Idea Lab

Video Volunteers Makes an Impact in India with Incentives for Media Makers

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• February 3, 2012
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The Other Side of Entrepreneurial Journalism

by David Cohn

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

• February 2, 2012
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Zeega + Localore = Innovative Local Storytelling for Public Media

by Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• January 26, 2012
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If We Were Starting NPR's Project Argo in 2012

by Matt Thompson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the past two years, I've been working on Project Argo -- a collaboration among NPR and 12 member stations in which the stations launched 12 niche websites on a platform we developed (built on WordPress), each putting their own spin on a common editorial model. As the pilot phase of Argo comes to a close, and we turn our attention to spreading and operationalizing what we've learned more broadly throughout the public media system, the question I get more than any other is, "If you were to start back at the beginning, what would you do differently?"I'd reframe the...

• December 27, 2011
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Trust Me: Credibility Is the Future of Journalism

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 15, 2011
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Too Big to Be Awesome: Big Giving and Its Discontents

by Tim Hwang
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the Institute for Higher Awesome Studies, our latest research has focused on thinking about the origins of awesome ideas, and how organizations and institutions play a role in supporting (or inhibiting) the implementation of those projects in reality. The big, looming question in this work is simple: What does the current social infrastructure supporting awesomeness look like? And, how could we tweak it to make it better (or in the very least, suck less)? Obviously, the classic piece of social infrastructure that casts the longest shadow (and the biggest piles of money) over this discussion is the arena of...

• November 23, 2011
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How Tiziano Project Beat CNN and NPR in the New Journalism Paradigm

by Jon Vidar
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 13, 2011
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Zeega Imagines New Forms of Digital Libraries and Archives

by Jesse Shapins
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since the founding of Zeega, one of the primary areas in which we've been working is the radically changing domain of libraries and archives. In the digital age, we believe libraries and archives pose one of the most exciting opportunities for re-imagining the ecosystem of public knowledge production and sharing. We see the questions posed by the future of libraries and archives to be intimately intertwined with the questions of who will own our digital future. In particular, it's our concern that what we see emerging is a model of the web dominated by private companies that provide an all-encompassing...

• October 12, 2011
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How Would You Start a Newsroom's Website From Scratch?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Starting from scratch, where would you start? Last Friday was my last day as program director of DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web. I've got a few more talks lined up (I'll be showing off DocumentCloud at SEJ in Miami and talking about our work at MobilityShifts), and I'll still be part of DocumentCloud's advisory group, but it was time to hand the reins over to the (very capable) staff at IRE. For my next trick, I'm helping get a new accountability journalism project off the ground....

• October 10, 2011
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Barriers to Failure

by David Cohn

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

• September 14, 2011
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The Argo Philosophy: Capitalize, Synthesize, Harmonize

by Matt Thompson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Part of the mission behind NPR's Project Argo is to construct a software platform that can maximize the output of a one- or two-person team of reporters. Project Argo is a collaboration between NPR and member stations to strengthen public media's role in local journalism. As the project has progressed, we've realized that we evolved a set of design and development principles that have guided our work throughout. This is how software invention looks in the era of the framework: Ten years ago, armed with an unstoppable designer/developer combo like Argo's tech architect, Marc Lavallee, and our designer/front-end developer,...

• August 9, 2011
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The New News Paradigm: 'Pivot or Perish'

by Tom Grasty
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the recent MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, I had the pleasure of speaking to 16 of the most promising thinkers in the area of digital news. Culled together from myriad of disciplines and backgrounds, some had already established themselves as pioneers in the digital space.Others had come from legacy newsrooms. A few had found their voices in the field. But regardless of their backgrounds, they all were united by a drive to innovate, inform and empower. In short, these 16 new news entrepreneurs had come to Cambridge, Mass., with a plan: Reinvent the news business. But if I had just...

• July 5, 2011
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Unplugging from Social Media Boosts Productivity, Human Connection

by Cody Shotwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Upon returning to stay with family in Olympia, Wash., to continue work on SeedSpeak, our Knight News Challenge Project, as well as complete a long-postponed creative writing project, I decided to commit myself to disconnecting completely from social media for two months. And, to the greatest extent possible, I wanted it to be an all-around web media fast. Apart from the most essential of emails, this post marks my first web communique to the world since my return home. No instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare. (However, as an unapologetic news junkie, I put no such limits on news produced...

• May 9, 2011
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Why Our Project (and the Country) Needs Cheap, Universal Broadband

by Joe Spurr
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Of all the challenges since November, when we began our Knight-funded project, hooking up the Internet was probably the least expected snag. Our project, OpenCourt (formerly Order in the Court 2.0 ), aims to modernize an old-school district courtroom and stream its proceedings live online. There was so much policy to chisel out. There was the logistical challenge to assemble the myriad of stakeholders necessary to have balanced discussions. Bottom-up site design and development. Content to produce. Community outreach. Surely any one of these would gobble more focus than a procedure typically taken for granted to be slightly more complicated...

• April 26, 2011
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Notifying Next of Kin in the Age of Facebook

by Teru Kuwayama
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

When she picked up the phone, I could tell from the sound of her voice that she didn't know yet. "I'm sorry to tell you this -- but I wanted you to hear from a friend, not Facebook. Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya. Chris Hondros too. I'm really sorry." There's a nauseating absurdity to those words, but it's the conversation I had yesterday morning with a friend. I'd been getting "pings" for an hour, mostly by Facebook IM, asking if I knew anything about the tweets coming out of Libya. I wasn't taking them especially seriously at first, having...

• April 21, 2011
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Newsgames Can Raise the Bar for News, Not Dumb It Down

by Ian Bogost
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Earlier this month a group of journalists, game designers, and academics gathered at the University of Minnesota for a workshop on newsgames. I was there, as was fellow Knight News Challenge winner and San Jose Mercury News tech business writer Chris O'Brien. After the event, Chris wrote a recap of the meeting here on Idea Lab. TechCrunch's Paul Carr penned a grouchy reply, and O'Brien responded in turn. As an early advocate and creator of newsgames who has spent the last several years researching and writing about the subject, I'm encouraged to see debate flaring up on the subject. But...

• April 13, 2011
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Basetrack in Limbo as Embeds Removed Due to Map Concerns

by Matt Farwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the weekend we learned that someone, somewhere, decided that Basetrack's journalists would have to go. So after we posted up the letter, we scratched our heads and wondered why. Actually, we're still wondering, especially since we received this note from the Marine Corps public affairs office in Afghanistan: Teru, Good chatting with you.  As discussed, we very much appreciate the Knight Foundation's efforts in highlighting the important work of our Marines and Sailors of First Battalion, Eighth Marines over the past six months in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.  Your team has not been disembedded; media ground rules were not violated. ...

• February 10, 2011
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The War After the War Plays Out for Veterans in Psych Ward

by Matt Farwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Basetrack is following the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, 1-8, for their tour in Musa Qala, Helmand, one of Afghanistan's most dangerous and strategically important locations. The goal is to tell a small fragment of their story in real time, as it unfolds. We aim to create a connection between the Marine strapping on his helmet and heading out on patrol and the public who have little or no personal stake in the war. For the Marines and their families, there is a perception that no one cares, that no one even remembers there is a war going on. (For more...

• January 12, 2011
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Why Design is So Important for Journalism Projects

by Cody Shotwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

As this year's batch of News Challenge applicants hurriedly slid those last-minute applications under Knight's door, the SeedSpeak team and its technology partner Gate6 were busy prepping a very limited sneak peek of the SeedSpeak website. Please stop by and show us love by giving us your contact information; we'll use it solely for the nefarious purpose of letting you know when the fully functional version is running, which should be very soon! After that, why not follow us and give us a quick Like on Facebook? We are excitedly bracing ourselves for all of you to explore, evaluate and...

• December 3, 2010
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'Report an Error' Button Should Be Standard on News Sites

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The web is a two-way medium. But when it comes to reporting errors on news sites, too often, it might as well be broadcast or print. It's time to change that. That's why, yesterday, we announced the launch of the Report an Error Alliance -- an ad hoc coalition of news organizations and individuals who believe that every news page on the web ought to have a clearly labeled button for reporting errors. Today's articles come with their own array of buttons for sharing -- and print and email and so on. We believe that opening a channel for...

• December 1, 2010
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Innovation Strategy #1: Don't Take 'No' for an Answer

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past week, Tom Grasty and I were invited to the Paley Center as part of "The Next Big Thing: The New News Entrepreneurs." We were asked to present Stroome before an extraordinary audience stuffed with CEOs, COOs and presidents of some of the world's most important media companies. During one presentation, Google's entertaining president of global sales operations and business development, Nikesh Arora, claimed the company culture regarding innovation at Google is about saying "let's try to find a way to say yes." It was one of the most inspiring leadership principles laid out during the two-and-a-half day conference...

• November 24, 2010
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Why MediaBugs Won't Take the Red or Blue (State) Pill

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• November 1, 2010
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5 Ways to Improve the Non-Profit Journalism Hub

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 25, 2010
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Open Data + Custom Maps = Better Afghan Election Monitoring

by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

If your organization is working on an open data release and your goal is to maximize the reach and impact of your data, sometimes just releasing the data and tools isn’t enough to accomplish your goal. Derivative products — like custom maps that visualize key data — extend the reach of data even further and help reach people who will never use complex tools or know how to meaningfully manipulate raw data. That’s why this week when the National Democratic Institute (NDI) launched an open data site for election monitors in Afghanistan, they also released 14 sets of custom map...

• September 16, 2010
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An Ethical Argument for Transparency in Journalism

by David Cohn

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

• July 22, 2010
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Where Did We Go Right? How to Be a Successful Entrepreneur

by CJ Cornell
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine a well-known Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Wanting to repeat his success, he scrutinizes all his articles and discovers they contain the letters "E" and "R" 10 times more frequently than any other letters. In his next article, he focuses on increasing the use of these letters, and then plans on teaching his new-found secret during his journalism seminar next fall. More than likely, his success as a reporter is due to a combination of talent, hard work, circumstances, personal relationships and some luck. Which means that evangelizing the benefits of proper letter frequency is irrelevant at best and probably harmful...

• July 9, 2010
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News Organizations Must Innovate or Die

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

People in news don't generally think of innovation as their job. It's that old CP Snow thing of the two cultures, where innovation sits on the science not the arts side. I had my own experience of this at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in Washington a couple of months ago. After one of the sessions I spotted an editor whose newspaper had adopted hNews (the Knight-funded news metadata standard we developed with the AP). "How's it going?" I asked him. "Is it helping your online search? Are you using it to mark up your archive?" Before I...

• July 8, 2010
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The Civic Media World Turns its Eyes This Week to MIT

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, all past and present Knight News Challenge winners descend here upon the MIT campus as Knight Foundation and the MIT Center for Future Civic Media co-host the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media conference. There has been an interesting evolution in the conference's -- and the News Challenge's -- focus: the question is less and less "How do we save, finance, or repurpose the functions of newspapers?" and more and more "How do we blow apart what we once thought media was 'merely' capable of?" News Challenge winners are showing that investigative journalism doesn't always need an...

• June 14, 2010
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Joel Spolsky Retires His Blog, but Blogging Will Endure

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Joel Spolsky wrote his final blog post last week. If you're not in the software field, you might not know Spolsky's name. But since 2000 his Joel on Software blog has been explaining the intricacies of programming with clarity and humor for an audience of both insiders and novices. Joel on Software served as a model example of how blogging liberated experts in myriad fields, enabling them to school readers without taking the shortcuts that so often mar conventional coverage of their subjects. A good many technology journalists, myself included, got any number of crash courses from Spolsky's posts, on...

• March 24, 2010
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Clifford Stoll Was Wrong, But Internet is Far From Perfect

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Poor Clifford Stoll. His 1995 Newsweek essay The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana resurfaced last month and, yes, is still so curmudgeony that it makes Dennis the Menace's Mr. Wilson sound like Pangloss: What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the...

• March 5, 2010
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Don't Blame the Tools -- People Plagiarize Copy!

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two high-profile cases of plagiarism made recent headlines -- one at the New York Times, one at the Daily Beast. In each case, the plagiarist expressed confusion and surprise when confronted with the evidence, and in each case, he blamed the speed of Internet-era reporting and the cut-and-paste tools that make lifting someone else's words so easy. I think we all need to remember that, "Every plagiarist says it was accidental." Those aren't my words. That's why I put them in quotes and linked to the place where Steve Buttry said them. When I first read Buttry's words I copied...

• February 19, 2010
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'Anarconomy' and the News Industry

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A good friend of mine forwarded me this essay (PDF) from the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies, which presents an important set of ideas. Although it belittles intellectual property using straw man arguments, it does a nice job of assembling the array of "knowledge as public good" arguments. An even more utopian future, which featured a backdrop of Eastern philosophy, was set out by James Burke and summarized nicely in his "the day the universe changed" series. In essence, it is a vision that holds the transcendental equilibrium of the individual in and with the collectivity of everything -- in...

• February 11, 2010
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The Great News Business Model Hunt is a Wild Goose Chase

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It may be impolitic to admit this, but I'm weary of the Great News Business Model Hunt. For those journalists who have just woken up to the changes in their industry, I know that this issue couldn't be more fascinating and pertinent. But if you worked in the news business on the web from the start, as I did at Salon.com beginning in 1995, this hunt has become an overly familiar routine and, at its worst, a rite of futility. Over the course of the decade I spent at Salon, we tried it all -- pay walls, partial and total;...

• January 25, 2010
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The Search for a New Revenue Model in Journalism

by David Cohn

My writing on PBS Idea Lab was introduced to me as a way to publicly discuss the growth of Spot.Us, my Knight News Challenge project. I've received kudos for being honest in my blog posts. I'm comfortable talking about where Spot.Us is falling short, and where we are exceeding expectations. I think we are doing a bit of both -- and trying to adjust to succeed more and fall short less. Hey, that's the nature of iterative projects, which I've always said needs to be at the heart of Spot.Us as a new concept. So let's keep that bit of...

• January 19, 2010
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Lessons Learned When Expanding Video Volunteers to Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers recently started a new program in Brazil that is focused on using video as a way for young people from favelas to earn a living. Starting a project in a new country has been an interesting, but also challenging, process. When I started VV in 2003, we did a few projects in countries such as Brazil, Rwanda, Uganda and the U.S. in addition to India, where we are currently based. But at that point, what we were doing was relatively easy: identifying volunteers, designing some basic video training modules or film script ideas, and sending them off. Once...

• January 11, 2010
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The Post's Public Enemy Gaffe: Why Circle-The-Wagons is a Joke

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A lot of virtual ink has already been spilled, by me and others, on the now-infamous Washington Post Public Enemy correction. (If you missed it, the Post ran a correction explaining that a story had "incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number." The correction went viral and inspired a flurry of Twitter responses mocking the paper with other misunderstood hip-hop song titles.) Before we move on, though, it's worth recording what this incident reveals about the disconnect between newsroom traditions and contemporary reality. A post by the Washington...

• December 17, 2009
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How the Olympics Can Thrive in the Digital Age

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

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

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 15, 2009
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How Do We Categorize All Journalistic Errors?

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

How many different kinds of errors is it possible for journalists to make? And how would you classify them or organize them into useful categories? These questions are not my attempt to concoct a tactful paraphrase for "How many different ways is it possible to screw journalism up?" Rather, they represent one of the interesting issues we face as we move work on MediaBugs from the project-organizing phase to the "let's build something" stage. There's a wealth of established practice in the software field for the kinds of data you can associate with a bug that a user finds in...

• November 11, 2009
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Kicking Off the Grant Process With Monitoring and Evaluation

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at the Jefferson Institute began our experience as a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner with one of the more exciting and misunderstood elements of the grant cycle: monitoring and evaluation (M&E). When done properly, M&E begins with the grantee setting out clearly the objectives of the grant, the activities necessary to achieve the objectives, and the resources applied to make these activities happen. So, for example, blogging for Idea Lab is an activity. An objective might be to create a thriving community, or to help guide the way for community news in transition. For our Knight project, the objective...

• November 5, 2009
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How to Win a Knight News Challenge Grant

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

October 12 was a day of high emotion; it was finally time to thrive under pressure. I got home from work, rushed to my friend's house, and cracked open my laptop. The goal was to brainstorm like crazy, write up some solid project descriptions, and submit as many Knight News Challenge grant applications as possible over the three days I had left. Thank goodness fate had a better plan: the deadline was extended. Now that we all have another two months, I'm going to take a few steps back and try to combine my formal education in information systems...

• October 28, 2009
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Printcasting Bridges the Digital Divide for Hyperlocal Coverage

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 23, 2009
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Viva CityCircles! Light Rail Publication for Phoenix in Alpha

by Aleksandra Chojnacka
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

First, a quick recap of our project: CityCircles is a multi-platform portal (using web and mobile) which delivers stop by stop information for Phoenix's light rail system. Information includes businesses and services, news, events, and promotions around each stop. We encourage collaboration and will feature a social networking aspect to the site. Our launch party in Tempe this past month led me to realize that this is all just now starting... Up until that moment CityCircles had been a concept that we've had to explain to our friends and colleagues - using hand gestures or drawings. Many people thought the...

• October 21, 2009
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Good, Fast and Cheap: Startups Can Only Pick Two of These

by David Cohn

Whenever people ask me about the process of building a website, here's how I explain their choices: "There is good, fast and cheap -- you get to pick two." Spot.Us has quietly started development again. I'll be putting up sketches of a much needed re-design on the Spot.Us blog soon, but you can see a sneak peek at the bottom of this post, courtesy of Lauren Rabaino. Looking back at what has almost been a full year of work, this is the part of building something from the ground up that plays to one of my strengths. It comes down...

• October 12, 2009
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MediaBugs Aims to Fix Errors, Rebuild Public Trust in Media

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As a student journalist working for my high school and college newspapers, I learned basic reporting from a strict rulebook. I can still recall my truculent resentment at one particular rule: why did we have to include the middle initial whenever we mentioned somebody's name? What a pain to have to ask for it each time! What an invitation to introduce a trivial error! On one level, of course, the middle-initial rule was, even then, a pretentious holdover from a bygone era of compulsivity, and today those lonesome capital letters are less and less commonly seen in print and on...

• October 2, 2009
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Spot.Us Expands to L.A. with USC Annenberg

by David Cohn

First: The big news. Spot.Us is expanding to Los Angeles and we are doing so with USC's Annenberg School of Journalism. Needless to say, we are very excited about the opportunities and possibilities. The main Spot.Us homepage will aggregate pitches from both the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles regions. You can go to Subdomains to find pitches specific to those regions: la.spot.us and sfbay.spot.us. As many know, I grew up in Los Angeles (Hamilton High School anyone?) so this is a bit of a home coming for me. I will remain up north running the Bay Area Spot.Us -...

• September 22, 2009
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For News Organizations, Transparency is the New Objectivity

by David Cohn

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

• September 15, 2009
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Look Beyond Data When Considering New Models for News

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My post last month -- Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content -- generated some thoughtful discussion and comments. But there was one thread that I want to highlight in order to elaborate on an important concept for news innovators. Before I dive into the details of the conversation, let me summarize my overall point. When it comes to understanding behavior, there are two general strategies. The first is to gather as much data as possible. And in this Google-driven, engineering-led era of product thinking, this tends to be the dominant approach. The Anecdotal And Observational Approach But...

• September 10, 2009
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The Shocking Truth About Journalism, Activism, and the Healthcare Reform Debate

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• September 4, 2009
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How Citizen Journalists Can Learn from Work of 'Citizen Scientists'

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• August 27, 2009
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EveryBlock, MSNBC.com and the General Public License

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now everyone has heard the news: EveryBlock is now part of MSNBC.com. And anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight's open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license -- it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn't MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service? We at...

• August 18, 2009
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Two Recent J-Education Conferences Show Resistance to Change

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's no intrinsic reason why organized journalism education shouldn't lead -- rather than merely reflect -- what's happening in the world of communications. Yet this passive "mirror" status cries out for transformation. Of course, not everyone sees J-schools as reflective entities. For years, editors worldwide have complained that the schools don't in fact reflect the mainstream media enough. J-teachers are blamed for a shoddy supply of new cogs to the newsroom machines. The industry's assumption has been that it knows exactly what's needed; that it's the J-schools that need changing. Educational institutions, in this view, should be service providers to...

• August 15, 2009
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The Leadership Vacuum in Journalism

by David Cohn

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

• August 5, 2009
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How Fear, Brand Addiction and Paranoia Block Innovation

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been thinking a lot lately about organizational behavior and innovation, and how the former can hinder the latter. It comes to mind not because I like to dwell on the negative, but rather out of hope that understanding the root cause of problems can help us all avoid the mistakes of the past. This is an important exercise because, as many of us were reminded in the re-imagined "Battlestar Galactica" series, "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." Or if you prefer the non-geeky version: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned...

• August 3, 2009
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The People Formerly Known as the Audience Need a New Name

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• July 21, 2009
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News Ecosystem Demands Collaboration, Not Us vs. Them Mentality

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the great tragedies that I see in the current debate about the future of journalism is the way the discussion continues to be framed around a series of binary choices. Newspapers or blogs. Print or online. Journalists or algorithms. In each case, there seems to be a simple-minded belief that the future will inevitably be one or the other. I consider this tragic because the result is a lot of dead-end debates that devolve into spitball fights about whether one will replace the other. My belief is that the better conversation is about how these things should complement...

• July 16, 2009
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Ideas for Professional Journalists to Prove Their Value

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you were a professional journalist and I asked you, "what does mainstream media provide that the crowd can't?" I have some guesses about what I might hear in your answer: It's more credible, more comprehensive, fact-checked, less biased, professionally composed, more knowledgeable, presented in the larger context, and more reliable, to name a few. But wait! It's a trick question, and not just because there are countless examples of all classes of reporting from both mainstream and creek media. The trick is epistemological: The existence or non-existence of these qualities on either side is practically meaningless if nobody can...

• July 15, 2009
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Reflections on a Facebook Birthday

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This year for my birthday I got three calls. Two people sent cards. And I don't think I ever received so much attention in my life. I have to say, it was fabulous turning 51 years old on Facebook. The well wishes started pouring in on the night before my birthday and they kept coming the day after, too. Friends from junior high, high school, college, past jobs, former neighbors, fellow travelers all weighed in on my Facebook wall. According to a January study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, adults between 45 and 54 make up 19...

• June 29, 2009
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What Are The New Obligations Of Readers?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• June 17, 2009
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Think Community? Think Maps! (Going to MIT. Part One)

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm looking into the Delta airplane illuminator at the white snow valley with scattered grayish mountain peaks of Greenland, which just recently became independent of Danmark, and comparing the view with the satellite map right behind me on the horizontal Kindle-size screen. First thought: since last summer Delta tech guys made a great step forward and significantly improved the entertainment services onboard, introducing a sensor screen and a possibility for the flyer to choose movies, games, CDs by genres and tracks. And finally build a personal playlist, which is a worthy alternative to watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button...

• June 17, 2009
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To Save Journalism We Need More than New Software Programs

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• June 8, 2009
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Singing the Praises of 'Strategic Journalism'

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With all the talk of how newspapers can retain readers, it's still worth remembering some useful advice to newspapers from more than ten years ago. It comes from Mike Smith, at that time the assistant director of the Newspaper Management Center at Northwestern University. In a publication titled Values. Culture.Content, he addressed the question, "How do you differentiate your product from the growing number of media and information options?" Observing that "newspapers are place-based media," he went on to note that the standard answer was that newspapers should "become the primary source of local news." Rebutting this, Smith declared that...

• May 26, 2009
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Journalism's 3.0 Business Model(s)

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A guest blog post by Jeremy Pennycook: The Internet killed journalism. At least, as we know it. Legacy media is on a serious decline. It's hard to argue with the numbers. The often named champions of web 2.0 - Google, Facebook, Twitter - these tools didn't destroy the foundation of a business model which supported journalism and promoted a free, democratic, and open society for decades. Instead, the real culprit is a fundamental shift in how society communicates, collaborates, and disseminates information.

• May 6, 2009
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A Related Epidemic: Swine Flu Brings New Lows in Context-to-Chatter Ratio

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One pig, if only in the news topic logo*, usually gets a cameo in television coverage of swine flu. The lonely pig is out of context, though -- separated from the three-quarters of a million caged, crammed, and fattened pigs slaughtered annually at the massively polluting pig factory in the town with the first human case of the virus. There is not yet hard proof that the pigs half-owned by U.S. agribusiness giant Smithfield Farms evolved the virus in their literal cesspool conditions -- there isn't a single pig outed with having this flu anywhere -- but media are rarely...

• April 30, 2009
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Innovation, Legacy Assets Give Newspapers Hope

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been a long six months, but I'm finally dusting off my keyboard and re-starting my blog here. First things first, a disclaimer: I don't graduate until May, so it's safe to say that I still don't know what I'm talking about. My hands, however, are a little dirtier than before thanks to folks at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who graciously hired me as intern. This experience has made me all the more hopeful about the future of news organizations, and I would like to rattle through a few thoughts inspired by my time there so far. The Spirit of Innovation...

• April 3, 2009
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Collaboration is Queen: Spot.Us Moving Forward

by David Cohn

There are more updates to spot.us than I can really fit into a MediaShift IdeaLab post. For the list-y version of recent milestones - scroll down to the bottom. But first, I want to highlight a very specific example of forward momentum both for Spot.us and the notion that news organizations don't try new things. I try and avoid the "new media v. old media" debate. What I often say is "I have constructive criticism for both sides." Details on new media criticism: It needs to mature and blossom. Details on old media criticism. It must learn to be agile...

• March 30, 2009
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How Many Homegrown News Stories Are in Your Daily Paper?

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• March 27, 2009
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Redesigning Journalism At Stanford's Design School

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had the great privilege to be invited to sit on a panel earlier this month at the Institute of Design at Stanford to provide feedback on an effort called, "Redesigning Journalism." I've been wanting to visit the "D School" for some time now. So I jumped at the chance to participate. In this case, design refers to the fundamental way a product is conceived and built. The D School teaches something called "design thinking". It's a powerful method and I'll be writing more in the near future about using it to find new ideas for journalism. In brief, a...

• March 26, 2009
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Good News as a Business Model?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• March 22, 2009
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Life After Newspapers: One Reporter Takes on the Island of Alameda

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Bit of a busy couple weeks for those watching the newspaper business. The presses stopped at the Rocky and the P-I, Clay Shirky and Steven B. Johnson took turns penning big think pieces about the Future of News(papers), and -- good news -- the San Diego Union-Tribune looks like it will sell to a private equity firm. So what does life after newspapers look like, especially in major-metro-adjacent neighborhoods? I asked one reporter-turned-blogger about the local news site she started after leaving the Bay Area Newspaper Group, the chunk of Dean Singleton's MediaNews that includes the Oakland Tribune and a...

• March 18, 2009
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Messages From Hot Places

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I got to go to the MIT Media Lab to sit in on a gathering of researchers and graduate students involved with the Center for Future Civic Media. It's hard not to get all fangirl when going to the Media Lab. I mean, I used to read about this place in issues of Wired back before they adopted rational typography! We all got brief presentations on three projects at different stages of development. One, Virtual Gaza, took eyewitness testimonies from people living in Gaza and overlaid them on a Google Virtual Earth layer. Another, called Between the Bars, was...

• February 27, 2009
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Janet Robinson's Remarks at TimesOPEN

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• February 20, 2009
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Spot.Us Deals with the Good and Bad of Limitations

by David Cohn

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

• February 16, 2009
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The Sins of Princes...

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been following the story of Prince's copyright battles for over a year, and found the latest development noteworthy enough to call attention to. My interest began with Prince and Universal targeting YouTube, fan sites, and housewives for a number of debatable copyright infringements in 2007. It got some good media attention at first, with ABC News doing a great piece in Oct. 2007. But although the attention on the subject has waned in the media, Prince and UMG have kept up their plight, and the latest fallout is the death of one of the oldest and most popular fan...

• February 5, 2009
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First Beta Site in the Open Media Project is a Success!

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Urbana Public Television, the first of six Public Access TV and Community Technology Centers to implement the model and modules developed for Deproduction's Knight News Challenge project, has launched their new Drupal website with our help. Lead Developer for Deproduction/Civic Pixel, Kevin Reynen explains the process of setting up this revolutionary new system with Kate Gorman of UPTV, "Launching a basic Drupal site can be a lot for someone to take in... let alone all of the new hardware, networking changes, file transfers, encoding, projects, reservations, error logging, etc, etc. I'm sure Kate was overwhelmed at times, but she persevered...

• February 2, 2009
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The Opportunity of Public Radio

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• January 27, 2009
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Printcasting.com Helps Spark a Global Movement

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• January 23, 2009
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The Journalism Bubble

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

You've heard about the housing bubble. And the dot-com bubble. I'm here to tell you about The Journalism Bubble. Anybody who's paying attention to the state of journalism in the US is aware of the financial crisis facing the news industry. And there's wide agreement on the cause of the crisis: advertising revenue for print and broadcast is declining, and advertising revenue for internet offerings is not rising fast enough to make up the difference. That's true. It's also a completely inadequate explanation for the waves of layoffs, bankruptcies, and outright closures of news organizations. There is a journalism bubble....

• January 16, 2009
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When is a Riot a Riot?

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now almost everyone knows that a group of demonstrators protesting against the killing of a young father by a transit officer splintered off and began a wave of destruction in downtown Oakland. Mainstream media outlets called it everything from a riot to a violent protest. Some bloggers referred to it as a civil unrest, rebellion or both a riot and civil unrest. Like is true with many issues, our perception of what happened is often shaped by our fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography. Perhaps because I live in Oakland and spent some years in Detroit,...

• January 12, 2009
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A Holiday Gift

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Written English Version: During this holiday season, many people take the time to reconnect with their family. This is true with deaf people, too. Yet for a large number of deaf people, their families are hearing. The majority of interaction is likely to be spoken, and the deaf individual is unavoidably left out of them. This situation is certainly true for me. This situation is not to be pitied, but simply is. What this highlights to me is not the barriers inherent here, but the importance in getting through and overcoming them. How communication is utterly important in maintaining...

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

by David Cohn

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

• December 22, 2008
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What Will 2009 Bring for Journalism?

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

...it is hard to imagine what America would look like without the small and shrinking number of people who engage in painstaking, firsthand research in order to separate the truth from the body of supposed facts, and who keep the rest of us honest. That's what David Samuels wrote about John Coster-Mullens, the author of a book-length work on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. You know what's surprising about this? The man who's being accorded this respect is not and never has been a journalist: he's a truck driver. 2009 looks to be a year...

• December 22, 2008
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The Day Print Didn't Stand Still

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, after 6 months of planning and hard work, we officially launched Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project, in alpha. We're still busy finishing up the remaining functionality while responding to the excellent feedback and ideas we're getting from alpha testers. And we are going full speed ahead toward a March 2 launch of Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. Thanks to those of you who have helped us out so far! If you would like to be an alpha tester, there's always room for one more. But I have to say that I can't think of a more ironic time...

• December 16, 2008
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Study on Digital Inclusion and Civic Engagement

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 16, 2008
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Why Spot.Us Should Have Used Drupal (and Why It Doesn't Matter)

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 12, 2008
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Hiring for Change: How to Staff a New Media Project

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now, I had something all ready to post, but I loved Chris O'Brien's post on Mistakes I Made With The Next Newsroom Project that I'm going to do one of my own. I've been working on Placeblogger, a 2007 News Challenge Winner, with Tish Grier, over the past year and a half. Like a lot of technical projects, Placeblogger had a ski-jump-like curve of complexity and features; when you're making something new online, you often do a ton of work in the background before anyone sees anything at all. That's one of the things that makes our most recent release...

• December 11, 2008
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Updating the Pulitzer Prizes for the Internet Age

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The people who run the Pulitzer Prizes, undoubtedly America's premier journalism awards, have taken some useful steps into the 21st Century with new rules that welcome online-only entries. From the official rules (PDF): Entries for journalism awards must be based on material coming from a text-based United States newspaper or news organization that publishes--in print or online--at least weekly during the calendar year; that is primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories; and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles. Printed magazines and broadcast media, and their respective Web sites, are not eligible.This will open the...

• December 11, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 12
Wisdom In Characters

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• November 28, 2008
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The Next Newsroom Proposal is Complete

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is with great pleasure that I'd like to announce that we have completed work on our newsroom proposal for The Chronicle, the independent, student-run newspaper at Duke University. The Chronicle’s board has adopted our proposal for a new home. That document will now serve as the basis for negotiations with officials at Duke University. The plan is available here: http://nextnewsroom.wikispaces.com. But first, I want to establish a little context for that document. The plan was written in collaboration with The Chronicle's board, officially known as the Duke Student Publishing Company. The proposal conforms to explicit guidelines created by the...

• November 20, 2008
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What Newsrooms Can Learn from Obama Campaign

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This thought occurred to me over the weekend when I heard that Barack Obama's campaign had purchased advertising space in videogames. According this Associated Press Article: "Nine video games from Electronic Arts Inc., ranging from the extremely popular 'Madden 09' football game to the street racing 'Burnout: Paradise,' feature in-game ads from the Obama campaign. The ads--they appear on billboards and other signage--remind players that early voting has begun and plug a campaign Web site." Now, what do videogames and Obama have to do with newsrooms? It's clear that over the past year, Obama's campaign has developed a profound understanding...

• October 20, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 3
The Chain of Angels

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 7, 2008
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Beanstockd in 500 Words or Less

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you haven't already read our mid-summer update (found here) I'll give you the abridged version. My name is Angela Antony, and my cofounder's name is Sandra Ekong. We were roommates at Harvard. Like most things hip and cutting edge, Beanstockd was born in Paris. Sandra and I lived there for 6 months during our junior year in college; it was there that we discovered that we were an unstoppable duo, that snails are ocassionally edible (it's really a personal choice), and that our chic Parisian lifestyle revealed some fundamental problems with the way we lived our lives in America....

• September 30, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 0
Our Hero

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

My story is real, except for the Includer, which may yet some day be real as well. The Includer is a device for Africans or anybody to read and write emails and other texts stored on their USB flash drives. Once a week they might walk the three miles or so to their Internet cafe to upload their emails and download more. The Includer is the hero of our every episode. I am simply the blogger for the Includer. I am real... so what. Yet I suppose that you matter. I will draw my characters and I will draw you...

• September 25, 2008
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Meet The Printcasting Team

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

by David Cohn

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
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How Newspapers Can Re-Engage with Communities

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
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Five Steps to Foster Innovation in the Newsroom

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last month, Dan Pacheco asked for readers' ideas on How to Foster Innovation in Newspapers. He was speaking at an upcoming Knight conference and was looking for feedback to augment his presentation. I didn't have a chance to respond in time to help him, but it's a subject I've been thinking about a lot over the past year as part of The Next Newsroom Project. I'm sure there are plenty of doubters who think newspapers are a lost cause at this point when it comes to innovation. Fine. But it's important to understand that this question is one that any...

• August 5, 2008
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It's Time for a Revenue Revolution

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• July 24, 2008
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How Different Media View Racial Controversies

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

No matter the medium, the subjects were the same. Jesse Jackson made some rather unwise remarks about Barack Obama and the New Yorker published a satirical depiction of the Obamas that many thought missed the mark. The difference came when you looked at how those stories were covered on the web compared to the "traditional mainstream" media. In the end, that was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the controversies because it was illustrative of the pros and cons of both forms of media. While some in the "mainstream" media struggled with how to characterize Jesse Jackson's off-camera and ill-advised...

• July 21, 2008
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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
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When the Star of the Story is Understanding Itself

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Maybe information and explanation ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. What put me in that mind is a special episode of "This American Life" called The Giant Pool of Money. It's a one-hour explainer on the mortgage crisis, the product of an unusual collaboration between Ira Glass, the host and force behind This American Life, Alex Blumberg, who works with Glass, and NPR, which lent economics correspondent Adam Davidson. He used to work for the show he was collaborating with. If you don't know "The Giant Pool of Money" you...

• July 17, 2008
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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
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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
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ASL video of journalism as community building

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Note: This is an entry that I created for my website, providing some explanation to the deaf community of how I'd like to use some of the new journalism methods. Although vastly simplified due to time constraints, they provide the basic idea. I am crossposting here to provide you with both an overall view of my thinking, and an example of how I am currently attempting to post 'bilingually' in both ASL and written English. Original post here. Transcript: Signcasts is an attempt to find out how to successfully provide news to the deaf community. Of course, the deaf have...

• July 13, 2008
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How to Foster Innovation in Newspapers?

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Next week I'm leading a discussion at a conference run by the Knight Digital Media center about innovation within newspapers. The topic of the conference is "Transforming News Organizations for the Digital Now."They've asked me to talk about two things: The "ecology of innovation." What type of environment fosters innovation best?Provide examples of innovation that helps journalists to transform. I have my own thoughts about this, informed by my work in Bakersfield as well as at previous companies. I will share those ideas here soon, in addition to anything that comes out of the panel discussion. But to make sure...

• July 8, 2008
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Swimming Lessons for Journalists

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday on the Poynter Institute's E-Media Tidbits blog (which I edit), contributor Alan Abbey posted an item about the latest spate of newsroom layoffs. He noted: "For media workers, these aren't necessarily bad times. For every job shutting down at LA Times, there is probably one (albeit less well paid, less prestigious, and more nose-to-the-grindstone) opening up in new media. However, for media veterans, 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?" That's pretty blunt talk, and I'm glad that Abbey had...

• July 4, 2008
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Hyperlocal Media Meets Negative Campaigning

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• July 3, 2008
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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
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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
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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
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The Sweet Nectar of Experimentation

by David Cohn

Now, it may turn out that this low-hanging fruit is poisonous. But aren't you glad that somebody is at least going to give it a good honest bite to find out? More importantly - aren't you glad it's somebody who shares the values of the news industry.

• June 19, 2008
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Civic Media Innovation Camps

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• June 11, 2008
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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
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Killing Trees and the Future of News Online

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Seth Godin on the news buiness versus the paper business: Jason wrote in to ask why I thought that the newspaper industry was in a Dip. In my book, I point out that with classified ads disappearing and the web thriving, the days of newspapers as we know them are clearly over. That shouldn't mean the industry is in trouble. In fact, there are more people reading more news every day than ever before--without the cost of printing and distributing a costly piece of newsprint every day. Happy days... But (many of) the people in the industry have built their...

• June 4, 2008
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Google News Layered in Google Earth

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the Where 2.0 conference in May, Google announced Google News would be now be accessible and located in Google Earth. As Brandon Badger, Product Manager noted in his Lat Long Blog entry The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser. By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide. The amount of content available Google Earth is astounding, but even more interesting is the ways in which...

• June 2, 2008
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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
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Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations

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
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What Does Popular Culture Have to Do With Civic Media?

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
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Ceibal Jam! Developing Apps for the XO Laptop

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the '$100 laptop') to recreate the student computer's user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux. That decision led to the defection of Walter Bender who had been OLPC's president of software and content and a longtime colleague of Negroponte. It also led free software guru Richard Stallman, who ironically switched to a XO laptop himself just before the announcement, to ask out loud, "Can...

• May 14, 2008
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It's Not Just a Newspaper Problem; It's a Media Problem

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past week, the National Association of Music Retailers landed in San Francisco to hold their 50th annual convention. Never heard of them? Neither had I, until I responded to a random email pitch and decided to attend for a few hours. Essentially, NARM is a trade group that includes every piece of the music ecosystem, from artists and songwriters to retailers to record labels. While the organization was unfamiliar to me, the main topic of conversation at the convention was all too familiar: How do we find a new business model in a digital world? The music world has...

• May 12, 2008
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Newspapers Suffer from Marketing Myopia Online

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• May 11, 2008
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Copyright and the Demise of Newspapers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Neil Netanel, a highly regarded legal scholar, has an interesting post on Balkinization entitled "The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech." Netanel, who has written extensively on copyright issues, posits that part of the reason for the decline in newspapers stems from Internet competitors that build on the content and value that newspapers create. He suggests that imposing a statutory license or levy on commercial Internet service providers and news aggregators might be a workable solution for ensuring that newspapers receive compensation for their investment in quality reporting. While I think he gives too little credit to citizen...

• May 8, 2008
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Driving Forward, Toyota Style

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When Toyota first began to rise to prominence in this country, the company's cars were known as cheap, plasticky, not-to-be trusted imports. Now Toyota is on pace to unseat GM as the world's auto sales leader, and is regarded as one of the most innovative companies around. A New Yorker article by James Surowiecki gives a quick rundown on how that happened. At Toyota, "the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps, but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis ... Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field...

• May 8, 2008
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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
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Finding Local Community Online

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
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How Do We Deal with Stolen Content?

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In an ideal world, I suppose, all information would be free and widely accessible. Maybe not credit records, health stats or income information -- but certainly journalism would be. Alas, though, we're not in an ideal world. On-line publications need readers (hits) to survive. In the case of a small independent site like Gotham Gazette, we need hits to attract funders and advertisers and to build our reputation and credibility. And we need to maintain control over our material to preserve our integrity. So it was distressing when our technical director, Amanda Hickman, using Technorati, found many sites using our...

• May 1, 2008
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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
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Tying it All Together

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The IdeaLab bloggers have spent four months talking about technologies, roles, and rules surrounding journalism and digital media. Now it's time to take some of the insights from those posts and design a system that will allow citizens and journalists alike to inform the media conversation, connect with their communities, and democratically drive the social agenda. I'll give an overview of one possible system here; over the next few weeks I'll explain each piece of it in more detail. System Elements Geotagging - by tagging content to physical location it is possible to personalize it without losing the benefits of...

• April 27, 2008
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Web 2.0: Blogtropulus vs. the Legacy Press Room

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the most telling juxtapositions at this week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is taking place on the third floor of the Moscone Center, where the traditional press lounge and the bloggers lounge (dubbed Blogtropolus, above) were set up side by side. As someone who inhabits both worlds, I was fascinated by the study in contrasts. Both rooms have wireless access, but there the similarity ends. Enter the press lounge and it's akin to stepping into a public library: about 18 tech reporters are hunkered down at their laptops, sitting around small tables with nary a whisper....

• April 25, 2008
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Participants Balk at Controversial Topics

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
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Press Can Survive Newspaper's Demise, But Must Benefit Public

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two weeks ago I participated in a forum on newspapers and the net put on by Britannica Blog. The tone was: are newspapers doomed and does anyone care? My part includes this: At many a conference I have attended on new media and journalism, some old pro whose subsidy is fast disappearing will (mentally) place hands on hips and say about the Internet as a whole, "Well, that's all very nice, very Web 2.0, but where's the business model, people?" As if that were some kind of contribution. I can't tell you how disconcerting-and weird-I find some of these performances....

• April 21, 2008
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Journalism Will Survive the Death of Its Institutions

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Massive layoffs with no end in sight. Wave after wave of acquisitions and mergers fueled by the excesses of artificially cheap capital. Widespread fear that an entire industry and its contributions will stall or simply stop.

This describes the news industry today, but it also described the high tech industry in the late eighties and early nineties.

• April 15, 2008
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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
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Community News Companies Will Become Extinct

by Richard Anderson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The internet has created the need for radical change in the community news business. Incremental changes such as Yahoo consortiums will not be sufficient to stem the loss of print revenue. Consumers do not want to be limited to browsing content provided by legacy top-down, control oriented news organizations. As well, banners and buttons, the online version of double trucks, ROP's and classifieds, do not translate into a value proposition that support feet on the ground reporters. If one reflects on the origins of the Internet - its reason for being - it is not surprising that applying print practices...

• April 11, 2008
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Good Night, and Good Luck

by Gabriel Berrios
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Versión en español abajo What is it that journalism needs? That the people can put their trust in it; many years have gone by since journalism was invented to communicate in a better way among those living in a common place, whether it be a neighborhood, town, city, country, or world. Furthermore it must be said that journalism has been converted into spectacle. Journalism has become selfishly motivated, converting its' own journalists into celebrities, into "newsmakers" themselves, James Bond types who reveal the truth, or, like Indiana Jones, seeking adventures in far-off lands that, from the perspective of first-world marketing,...

• April 6, 2008
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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
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EveryBlock FAQ created

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since launching the Knight-funded Web site EveryBlock just over two months ago, we've been asked many questions about the project, from the philosophical ("Why is this 'news'?") to logistical ("When will the code be open-sourced?"). We've compiled the most frequently asked questions into a brand-new FAQ. Check it out....

• April 5, 2008
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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
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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
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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
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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
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What Drives News Decisions (What Are They Thinking)?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Senator Barack Obama mischaracterized statements of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. To be charitable, there's only so many media narratives any one person or even campaign can try to change at one time. That's my question for today: how are these media narratives formed in the first place, and why? Easier question: Did you see the videos below? The seven and ten minute versions, not the seven and ten second versions? Obama, in his speech, chose to defend Wright as a person and a leader, but he denounced the statements as divisive and reflecting a static view of progress in history. In...

• March 25, 2008
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Media's "New" Community Role

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I just got back to the U.S. from my first visit to Rome. The whole trip was great, but my favorite part was The Roman Forum. This ancient gathering place represents, as far as I'm concerned, the epitome of community facilitation given the resources available at the time. This may not seem like a relevant anecdote at first but the point is that I think members of the news industry who are looking for a role in this crazy Internet filled world may discover that the answer to their identity crisis isn't so new after all. This post is about...

• March 21, 2008
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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
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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
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Boulder's ClimateSmart Lacks Online Community

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
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The San Jose Mercury News and Gary Webb

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The San Jose Mercury News' location in Silicon Valley is not the first reason it should have become the newspaper of record in the Internet age. Reading about this year's round of layoffs and cutbacks, I think about the journalist the Mercury News cut off twelve years ago during boom times. In 1996, a series of articles by Gary Webb showed the Central Intelligence Agency's complicity in bringing crack cocaine into Los Angeles. Profits from the new, highly addictive, and illegal drug supported the U.S.-backed Contras' war of terror against the people of Nicaragua during the 1980s. In those first...

• March 11, 2008
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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
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Dealing with Privacy Issues in Hyper-Local Media

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• March 4, 2008
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National Awareness Days are a Cry for Help

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, March first, is National Self-Injury Awareness Day. You may not know much about this issue. A Google news search turned up one article, in the independent Charleston Gazette. I am meaningfully aware that people self-injure only through a friend's yearly blog post to mark self-injury awareness day: "We are male and female. We are artists, athletes, students, and business owners. We have depression, DID, PTSD, eating disorders, borderline personalities, bipolar disorder, or maybe no formal diagnosis at all. Some of us were abused, some were not. We are straight, bi, and gay. We come from all walks of life...

• March 1, 2008
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Community Organization with Digital Tools

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
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Tips to Win a Knight News Challenge Grant

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Earlier this week I was at WeMedia 08 in Miami, where I was on a panel about the Knight News Challenge. (Last year, Adam Glenn and I won a Knight News Challenge grant to fund our community journalism project, the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker.) Also on the panel were Gary Kebbel, director of the News Challenge progam for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and fellow grantee Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota. Here are five points I think are useful to anyone considering applying for a News Challenge grant, based on Adam's and my experience so...

• February 29, 2008
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Computation + Journalism Confab: Exciting, Disappointing and Confusing

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week's Symposium on Computation & Journalism left me excited, disappointed and confused. It was hard not to be excited listening to all the technologists talking about the latest advances that will allow us to get news to once isolated people in Africa and India using mobile phones and other technology. Once again, it was driven home that no longer is the price of a computer a barrier to digital participation. The ubiquitous cell phone, as common in my neighborhood as the bikes people use for transportation, is now allowing us to get news to people all over the world....

• February 25, 2008
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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
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The Washington Post vs. washpost.com

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Washington City Paper this week published an extensive profile of the online strategy used by The Washington Post. Called, "One Mission, Two Newsrooms," the piece details how the Post has built an entirely separate newsroom for the online staff across the river in Arlington, Va. While the online team has flourished, and developed a number of innovations, the profile notes that this arrangement has led to tension between the old newsroom in the city and the dot-com operation. The story kicks off with an extended anecdote about how Dana Priest and Anne Hull kept their big investigative series on...

• February 21, 2008
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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
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Will There Be a Newsroom in the Future?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The nature of our project at Duke University, the Next Newsroom Project, is to try to design the "newsroom of the future." But the other day on our project site, Leonard Witt of Kennesaw State University, started a discussion around the first, most obvious question we confronted: "Does the newsroom of the future really need to be a brick and mortar newsroom?" You can view the various responses, and some relevant links that got posted there. I wanted to withhold my reply until folks had their say. Naturally, it's not the first time I've heard that question since our work...

• February 14, 2008
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When Frames Go Bad: My Apology to NYT Reporter Jens Erik Gould

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A previous post of mine had an inflammatory headline unjustified by the text: "Lies about Venezuela: If NYT.com ran Related Content". I was guilty of looking at Jens Erik Gould's article, "Venezuela's Fateful Choice," through a frame: that major media coverage overwhelmingly seeks to portray the Venezuelan government as illegitimate and bad. My own view (frame) that the New York Times has that overall frame overrode a good analysis of the article. I apologize specifically to the reporter. Gould's article, while (despite the headline) primarily about accusations that the Venezuelan government lacks financial transparency, was not by itself part of...

• February 1, 2008
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Kenyan Bloggers Innovate to Heal Country

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The post-election crisis in Kenya has received a good deal of blogger coverage, both at Global Voices as well as the wider blogosphere. Some say the ensuing violence boils down to ethnic animosity. Others insist that such a viewpoint is overly simplistic. Kenya's post-election crisis has taught us that cell phone airtime can become currency in times of need and that bloggers on opposite ends of the earth can collaborate on a moment's notice to push the limits of online innovation and usefulness. There has even been a meta-conversation in the U.S. tech blogosphere about whether or not tech bloggers...

• January 31, 2008
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Physical Location is Different from Physical Community

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I applied to the News Challenge last year there was a guideline that all proposals had to somehow further the way digital media was used to assist a "specific physical area". This is actually why my friend Ian Anderson mentioned GPS during our brainstorming session, which led right over to Geotagging. The funny thing is that we had actually misinterpreted the entire situation - we took "specific physical area" to mean "specific physical community" - yet our solution still fulfilled the requirements of the News Challenge. This post is about my suspicion that although Geotagging does connect information to...

• January 30, 2008
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EveryBlock Launched

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've launched the first version of our Knight-funded project, EveryBlock. It offers a news feed for every block, neighborhood and ZIP code in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. Our launch announcement gives more information about what we're trying to do. We've still got a long way to go, but it's good to have this initial version out the door. Please let us know what you think! You can e-mail us at feedback at everyblock.com....

• January 24, 2008
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A Crisis in College Media?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Anyone interested in the challenges facing college media, especially independent college media, should check out a series that ran this week in The Daily Bruin, UCLA's independent student newspaper. There are three stories posted so far, including one that features The Chronicle Duke University, and its editor David Graham: "We were seeing all of the dire predictions about the future: We have to go online, do multimedia, blog, do video," said The Chronicle's Editor-in-Chief David Graham. "Those who are interested in journalism as a career realized we had to be pragmatic and be aware of this." But: But until the...

• January 24, 2008
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Ubiquitous Networks: The Trails Of Our Digital Identities

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For a while now I've been describing the locative process as overlaying a virtual landscape on the physical world. I've been describing locative media as embedded content in place. Some people do ask, "in place of what?" In the end, it's all a way of saying Locative Media is the hybridization of the virtual world and the physical world relying upon location-enabled mobile devices (eg, 50% of cellphones) leading to the formation of ubiquitous networks full of cultural content. Sounds good. The only part of that statement that's a bit tricky is the "ubiquitous networks." Not being a particularly dedicated...

• January 15, 2008
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A Developer's Dilemma: Who's a Journalist?

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I just got back onto campus after a glorious winter break and I'm full of chocolate and food from the holidays. To get back into things I was planning on using this post to flesh out my ideas for content moderation in a user-facilitated aggregation system. To be specific, I wanted to find a way to give journalists a special place in the content judging process without losing a sense of democracy. Unfortunately, within 10 minutes of sitting down I realized that there was a big snag that needs to be addressed before the conversation can even begin. The Snag:...

• January 14, 2008
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It's The Network, Stupid!

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My challenge has been summed up as making money from a hyperlocal community web site or, said differently "It is the sales, stupid." (see previous entry) That is a gross oversimplification. What my 21st Century Newchallenge is all about is building a sustainable business model based on connecting a community. That means it is always about the network. Sales and revenues impact sustainability but are secondary to the core mission, which is to develop the community. If challenged to say what is the community, I could just smirk and say, read the site; all 1.7 million posts. If you were...

• December 30, 2007
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Traditional Tagging is Important Too

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There has been a lot of talk about Geo-fillintheblank on this blog. Much of it is coming from me, so I want to take a second to bring things back down to earth (pun!). This post is about the old standard of information breakdown: separation by topic. Since "sections" are a typical feature for most, if not all, traditional news sites and newspapers, I don't think I need to spend time trying to explain why topical categorization is useful in general. Instead, I just want to make sure we re-incorporate this navigational technique while making the mad rush towards new...

• December 24, 2007
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Categorizing and Contextualizing Locative Media

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 19, 2007
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Philadelphia's Latino Immigrants Tell Their Life Stories

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We finished the first round of video production training! On Monday December 3rd, 20 Spanish-speaking immigrants received diplomas for successfully completing the first in a series of workshops in which they were trained in video production and basic web skills. This project, developed by the Media Mobilizing Project with Mexican immigrant community based organization JUNTOS is called, Our City, Our Voices: Immigrant Newscasts in the Digital Age. To remind people, the goal of the project is to give Philadelphia's newest inhabitants the capacity to tell their own stories and document their struggles through short digital videos. At the forefront...

• December 7, 2007
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More Than Just Finding A Toilet

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 3, 2007
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Open Journalism Challenge: Can Paid Media Report on Plan Mexico this Well?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Immigration, military contractors, fiscal responsibility, foreign policy, domestic policy, trade policy, business, labor, crime- this story has it all, plus underlying themes about access to information and democracy (optional, if you care to report on those kinds of things). And all with a presidential race coming up! Is your favorite news source keeping up? The Bush administration is trying to get Congress to approve what it calls the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion aid package to Mexico in order to fight drug cartels. The plan is more commonly known as Plan Mexico because of its inevitable similarities with Plan Colombia,...

• November 20, 2007
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Rethinking Newspapers

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been reading with fascination the email threads in the Rethinking the Mercury News project, which launched a Google Group discussion this month. In news circles, the San Jose Mercury News is considered one of the top-tier mid-size papers in the country. after its sale to MediaNews last year, the paper has been undergoing a series of cost reductions, resulting in staff reductions, slimmed-down sections and less original news coverage. In other words, like almost every other paper in the country, it's feeling the pain, both financially and journalistically. Not sure if MediaNews breaks out finances by newspaper, but...

• November 19, 2007
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Wanted: A Marshall Plan for Campus Media

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the past few months, I've had a chance to visit various campus media groups as part of our research project on newsrooms. And as I've noted before, I'm continually surprised at how dramatically behind the times many of these groups are. Rather than closing the gap, it seems to me that these student groups are falling even further behind. There are a variety of reasons why this is happening, some of which are general, and some of which might be specific to certain organizations. But I see this is a big deal. These groups play a role that's at...

• November 19, 2007
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What Will Journalist- Programmers Do?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the most common questions I've gotten about our journalist/programmer scholarships comes from news organizations: "When can we hire them?" And recent developments suggest that the need for people with both journalism and programming skills is only going to increase. For Northwestern's Readership Institute blog, I wrote last week about the growing number of data-driven applications being published on news Web sites. I used the Indianapolis Star's Data Central as a case study. It's worth pointing out, though, that the paper was able to publish most of these databases without involving professional programmers. This reflects one of the driving...

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

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• November 16, 2007
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Tapping the Potential of Geotagging

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I saw someone wearing a shirt that said "Think Globally. Act Locally. Eat Noodles." The noodles part still confuses me, but I think the rest of the message does a really good job of summarizing what I want digital media to facilitate. It seems that the key to bringing local into the inherently non-physical Internet is Geotagging and geographic interfaces. These technologies open up some innovative ways to present stories, but before looking at this idea more closely I'm going to describe the current situation from the perspective of a 21 year old media consumer in the hopes that it will illustrate the need that I'm trying to address.

• November 15, 2007
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How to Make a Foundation Cry

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"People misunderstood what we mean by innovative -- they looked at what won last year and applied it to a kind, cute, delightful new content area that made us just cry when we had to reject it." -- Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation, speaking at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society about the process of judging applications for Year 2 of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge grants....

• November 13, 2007
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Plain Dealer Should Deal Openly with Blog Ethics

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now you may have heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer featuring four voices from the ranks of local bloggers: two left, two right. They were paid as freelance contributors. Here's the way the "reader representative," Ted Diadiun, described the meltdown. It began when Rep. Steve LaTourette, a Republican Congressman, found out that one of the Wide Open bloggers, Jeff Coryell of Cleveland Heights, had contributed $100 to his opponent. LaTourette was unhappy that the newspaper would pay someone who financially supported his opponent to write political opinion. He complained to...

• November 11, 2007
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Armistice Day

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I wanted to riff on the free software requirement some more. To prove, with eloquent argument, that so-called uncompromising radicals drive needed change. That efforts toward free software alternatives to Flash my push Adobe to make Flash itself truly free. To argue that if you want modest changes for the better, many advocates of hopeless causes are your most important allies. To turn this discussion toward journalism, and how we need a radical commitment to some core principles if we aren't to lose all sense of truth and what matters. But, fortunately for you all, it is the eleventh hour...

• November 11, 2007
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Microsoft Demonstrates that Free Software is about Control of Our Own Future

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a follow-up to Amanda Hickman's post on open source free software games. Microsoft made tech news in the past week with reports that schools in Nigeria would use Windows XP rather than the Mandriva Linux on 17,000 computers ordered from Mandriva, a French GNU-Linux vendor. Public statements from Mandriva officials suggested foul play, but not many details were reported. Now, the Nigerian government has overruled the switch, Jeremy Kirk of IDG News Service reported, and his article published online yesterday by Computerworld UK has a lot more information on what actually happened. Nigeria's Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF),...

• November 10, 2007
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Moderating User Content in the Land of Journalism

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When people talk about the job of a moderator, they are talking about maintaining some type of standard. During a conference panel a good moderator might make sure that all the panelists get the chance to talk and keep the audience from throwing tomatoes. For YouTube it means promoting quality entertainment and keeping out the spam. But how do you maintain standards that are as high and complex as those of the journalism tradition, and how do you keep those standards in a democratic way? We have all faced these questions in one form or another, particularly when discussing the...

• November 6, 2007
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Is This News? Reporting with Opinion on Plan Mexico

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What is the public to do when an important matter such as $1.4 billion of military-police funding for a neighboring country head toward Congressional rubber-stamping with little media coverage? We take what we can get. And that tends to be reporting from people who have no steady income assured for their considerable journalistic efforts. When one does reporting out of a love of and a concern for humanity, one tends bring some of one's own perspective to the task. And in part what we get appears to be what we want. Alternative sources and aggregators for points of view are...

• November 4, 2007
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Free and Open Source Games

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our Technical Director, Amanda Hickman, is not a formal Idea Lab blogger, so I'm posting this on her behalf. This won't be the last you hear from her on the Idea Lab. --Gail As the Gotham Gazette prepares to launch our first Knight-funded news game, I've been thinking a lot more about their requirement that we produce our games using free and open source software. It is only fair for me to start with a couple of observations about where I'm coming from: I think that software freedom matters, a lot. As a Circuit Rider at the LINC Project I...

• November 2, 2007
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Report from Digital Hollywood Confab

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When my book Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation came out in 2005, the Hollywood studios were still doing everything in their power to resist the onrushing wave of the personal media revolution. These days, it's a far different story. Hulu, the online video portal backed by NBC and News Corp., is about to launch, and talk in the hallways at Digital Hollywood this week is all about how to embrace our digital destinies. Talk during the panels is not about how to build a better Facebook but how to build a widget that gains traction on Facebook. Will...

• October 31, 2007
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"Now" Trumps "Me" by Putting Us All in the Newsroom

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 30, 2007
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What's Not News? Unflattering Trivialities, Opinions on Planet's Shape, and Fake Press Conferences

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We can make some easy progress defining news by instead listing what's not news. Paul Krugman interviewed by Rory O'Connor: several major parts of the news media that are for all practical purposes part of "movement conservatism" -- Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Times -- and [...] other news organizations are intimidated, at least to some extent. I sometimes talk about what I call "asymmetrical intimidation." If you say a true but unflattering thing about Bush or in fact about any other prominent conservative, oh, boy! People are going to go after you. I mean, I've got...

• October 30, 2007
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Locative Media and Embedding Stories in Place

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 29, 2007
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Surprise! Students Resistant to New Media

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm currently attending the College Media Conference in Washington, D.C. And what I've been hearing from college media advisers this week confirms something that I've been seeing anecdotally while working on the Next Newsroom project at Duke. Advisers from colleges and universities of all shapes and sizes are frustrated at how resistant their students are to embrace new digital media tools and to collaborate with other media organizations on campus. At an otherwise jovial keynote on Thursday, Rob Curley, the Washington Post's digital and community guru, (see J.D. Lasica's previous post on Rob here) actually admonished the room full of...

• October 26, 2007
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Educate: Journalism and Teaching Technologies

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many who spoke at the Online News Association conference in Toronto defined education (of the public) as an important part of journalists' work. Most of us clearly do not feel the need to fulfill Toronto-raised Mary Harris "Mother" Jones' injunction to educate, agitate, organize (and not doing so is a disservice news organizations do to themselves and to society, I will argue later), but what would taking seriously the responsibility to educate, by itself, mean for news? The related content to which this connects is an online video recommended at the conference by Jeff Young (of the Chronicle for Higher...

• October 23, 2007
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Some Goals and An Idea

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jay Rosen beat me to the punch but I'm still going to jot down seven goals that I think the perfect news system would address. I used this list as a foundation when thinking about how to utilize digital media and it is what I feel any type of aggregation system should include. Afterwards you'll find a quick summary of the idea that got me into this big mess in the first place.

• October 22, 2007
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Locating Ourselves in the New Media Landscape

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 19, 2007
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Community and the Next Newsroom

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a world increasingly obsessed with the virtual, I'm leading a project focused on the physical. Our aim is to imagine the ideal physical space that will serve the needs of journalism for the next 50 years. There's no shortage of folks who will immediately say, "In the future, there will be no newsrooms." Perhaps. And there are some news organizations that operate that way now. Check out the New Haven Independent which operates virtually except for an occasional staff meeting in a local coffee shop. But I'm not convinced that's the model for most groups. There's still something intangible...

• October 19, 2007
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Ready? Here's My Formula for Online News Success

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am at the Online News Association annual meeting in Toronto. Listening to some of the speakers at the J-Lab's workshop, puzzling through the success of some sites and the failure of others, and putting together what I have learned from four years of doing PressThink, the emerging model I see would combine... √ High quality aggregation within a strong editorial focus. (Like the Huffington Post nationally, or Twin Cities Daily Planet locally.) √ Blogging platform with the best posts filtered to the front page. (Like Daily Kos) √ Original reporting with hybrid strength: amateurs with pro support (training, production...

• October 17, 2007
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What is the Knight News Challenge About?

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hello World! Seems fitting to open this new space with this traditional greeting, used by humans upon first interaction with a new computing environment. My name is Lisa Williams, and along with 23 others writing on this blog, I am one of the winners of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge. I pause here, because if there is one thing that blogging has taught me, it is to distinguish what I know from what I just think I know. When I don't, well, that's what my friend and fellow blogger Shimon Rura calls "self-teaching through shame" kicks in in the...

• October 16, 2007
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Playing the News...The Challenge of Gaming Reality

by Nora Paul
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our Knight project is to create a toolset that would make the creation of a news simulation environment / game space easy for a somewhat motivated newsroom. The goal is to see if it would work to use a highly graphical and interactive environment as a way of presenting those "important but (too often) boring" issues in a community. Would this kind of presentation of the often complex and conflicting facets of an issue lead to greater citizen engagement, understanding, and action taking? We had some experience with creating a game, a mod of Neverwinter Nights that we used for...

• October 16, 2007
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Welcome to Idea Lab

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks back, I heard gunshots outside my window. It was pretty scary, and reminded me of my urban environment here in Potrero Hill, San Francisco. But where could I turn to get the story on what happened? Was someone killed? Do police know what happened? In the past, I might have heard something about it on the local TV news or radio news, or perhaps read something in the local newspaper. But in this case, no one was hurt or killed, so there was nothing to see in any of the bigger media outlets in my local area....

• October 16, 2007
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What is News? What's Important? And Who Decides?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What is news? If we define news as what's important, and we were to ask regular folks what they considered important enough to be in the news each day, I wager we'd get a much more serviceable media than we have now. Serviceable, in the sense that we would have an idea of what's happening in our world and, equally important, an understanding of how to affect the conditions that shape our lives.. In blogging about Related Content, the little Drupal module which will try to show that news plus ideas can equal action (that will be the next day's...

• October 16, 2007
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Deep Thought Strikes Again

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last year I sat down to brainstorm with my friend Ian Anderson in hopes that we could chip away at the question: "What is the Perfect News System?" An hour and a half later we had a nice list of what we felt such a system would have along with a few vague ideas about how to implement it all. Over the next few months that list and those ideas were fleshed out into a winning News Challenge proposal. Was the resulting system design actually perfect? Nope! If it was I would probably be programming right now, but I tell...

• October 16, 2007
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What Is Civic Media?

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

An MIT Communications Forum event, on September 20, represented the formal launch of the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media. The event featured Beth Noveck (NYU Law School), Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center, Harvard, and the Global Voices Project), Chris Csikszentmihalyi (MIT Media Lab), and yours truly. You can find a webcast of this event here. This was the first of a series of Forums focused on the ways media can be deployed at the local level to foster greater civic engagement. This event's focus was largely definitional -- trying to map out what we mean by civic media and...

• October 15, 2007
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What We're Learning About What Journalism Students Don't Know....

by Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It seemed reasonable, as we first started talking about the innovation incubator project 15 months ago, to expect that journalism students would be more technologically adept and experienced than we were. After all, we are a bunch of college administrators, women who (for the most part) have spent our careers in legacy newsrooms and scholarly environments. We figured that students who grew up with the Internet -- or, more accurately for this cohort, grew into adulthood with the Internet -- would come to the task of creating new approaches to community news not only with great ideas but with the...

• October 15, 2007
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A Fresh Start

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I could begin by reciting in mind-numbing detail my experience running The Next Newsroom Project. There have frustrations (many); there have been moments of despair (a few); there has been progress (some); there have been unexpected discoveries (lots). But this blog is just getting started, and there will be plenty of time for those stories. For the moment, you can visit our project site for the skinny. Instead, I'd like my first post here to sound a note that's far more hopeful, if not exactly profound: I feel optimistic about the future. And that, more than anything, is the most...

• October 14, 2007
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An "Outsider's" Perspective

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I found out that I won the "First Annual News Challenge" I wasn't sitting in an editor's office or getting ready to talk at a conference about new media - I was in my dorm room trying to decide whether or not I wanted to order a pizza for dinner. All of a sudden I was plopped at the forefront of an industry near the brink of some incredibly exciting technological innovations armed with nothing more than a big idea, a few complaints, and my Millennial demographic.

• October 14, 2007
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New Media Reality Check

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight News Challenge folks will be heading off to the Online News Association conference in Toronto on Tuesday (Oct. 16) for a few days' worth of new media reality checks. As a member of this merry troupe of experimenters, I'll be moderating a panel on Becoming a Community Evangelist, which is perhaps the term du jour for citizen journalist, with Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, and Rob Curley of the Washington Post. But mostly, I'll be listening and comparing notes with old friends and new colleagues. Every year seems to be a pivotal one for the news industry, but 2007...

• October 13, 2007
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