readers of Spot.Us updates will know I am a big believer in staying agile and iterative. Take small bites, chew well, rinse and repeat. With that in mind - I am "en route" to visit my developers to do another "dev blitz" to try and get Spot.Us as close to a 2.0 version as I can with limited means. As I've said before - the current version of the site contains about 1/4th of what we've designed (see full but outdated designs here). We have been limited in resources so I've constantly had to pick and choose what features...

February 16, 2009
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BarCamp NewsInnovation Chicago: Join the Conversation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you've been following my posts to this blog, you know that I'm always interested in exploring ways to connect journalists and technology professionals. The Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarships are one approach. So is the idea of a "computational journalism" conference like the one held last year at Georgia Tech. (Early indications are that the second conference will be held this fall.) Here's a new opportunity: BarCamp NewsInnovation, a series of user-generated conferences focusing on the future of journalism. The next conference in the series will be held Saturday, Feb. 21, at the Medill School newsroom space in downtown...

February 15, 2009
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ReportingOn is Back in the Lab, Defining the Terms of the Pitch

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

[I'm going back to the proverbial drawing board for ReportingOn, working with the development and design team at Lion Burger to build the next iteration of the backchannel for your beat from scratch, more or less. Here's some of what we're talking about in front of the whiteboard...] I've been pitching ReportingOn using the same set of phrases for more than a year now, but until I sat down with my new development team earlier this month, it hadn't occurred to me that the entire scope of the project was actually encapsulated in those little slogans. For example: "It's the...

February 14, 2009
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Сthulhu, Dr. Zoidberg & the Teacher of English to Symbolize the Olympics

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 13, 2009
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Balance the Budget: Gotham Gazette Game 3

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a series of false starts on an energy consumption game we decided to skip ahead to a timely game of balancing the budget . The game is actually a reprise of a popular budget balancing game we created in 2003 -- we're regularly asked for the source code for that game, and while we do have it, it is a bear of a maze of a mess that no self-respecting programmer would want to try to wade through in search of numbers and texts to change. For this game, we did use Flash, which made it significantly easier to...

February 12, 2009
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Convergence and Disturbance: New Media, Networked Publics, and Pakistan

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 4, 2009
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News Mixer Options: Launch a Site, Use the Code or Be Inspired

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What's next for News Mixer? The demonstration Web site, launched in December by a team of Medill students, shows off some interesting new ideas for engaging people in online conversations around news. The site has attracted quite a bit of attention from people interested in the future of journalism, social media and new technology. More than just attention, in fact. There are now at least two separate organizations actively working with News Mixer's open-source code. One is the (Knight News Challenge-funded) Populous Project, which announced recently that it will incorporate News Mixer's functionality into the Populous open-source publishing platform for...

February 2, 2009
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Voces Bolivianas Makes 'Web 2.0 for Everyone'

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Despite Bolivia's low internet penetration (among the lowest in Latin America at 4.4% compared to neighboring Chile's 36.1%, according to El Deber), the citizen media project and Rising Voices grantee Bolivian Voices is determined to spread Web 2.0 well beyond Bolivia's connected elite. Their latest initiative, Web 2.0 for Everyone, began Friday with a public event in Cochabamba followed by a day of intensive workshops aimed at teaching more Bolivians how to make their voices heard and gain social capital from tools like Twitter, blogs, and various photo- and video-sharing websites. Friday's public event began with an introduction to the fundamentals of Web 2.0 by Anne Arrázola. Hugo Miranda then moderated a panel on the history of Voces Bolivianas and their training workshops.

February 1, 2009
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Philadelphia's Community News Portals

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As part of Our City Our Voices, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) in partnership with Juntos has launched a new drupal based participatory website. The Our City Our Voices portal is part of a network of community portals MMP has developed to create dynamic spaces for communities across the city to tell and share stories and get information. The aim of the network of community portals is to develop new spaces for folks disenfranchised by the digital age to have a place to speak and listen. The project entails 4 steps: 1) find and distribute low cost internet access to...

January 30, 2009
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Partnerships to Watch (and a Crowdsourcing Project I'm Envying)

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A small local website from Brooklyn has partnered with NBC to build neighborhood pages for a handful of NBC markets. I haven't followed Outside.in for more than stoop sales (which is New Yorkerese for garage sales or yard sales since most New Yorkers have neither yards nor garages), but it looks like they've taken up EveryBlock's approach to local news aggregation as well, though they want posts explicitly geo-tagged for their maps. Speaking of EveryBlock, they recently announced that they're working with the New York Times to track Times reporting on political districts. Presumably they'll be taking advantage of the...

January 29, 2009
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Protests in Madagascar and the Importance of Citizen Journalism Training

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The recent coverage of Tropical Storm Eric, Cyclone Fanele, and the ongoing protests and political turmoil in Madagascar by local citizen journalists reveals the importance of 1.) citizen journalism training programs, 2.) the translation and contextualization of local content for a global audience, and 3.) networks of media groups so that local voices can be amplified and understood when breaking news hits.

January 28, 2009
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Online-News@ reborn as News-Online@ -- E-mail List Nostalgia or the Best Way to Interact?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As spaces for those interested in online news like WiredJournalists.com and Poynter's online groups go completely web-centric, my heart pangs for the simple e-mail list. Something I can easily read and post to in those rare idle moments in transit on my handheld or from the place I still spent the majority of my time online - conveniently from my desktop e-mail. On a whim, I decided to contact those who posted to the Online-News e-mail list (Steve Outing started it way back in the early 1990s) in the months before it was retired. Poynter's moved on with their conversion...

January 27, 2009
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The Opportunity of Public Radio

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today I write about public radio, its potential and its promise. I am not an Internet or social media native. I am 40 years old and remember using our encyclopedia set for school papers and had a well-worn library card. I am an Internet and social media enthusiast. Recently I was helping my 10-year old daughter with a research paper on Nelson Mandela. We started by reading the Wikipedia overview page. While it provided a good overview, it did not reveal the passion that Nelson Mandela inspired. After a bit of sleuthing, I discovered a page on NPR.org, titled Mandela:...

January 27, 2009
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Building a Social Entrepreneurial Garage Startup in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

January 24, 2009
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Each Culture Should Communicate News Their Way

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the "Community Video Unit" has lots of potential for great programming on arts and culture. But rural Rajasthan is a deeply conservative and feudal place, where the women are veiled, and there is very high incidence of child marriage and female foeticide. My hat goes off to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, the NGO who has set up this Community Video Unit...

January 24, 2009
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Printcasting.com Helps Spark a Global Movement

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ever since the Knight News Challenge was first announced in 2006, I've been fascinated and inspired by its open nature. While the primary goal of the contest is to fund great ideas for new local news and information projects, it has a larger mission. It also requires those projects to eventually be released under open source licenses. To me this has always meant that News Challenge projects have a responsibility to a larger community of people who will one day repeat our successes in their communities.

January 23, 2009
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Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part One)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the pleasures of living and teaching at MIT for the past 20 years has been the chance to build ongoing relations with a fascinating cast of characters, many of whom have been regulars at the MIT Communication Forum events that are run by my colleague, David Thorburn. These events have attracted people from across the campus, from neighboring universities, and from the greater Cambridge area, many of whom have been coming regularly for a decade or more to listen to smart, citizenly discussions about democracy, new media, and public life. The Center for Future Civic Media partners regularly...

January 21, 2009
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Rising Voices: 2008 in Review

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2007 Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices aimed at bringing under-represented voices from the developing world to the social web, got its feet on the ground. 2008 was a year of scaling up and defining processes. In 2009 we plan on becoming more inclusive to build a global resource and knowledge network centered around citizen media training.

January 15, 2009
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Gates Foundation Invests $2 Million in Chilean Social Web

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

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

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

January 13, 2009
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Unrest in Oakland: Who's On The Case?

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My friend and fellow citizen-journalism thinker Amy Gahran once asked, "Was Zapruder a journalist?" Zapruder's home-movie camera captured the famous footage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, TX. If your answer to that question is yes, then there were an untold number of journalists on the Oakland BART train platform on New Year's Day, where they pointed increasingly ubiquitous pocket-size video cameras toward Oscar Grant and BART transit police officer Johannes Mehserle. The videos these onlookers took show the chilling final interaction between Grant and Mehserle, which left Grant dead, and Oakland in a...

January 9, 2009
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News Mixer Generates Widespread Interest

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since we announced the launch of News Mixer, a Web application developed by Medill master's students to demonstrate new ways of fostering conversations around news, the site has gotten a lot of positive feedback. News Mixer is the final project for six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending Medill on Knight News Challenge scholarships. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system. The class officially ended Dec. 12, but the students and I have...

January 5, 2009
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Community-Owned Media: What Does It Mean?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many people today who work in social change are convinced that the typical 'top down' approach to development, where bureaucrats and international agencies design large-scale social programs and then impose them on millions of poor people, isn't working. Instead, they favor the idea of 'community-led development', in which communities themselves design the social programs, and interventions only arise from the stated needs of the communities. The goals of all these programs is the idea of eventual 'community ownership' of programs themselves and of the social change process. It means that communities won't only participate, but they will be able to...

December 24, 2008
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End of the Year Radical Transparency for Spot.Us

by David Cohn

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

December 22, 2008
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Ethnic Hyperlocal News Network Launched in L.A.

Language as a Bridge to Inclusion

A project billed as the "first-ever online network of ethnic citizen journalists" was launched last week in Los Angeles. Called LA Beez, the effort is a project of New America Media with support from the Ford Foundation. It brings together six L.A.-area ethnic media outlets with the goal of providing a more diverse representation of views. The participating local publications include: Arab-American Affairs Magazine, Asian Journal, Carib Press, Impulso, Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, and the Los Angeles Watts Times. Despite a healthy appetite in general for locally relevant news and information in ethnic communities across the U.S., it will...

December 22, 2008
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by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deaf people can participate in citizen journalism through written language tools. Given this, why do I believe that using American Sign Language videos are an essential tool to provide them access to journalism? For those who are confronted by the 'digital divide' there are often seemingly hidden elements that cause their lack of access. With any technology or system, there are built-in usability assumptions, including those that are taken for granted so much that they are not even acknowledged. For deaf people, most digital technology remains accessible to them as sound is rarely used as a primary interface element. Yet...

December 21, 2008
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Interactive Journalism

by Angela Powers
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism hosted an informational meeting with local elected public officials on Wednesday, November 19, to showcase VoxPop, an interactive tool for civic engagement, developed by journalism students through the Knight News Challenge grant. The school is collaborating with the Manhattan Mercury to launch and research VoxPop. The software innovation allows area citizens to contact elected officials regarding local issues in the news. The AQ Miller School of Journalism at Kansas State University was among a consortium of universities awarded a $235,000 grant by the Knight Foundation to develop new ways and technologies that can help...

December 18, 2008
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Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect. But perhaps we shouldn't use the J-word. The precipitous slide of journalism from iconic cultural power status to cultural irrelevance during the past decade is stunning. When the Shorenstein Center's Prof. Tom Patterson told his board last month that the nation's premiere think tank of, by and for top-notch...

December 18, 2008
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'News Mixer' Offers Better Engagement

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project -- six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending the Medill School on Knight News Challenge scholarships -- set out this fall to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults. Here's what they came up with: News Mixer. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system. News Mixer is already getting some positive buzz thanks to some Twittering last week after Team Crunchberry presented...

December 16, 2008
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Study on Digital Inclusion and Civic Engagement

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hey folks, I wanted to tell you all about a study I am wrapping up with Peter Funke, Dan Berger and a few other folks in Philadelphia. We received a grant from the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC) "Necessary Knowledge for Public Sphere" initiative to study the Media Mobilizing Project(MMP) and their use of new media and digital inclusion to promote civic engagement in disenfranchised communities across Philadelphia To offer some background, MMP was launched in 2005 as a strategic initiative to partner with local organizations, facilitating grassroots media production to advance socio-economic justice through the (self) empowerment of...

December 16, 2008
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ReportingOn: Changing Horses Mid-Stream is Easy When You're the Horse

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

DIY development, design, community management, and marketing isn't for me (this year). This is an update about what's going on with ReportingOn, which is to say, there's not much going on with ReportingOn. For now. My Knight News Challenge-funded project to connect journalists on the same topical beat with their peers launched on October 1. I continued development work on it through the month of October, and then was completely tackled by a pack of wild bears known as my day job, life at home, and a need for some brief moments of sanity in between the rest. Now that...

December 12, 2008
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Why Spot.Us Should Have Used Drupal (and Why It Doesn't Matter)

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's the one that got away. With many Knight News Challenge projects using Drupal, the dedicated Knight Drupal Initiative (reopening after DrupalCon in March), and Drupal sites for the Knight Foundation's own community, David Cohn must just be deficient in groupthink to have chosen to develop Spot.Us in Ruby on Rails. Despite my bias, the "Why Spot.Us Should Have Used Drupal" title is tongue-in-cheek. I'm pretty sure David Cohn (who is smarter, better looking, and always better dressed than me) and the Spot.Us development team will get the following enhancements in place quickly. Especially since, when it comes to winning...

December 12, 2008
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Inspiration: The Secret Sauce for Printcasting

by Mary Lou Fulton
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

December 9, 2008
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Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Politics to Poetry

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Go to Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog and you don't know if you're going to find a post on politics, poetry, the NFL or the world of videogames. A journalist who has worked at Time Magazine and the Village Voice, Coates started his own blog after being laid off from Time Magazine. Then, back in August, the author of the recently released "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood," was added to the magazine's roster of bloggers at the Atlantic.com. There he continues to interweave culture and politics in posts that ruminate on topics ranging from...

December 8, 2008
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RadioEngage on the Move

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We were awarded this grant as technologists to build a tool for public radio. We are fulfilling this grant as social media-infused journalistic technologists. The road has been bumpy.

December 7, 2008
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Extract: Civic Defense 2.0

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

December 7, 2008
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Answering the Info Needs of Non-Geographic Communities

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There has been much said about the idea of empowering local communities through citizen journalism. But when I view this within the context of minority communities, focusing solely on geographic communities is a mistake. Lets focus on the Deaf community as an example of this situation. The number of totally deaf people is on the order of less then 0.1 percent of the United States population. This number by far is much too little to make any real impact on society at large, and usually means that even a even a large city has a comparatively small and scattered deaf...

December 7, 2008
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The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Social software -- technology that enables interactions among multiple people -- has existed for almost a half century now. (Clay Shirky, in a widely linked essay on this topic, traces the roots of social software to the PLATO system, built at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s.) I'm using the term "social software" because the more popular "social media" increasingly feels like an oxymoron. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg aren't media. Media refers to one-way communication -- like publishing or broadcasting. Today's social sites are, fundamentally, computer programs -- software that determines what users can (and can't)...

December 2, 2008
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Tough Economic Times Put New Spin on Beanstockd Game

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's official: the US economy is in recession. The reality of our current economic crisis has hit corporations hard and is now starting to affect the American consumer. Reports on this year's Black Friday show that the annual post-Thanksgiving shopper has a new attitude, one that is cautious about what and how much is bought. According to an article in the New York Times friday&st=cse, "this year there were more shoppers than shopping bags. Even many die-hard Black Friday shoppers -- the ones who camp out on sidewalks overnight to be first through the doors -- said they were cutting...

November 30, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 12
Wisdom In Characters

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I read Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. On my Sony PRS-505 Reader, thanks to Ricardo. On my three-hour rides through the mountains between Sarajevo and Tuzla, thanks to the American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Also in bed, when I unwind, before I'd fall asleep, in my room in Grbavica, without Internet, thanks to God, who lets me wake up offline in every way, on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, so that I might devote my best intensity to my life's quest. I'm discovering, and embracing, that God is alone.I write you The Includer. As I write, perhaps you, my reader, will...

November 28, 2008
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Populous Code Released

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I have an exciting, albeit brief, announcement to make about our progress on the Populous project (formerly known as the Community News Network). Today we publicly released all of our code, in alpha, on the social coding site GitHub. The entirely of our progress so far is there, which at this point is an extremely powerful and flexible content management system. We've released it under an open source BSD license, and highly encourage anyone interested to check it out and contribute. We're coding Populous in Django, a Python rapid development framework specifically designed to quickly build robust news sites. So...

November 24, 2008
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Two Weeks, Two Stories, Too Early For A Victory Dance

by David Cohn

It has been two weeks since the "official" launch of Spot.Us. I'm happy with its progress, but I remain unsatisfied. The new media hype has been great. I'm truly honored at how much attention Spot.Us has received, the optimistic and hopeful remarks, the young journalists with questions, etc. But that will die down. With the initial hype of our launch we've managed to fund two different stories: "Return of the Hooverville" and "When the Longevity Revolution Hits Your Town." Together they represent $1,550 donated by 53 people who gave an average of $29 each (some of that money was raised...

November 24, 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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The Pitch: Bringing Together Seattle's Best Media Minds

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

So here's The Pitch: Put together some of the smartest, most engaged, passionate thinkers about the changing media landscape in a room, buy them a few drinks, and let the conversation flow. That's the premise behind a series of meet-ups in Seattle, put together by Jason Preston, a social media consultant with the Parnassus Group. Jason blogs at Eat Sleep Publish along with Mónica Guzmán, a reporter and blogger at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (Here's a BeatBlogging.org interview Pat Thornton did with Mónica about cultivating conversation.) If the premise of The Pitch sounds familiar, check out the Copycamp archives for ideas...

November 20, 2008
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Student R&D Can Show the Way for Media

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Placeblogger, a Knight News Challenge winner from 2007, has launched a new design and announced that it is now indexing more than 3,000 "placeblogs" -- Web sites that deliver, as founder Lisa Williams puts it, "an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time ... about the lived experience of a place." The new design served to remind me -- yet again -- of how much has happened in online media in the past few years. About 4 1/2 years ago, I directed a team of Medill master's students who explored the potential of what they called "hyperlocal...

November 17, 2008
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Toward a National Journalism Foundation

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

November 17, 2008
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Stack Overflow Sets an Example for News Commenting Systems

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a poorly-kept secret: I hang out with Web developers all day. And by their nature, Web developers tend to be Web savvy, and Web natives. Which means they are already using and hacking and rebuilding the next big thing online before most of us have ever laid our eyes on it. Like this one: Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a service where programmers can ask and answer questions. That's all. Not too complicated when you describe it that way. But hidden in that description is a valuable system of voting and rating, where users earn points (call it Karma...

November 14, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 10
Our Good Idea

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Includer grows wings. An idea can't fly on a single wing or even two or three. An idea soars when inspired from every angle. Just as a gangster's heart can't shut out love from all directions. Who among us can take credit for a miracle? It's the logic of the Glory of a greater Inspirer.I was disappointed that I didn't submit proposals to the HASTAC or Google calls for projects. I was simply overwhelmed with my new job, teaching algebra at the American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am delighted to learn that Ricardo championed the Includer with...

November 14, 2008
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Bloggers Demonstrate the Difference Diversity Makes

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

November 13, 2008
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Whither Online Social Networks?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My "innovation project" team of master's students at the Medill School is tackling two interesting challenges: (1) improving the tools available for online interaction around news (for instance, better ways of commenting) and (2) engaging young adults in local news. They've decided to take advantage of Facebook Connect in building a news-interaction site. This means Facebook users will be able to log in using their Facebook ID, and it also means that this ID will serve as their persistent identity on the site. Read/Write Web, one of my favorite sites/blogs, posted last week about Facebook Connect. The post points out...

November 10, 2008
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Twittering the Minnesota U.S. Senate Recount

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

November 6, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 9
Africans Want to Chat With You

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our scheduled chats are how we bridge single tasking and multitasking. ... Fred Kayiwa of Uganda staffs our chat room on Saturdays thanks to a $100 gift from St.Benedict the African's choir. We're taking our first steps to link Chicago and Africa with our chat room.

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

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

November 3, 2008
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The 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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The Includer
Episode 8
People Vs. Ideas

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Open culture is the interplay of open people rather than open ideas. I proposed an idea, but actually, I proposed to bring it to life. I and my team didn’t win funding to build Includers. Instead, I won the chance to blog about them at the PBS Idealab website. But what is the point of blogging about a one-year-old idea? My challenge is to link together those who care and bring to life something new. The challenge I bring to the Knight Foundation is to call for knights - for champions - for includers, rather than for ideas like the Includer.

November 1, 2008
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Not All Journalism Students Hip to Social Media

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Right now I'm attending a national conference in Kansas City (Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers) for student news organizations, and I must say I've been underwhelmed. There was a keynote yesterday afternoon from Rich Beckman, a professor at the University of Miami School of Communication. I think he started off strong, outlining where newspapers need to go on the Internet and mentioning the recent announcement from the Christian Science Monitor to go online only. Later in the speech (see attached YouTube video, recorded in very low light from my Flip Cam) he outlined how the Internet is changing things for...

October 31, 2008
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How Philanthropy, Education and Industry Can Partner

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project is now officially past the halfway point, and I'm getting a clearer picture of what our student team can accomplish in the remainder of the fall quarter at the Medill School. The students' vision is coalescing around a Web site that enables young adults to interact with news and information via different types of "comment structures," which we're defining as forms of user interaction. The features in the software they are developing are: integration with Facebook (using Facebook Connect), with the following results: Users can log in using their Facebook ID's and have their Facebook identity carry...

October 31, 2008
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The Role of Citizen Media in Ensuring Fair Elections

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times describing the fears some voters in Duval County, Florida have that their early votes will be lost and never counted. I found the article deeply disturbing. It wasn't because it surprised me that people fear their votes won't be counted (that fear has some precedent in Duval County, where 26,000 ballots were discarded in the 2000 election), but because it brought into focus for me the apprehensive feelings I've been having about the upcoming election. I have this nagging feeling that something . . . well, terrible . ....

October 30, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 7
Vote For Losers!

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

October 29, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 6
Help Room

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2008, Minciu Sodas was the online world's most responsive network for helping Kenyans during the post-election turmoil. At our chat room, we coordinated the flow of news from SMS and Skype and letters to wiki to Ushahidi and blogs and reporters. We organized response.

October 26, 2008
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Scaling the Beanstockd Game

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Beanstockd was initially tailored to a very specific population, and as we built out the game and shared the idea with fellow entrepreneurs we received some interesting ideas and feedback that led us to consider other verticals.

October 20, 2008
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The Five Biggest Barriers to Online Participation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Team Crunchberry -- so-called because we're thinking about Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home of a large Quaker Oats cereal factory responsible for the nickname "City of the Five Smells" -- has emerged from its ideation process with a core idea and a target audience. The six-student team has created three personas representing 20-34-year-olds in eastern Iowa, and is brainstorming what the barriers are that keep them from participating in online conversations related to news and information. The brainstorming process, in turn, has begun to yield some very interesting ideas for improving online-news conversation systems. Like many online news sites, the sites...

October 18, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 5
Hardship Letter

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Please think of him as your mother or father, or your grandmother or grandfather, who rely on your help to make sense of the mail they get, even more so when they are shocked, dismayed or confused. You are their shield, their sword, their justice, their advocate, their Includer. David and I share his hardship letter to Aurora Loan Services.

October 18, 2008
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Interactive Literacy

by Mitchel Resnick
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What does it mean to be truly literate with new media? Certainly, it means more than the ability to send email and browse websites. Recent commentaries on new media literacy have emphasized the importance of the ability to analyze media critically and the ability to participate actively in online communities. Those abilities are clearly important. But I feel these commentaries haven't paid enough attention to another important aspect of new media literacy: the ability to express oneself with new media. This aspect of literacy is sorely lacking in today's society: very few people are able to express themselves fluently with...

October 13, 2008
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Student Innovation Team Explores Needs of Young Adults

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project -- the innovation class that includes the first two Knight News Challenge programmer-journalists -- is moving forward rapidly. The six journalism master's students involved in the project started out exploring "conversations around news." As their instructor, I challenged them to build some kind of site or service that connects people to one another and to community news and information. After meeting with the staff of Gazette Communications (which, among other businesses, owns the daily newspaper and ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa), the class decided to target its work toward young adults, ages 20-35 in the Cedar...

October 13, 2008
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Can the Internet have a heart?

A Talk with the Creator of Drupal

I attended a conference on "Online Giving Marketplaces" at Stanford University this past week, which was a great gathering of online donation, volunteer, and social matchmaking sites like Kiva.org and GlobalGiving. The kind of organizations that are doing in the social service sector what sites like Prosper.com are doing in the commercial peer to peer space. One site among many worth checking out is ModestNeeds, which gives grants of up to $5,000 to average folks - for things like paying off overdue bills and rent, etc. In these challenging economic times it's a welcome and important service. One of the...

October 11, 2008
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by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

October 8, 2008
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One Week of ReportingOn, International Style

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

One week after launching ReportingOn in a public beta that's helping me prioritize features and fix bugs in my programming, there is one big surprise: The large international turnout. The Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking media blogosphere appears to be truly excited about the idea of Twitter para periodistas, even as I try to differentiate from Twitter as fast as I can. Pablo Mancini, interactive services manager at the beautifully designed El Comercio of Lima, Peru, interviewed me by e-mail yesterday. Rodrigo Orihuela handled the translation, so if your Spanish is up to the task, you can read the exchange posted on...

October 8, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 3
The Chain of Angels

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Includer is a tool for a solitary thinker. When we center our world on the solitary thinker, then we'll all be one, in life and death, in our evergrowth - our choice to grow forever, to live forever. Let's connect the scattered dots. David Ellison-Bey and I are still up. The police are still searching outside. They have the measuring tape out. A couple of hours ago we heard a crackly crackle of what I thought was fireworks, but David understood was a gunfight. I went outside when David alerted me to the police lights. I thought, I must...

October 7, 2008
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Medill Student Innovators Focus on Conversations Around News

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been almost a year and a half since a grant from the Knight Foundation allowed the Medill School to offer journalism master's program scholarships to experienced programmer-developers. Since then, on this Web site, I've been documenting the experience of the first two "programmer-journalists." Now things start to get interesting. For graduate students majoring in new media, Medill's one-year academic program ends with one of our "innovation project" classes. These are team-based classes in which the students are challenged to create a new digital or cross-media product. Sometimes these classes seek to apply proven technologies or business models to a...

October 5, 2008
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Denver Open Media Close to Selecting Beta Sites

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you know of a Community Technology Center, Public Access TV station, University Media Program, or other non-commercial, community media outlet who may be interested in participating, please invite them to apply at http://deproduction.org/ombeta.

October 5, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 2
Year 2

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

October 3, 2008
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South African Seniors Speak: Age Demands Action

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Originally published on Rising Voices. Which group is most affected by today's digital divide? The poor? Those who live in rural communities? The so-called Global South? Women? To a greater or lesser degree, they have all tended to benefit less from the advantages and opportunities afforded by the internet than, say, young men living in urban North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. But there is another demographic whose online exclusion trumps all others: the aged. According to a study by Jonathan Gardner and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, "almost three in five of the 18 to 24...

September 29, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 1
Sisterhood

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We all wish to thank Janet for her wonderful contribution written out on our behalf which first read exactly as if she was writing from our minds eyes.

September 28, 2008
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Are We Ready for Citizen Journateerism?