I plan to open the course with reflections on the current presidential campaign
season, the role of both old and new media, and signs of increased voter
registration and activity by young Americans. To set the stage, I am having my
students read from several recent news stories on the campaign, including:
David von Drehle, "The
Year of the Youth Vote," Time , Jan. 31 2008.
David Talbot, "How Obama Really
Did It," Technology Review, September/October 2008,
Marc Ambinder, "HisSpace,"
The Atlantic, June 2008
In the first class session, we will be looking at the images constructed around
the two candidates through their advertising, websites, and official biography
videos. The best online resource for these materials is realclearpolitics, a site which
aggregates recent media coverage of the campaigns, including collecting current
political advertising. I plan to discuss the roles which YouTube played early
in the campaign season, a topic which I discuss in a new "afterward" to the
recently released paperback edition of Convergence Culture: Where Old and
New Media Collide. And I plan to explore the ways that the McCain campaign
is taking aim at Obama's blurring of the lines between popular culture and
politics, a topic I addressed in a recent
post on my blog. We also will be placing these materials in a larger
historical context by looking at earlier forms of political advertising. You
can find such materials through the Living Room
Candidate, an archive created by the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria,
NY, and through Project Look
Sharp's curricular materials on studying presidential campaigns.

• New Media Literacies
• Civic Engagement
• Youth as Cybercitizens
• Digital Ethics
• Is There a Digital Generation?
• Children's Fiction and the Fiction of Childhood
• Expression and Participation
• Games and Virtual Worlds
• Collective Intelligence and Social Networks
• Identity and Community
• The Digital Divide and the Participation Gap

The only full book we are reading is Cory Doctorow's recent young adult
novel, Little Brother, which deals with the politics of cyberactivism
and homeland security. Check out my
blog post on this important novel.

We will also be reading extensively from the recently published Born
Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, written by
John Palfrey and Urs Gasser from Harvard's Berkman Center.

We will also be drawing extensively from the new books, recently released by the
MIT Press and the MacArthur Foundation, as part of their Digital Media and
Learning Series -- Civic Life
Online;Digital
Media, Youth and Credability; Digital Youth, Innovation,
and the Unexpected; The Ecology of Games;
Learning Race and
Ethnicity; Youth, Identity and Digital
Media. All of these books are available online for free access and they
include work by many of the most important contemporary thinkers on youth and
media literacy.

I also anticipate working with the report out from an extensive ethnographic
study of young people's online lives being conducted by Mimi Ito, Barrie
Thorne, Michael Carter, and an army of graduate students from USC and Berkley;
this document will be released later this term, but you can read about the
research.

For a counter perspective on many of these issues, my students will also be
reading from Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age
Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone
Under 30).

And I will be having students look at parts of Ben Rigby's Mobilizing
Generation 2.0. I recently interviewed Rigby for my
blog.

Throughout the course, we will be looking at a range of recent white papers
which offer cutting edge perspectives on these issues, including:

• Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st
  Century
• Twenty First Century Skills
• The Civic Mission of Schools
• Cynthia Gibson, Citizens at the Center: A New Approach to Civic Engagement
• Aspen Institute, Civic Engagement on the Move: How Mobile Media Is Serving the Public
  Good
• Carrie James with Katie Davis, Andrea Flores, James M. Francis, Lindsey Pettingill, Margaret Rundle and Howard Gardner, Young People,
  Ethics, and the New Digital Media

Along the way, we will be exploring two significant PBS documentaries, both of
which can now be accessed online -- Growing
Up Online and By the People: Citizenship in the 21st
Century

The Center will also be hosting two public events through the MIT Communications
Forum this fall focused around the Presidential Campaign and the role of media.
You can find out more information about these events and hear podcast versions
of previous Forum events here.

I hope to offer some more reports on the class and how it is informing our work
at the Center for Future Civic Media in the weeks ahead. But I'm hoping the
above may introduce you to some materials you might not know about otherwise.

Between now and when the class starts (Sept. 23), we have to decide what the focus of the project will be. In my experience with previous projects, the key is to come up with an interesting challenge or question for the students to explore.

Right now there are two competing ideas, neither of them yet specific enough to organize the class around:

• Civic engagement through online conversations
• Mobile content and services

Here's a little more detail about the two possibilities.

Civic engagement through online conversations

For more than half a century, newspaper readership has been declining - and so have a variety of other indicators of civic and community engagement, such as participation in PTA's, membership in bowling leagues and turnout on Election Day. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam documented these changes in American society in an influential article and a best-selling book, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community." The book, published in 2000, popularized the concept of "social capital," the idea that people's social relationships produce tangible benefits for their communities. "Bowling Alone" also offered some intriguing insights about the relationship between communities and journalism: the best predictor of community engagement, Putnam said, was newspaper readership.

More recently, Putnam has published even more troubling findings: The more diverse a community is in race and ethnicity, the less trust there is among members of that community and the weaker the bonds are that connect people to one another.

What I've been wondering about is whether new technologies can, in any way, help rebuild social capital among people who live in the same community. We know that online communities enable people with common interests to build powerful connections even if they are halfway around the world from one another. I'm intrigued by the possibility that we could apply these online community tools to strengthening local bonds.

It's also hard to ignore that when conversations about the news occur on the Web, they often turn ugly -- or, at best, fail to advance the discussion beyond ranting and raving. Many news organizations have been struggling just to keep their online comments civilized -- let alone productive. I have been wondering if there's a way that journalists can play a role in improving these conversations -- for instance, by doing original reporting to corroborate or debunk what people are saying in these online conversations.

Evidence that local media can play a role in fostering community conversation can be found in newspaper history. David Paul Nord's fascinating book, "Communities of Journalism," for instance, describes many instances in which newspapers served as community forums, not just as one-way communicators of news and information. He describes the way newspapers enabled Philadelphians to share valuable information during a yellow fever epidemic in 1793. And how Chicago newspapers built a sense of community through letters to the editor.

Online communities have been around for decades, since before the World Wide Web. And anyone who has participated in successful online communities knows that they can build powerful interpersonal connections that transcend members' gender, racial or ethnic differences. Yet, there are also arguments - for instance, by Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com - that online communities can foster isolation and division by enabling people to connect only with those whose characteristics and attitudes are like theirs.

What I might challenge our students to do is come up with ways to improve online conversations about the news -- to build social capital and raise the quality of these conversations.

Mobile content and services

The second idea -- to challenge the class to develop something interesting for mobile platforms -- is even less well-formed than the first. Still, the topic seems hard to ignore given these recent developments:

• As another student team found earlier this year, all mobile phones are increasingly going to be GPS-enabled.
• The new iPhone has GPS functionality and also provides a platform to distribute applications
• The first Android (Google) phones will be on the market before the end of the year, and will also serve as a platform for third-party applications..

The challenge to students might just be to develop an iPhone and/or Android application that somehow helps provide people with information they need about their local communities. Because the class will include two experienced technology developers, I expect the students can make a functional prototype.

What do you think?

Which of these high-level ideas seems most intriguing? Are there specific aspects of either topic that you think are worth exploring? Or is there an even more important topic or question for our students to delve into? Please provide your feedback below.

One approach that wasn't mentioned (yet): partner with a university.

Academic institutions are full of smart faculty members, including experts on innovation, technology, audience behavior, journalism and the business of media. Even more important, they are full of young people who are "wired" for the contemporary media world and can do amazing things if given an interesting challenge and the right amount (not too much, not too little) of coaching and direction.

At the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where I teach, we have several classes in our master's program that challenge students to innovate to solve real-world media problems. We've been doing things like this for decades, as noted by this recent Miami Herald article that mentions Medill students' role in helping invent the original "Neighbors" print sections. Collectively, we now call these classes "innovation projects," and they are getting greater emphasis in our curriculum as we seek to prepare young journalists for the realities of the 21st century.

Here are some examples of innovation projects that have had real impact:

• Twice a year for more than 25 years, our magazine publishing majors have created a magazine concept from scratch or taken on an assignment to revamp an existing magazine. Four of these concepts, including "Raising Teens" in 1997 (right), were ultimately purchased by real companies and launched.
• Our Media Management Project class has helped newspapers improve their print and online products for more than a decade. In 2003, for instance, the class worked with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to understand the needs of young adults in its market. Their work ultimately led to the launch of MKE, a Web site and weekly print entertainment publication.
• In 2004, a small team of new media students developed one of the earliest "hyperlocal citizen media" sites, which they called GoSkokie. The site was designated a "notable entry" in the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism, and inspired the Skokie Public Library to launch its own version, SkokieNet.
• Another class in 2004 developed the concept for YourMom, an online social network and print publication for teenagers in the Quad-Cities area of Iowa and Illinois. The site won recognition from the Newspaper Association (one of the nation's best young reader initiatives) and Editor & Publisher ("10 That Do It Right").
• Last year's Media Management Project class developed the concept for a new hyperlocal site in Zeeland, Michigan, for the Holland Sentinel newspaper.

In addition to these projects that led directly to new product launches, we've had other classes that were more experimental. In 2001, for instance, classes sponsored by Thomson Multimedia developed prototypes for "digital tablets" (the ancestors of today's Kindle e-book reader). Here's a link to a Flash demo of a portable device for the kitchen. (One of the students' clever ideas was that the device could serve as a refrigerator-mounted photo frame when not in use -- to see the kitchen functionality, click on the family photo.)

Another Thomson-sponsored project in 2001 developed ideas for a newscast on interactive television (screen capture at right).

Our new media project earlier this year, which Leslie Rule wrote about for the IdeaLab blog, focused on "locative journalism." The students used technology from Hewlett-Packard to experiment with GPS-triggered storytelling. Just last week, this project, like GoSkokie four years earlier, was designated a "notable entry" in the Knight-Batten Awards.

I have to acknowledge that not all of the products launched as a result of our students' work ultimately survived. For instance, the Milwaukee paper has shuttered MKE, and Your Mom is no longer with us. (The shutdown of Your Mom did, however, lead to one of my all-time favorite headlines: "Oh My God! They Killed 'Your Mom.'" It's hard to tell whether their demise is due to flaws in the concept or in the execution. But the fact remains that these classes turned out innovative new media products that otherwise might never have been launched at all.

And Medill is not the only university developing innovative ideas for new media products. There are now media innovation initiatives at the City University of New York and the University of Florida, as well as programs funded by the Knight News Challenge involving Arizona State and a multischool "digital incubator" consortium.

As opportunities for new product development have increasingly moved to digital platforms, one of our challenges has been how to address the technological complexities underlying most digital products. Journalism students can design print prototypes with skills they learn in our program, but building a functional Web site or mobile application requires high-level technology skills unusual among journalism students. That reality was one of the motivations behind our winning Knight News Challenge grant application that is bringing experienced computer programmers into our master's program.

Starting in just a few weeks, our first two programmer-journalists will be among the students enrolled in the New Media Publishing Project class. My next post will address some of the ideas we're thinking about for that class.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear about other projects in which universities -- especially, but not limited to, journalism schools -- are helping jumpstart media innovation. Chime in below in the comments section.

At the Future of Civic Media conference at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from
the co-creator of Many Eyes.

Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, described some of the uses for this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don't know" and "I don't recall."

Here's a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and mobile media. You can see it as a tag cloud, as a word tree, or in other ways.

Watch or download video in high-quality (H.264) on Ourmedia
Watch video in Flash on Vimeo

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

As a reminder, the project is threefold. Through Our City Our Voices we: 1) offer video and web workshops to immigrants, 2) we teamed with the city of Philadelphia to get participants both computers as well as Internet access and 3) we are in the process of creating an online portal (drupal based) which is a home setting for these learners to post their videos but also to discuss their life experiences.

Please check out the first video Does Discrimination Exist Against Immigrant Workers. To see the rest of the videos go to our provisional website.
We are having a screening of the first 6 videos this weekend and our excited as we begin to see this process unfold.

While we have completed two series of workshops thus far, this summer we have two workshops planned, one for Spanish speaking youth and another for English speaking youth and two more courses planned for the fall.

One of the great challenges for the Innovation Incubator students--undergraduate and graduate alike, and from all institutions--was pitching an innovative idea that not only met some of the nobler purposes of journalism connected to democracy and an informed citizenry, but also successfully considered and addressed the financial side of the equation, media audiences, and advertising.

Which leads me to the question: Is it possible to design a curriculum that teaches journalism and advertising together?

We always like to pretend that journalism and advertising are completely separate. But let's face it: all this time, the two have been sitting right next to each other on the printed pages of newspapers. And now, they occupy connected spaces and times on the web pages of news organizations.

The royal 'we' which begins the prior paragraph refers both to the academy and the news industry. In the academy, the sequences in news writing and advertising are separate and are taught as completely different disciplines. We like to act like one, journalism, is exclusively pure and noble, serving democracy, and is untainted by advertising influences or press releases. In the industry, no one wants to lose credibility by acknowledging the relationship among news, advertising, and public relations. There are currently a number of movements toward 'transparency' in the news-making process, but still the interconnections remain opaque.

Are the goals of journalism and advertising compatible, and if so, how? Can we admit the connections in our news media and also in realm of higher education, and work constructively and openly with those connections? If not, we need to jump a lot further back on the innovation drawing board.

I wrapped up my second quarter of journalism school and my daily reporting class a couple of weeks ago. Learning firsthand what goes into a simple news article gave me a new-found respect for the work that's required. Making call after call, leaving messages with people who will never call you back, and then taking notes while paying attention to what somebody is saying is quite a difficult way to spend a day.

The Internet makes a lot of the job much easier that I can imagine it used to be, but I still ran into some basic roadblocks that no amount of global communications technology can breach.

I wrote a story about information systems in nursing homes at the end of May, and in the course of my research I had to make use of Medicare and Illinois Medicaid data. Medicare has a comprehensive online resource of most if not all the nursing homes in the United States, along with metrics such as size, whether they accept Medicare or Medicaid, and if they've had citations from regulatory agencies. The data was on the Medicare site, but it wasn't easy to work with.

All I wanted was a list of nursing homes in Cook County, Illinois, that accepted Medicaid, ordered by the number of residents the homes had, from smallest to largest.

Anybody who has worked with a database or Excel knows that this shouldn't be difficult but Medicare's web interface wasn't built to handle a complex request. No problem, I thought. The site offers a way around this: you can download their database!

But it's in Microsoft Access format.

Since I use a Mac, to access this 'public' information, I needed to install Windows XP and Access on my MacBook. I was lucky I had Windows installed already and an old copy of Office 2003 Professional lying around, and still remembered how to use Access.

It only took me a few hours to generate my list of 20 nursing homes.

Why couldn't have they put the data in a text file? Access can save tables to a text file. I could have used Open Office, Apple's Numbers or Excel, and I could have viewed it on my Mac or on Linux. I could have written a new web page with tools to work with the data, the tools that the Medicare site couldn't provide. I could have uploaded it to Many Eyes.

And Medicare does a better job with its data than the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services does with Medicaid information.

The Illinois Medicaid website has lists of PDF files for each nursing home that receives Medicaid in the state. It's a wealth of information, but it's very difficult to write a program to pull useable information out of those files.

If you don't feel like wading through hundreds of PDF files, you call the DHFS'smedia department and talk to a nice woman named Penny. You tell her the zip codes, date range and what kind of numbers you want, and she calls back in a day or two.

Most of this data should be transparent and easily accessible. I shouldn't have to call up the media department to get numbers. It's our government, so the data should be ours, where it's not protected by privacy laws.

There are people working on getting government agencies to provide information in a usable format. From talking to Adrian Holovaty briefly at the recent Future of Civic Media Conference, the folks at Everyblock deal with these problems on a regular basis. Everyblock, along with other interested organizations have put together the 8 Principles of Open Government Data. Organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, and programs such as Sunshine Week are trying to bring more attention to government transparency, and doing it in a web-friendly way.

I think government agencies should focus on getting data out there in a standardized format, and I would venture to guess that in many cases they will need help implementing that standardized format.

The first is an 11-minute talk with Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, maker of Miro at getmiro.com. Miro's an important, rapidly maturing application that lets you watch and subscribe to millions of channels of content created by anyone with something to say (you can pull down any videos with an RSS feed, for example). You can also browse through more than 4,000 channels in its directory listing. I've been using the open-source Miro for almost two years now and it's become a regular part of my grassroots media routine.

Watch or download video in H.264 on Ourmedia

Watch video on Vimeo

In the second, Sean Tanner, research director of MAPLight.org, talks about how the organization provides transparency to the political donations system through widgets that tap into pubic information databases.

By visiting MAPLight, you can customize and embed a widget related to any congressional race or to the presidential race. Here's the current Presidential Money Race Widget:

Watch video in H.264 on Ourmedia

Watch video on Vimeo

I posted a blog in early May on the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on mapping and social activism; I noted that having a purpose (outside of making money and/or creating cool tools) moves the process and the product along. Where 2.0 was three days of 25 presentations a day and then evening events; so it's no surprise that it was over a month later that the dots from Where 2.0 connected with the dots from my next three conferences: Knight's Future of Civic Media at MIT, The Center for Social Media's Beyond Broadcast, with this year's topic being Mapping Public Media at the American University, and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE's) National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio.

The guiding questions of the Beyond Broadcast conference seemed especially relevant for my locative media practice:

How are media makers using online mapping and visualization tools to tell stories and engage communities? What can those same tools tell us about changes in the public media landscape?

The first dot (still unconnected) came at Beyond Broadcast when a member of the audience commented that hyperlocal mapping is a contested space. His comment was in reaction to the Oakland Crimespotting site. Living in Oakland, he commented that crime in Oakland is no surprise and not news. He pointed out that hyperlocal, crimemapping sites reinforce stereotypes about where crime occurs, and more importantly, who commits it; from his perspectives, these sites don't necessarily inform the community, offer insight into issues, or shed light on potential solution. Interesting comment. Got me thinking.

If it's not news to the residents and doesn't help solve community problems, then what's the value? I visited the Crimespotting site for a more in-depth look with widen eyes. Crime data was "mashed-up," with geographical info; but more accurately, it was two pieces of information overlayed: an event (eg, the crime) and the place where the event occurred. De facto every event has "place" information embedded in it - events happen in place. And it's valuable to know where they happened, but just placing a crime event on a map does not necessarily give us insight into the story. As the Beyond Broadcast panelist Lee Banville, Editor-in-Chief of the Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, noted simply mapping "doesn't necessarily tell a story, it introduces a story." Otherwise, he pointed out, a map can become a data dump.

Most Knight grantees have a j-background, so narrative is normally wrapped around any mapping. But still, additional graphical/data info layers would provide material for a more detailed analysis. Just adding place information to data doesn't encourage deep critical thinking. So we ask: what tools might allow us to go beyond simple geographical information and towards analysis and problem solving?

I found the next soon-to-be connected dot at the NECC conference in San Antonio via a GIS presentation by Professor Bob Kolvoord from James Madison University. Graphical Information System (GIS) is connecting data to maps, but the difference is both in quantity and quality of data, as well as intention. The intent is for analysis, not a superficial look. On the flip side, there is a learning curve with GIS software. I took a semester length course in GIS at our community college. It's complicated software for those with little programming experience. But it did allow me to overlay many professionally produced data layers on a map, offering more than just place information. The most prominent commercial provider of GIS software is ESRI, and they have created a light version of their GIS software for K-12 education.

Like it or not, almost any discussion of mapping either begins or ends with Google Earth or Google Maps, and so goes this post. At Where 2.0 this year, keynote speaker John Hanke, Director, Google Earth & Maps invited Jack Dangemond founder and president of ESRI on stage with him to announce a partnership that enables ESRI's newest 9.3 release of their industry-standard ArcGIS suite to be imported into Google Earth/Maps, thereby bringing lots of highly detailed data into the light. Taking into account Google's large layperson user base, Jack Dangemond observed that the partnership represents the emergence of a new "societal GIS." The addition of this new features in the ERSI software facilitates KML output of the GIS data. This output makes it possible to create mashups between deep GIS databases and neogeography databases and tools, between crowdsourced data and professional GIS data, moving beyond just mapping problems to helping create solutions.

I used to be very critical of the OLPC project during its earlier stages because I could not understand the rationale behind giving a personal laptop to each child, instead of having them access a shared PC in a kiosk for example. The kiosk model would have been much cheaper, and it could even have encouraged a culture of sharing among children. Although this argument is still true to some extent, evidenced by the poor response from pilot projects in Nigeria, but I now appreciate the project for many other reasons. For one, it led big companies like Intel to focus on extremely low-cost designs for computers, which may be used not just by children, but even by adults to access information. Second, these is a spirit of continuous innovation in the project which is critical in order to build an appropriate technology that correctly fits in the context in which children and adults in developing countries would use it. Third, the $75 price tag is fabulous. Considering that mobile phones now cost hardly $20 but these models do not have good text and image displays, the $75 laptop plus e-book reader could be a perfect complement.

Many hurdles still remain though, a prominent one being that Internet connectivity in remote rural areas in developing countries is extremely poor. In India, although state governments are funding SWANs (State Wide Area Networks) to provide connectivity to rural kiosks, it may still take many years for large scale deployment to happen. Solutions to provide connectivity to a central hub in each village using long distance WiFi links or asynchronous connectivity through mechanical backhaul seem suitable. Devices like the OLPC laptop can use WiFi to access downloaded content at the hubs, or periodically upload content such as queries about what crop rotation pattern to follow, or how to set up a small-scale-industry to manufacture mosquito coils, etc.

So how does all of this tie in with the community radio model of Gram Vaani? Community radio is in fact only one technology that we are starting to improve and experiment with, but our goal is more broad, and includes any technology that can be used to improve media delivery and citizen participation in rural areas. In the future, we will also develop systems to enable news delivery on cellphones, and even on devices such as the $75 laptop. These devices have the advantage that their user interface is more suitable to solicit citizen feedback, as compared to radio. Being a broadcast medium, radio of course has other advantages in terms of community involvement and reachability. Therefore, one avenue of innovation for us will always lie in understanding the epistemological characteristics of different media, and to use them in a complementary manner to best serve society.

Halfway through his Medill graduate journalism education, programmer Brian Boyer reflects on the paths that might lie ahead:

When I first spoke to Rich Gordon about becoming a "programmer-journalist," the meaning of the term was unclear. Not being the sort to be concerned by ambiguity, I dove into journalism school with no plans for what might come after.

Six months into my re-education, I still don't know what to do with myself, but the potential jobs for which a programmer-journalist would be well suited are becoming clear. I will try and enumerate them here.

Also, I will try and avoid the important and fascinating fields of design, usability, accessibility, and information architecture. Like many coders, I consider them hobbies, but they're aspects of user science, not programming, and I feel theyrequire less clarification here. (I also think you could make a very good case for why they should get journalism scholarships too, but that's another essay entirely.)

Many of the roles I'm thinking of will overlap, depending on the gig and the person, and I'm certain that I've missed a few, but here goes...

The platforms on which the news is published online need to be built. Without content management systems (CMS) like Ellington and Wordpress, each bit of HTML would have to be hand-crafted -- a useful skill on a journalist's tool belt, but not what most reporters want to do with their time. Someone needs to build these tools, and who better than a programmer who has studied the mindset of writers, editors and readers?

Once the platforms are built, they almost always must be rejiggered into a shape that fits the needs of the organization. My buddy Brad Flora is not a programmer, but he made the Drupal CMS do his bidding with self-taught programming skills and sheer force of will when creating The Windy Citizen.

After the implementors have done their job, and it's time to jam some news into the newspaper-shaped CMS, someone needs to use the system to publish the news. Job descriptions I found after a quick search online reveal this is be a varied job, requiring news judgment, writing skills, and web programming abilities.

Among other duties, they update the homepages, turn print content into web content and publish user-generated content.

Journalism has taken on new forms in recent years. Once high tech, specialized CMSs like blogs and wikis are now overshadowed by news applications like EveryBlock and PolitiFact.

These applications are not just used to read written articles, they give the reader a way to interact with data. A journalism background would ideally give a programmer better ideas when creating these applications.

Wrangling data is hard. It's buried in paper documents, messy spreadsheets, and if you're very lucky, published in a barely-readable format on well-intentioned but terribly-implemented municipal websites.

Knowledge of old-school techniques like OCR, and new-school ones like web scraping would be very helpful in a newsroom. And the task of pumping a mess of data into a database and mining it for the good stuff is, I imagine, beyond the skills of all but the most industrious (and tech-savvy) reporters.

There are a lot of programmers out there that have drunk the Tufte kool-aid (There's no bullet list like Stalin's bullet list!) and are into making data more interesting. The New York Times has been doing an exceptional job harnessing this talent. Their Clinton/Obama support visualizer and box office receipts graphic are two fine examples.

Programmers at the New York Times are also creating killer visualizations of less-data-y, more-newsy information. Interactive components built in Flash or HTML can tell aspects of a written story not suited to plain text. A programmer-journalist is obviously well-suited to this task.

First, I should probably clarify, "hacker" is a compliment in my world. If you're a hacker, you're an especially good programmer. So, what are you if you're a hacker journalist? Think about what photojournalists do -- they tell stories with a camera.

A hacker journalist would do original reporting, and use a combination of the above techniques to tell the story. Or maybe painting is a better analogy: they are both creative processes, requiring a finely honed set of technical skills, as well as inspiration and storytelling abilities.

(Props for the name of this role go to Neal Stephenson, author of the inspirational article Mother Earth, Mother Board.

I'm most drawn to the applications developer and hacker journalist roles -- probably because the former is most similar to my previous life as a software developer, and the latter because it sounds cool as hell.

Other programmer-journalists would have different feelings about their ideal job. Database junkies, visualization geeks and HTML hackers all have a place in this profession.

Lucky for journalism, and contrary to their public image, programmers are usually a opinionated, passionate bunch. Great hackers "care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it". (If there's only one link in this essay that you visit, it should be this one.)

Fellow programmers, join us on our mission! Help inform the people so that they may better self govern. Help people solve their own problems. Code the future of democracy.

It's one hell of an interesting problem to hack.

Read more from Brian at his blog, "Who What When Where Why Web," www.sixthw.com.

We are also creating an advisory council to seed Detroit neighborhoods to get the community involved in the process.

At the suggestion of Nancy Hanus, online editor, and Jonathan Morgan, multi-platform editor, at The News, we have enlisted the directors and faculty of four Detroit area universities, Oakland, University of Detroit Mercy, University of Michigan Dearborn and Wayne State to join the project. Their students will enroll in Jonathan's JRN 408 Community Journalism Tandem course this fall along with, we hope, some MSU J-School students. Unfortunately, the price of gas for the 180 mile round trip will definitely lower the MSU participants!

We will be meeting later this summer to hash out the rest of the details.

With the news in the past week on more buyouts, lay-offs and problems for the financially ailing newspaper industry, grassroots projects like Tandem may help folks understand the importance of investing in their local news.

Liza Kaufman Hogan, a former CNN.com senior producer, found out this spring when she taught the introductory new media journalism class at the Medill School of Journalism. The class, "Interactive Techniques," revolves around blogging. Students create their own blogs (using Wordpress software and a commercial ISP hosting account that they establish and pay for). Class sessions focus on the critical issues involved in online journalism, from copyright to business models. Between classes, the students are required to blog regularly and also to become comfortable with the technology infrastructure that powers their sites.

Liza's class ran from April to June and included students Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, the first two programmers to win Knight Foundation scholarships to enroll in our journalism master's program. Here's Liza's take on the experience:

Let's be honest. In most online newsrooms, web developers and news editors aren't likely to head out to happy hour together after work. What would they talk about? Headlines? Search engine optimization? Social networking? Exactly. And newsrooms the world over would be better for it.

I had the good fortune to witness this sort of creative energy this spring when Ryan and Brian joined my online journalism class. From the first day of class, when the two led an all-out assault on the practice of coding links to open in a new browser window, I knew we were in for an interesting class.

Sharing what they knew about building Web sites, computer networking and usability, they contributed to a stimulating open-source atmosphere in the classroom. During a class on Web analytics, Ryan demonstrated the features of a site he helped run before coming to Medill. A few weeks into the class, Brian started a reading group to discuss books on new media. He posed tough questions to our classroom guests and showed students how to make better use of Creative Commons licensing.

Both Ryan and Brian posted useful tips to our class blog. And as part of their course work, they created their own blogs merging their prior experience with their work at Medill. Brian's Sixth W, a blog looking at the intersection of technology and journalism, should be required reading for any online journalist. Ryan sought to narrow the gap between the technical haves and have-nots with his equally vital blog "Digital Divisions: Online Advocacy for the Offline Millions."

I am hopeful that both will continue their blogs and carry on the work they started while earning their degrees. Meanwhile, to journalism academics out there, I highly recommend having a programmer in your class. Even without a scholarship program like Medill's, consider walking over to the computer science department to recruit some students interested in sitting in on a few classes or doing a joint project with your students. Who knows? They might just head out together for a drink after class.

"My name is Jose Gutierrez. I am 18 years old and live in East Oakland, off of International and 24th Streets. We don't have a computer in my house, and other than Spanish language TV and radio we get all of our information on our mobile phones on LOCOBEAT (fictional).

-On my cell phone I have my neighborhood mapped out. I know which blocks to avoid because of gangbangers & drug dealers (and I get color coded updates from people in my neighborhood when violence happens to help me decide which places to avoid and which safe routes for my little brother Ernesto to take walking to school)

-Neighborhood job openings appear on my mobile map as they are announced, and I get a text message alert when I walk by a store or and business on the street that has an opening.

-I belong to locobeat's social network that lets me know if I know anybody that knows the person who is looking to hire, and keeps me and my friends connected. We get alerts when friends or friends of friends are nearby and have a color coded system for people we don't like or the cops come around.

-My friends and I share and rate the music of local rappers and Hip-Hop artists that we like, and we have created our own marketing business that lets everyone know when and where our favorites are playing. We also earn money from ringtone and song downloads, and can mix our own beats on the fly.

-My uncle Jaime is a day laborer, and he gets a text message in Spanish when a day job is available, that tells him where to go...so he doesn't need to stand out on the street all day.

-My mom uses locobeat to get alerts about fresh vegetables or other things she likes to buy arrive at our local supermarket.

-When I walk by the community center or library my cell phone tells me what events and classes are happening there this week and I can register to attend. Announcements are in Spanish & English.

-My cousin was killed in a drive-by shooting last month, and when you walk by the corner where he was shot, you can hear and see a tribute to him on your phone, along with stories about him from friends and anonymous tips from people who saw it happen and know who did it. Or you can add your own tribute or message that is added to the LocoBeat community news made up mostly of video and voice reports filed by people who live in the community along with news from were we come from in Mexico."

There are lots of great mobile projects and tools (i.e., mobile banking) aimed at the poor in the developing world, so why not in the US too? What are your ideas for a mobile future in low income and underserved communities, and anyone interested in working on a real LOCOBEAT?

• All in all, it was a fascinating gathering of some of the real thought leaders who will be driving new media forward in the coming years. The program grew stronger as it went along.

• The Media Lab setting was inspirational. This was my first visit here, and the mix of astonishingly bright students and faculty meshed well with us ruffians from the outside world. One suggestion for future gatherings: Invite student and members of the university community to take part in the underattended breakout sessions. Certainly a wide range of students would have found our session on citizen media thought-provoking.  

• Loved the "Diving Deeper" format, where speakers gave presentations on stage, then made themselves available at small tables outside the hall after the session for follow-up inquiries. Will be making use of this.

• I was highly impressed by some of the student demos I saw, including Say What? (which uses interactive storytelling as a path to youth civic engagement) and Buy It Like You Mean It, and some of the more mature projects, like Speakeasy, Selectricity, iCue and IBM's ManyEyes.

• The project "Cameras of the Future" made me want to fast-forward five years, when this technology will be incorporated into many commercial cameras. The subject you shot is slightly out of focus? No worries! If it was shot with one of these gizmos, you can reorient the focal point -- weeks after you took the shot. (It doesn't work with the fuzzy shots from the current generation of cameras, and no algorithm will likely ever be able to change that.)

• About 16 of us had the best time tooling around Central Square while part of a Street Media posse guided by Rekha Murthy. Excellent tour. I'll never look at signage and graffiti quite the same way again.

• One of the secrets I'll be taking back to Silicon Valley is Backchan.nl, a clever Web-based program that enables conference-goers to participate in a "backchannel conversation" with the most timely and relevant questions voted up to the top.

Citizen media on international stage

• Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices described the progress of the Knight-funded Rising Voices project, run by David Sasaki and Georgia Popplewell. I've been impressed with the citizen media project from the start but hadn't known about its scope and depth.

Ethan briefly outlined these 10 Rising Voices projects: Nari Jibon, a new media skills training center in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A Calcutta group called Neighborhood Diaries that provides creative writing and citizen media tools for marginalized children. Iran Inside Out, a group in Teheran that uses videoblogging to open doors to Iranian perspectives. FOKO Club, which pursues, environmental issues and poverty in Madagascar through citizen journalism. A street theater group called Repacted in Nakuru, Kenya, that documents post-election violence and refugee issues. A journalism project in Freetown, Sierra Leone, called Think Build Change Salone. Young people exploring the prison system in Kingston Jamaica in  Students Expressing Truth/Prison Diaries. A project in Uruguay called Blogging Desde Infancia. An effort to bridge cultural differences in La Paz, Bolivia, called Voces Bolivianas. And, perhaps most remarkably, HiperBarrio, where teenagers in the public libraries in the poorest neighborhoods of Medellin, Colombia, practice video journalism chronicling the lives of local townspeople.

In all, the project has created 300 new bloggers in 21 communities in 10 countries. "If you think this stuff can't be done, you're wrong," Zuckerman said. "Anyone can author media."

• Brian Sholin's ReportingOn helps journalists collaborate with each other by exchanging information about stories they're working on.

• During our session on citizen journalism, Amy Gahran had some good advice for journalists (amateur and pro) trying to pry public information out of government agencies like the EPA and Department of Energy: don't identify yourself as a journalist (at least unless you have to).  You're a citizen, too, and citizens who ask for government reports aren't usually shuffled off to a press office whose chief goal is to stiff-arm the media.

• Two fun quotes during our session: "You don't want to crowdsource your brain surgery." So crowdsourcing has its limits. And: "I play guitar. You don't call me a citizen guitarist."

• From G. Patton Hughes, publisher of Paulding.com: "Now -- what people are talking about right now -- trumps the me" on discussion forums.

• Cool educational site designed to engage and empower youths: Scratch News Network, where 145,000 projects have been uploaded and a new one comes in every two minutes.

• I knew that SixApart's blogging service LiveJournal skewed young, but didn't know it skewed that young. The most predominant age group among LiveJournal bloggers: 18, followed by 19 and 17, with a heavy dropoff after age 24.

• Factoid shared by Knight Foundation's Gary Kebbel: 1.5 billion internet connections worldwide and 2.5 billion cell phones.

• More Kebbel: During its first two years of the Knight News Challenge, Knight received few applications from newspapers because they "were not comfortable" with developing open source tools that would help them but also made available to their competitors. One more reason newspapers are on the way to irrelevance, in my view. 

• Students at the UCLA Daily Bruin are creating a digital newsroom to allow staffers to report on the fly without having to be in the office.