Idea Lab

Ten Points on Funding Citizen Media

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
1 comment

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
3 comments

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
2 comments

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
6 comments

For News Organizations, Transparency is the New Objectivity

Got a new way to talk green? Go digital.

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
6 comments

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
No comments

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
2 comments

Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 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
1 comment

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
1 comment

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
No comments

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
5 comments

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
No comments

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
1 comment

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
1 comment

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
2 comments

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
1 comment

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
No comments

The Leadership Vacuum in Journalism

IOC to Include Citizen Contributions with Virtual Olympic Congress

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
4 comments

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

August 4, 2009
1 comment

No Newspaper Bailouts without Civic Representation

The People Formerly Known as the Audience Need a New Name

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
7 comments

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
17 comments

Crowdsourcing Keeps Coming

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 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
No comments

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
4 comments

Bump: Getting on the Ballot in NYC

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 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
No comments

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
No comments

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
5 comments

Printcasting Goes National, Partners With MediaNews Group

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

June 28, 2009
No comments

'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
2 comments

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
1 comment

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
13 comments

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
7 comments

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
5 comments

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
No comments

Citizen Journalism Networks Stepping Up Editorial Standards

To Save Journalism We Need More than New Software Programs

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
7 comments

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
No comments

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
1 comment

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
6 comments

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
1 comment

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
1 comment

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
1 comment

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
4 comments

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
1 comment

How Crowdfunding at Spot.us Has Worked -- and Fallen Short

Bringing Hyper-Local, Citizen-Driven News to South Africa

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
2 comments

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
8 comments

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
No comments

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
3 comments

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
No comments

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
2 comments

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
8 comments

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
1 comment

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
8 comments

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
4 comments

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
4 comments

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
No comments

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
1 comment

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
2 comments

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
48 comments

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
No comments

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
8 comments

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
2 comments

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
1 comment

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
20 comments

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
2 comments

Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 17, 2009
16 comments

Ease of Use Matters

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 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
8 comments

The Community Radio Movement in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 10, 2009
3 comments

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
3 comments

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
3 comments

Change Tracker

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 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
No comments

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
1 comment

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
3 comments

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
1 comment

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
No comments

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
5 comments

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
2 comments

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
No comments

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
1 comment

Digital Migration For a Small-Town Paper in South Africa

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

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
No comments

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
No comments

Spot.Us Deals with the Good and Bad of Limitations

BarCamp NewsInnovation Chicago: Join the Conversation

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
2 comments

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
4 comments

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
No comments

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

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 13, 2009
No comments

Balance the Budget: Gotham Gazette Game 3

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 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
1 comment

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
1 comment

Partnerships to Watch (and a Crowdsourcing Project I'm Envying)

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 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
1 comment

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
No comments

Building a Social Entrepreneurial Garage Startup in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

January 24, 2009
8 comments

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
5 comments

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
3 comments

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
2 comments

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
2 comments

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
7 comments

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
No comments

End of the Year Radical Transparency for Spot.Us

Ethnic Hyperlocal News Network Launched in L.A.

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

December 22, 2008
1 comment

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
2 comments

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
2 comments

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
No comments

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
8 comments

'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
5 comments

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
2 comments

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
2 comments

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
3 comments

Inspiration: The Secret Sauce for Printcasting

by Mary Lou Fulton
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

December 9, 2008
6 comments

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
1 comment

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
6 comments

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
No comments

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
8 comments

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
1 comment

Two Weeks, Two Stories, Too Early For A Victory Dance

The Includer
Episode 11
$100 Solar Project

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
No comments

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
7 comments

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
1 comment

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
No comments

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
8 comments

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
4 comments

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
No comments

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
1 comment

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
1 comment

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
No comments

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
1 comment

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
5 comments

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
1 comment

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
No comments

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
1 comment

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
No comments

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
13 comments

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
No comments

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
3 comments

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
2 comments

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
1 comment

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
No comments

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
3 comments

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
1 comment

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
2 comments

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
3 comments

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
No comments

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
No comments

The Includer
Episode 2
Year 2

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

October 3, 2008
3 comments

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
1 comment

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
4 comments

Are We Ready for Citizen Journateerism?

Meet The Printcasting Team

Thanks to massive adoption of blogging and other do-it-yourself Web 2.0 tools like Twitter we have seen an explosion in citizen journalism in recent years. That goes without saying on a blog like this. But there is a related trend emerging which is perhaps not so apparent. Lets (rather clumsily) call it Citizen Journateerism. Citizen Journateerism = Citizen Journalism + Volunteerism. Basically that means ordinary folks leveraging social media tools to help people in need. I'm not talking about political or community-relevant reporting and opinioning, which is certainly a kind of volunteer community service, but about the re-purposing of citizen...

September 28, 2008
4 comments

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the most exciting times in the development of any new product is when concepts begin to give way to reality. That's the phase we're entering now with Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing and make print advertising affordable for local businesses. After three months of working with conceptual mockups and user interface flows, we're finally able to click through a set of Web pages connected to a database that generates simple magazine-style PDF files. In the coming weeks and months we'll be sharing more of that with you, starting with videos and, as soon...

September 16, 2008
No comments

iamnews: A Global DIY Newsroom

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

September 15, 2008
2 comments

Can the Political Press Self-Correct? Spinewatch Hopes it Can

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Fellow IdeaLabber Jay Rosen, an NYU journalism professor and PressThinker, mounted a campaign this weekend to encourage the political press to grow a spine. Rosen and others are calling for journalists of all stripes (professionals, amateurs, citizens, bloggers, etc.) to use a #spinewatch tag on Twitter and elsewhere to call attention to whether or not the professional press covering the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election is standing up to stonewalling candidates or sitting back and repeating their talking points. In an IM interview today, Jay said: "The premise behind spinewatch is more this: It's hard for me to...

September 15, 2008
11 comments

Are the Info Needs of Local Communities Being Served?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy arrived in Silicon Valley to hold the first of its three planned community forums. I was asked to speak on a panel that day about "technology and innovation" but hung around for most of the day to listen to the other two panels and the wide-ranging discussion. This is timely and important work. I've spoken with numerous community leaders in Silicon Valley in recent months who are growing more anxious about what will happen to the quality of civic life if the coverage of local...

September 15, 2008
5 comments

Challenges for the Collegiate Press, Part 2

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my opinion everything the new media people are working on equals better journalism, and more accessible content. But it's not enough. Newspapers have to find a way to become central to the exchange of information and ideas in their communities if they want to start making more money.

September 12, 2008
2 comments

Public Information Done Right

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I spent Tuesday in Washington DC at Websites Without Walls. A nine hour trip for a four hour meeting always makes me nervous, but we're passionately interested in seeing New York City match Washington DC's astounding wealth of open public data. Never knew that the District publishes an astounding wealth of usable public information? Me neither. I made the trip to find out more. While New York City busies itself posting PDFs of city agency documents within 10 days of their publication, the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technical Officer is churning out no less than 261 live...

September 10, 2008
1 comment

Listen and Learn: Recording in Harare's Cafes

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

September 3, 2008
3 comments

Participatory Philanthropy, Part II

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the second of a two-part piece which examines how participatory media can help streamline and democratize philanthropy. In the first post we saw three examples of how philanthropic foundations are relying on public input to help decide which proposals receive funding. This post will examine how participatory media can redefine the evaluation process after a project has already been funded by giving the targeted community a greater say in how the initiative has (or has not) had an impact on their lives. As far as development work goes, the Millennium Villages project based at Columbia University's Earth Institute...

September 1, 2008
3 comments

Gustav Information Sources

Participatory Philanthropy, Part I

There is a great selection of new media information channels already to go even before Gustav has touched down in the U.S. These include: A Gustav Information Center on the social networking site Ning: A government Gustav Twitter feed A Gustav Wiki with centralized information: And a whole slew of live video feeds and news broadcasts on LiveNewsCameras.com Please help spread the word to those who can benefit from the resources now in place, many put together by volunteers....

August 31, 2008
1 comment

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the first of a two-part piece which examines how participatory media can help streamline and democratize philanthropy. First we'll look at how collaboritive tools can help draw out the brightest ideas and most capable project leaders. Next we will examine how participatory media can redefine the evaluation process after a project has already been funded by giving the targeted community a greater say in how the initiative has (or has not) had an impact on their lives. Imagine you have just started working for a philanthropic foundation that is about to request proposals that aim to strengthen community...

August 29, 2008
1 comment

Growing a Community and The Importance of Being Iterative

Barcamps in Bolivia and Madagascar

As always: If you just want the status update of Spot.Us as a project -scroll down to the bottom for a nice digestible list of what's going down. Or - keep reading for detailed thoughts. This will be cross-posted at the Spot Us blog. Two months ago I decided that instead of sitting on my hands and waiting for a "tada-moment" to launch spot.us, we should just get started by using a wiki and a blog."Best decision ever" (said in the voice Jeff Albertson).Producing something from nothing Granted, the site can best be described as fugly (take a guess what...

August 28, 2008
No comments

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

August 27, 2008
2 comments

What's a Good Challenge for a J-School Innovation Class?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

August 25, 2008
4 comments

Meet the Editor Behind Sterohyped

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A little more than a year ago, when Jossip Initiatives launched Stereohyped, it tapped former print journalists Lauren Williams to be the editor for the "black interest" site, which boasts the tag line "Once you blog black, you never go back." Written with attitude, humor and at times a sense of horror at the mess we humans can make, the site provides one stop shopping for those who enjoy everything from Beyonce to Barack, from the serious to the celebrity. On any given day, Williams will post an item and links on subjects ranging from an historical overview of the...

August 20, 2008
2 comments

An Olympic Moment for Mobile Media?

Ideal Printcasting Publishers

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

August 19, 2008
2 comments

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the roughly 14 years that I've been in the online industry, I've learned that it's really easy to focus so much on what you're going to build that you can easily forget about why you're building it and who's going to use it. The key questions to constantly remind yourself of are: Who's going to use what you build? How will it help them solve problems in their daily lives? How will they find out about your product, and what will keep them coming back? This is especially easy to do with a project like Printcasting, which is simultaneously...

August 15, 2008
1 comment

From iPhone to Facebook to Live Photo-Blogging

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On some level I was live photo blogging (plogging?) from that party, complete with comments on some of the images. If we could create an application, which wouldnÃÂÃÂ¢ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂt be hard, to upload iPhone pictures automatically to a blog or to the front page of a newspaper website the possibilities are endless.

August 14, 2008
2 comments

ReelChanges Aims to 'Audience-Fund' Documentaries

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

August 13, 2008
No comments

Resorting to Interviews When Conversation Stalls

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we started the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project, we believed what local people involved in this effort told us -- that they'd be happy to contribute to this public conversation, speak up with their ideas and observations. Since we're dealing with a fairly niche topic mainly involving local government in a small city, we were relying on some initiative from people involved in what the city is doing with the carbon tax money. The kind of engagement we envisioned was people speaking up, having a public conversation. But when it came down to it, most of the people "in...

August 11, 2008
1 comment

How Can We Get People to "Geek Out" About Journalism?

How Newspapers Can Re-Engage with Communities

If you just want the progress report on Spot.Us - scroll to the bottom. If you want to peer into my mind, read on.If I want to explain my job as founder of Spot.Us in one sentence, I'll just say "I'm fundraising for independent journalists to do local investigations." Obviously it's much more involved than that, but depending on how much energy I have, it works. But what's the mission of Spot.Us? Perhaps of any Knight News Challenge project? What follows won't be a personal mission statement, but could be construed as brainstorming to that end. Right now I'm fundraising...

August 8, 2008
3 comments

Maps Worth Looking At

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette learned this week that two of our recent projects, Who's Running for What and The Garbage Game were listed among the notable Knight-Batten entries this year. Most notably, that means we aren't finalists. Some of the finalists, though, are pretty noteworthy. One I hadn't seen before is JD Land, which maps real estate development projects (proposed, completed and underway) in Washington DC's Southeast area. It is pretty smart stuff, and it reminded me that I've been looking for an excuse to point people to another mapping project that has really taken off: Habitat Map is a crowd sourcing...

August 6, 2008
No comments

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Will Bunch recently published a piece at American Journalism Review about journalists' disconnection with the communities they cover, and wondered if (how) online tools could help them reconnect. Read it all. Here are the thoughts I shared with him in full (edited to remove redundancy now that I've added links to previous postings). Q: When you worked in newspapers, especially at a larger metro with a mobile staff like the Mercury-News, did you feel that reporters and editors were well-connected to the communities that they covered -- engaged in the community and in conversations with citizens that led back to...

August 5, 2008
1 comment

Is Twitter the Newsroom of the Future?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I was sitting at my desk at the San Jose Mercury News on Tuesday when I first heard about the Los Angeles earthquake through an inter-office message from a colleague. My next instinct was to click over to my Twitter account to see what was going on. Like a lot of folks who have developed a cultish appreciation for the microblogging service, I've increasingly found that Twitter has become the place get breaking news before it hits online news sites or television. I follow Twitter through a desktop application called Twhirl. Since I only follow a limited number of folks...

July 30, 2008
13 comments

My Advice to Knight on Local Democracy Online

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight Foundation is beginning to make some waves in local democracy circles. And I am not just saying that because they fund this blog. Earlier this year they hosted a conference with community foundations on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, then they announced the Knight Center of Digital Excellence focused on universal access to the "digital town square," and most recently announced a commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy and $24 million in matching funds for community foundations (see my collection of online civic engagement resources for community foundations referenced in a...

July 30, 2008
3 comments

Is There a Marketplace for Local Storytelling?

How a Hyperlocal Site Can Sway Elections

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

July 24, 2008
1 comment

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Every political campaign, whether local, state or national, is a battle of competing narratives. The role of the media in general - this includes editorial, advertising and in the case of hyperlocal news/social sites conversation - is to serve as vehicles for the competing narratives. Candidates attach themselves to these narratives and voters choose. The conversation on Paulding.com, a hyperlocal media site, was decisive in the local primary election in July 15th with the site being credited as being a key influence in the landslide victories of three candidates that rejected incumbents, including a well-funded two-term incumbent commission chairman who...

July 24, 2008
No comments

Reforming a Mean World: Hero Reports

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in the position of having to play detective" --Walter Benjamin 1938 In the research on media effects, one of the most fully developed findings is what is known as the "mean world syndrome." Research finds that the average citizen grossly over-estimates how dangerous her neighborhood is because she reads the newspaper and assumes that the crime reports are actually a sample of the whole and thus amplifies them accordingly. In practice, a higher portion of violent crimes get reported than most people assume, although there...

July 21, 2008
1 comment

A Call for Quality Comments

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few days ago I was snooping around Digg when I noticed a popular submission titled The Difference Between Digg and Reddit. I clicked, eager to learn, and was presented with an image juxtaposing two very distinct flavors of user-submitted comments surrounding the breaking news of Tony Snow's death. The first comments shown at Digg offered generic words of respect that you might expect to hear about a public figure that passed away. The top comment at Reddit, however, was a bit more candid to say the least. The discussion that followed ranged from folks saying "maybe I should join...

July 18, 2008
4 comments

Hero Reports Website

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

July 17, 2008
No comments

Participants of 'Our City Our Voices' Release First Videos

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The participants of Media Mobilizing Project and Juntos's Immigrant and Low-Wage worker video project have finished their first batch of videos. The videos tell a wide array of stories focusing on health in the community, discrimination against immigrants, the role of unions in protecting immigrant workers and community outreach. Please check out the first video Does Discrimination Exist Against Immigrant Workers

July 16, 2008
No comments

We Always Needed Something New: Journalism Meets World

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Where will today's journalists will find tomorrow's jobs, Amy Gahran asks, and partially answers, in a recent Idealab post. She opened by quoting Alan Abbey, a commenter on her Poynter blog, discussing journalists' job losses: this downturn does feel similar to the widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago. What can we do with our outdated skills? If we in the media had covered the economic downturn and widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago with more care, respect, and investigation into how economic and political systems affect people, we would have...

July 15, 2008
4 comments

An Introduction to ReportingOn

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been writing about ReportingOn, my Knight News Challenge project, in fits and starts for 11 months now, but it's time to backtrack for a moment and answer some simple questions about what I'm up to here. Q: So, what's ReportingOn? A: ReportingOn.com will be a simple way for journalists to update their peers on the stories they're working on right now. Tag your 140-character-or-less updates with the beat you're on, and find peers reporting on similar beats to make connections, introduce yourself to potential mentors, or discover an unsung hero. Q: When you say "journalists," who are you talking...

July 14, 2008
1 comment

The Bull Pen is Active at Spot Us

Sharing the Same Space: News and Advertising

We raised $250 in 10 days to support a journalist. On July 3rd I announced that Spot.Us created a wiki that could accomplish our basic goals: The wiki would allow groups of people to come together around topics, let journalists create pitches and using a 3rd party e-commerce solution, we could crowdfund. Two weeks later, we have successfully raised enough money for our first example of "community funded reporting." Best part: You can duplicate this. I've used no secret technology and I tried to detail the steps I took at the Spot Us blog. A note about this first example:...

July 14, 2008
2 comments

by Kimberly Sultze
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Innovation Incubators project is moving into the industry testing phase. Teams of students from seven institutions, Ithaca College, Michigan State, University of Nevada--Las Vegas, St. Michael's College, Western Kentucky, University of Kansas, and Kansas State, worked together to develop three new ideas for community journalism which will be tested in the months ahead. It's a good time to reflect on the project so far and to share one of my observations about what we've discovered during the collaboration process. One of the great challenges for the Innovation Incubator students--undergraduate and graduate alike, and from all institutions--was pitching an innovative...

July 13, 2008
2 comments

Rebooting the Connection: The Deaf in the News Industry

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deaf people have an interesting relationship with the news. For over 100 years, the Deaf literally made the news. That is, a relatively large percentage of press operators have been Deaf. This just happened to be one of a few jobs where Deaf people could be hired due to the quite comfortable environment of loud, noisy presses. This gave the Deaf experience making the physical product of newspapers, which did translate into Deaf people creating their own newspapers. One of the most notable was Silent News. But even at its height, Silent News was little more than a monthly tabloid...

July 12, 2008
1 comment

Is a CNN For the Base of the Pyramid Possible?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we and our NGO partners initiate community members--young men and women from the slums and villages of India--into their new full-time jobs as 'Community Video Producers,' we often start the training sessions by drawing a triangle on the board. 'This pyramid,' the Video Trainer says, 'represents the global media.' The Producers then divide up the triangle into different layers--the nightly news programs at the top. Then, going down, CNN. Then India's Murdoch-owned English language stations. Then India's regional language private news stations, then India's national televsion, 'Doordarshan,' etc. etc. At each layer, a slightly wider percentage of the global...

July 11, 2008
2 comments

What Gets Talked About Most on Idea Lab

Defining Civic Media at MIT

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

July 10, 2008
2 comments

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here at MIT, summer means time to dig into our research. A group of us at the Center for Future Civic Media is working on a white paper defining "civic media." We are interested in how civic media is empowering new user-creators, with related effects on governing elites. Inspiring people to take action, through access to information and the public spotlight, is a familiar goal to those of us on the team who used to be journalists. We used to facilitate the agency of an isolated person or community to make the government act for justice or change. It often...

July 7, 2008
No comments

Independent Government Observers Task Force Non-Conference, August 4 - 5 in Chicago

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I wrote earlier about the IGOTF, a "non-conference structured around three sets of working group activities": 1. Case Law (Working Group Chair: Carl Malamud, carl at media dot org). This working group brings together individuals groups involved in the day-to-day work of putting the courts on-line. Topics that will be considered include markup of citations in cases, "universal resolvers" for mapping citations to URLs, recycling of PACER and other documents, and other subjects as appropriate. 2. Municipal Governments (Working Group Chair: Daniel X. O'Neil, danx at everyblock dot com). This group will focus on issues involved in citizens attempting to...

July 7, 2008
No comments

Life in a Failed State Certainly Isn't Boring

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's hard to convey how important it is for those of us "left behind" to vicariously experience the richness of these networking opportunities.

July 7, 2008
1 comment

Two Videos on Participatory Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I believe IdeaLab readers would benefit from a wide range of posts related to important developments taking place in the participatory media movement. With that in mind, here are two interviews that bear on that subject: The first is an 11-minute talk with Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, maker of Miro at getmiro.com. Miro's an important, rapidly maturing application that lets you watch and subscribe to millions of channels of content created by anyone with something to say (you can pull down any videos with an RSS feed, for example). You can also browse...

July 7, 2008
No comments

Three Obstacles to a Truly Global Conversation

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine your own blogging community for just a second. Go ahead and put yourself at the center of your personal blogosphere - those you read and those who read you on a regular basis. What does it look like? Where do they live? What languages do they speak? What are their ethnicities, interests, political leanings, sexual orientations? What religions do they practice, or for that matter, not practice? Now, imagine that community, that sphere of burning blogstars, expanding like the universe itself. Imagine that it encompasses your entire city, and keeps expanding to include every citizen of your country, and,...

July 4, 2008
2 comments

Starting Small and the Importance of Being Iterative

Hyperlocal Media Meets Negative Campaigning

The short story: People are starting to ask me how they can get involved in Spot.Us. The site won't really be ready until the Fall, but I hate telling people to wait. In an effort to start community building, so we don't lose track of ideas and to keep everything transparent, I'm happy to point people to the Spot Us Community Wiki. It's not high-tech but this wiki, combined with a blog and a third party e-commerce solution is enough to organize "community funded reporting." If you are a citizen and have a story idea or a reporter and want...

July 3, 2008
No comments

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If all politics are local, then hyperlocal media of sorts should be in tall cotton when it comes to local politics. No so and not now; rather hyperlocal media is at best a big thorn in the side of the key group that determines where the big buck political money goes. That key group is the political consultant. This group controls spending for most big-dollar local races such as state house, senate, commission chairman and sheriff in most mid-size to large counties in the nation. Today a serious candidate for commission chairman in Paulding County will spend upwards of $100,000...

July 3, 2008
No comments

Cheap, But Not Free

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A lot of the interest in citizen journalism over the past few years has been related to economics. Sign up a bunch of users on your site, get them to write stuff, sell ads along side the free content, retire early. While some content that comes in this way is impeccably written and delightfully newsworthy, most is not. So news organizations interested in publishing quality content, and hoping to do it for free, are bound to be disappointed. Partnering with citizen journalists to produce great neighborhood coverage involves money, and sometimes a lot of it. The journalists need training, and...

July 3, 2008
1 comment

$100 Laptop Redesign

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

July 3, 2008
3 comments

The Print on Demand Revolution

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I delve more into Printcasting, I've been learning about the relatively new and growing POD movement -- which stands for Print on Demand. And every new leaf I turn over is another confirmation of what we suspected when we originally entered Printcasting into the Knight News Challenge. There's an all-out technology revolution happening with print which, until now, newspapers have largely missed out on. Here are just a few examples. For this first one, I have to thank Medill student and journalistic-programmer Brian Boyer who introduced me to the service. When I met Brian at the MIT Future of...

July 2, 2008
11 comments

CopyCamp: Community Unconference in the Newsroom

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

(photo by Rob Knight) As part of the Next Newsroom Project, I've been exploring several core questions about the structure of news organizations, both physical and operational. One of those central questions is this: What is the ideal relationship between a newsroom and its community? One of the exciting things about the era we're entering is that there are much wider range of options to consider when addressing this question. We're moving away from the traditional broadcast model where information flowed in one direction from the newsroom to the community. It's clear that the community should be placed at...

July 2, 2008
No comments

Glimpsing the Worlds of Neighbors Online

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over at TheRoot.com, Kim McLarin points out the ridiculousness behind the rumor that floating "out there" exists a tape of Michelle Obama using the term "whitey." McLarin does not base her argument on the fact that a Princeton and Harvard University graduate, married to a man with the political savvy to come from behind to be the presumptive Democratic nominee, is not likely to be guilty of such a political misstep. Nor does she argue that someone who has spent decades of her life navigating the racial fault lines is not likely to step on a cultural landmine by spewing...

July 1, 2008
1 comment

People-Funded Journalism Budding

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

July 1, 2008
1 comment

Prepping Printcasting for Mass Adoption

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've spent the last couple weeks with my head in the wires, so to speak, thinking about things like technology platforms. And lest you hear that term and begin to tune out, stay with me. The reality is that in today's media, all of us are need to be a little semi-geek (to quote Amy Gahran from last year's News Challenge contest). First, I have a significant decision to report. After a lot of thought, discussion and hand-wringing, we've finally settled on a technology platform for Printcasting: Drupal. And we have contracting needs galore. If you're a Drupal developer (or...

June 30, 2008
No comments

World of Digitalmediacraft

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There is one reason and one reason alone that I haven't catastrophically dropped out of college yet: I avoid World of Warcraft as though it were the plague. In case you are unfamiliar, World of Warcraft is an incredibly popular game made by Blizzard Entertainment in which players take on the role of an adventurer in a Tolkein-esque virtual world alongside thousands of other people. Obviously the game must be fun, but what makes it dangerously addictive is that the more you play the more you can do and the better you can do it. The result is an incredibly...

June 27, 2008
3 comments

Journalists Need to Update Stories Online

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For people without their own web site or blog, a newspaper article can become their primary identity online. Local news sites face this responsibility most often and most intensely. Every article or blog on the internet can become part of the permanent record, but the publisher doesn't control how and when people access this information- for the most part, search engines become the gatekeepers. However, news organizations can and should take responsibility for ensuring their piece of the permanent record provides their best understanding of reality. JD Lasica (also an Idealab blogger) quoted Terry Heaton riffing on a post by...

June 26, 2008
3 comments

How Community Radio Becomes the 'Voice of the Village'

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It all started in the Tetherless Computing Lab at the University of Waterloo. Our research group led by Prof. S. Keshav prototyped an extremely low-cost software and hardware platform called KioskNet, for providing Internet connectivity in rural areas. The first pilot deployment was done in May 2006 in the village of Anandpuram in the Vizag district of Andhra Pradesh (India), and has since been followed by deployments in West Bengal (India) and Ghana (Africa). But we soon realized that providing a communication infrastructure to rural areas is not even half of the story. It is useless unless appropriate applications are...

June 23, 2008
2 comments

Sidewalks for Democracy Online

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Government websites don't have sidewalks, newspaper racks, public hearing rooms, hallways or grand assemblies. There are no public forums or meeting places in the heart of representative democracy online. The question that this essay will ask and answer is not what can we do to redesign democracy for the Internet Age, but, rather, why have we decided to delete democracy from the most visited interface citizens have with "their" government? And what are we going to do about it? After almost two decades of "e-democracy," we seem content with simply accelerating online what's already wrong with politics. We raise money...

June 22, 2008
5 comments

Empowering Poor Communities through Mobile

Making Print Pubs a Vital Part of Web 2.0

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

June 22, 2008
11 comments

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the 13 years I've been involved in online media, I've learned firsthand how dangerous it can be to be lead by ideology. Ideals are great, but if you become too invested in them they can blind you to the real needs of the customers you're trying to serve. And when it comes to innovation - which is part of the brand of The Bakersfield Californian newspaper where I work - the temptation to drink your own Kool-Aid is huge. So it's not without some humility that I come to you today with a confession. My name is Dan Pacheco,...

June 18, 2008
6 comments

Takeaways from the Future of Civic Media Conference

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

June 14, 2008
No comments

Initial Milestones from Denver

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Goal 1: Staffing. Our first goal for the Deproduction / Denver Open Media project was to establish the development team. In June, we hired long-time contractor Brian Hiatt, as well as his partner/designer Sharee Dierringer, merging their Drupal development shop, Civic Pixel, into the Deproduction Family. We also posted our Developer Job Opening and with Brian at the helm, conducted a three-part interview process, and feel good about our top candidate. We hope to bring him on-board full-time by July 1. We're also lucky to have applied-for, and received, a CTC Vista, who will start on July 1 and will...

June 13, 2008
2 comments

Trying to Solve the Civic Media Participation Gap

by Angela Powers
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Knight News Challenge winners are meeting at MIT to discuss the future of civic media. The focus has been on PARTICIPATORY culture and the skills that the youth and others need. Problems that have been identified include the following: Transparency problem: people are swimming in media Participation gap: resources growing in the life of young vs. those who are alienated from the resources. While more information and laptops are available in public spaces, usage and time are limited. Also, users can't store information, etc. Ethics challenge: norms and standards of the journalism profession are still stressed, High school students are...

June 13, 2008
3 comments

Live-Blogging Future of Civic Media Gathering

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

June 12, 2008
4 comments

Civic Media Innovation Camps

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

June 11, 2008
No comments

Twittering from the Future of Civic Media Meeting

Election Day Could Be Our Own Pangia Day

Opening panel at the conference is talking from local media (as civic media), ranging to macro political level. Tweeting the debates....

June 11, 2008
2 comments

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When the filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED), her wish was to create one day where people across the world gathered at the same time to watch films produced by international filmmakers. Best known for her film Control Room(film), Noujaim believed the power of the films could help the audience see beyond our differences to the humanity that binds us together. Or, as the tag line declared, "4 hours. 24 films. A new way to see the world." Pangia Day, as it came to be called, took place on May 10th at 18:GMT, 11 am PDT, at...

June 10, 2008
No comments

Voces Bolivianas Featured in Vamos Magazine

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices aims not just to get new communities actively participating in the conversational web, but also to introduce their voices to mainstream media outlets so that, for once, under-represented communities are portrayed by their own residents. While the majority of the ten current Rising Voices outreach projects have been covered by mainstream media organization, Voces Bolivianas takes the prize when it comes to attracting national and international media attention. The citizen media outreach project, which trains new bloggers in El Alto, Santa Cruz, and other sites around Bolivia, has been featured in El Deber, the BBC, Argentina's La Nación,...

June 10, 2008
No comments

Will 3G iPhone Help Push Geo-Based News?

How to Create a Reader-Driven News System

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

June 10, 2008
No comments

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We all know that the "audience" analogy no longer represents the way journalism should work. We know that the people reading the news have opinions, perspectives, and facts that are relevant to the conversation. Some of them just have observations, but others are reporters at heart or maybe they have the wordsmithing abilities of a columnist. This post is about how the news system I've been blogging about can be driven by user generated content and collective intelligence. In a larger sense, however, it is about the way in which any news organization can make the move past the one-sided...

June 8, 2008
No comments

Smart Mobs for News Participation

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

June 8, 2008
2 comments

Laptops in the Most Disadvantaged Areas of Uruguay

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The following is a translation of a post by Rising Voices grantee and Plan Ceibal coordinator Pablo Flores, who details some of the upcoming challenges and opportunities as the OLPC project in Uruguay spreads to the capital city, Montevideo. If we look at how the next phases of expansion of Plan Ceibal (OLPC in Uruguay), it is apparent that we are about to face some new challenges. The arrival of the plan to the capital, Montevideo, next year will bring a new unprecedented dimension to the project which involves the most marginalized communities in the country. For the first time,...

June 7, 2008
No comments

Reforming Media Will Help Reform Conferences

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Journalism That Matters "The New Pamphleteers," held earlier this week in Minneapolis, every session meant horizontal communication: no one on a stage, a circle of chairs with the facilitator at the same level as anyone else. John Nichols is most certainly one of my favorite organizers of the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), going on now in Minneapolis. He visited the earlier, far smaller New Pamphleteers and represented what is wrong with the NCMR model of conference. He dropped in without having attended the rest of the New Pamphleteers, without having had the experiences all the rest of...

June 7, 2008
No comments

Prisoners Become Media Makers in Jamaica

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When thinking of Kingston, Jamaica, blogging and podcasting are far from the first words to come to mind. "Murder capital of the world", sure. Bob Marley and reggae music, of course. But a cutting edge prison rehabilitation program, which teaches prisoners at a maximum security correctional institute how to blog, podcast, and even participate in Second Life? Photo of Tower Street Correctional Facility by Christina Xu That is precisely what Students Expressing Truth (S.E.T.) has set out to accomplish with its new citizen media initiative, Prison Diaries. S.E.T. first began in 1999 when two former prisoners created the organization to...

June 4, 2008
2 comments

Give the Public Access to Public Records

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

May 29, 2008
1 comment

NY Times to Test Crowdsourcing Its Data

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

May 27, 2008
1 comment

From GeoGraffiti to GeoJournalism

Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations

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

May 25, 2008
2 comments

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Before I went home this summer I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Twedt, a reporter at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who teaches one of the few journalism classes at Carnegie Mellon. I told him about the Idealab and the user driven system I've been writing about here. The first big question he asked deserves a well thought out response: "What if the users don't contribute?" Steve is right; a developer can't rely on user contribution unless he/she is sure users will contribute. Since one can never actually be sure about that, we are left with three simple tasks: hedge...

May 24, 2008
No comments

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Center for Future Civic Media is collaborating with the MIT Communications Forum to host an ongoing series of conversations about media and civic engagement. This past term, we hosted two such exchanges --- "Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," an exchange between University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein (Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge) and Harvard University law professor Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) and "Youth and Civic Engagement" with University of Washington political science professor Lance Bennett, actvist Alan Khazei (Be the Change), and our own Ingeborg Endter (formerly with the Computer...

May 23, 2008
1 comment

Rising Voices at the Global Voices Summit 2008

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What is the state of the global blogosphere? Where is participatory media growing the fastest? And where, for that matter, are new voices being restricted by state censorship? Is social media actually changing the electoral landscape in emerging democracies like Armenia, Kenya, and Venezuela? Has the promise of an international, barrier-free, multilingual conversation finally become reality? Most importantly, where do we go from here? How do we encourage dialog in times of heated international debate? How do we bring new voices from new communities into the universe of web 2.0? And how do we protect their rights to free speech...

May 23, 2008
1 comment

YouTube Lauches New Citizen News Channel

Sean Bell Illustrates Lines that Divide Us

This week YouTube announced it's very own citizen news channel, and assigned a news manager named Olivia Ma, to run it. You can apparently reach her at citizennews@youtube.com Just for fun, here is our own Dan Gillmor, talking on YouTube about how web censorship is affecting citizen journalism, posted prior to the launch of the YouTube Citizen news channel. Hopefully we will see more of him and his students, and the great work of such projects as Global Voices there....

May 22, 2008
No comments

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Blaring red headlines on the Drudge Report announced to the world that the three New York City Police who shot Sean Bell 50 times, killing him, were found not guilty. Drudge, with his right wing reputation, it turns out was one of the only mainstream white blogs to prominently play the Bell verdict. In fairness, the Huffington Post did have a small headline about the verdict. Things were different in the black blogosphere. It wasn't just that the black interest sites carried the coverage, it was also that many included rich texture and context in which to look at the...

May 12, 2008
No comments

Looking for the Mouse in Media: Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ever wondered: where's the time going to come from for all these nifty open source ventures people are planning? Clay Shirky says we got plenty. He just gave an extremely useful and imaginative speech to Web heads about where we are in media time. Shirky, who teaches in a different program at NYU, has a new book out: Here Comes Everybody ("The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.") But this speech stands alone. You can read it here, but you should really watch him here-- after reading this post. The clip is less than 15 minutes. It lets you think along...

May 6, 2008
No comments

Related Content in 100 words: An Update

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Related Content will provide an easy way for people visiting a Drupal-powered newspaper site to connect articles to past reports, opinion pieces, letters to the editor, or feature stories- to relate any piece of content on the web site to any other piece. This engages readers with the lowest barrier to participation while providing to other readers and the news organization the value of deep links. A plug-in interface for other modules to suggest related content to be connected and a data architecture that could allow relating content between sites has been completed, and work continues on the user interface....

May 6, 2008
No comments

A Collage of Business Models from NewsTools2008

Finding Local Community Online

Some of the most interesting discussions and demonstrations at last week's NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley centered around making the changing news landscape sustainable. Here are some of the ideas I heard, along with a few of my own: 1) News Consultancies: Leveraging local information channels & relationships to connect average people with local influencers and experts. Examples: -An online/offline service which people pay journalists to help them navigating local political/business channels. i.e, the fastest way to get a building permit approved or knowing which local developer to talk to about a project. -recommending a trustworthy plumber of mechanic. This idea...

May 5, 2008
8 comments

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been thinking a lot about just how "local" most people want to be online. The greatest myth about the Internet is that people only want to go to world online. That they only care about creating social networks with friends or people like themselves with similar interests from thousands of miles away. It is as if the cross-dressing organic gardener from Sweden connecting with those like themselves on the other side of the world (someone I met once who shared his tipping point experience with the power of the Internet) has more virtue than enabling a plant swap online...

May 2, 2008
2 comments

Rising Voices Seeks Micro-Grant Proposals

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, in collaboration with the Open Society Institute Public Health Program's Health Media Initiative, is now accepting project proposals for the third round of microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects focused especially on public health issues involving marginalized populations. Rising Voices and OSI aim to bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities. Examples of potential projects include: Working with a tuberculosis or HIV clinic or local drop-in center...

April 30, 2008
No comments

Signal-to-Noise and Related Content

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Related Content: If you're in California's bay area, don't miss Drupal Day on Friday May 3, a special open session of NewsTools2008's mixing up journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs. Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio. Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools. I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can't. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem. As mentioned by IdeaLab bloggers and elsewhere, solving this problem is a...

April 29, 2008
1 comment

Locative Media in the Newsroom

Tell Me You Hear the Writing on the Wall?

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

April 27, 2008
No comments

Participants Balk at Controversial Topics

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

April 24, 2008
No comments

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It might seem a good starting point for building virtual community when people already know each other in the real one. But for Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker, we've been surprised to find that doesn't seem so true. For many potential users of our online group blog and forums, the risks of speaking about a controversial topic so openly in an online public forum appear just too great. When we launched our project in the summer of 2007 in the wake of the city's approval of a carbon tax to fight global warming, we began with the premise that experts and...

April 22, 2008
4 comments

A Year of Rising Voices

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

With this week's introduction to Iran Inside Out, a video-blogging project led by Shaghayegh Azimi, all ten Rising Voices grantees have now been introduced. Some of the earliest projects, like Nari Jibon in Bangladesh, have been active for nearly a year now. Here is a comprehensive run-through of some of the successes and challenges they have met along the road. Nari Jibon Introduction Feature Posts Happy Pahela Baishakh! Last Monday marked the first day of year 1415 according to the Bangla calendar. Nari Jibon students and staff celebrated with songs, poetry, and a brief skit. They started the evening by...

April 21, 2008
2 comments

Old and Young Playing a Video Game

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can a virtual world bring together young and old people to explore a community's history in a shared video game experience? This is a question we're pondering in the wake of some user testing of our Remembering 7th Street video game. We previously showed a video version of our game world to people who remembered Oakland's 7th Street blues and jazz club scene from the 1940s and 1950s, and were surprised by their generally positive reaction to the virtual re-creation of what they had actually lived. Several also said they hoped the game would help young people in Oakland learn...

April 20, 2008
No comments

Our Hidden Biases Reflected in Our Work

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent post Lauren Williams editor of the black interest blog Stereohyped, wrote about the case of a black man accused of killing a white police officer in New Hampshire. In defense of the accused, Mahzarin Banaji, the creator of Implicit Association Test, a web-based test that measures an individual's inherent biases, testified that it would be virtually impossible for a black defendant to get a fair trail by an all white jury. The movie Race to Execution makes a similar argument, noting that once the jury composition tips in favor of white men, the chances it will deliver...

April 19, 2008
No comments

Iran Inside Out

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Shaghayegh Azimi is the epitome of what is often referred to on Global Voices as a "bridge-blogger"; that is, someone who uses his or her weblog to bridge two or more cultures. There is only one catch - Azimi isn't really a blogger. As a former film producer in Iran, video has always been her preferred medium of expression. And she's not alone. In an interview over Skype, Azimi says that thousands of Iranian youth yearn to become filmmakers, but that limited access to equipment, along with Iran's few channels of distribution, mean that only the very best, luckiest,...

April 19, 2008
3 comments

'Digital New Deal' Needs Real Life Counterpart

Google Earth, New York Times Team Up

An interesting piece appeared in the Friday, April 11 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, calling for a New Deal-like investment by America in youth and technology. The basic argument is that a new generation of technology savvy youth could be put to work leveraging their digital skills to create socially useful tools and engage in 21st Century public service. The OpEd sites a study listing the US as much lower down in rankings for broadband penetration (24th among industrialized countries), and uses this as reason to put millenials to work bettering our nation's online offerings. What such studies often...

April 18, 2008
No comments

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In early March, the amazing Amy Gahran and I presented at Knight Digital Media Center seminar talking about new tools. I spoke about locative media, showed examples, learned a lot, and assured all the participants that they too could create multimedia editorial pieces using Google Earth's very simple toolkit. One participant from a medium-sized paper in New York State took me up on my offer to walk her through the process. She thought it was cool and wanted to bring it into her newsroom. We soon hit the wall: systemic infrastructure issues like only administrators can add applications (standard operating...

April 13, 2008
3 comments

Journalists, Citizens, and the Media Conversation

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my first post to this blog I said that the professional/citizen journalist debate was a "topic best left for another day." It seems that the time has finally come for me to put my two cents out there, and I'll be doing it by exploring what it means to be a journalist and a citizen in this digital world. Ultimately, though, I hope to convince everyone that although it may seem difficult, there doesn't have to be a tradeoff between quality and democracy: we can have it all.

April 12, 2008
1 comment

Our City, Our Voices Graduates Second Round of Students

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

On Sunday April 13th, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) and Juntos will graduate a second round of twelve students from an English Speaking video and web workshop. The graduation will take place at Songhai City Cultural Center at 3117 Master Street in Philadelphia at 3pm. Like their counterparts from the previous Spanish speaking workshop, members of this class learned web skills, video-making skills and media literacy.

April 10, 2008
1 comment

A Blogger Posse in Israel

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been busy the past two weeks readying for a last-minute trip to Israel. I'm honored to be past of a blogger/citizen journalist delegation heading to the Holy Land. The trip was arranged and paid for by the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest, which covers California and the greater West, though we'll be paying for some items. The goal is to meet and mingle with some of the best and brightest in Israel's tech field. Here's who's going: Robert Scoble, Craig Newmark, Susan Mernit, Cathy Brooks, Deb Schultz, Jeff Saperstein, Brad Reddersen, Renee Blodgett, Sarah Lacy...

April 9, 2008
1 comment

Early Adapters Don't Conform to Conventional Use

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

April 8, 2008
1 comment

Fire Eagle and the Future of Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

April 7, 2008
No comments

Journalism Education and Social Networks

by Angela Powers
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Citizen journalism, the blogosphere, YouTube, Facebook and more...what do these social networks and new media forms have to do with journalism and mass communications? Often they refer to individuals, rather than traditional media organizations, playing an active role in collecting, reporting and disseminating news. * For example, students at Northern Illinois University took to the streets writing, shooting photos and blogging during the hours and days that followed the Valentines Day shooting. Kyle Yataes posted a video on UTube, providing more moving coverage of the events than the local news. Journalism as we know it today is becoming less confined...

April 7, 2008
No comments

Human Rights Video in a Participatory Culture

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of our goals at the Center for Future Civic Media is to identify best practices from existing projects which might inform those initiatives which will emerge from the Center. We want to understand how people out there are using the tools available to them right now to enhance civic awareness, to play informal watchdog functions within the culture, to call attention to problems and force governments and other institutions to respond, to skirt around censorship and other kinds of regulation over communication, and so forth. We are looking at a range of different models -- from serious games to...

April 6, 2008
No comments

How Do You Balance Anonymity & Accountability?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's your question for the week on Idea Lab. Many people think that anonymity is important online for people who are whistle-blowers or would not speak out if they were identified. But the flipside of that is that many people use the protection of anonymity to lob insults and ad hominem attacks at opponents and turn civil conversations into flame wars. What happens if you try to pin down people and make them use real names in forums? Does that bring more civility? That's certainly the case at Front Porch Forum, where people must use their first and last name,...

April 3, 2008
7 comments

Bring On The Clowns

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sometimes I wonder exactly what we're offering our citizen journalists in return for their hard work. We don't pay them. Reporting can be challenging and time-consuming, and sometimes it's not nearly as exciting as the movies make it out to be. On the other hand, last week I was able to introduce a citizen journalists to one of our business' greatest pleasures -- the random famous-person interview. Here's how it went: The citizen journo, Jack Newell, was working on a feature about a local artist who makes theatrical masks. The artist told an anecdote about the time he spent traveling...

April 3, 2008
1 comment

Hyperlocal Sites Can Deliver More Than Display Ads

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 30, 2008
3 comments

What Journalism Needs: A Product People Want

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When journalists were asked in a recent survey to identify the most important aspect of their work, 91% said "make my publication successful by creating appealing content for its audiences." What a turn-around from the not too distant past when such sentiments would have been denounced in many newsrooms as pandering to the public and giving people what they want, not what they need. This shift in perspective was predictable in the face of hemorrhaging print circulation and broadcast viewership and the recent precipitous decline in ad revenue, at least for newspapers. But I think it also should inform some...

March 30, 2008
2 comments

(Only) Two Visions for the Future of Blogging?

The Read and Write Library

An interesting battle of the blogging titans was covered in the "Bits" section of today's New York Times. It's basically an exchange between popular technology bloggers (and blog owners) Michael Arrington and Rafat Ali. Their differing views are worth examining because they touch on a hot button issue in blogging and journalism: How are new for-profit business models impacting blogging and the journalistic integrity of bloggers? In their personal scrap Mr. Arrington and Mr. Ali are tackling the difficult question of profitability models for blogging. Mr. Arrington seems to favor a monopoly approach, where blogs are brought together to form...

March 30, 2008
No comments

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

From cataloguing books to training users how to blog At least six times a week, Gabriel Venegas, a dedicated and underpaid librarian in Medellin, Colombia, rises from bed while the world outside is still dark royal blue and heavy with the silence of early morning to in order to make the 45-minute bus ride that begins in the valley center and eventually climbs up the city's northern slope to the isolated community of San Javier La Loma. Five years ago it was Vanegas' responsibility to make sure that the library's book collection was catalogued and well-organized. Occasionally he would help...

March 28, 2008
3 comments

The Case for Local Ownership of Newspapers

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 26, 2008
2 comments

How Would You Engage People in Public Policy?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The one million figure is my number, but seriously, the UK government wants advice on how to engage lots of people online. Engage is the key word, the British Prime Minister already receives e-petitions online (nothing like that with the White House, Congress, or even one U.S. governor despite our constitutional right to petition) which is more about political expression than engagement. From the UK-based OpenDemocracy site you can learn about UK government's "desire to hold a national debate on a British Statement of Values as part of the Governance of Britain Green Paper." You can read a summary of...

March 25, 2008
1 comment

Nuestra Ciudad, Nuestras Voces

by Gabriel Berrios
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Versión en español más abajo. Greetings all, for some time now we have been deeply involved in developing our project and carrying out the audiovisual production workshops with the immigrant population in Philadelphia. The workshops have had a good turnout, and as you may know already from my colleague Todd Wolfson, the first 20 participants finished the course successfully and are now in the process of making their videos. The first round of workshops was directed at the Spanish-speaking immigrants who came to Philadelphia looking for a better quality of life; soon we will be screening the videos they have...

March 20, 2008
No comments

How About a Chris O'Brien New Media Business Model Award!

What Good is All This Data?

Returning to Chris O'Brien's Business Model Challenge, here are some suggested approaches and models from the perspective of an entrepreneur and strategic consultant. For a more rigorous approach I would absolutely check out Chris's recommended NewspaperNext report. That said, let's try and smash some boxes or at least poke some holes in existing ones... 1) MyPaper model: Going beyond the trend in news aggregation and self-customized news portals like NetVibes, why not think about physical papers that are delivered to your door (or on the Web/mobile device) which combine your specific preferences for local, national, and international news + features...

March 20, 2008
1 comment

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine a website that would show you, not just how many copies of some book are available for sale from Amazon, but which libraries near you carry the book. Oh wait, that already exists . Between WorldCat and Steven's thoughts on the Sacramento Bee salary database I'm thinking a lot about what really good data driven content looks like. How could we, as news reporters, use our readers as more than passive observers in meaningful ways. WNYC has been doing some interesting work with crowdsourcing and I'd like to see some ideas for introducing the concept to public salary databases...

March 19, 2008
No comments

No Returning to the Cult of the Expert

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 19, 2008
3 comments

Is Citizen Media Skipping Small Town America?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am on a hunt. While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic "user-generated" content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America. As part of E-Democracy.Org's Rural Voices project in Minnesota we seek to discover bloggers, social networking groups, wikis, online community forums, etc. from rural/Greater Minnesota. This map of 200 blogs aggregated by MNSpeak, shows just three outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area....

March 19, 2008
1 comment

The State of the News Media Is Troubled

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 18, 2008
1 comment

Fragmentation of Media is Democratization of Media: Retaining Reach

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Oso uses a German pilot's statement that he would not have shot down the author of the Little Prince, had he known, to ask: Will Global Voices' coverage of Iranian bloggers have any influence one way or the other on a potential US invasion? It is comforting to think that it could, but realistically, I doubt it. (I'm going to project a little there and clarify that it's comforting to think it could prevent a U.S. attack- which would probably be in the form of Guernica-esque bombing, rather than a land invasion.) Oso concludes: the fragmentation of media is part...

March 17, 2008
1 comment

A News Mashup

Boulder's ClimateSmart Lacks Online Community

The good folks at Netsquared in San Francisco are sponsoring a Mashup Challenge, designed to encourage civil society and social benefit organizations to submit innovative new ideas for Mashups(web_application_hybrid) supporting social change. Of the 50 or so entries submitted so far, a number of them have a news angle that may be of interest to journalists and the larger media community. For example, a submission called Community News & Caring Map is aimed at allowing writers to know where their readers are geographically located. The idea being that if you know more about who your audience is, the better you...

March 12, 2008
2 comments

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Why the journalistically independent Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker fills a gap that local government web sites cannot.

March 12, 2008
No comments

Newspapers Must Innovate or Die

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

March 9, 2008
No comments

Is Old Media Really Dead?

Community Organization with Digital Tools

According to this new report released by We Media/Zogby, two thirds of Americans think traditional journalism is out of touch with what they want from their news and nearly half now get their news online. The report suggests that 29% of Americans get their primary news information fromTelevision, 11% from radio and only 10% from newspapers. Is traditional media really dead or dying? Is journalism itself the problem or is it all about a shirft in medium and not the quality of journalism itself that is itself the cause of our dissatisfaction? Or are these the wrong questions to be...

March 2, 2008
4 comments

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I took a digital-communication-oriented glance at the war on Scientology being led by the nontraditional online group called Anonymous. I'm not exactly writing a part 2, but I want to start a follow-up discussion on a few of the comments made and questions posed by Anonymous about how digital media affects the dynamics of community organization. That being said, if you haven't had the chance to browse the comments of that post it's probably worthwhile. I have mentioned in the past that I want to see digital media facilitate local impact; to do that well we need to...

March 1, 2008
6 comments

What Did You Call Me?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 22, 2008
5 comments

Crashing the E-Politics and E-Democracy Gates

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My focus tends to be the "citizen" in citizen media. Over the last few years I've increasing found myself at conferences like Public Media and the Online News Association. I always feel a bit out of place, because despite the adoption of online interactivity in online news and media, I am still pretty much viewed as a "consumer." Someone to be captured and delivered to advertisers or to become a donor to public broadcasting. Interactivity is often viewed in the context of news be it reacting with reader comments or creating "news." True conversation, the heart of being a citizen...

February 21, 2008
1 comment

Every Nonprofit Tries to Give People Information, Which is Power

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At this year's SalesForce.com Foundation gathering, "Innovation for Nonprofit Success," the recurring theme was less the SalesForce software than the broader topic of the social web. This is to SalesForce's credit; Suzanne DiBianca, cofounder and director of the Foundation, set the tone when she introduced Holly Ross, Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, as the keynote speaker. "What I really want to talk about is power," Ross said early in her presentation. "Because powerful people can make change." "At the heart of every nonprofit you are trying to give people information, and information is power." Ross and other presenters...

February 20, 2008
8 comments

BarCamps Without Borders: The Unconference Spreads Globally

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

OK, So you've got your own blog. You've started taking pictures and posting them online. But what's more, you've also trained some of your friends, family, and neighbors how to publish online. And, via the blogosphere, you've been able to get to know others in your city who you otherwise never would have met. Great! It gets even better. Through this new online community and conversation you have discovered that many of your daily concerns are also the concerns of your neighbors and friends. You want better public transportation. So do they. You think it would be cool to organize...

February 17, 2008
3 comments

Anonymous vs. Scientology: A Case Study of Digital Media

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

So far I have avoided bringing up specific events and breaking stories here even when they might illustrate relevant uses of digital media. The reason for this is that I'm not really a reporter, but I've been watching something play out over the Internet and it is just too interesting to pass up. I'm talking about the recently declared and currently unfolding "War on Scientology" that is being led by an online group called "Anonymous." It is a really fascinating case study of how current technologies and information dissemination via digital media can snowball into something that actually results in...

February 15, 2008
46 comments

Open Media Publishing: One New Option

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 14, 2008
4 comments

Public Notices 4.0: Time to Upgrade Public Meetings

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the years my work has brought me to Rome a few times. The Roman Forum as well as the Athenian Agora have always intrigued me as a model for envisioning online public spaces. Surrounding a public space you have major public and religious institutions, a commercial market in one corner, a place for public speeches, and in Roman Forums the "Albus" or a white notice board with public announcements written in black. Today we often experience institutions (online and off) without a town square or commons in the center, which I try to counter with Issues Forums. However, today...

February 13, 2008
1 comment

XO Laptop Turns Kids into Media Creators in Uruguay

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo. It's an amazing thing to watch--at least, to a city slicker like me who doesn't get to witness the miracle of birth every day. But what makes this particular video remarkable is that it was shot by a fourth-year student at Villa Cardal's Public School 24, using the built-in camera and recording software on the student's XO Laptop, within weeks of the machine's arrival at...

February 12, 2008
2 comments

NewsTools2008 to Bring Geeks and Journalists Together

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 11, 2008
2 comments

Place-Based Video Games Could Transform Education

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 11, 2008
No comments

Toward a Community Media Toolset

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

February 11, 2008
No comments

News That Moves

We the Media, How Have We Failed: "Re: Fwd: Who is Barack Obama?"

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

February 10, 2008
No comments

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is old news, I know. Various political forums mentioned the "Obama is a MUSLIM" e-mail smear campaign more than a month ago. But when I read about it, my understanding was this hatemongering and lying - or at least the lying - had been laid to rest. But then the e-mail was forwarded to me. Thoughtfully. As in, "you should know this." I trust this friend. This friend is a good person. This friend has a college degree and has read more books than most of our presidential candidates, probably. And this friend forwarded me a whole troop of...

February 6, 2008
10 comments

A Discussion of Mobile Technologies and News Making

Explore New Videos at Rising Voices

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

February 2, 2008
No comments

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first round of Rising Voices outreach projects have already been training participants in underrepresented communities how to use the tools of citizen media for just over seven months now. Of course in the beginning they started slow. First each of the project participants created their blogs and learned how how to link to other information on the internet. Slowly, the projects then explored digital photography and photo-sharing websites like Flickr. Now many of the projects are taking their media production skills to the next level by using Windows Movie Maker to produce short video documentaries that reveal the realities...

February 2, 2008
1 comment

National Night On(line)!

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The other night it was -10F with a windchill of -40F here in Minneapolis. When things get that cold, we Minnesotans start thinking about ways to get warm. I think this is why we have a reputation for public innovation, we have a lot of indoor time to think up schemes when the rest of the country is out on their deck enjoying a beer. So I started thinking about ways to better connect with my neighbors despite the cold. I am a huge fan of National Night Out when neighbors around the U.S. put up road blocks and hold...

January 31, 2008
No comments

Questioning Candidates on Government Openness and Transparency - Pick your Top 5

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the mainstream media community raises awareness about open government each year during Sunshine Week, we need to push local up strategies that promote greater government transparency online so local citizen media has access to the raw "info" materials we need to improve democracy. We need to take a lesson from OMBWatch's Open Government online survey and ask questions of state and local candidate. Here is the survey introduction from OMBWatch: Open Government: What We Need to Know We deserve a more open and honest government. Elections are the time when politicians pay the most attention to people and issues,...

January 29, 2008
No comments

Crowdsourced Election Coverage

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What with the nonstop drumbeat of presidential campaign news these days, it's easy to forget that we've actually got some other elections coming up. On Feb. 5, primary voters in Chicago will cast ballots for ward committee leaders, the county's chief prosecutor and a slew of other positions. From my point of view this is an interesting deal, because I've never run a news organization's election coverage before. I'm always the guy who comes in afterwards to do the big project on voter fraud. Which is a good thing, because I can't plan my way out of a paper bag....

January 25, 2008
2 comments

Primer on Copyright Liability and Fair Use

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As a lead up to next week's launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide, we are putting up longer, substantive blog posts on various subjects covered in the guide. This post, which discusses copyright and fair use in the context of citizen media, is the second in our series of legal primers. The first addressed the subject of immunity and liability for third-party content under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Because the primer is too long for me to republish here, I've included just a summary. If you are interested in reading more, the entire...

January 25, 2008
No comments

Political Blogs Engage; Steve Jobs Doesn't

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had a contrarian reaction to Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld Expo last week. Sitting in the convention center, tapping away at my laptop once again, I couldn't help but think that some of the magic of Apple had left the room. Jobs, now on the board of Disney, has been slowly morphing into a creature of Hollywood, more interested in doing deals that let consumers view streaming blockbuster movies than in helping to revolutionize Web video for users to take the next great leap forward. It wasn't a sell-out -- Apple answers to its shareholders, after all -- but...

January 22, 2008
6 comments

A Private Picture is Worth How Many Words?