So what is there to look forward to? There will be a data journalism workshop each day of the festival. On April 24th Steve Doig will guide you through Excel as a tool for journalism. The following day you can find out how to use the Twitter API for journalism. On April 26th the workshop will be a survival guide to making data visualizations. Finally, on April 27th you will cover data visualization, maps and timelines on a shoestring. The visualization guidance for these workshops will be given by award-winning interactive news developer Gregor Aisch.

Along with the workshops there will be panel discussions each day of the festival.
On April 24th we'll be discussing the state of data journalism in 2013. The following day the topic will be data and investigations and collaborating across borders. We'll be debating data journalism in Southern European countries on the April 26th, an event that has been co-organized with Ahref and datajournalism.it. And on April 27th we'll be covering emergencies in the Age of Big Data, this final workshop will cover the new role of journalists during humanitarian emergencies, this session is organized as part of the EJC's new initiative Emergency Journalism .

who will be there

Discussing these issues we have:

• Anthony de Rosa, social media editor, Reuters
• Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News, The New York Times
• Dan Sinker, director, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews
• Elisabetta Tola, co-founder Formicablu, data journalism trainer
• Friedrich Lindenberg, OpenNews fellow, Spiegel Online
• Guido Romeo, science editor, Wired Italy, Ahref
• Jack Thurston, writer, broadcaster and co-founder of Farmsubsidy.org and Fishsubsidy.org
• James Ball, data journalist, Guardian
• Mar Cabra, multimedia investigative journalist
• Marko Rakar, president of Windmill, blogger and data journalist
• Paul Radu, executive director of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, co-founder of the Investigative Dashboard concept

Tempted to join us? You can sign up using this registration form. We look forward to seeing some of you in beautiful Perugia in April.

As Scott Barnwell looked toward the horizon of Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, N.C., a flock of third graders came into view, and his hand tightened on the string tethering a massive, red helium-filled balloon. Peals of delight could be heard, and the children's chatter soon became intelligible as their pace quickened. "What's it made of?" cried out one third grader. "Can it lift me up?" squealed another. "How big is it?" called a third.

The students had come from Ms. Ali Trainor's class at Isaac Dixon elementary school to participate in a balloon-mapping activity that aligns perfectly with the third-grade curriculum in Asheville City Schools. As a sixth-year teacher, Trainor is a huge advocate of hands-on activities with her students and takes them on a number of field trips. Her planning contributed to the day's success and laid the foundation for a successful unit of place-based mapping and geography.

Each student arrived with his or her data collection sheet, clipboard, and pencil, and when vans and buses were unavailable to transport the students, Trainor was unfazed: They walked the 1.25 miles to the the cemetery, further cementing the concept of place in the students' minds.

partnerships around the country

Watching the day's successes unfold made me reflect on my own years as a middle school science teacher. Linking an involved field experience with classroom learning is not easy, and I am proud to be able to offer Public Laboratory support to teachers like Ms. Trainor. Public Lab is building more partnerships like this around the country as we develop our K-12 place-based education curriculum.

For example, Cypress Hills Schools in New York City are working on air quality and advocacy through an EPA Region 2 Citizen Science grant. Public Lab's Shannon Dosemagen has worked with students at the University of Southern Alabama in Mobile and PLOTS' Stewart Long with San Francisco State University. Our nascent education listserve is gaining momentum.

A partnership is the best word to describe the efforts of all the people involved on this sunny day in Western North Carolina. A large portion of the day was coordinated by employees of the city of Asheville: Christen McNamara in Parks and Recreation, Corey White in GIS, and Scott Barnwell in IT Services. McNamara ordered the balloon-mapping kit. Barnwell got the helium. White needs the data. Joshua Darty introduced the children to the cemetery.

With close to 15,000 graves, Riverside Cemetery is managed by the Parks and Recreation Department and relies on new burials as revenue. White has been mapping the cemetery for nearly a year and identified the lack of high-resolution aerial imagery as the biggest challenge to his progress. The high-resolution images collected with the Public Laboratory Balloon Mapping Kit were exactly what he needed. The need for data was the main driver of this successful and ongoing project, and with some extra effort, we left an indelible impression in 18 young minds.

Ms. Trainor wrote in an e-mail to Barnwell:

"After we got back to school and talked, MANY students stated that this was the best field trip we have taken all year. What better way to understand why maps are created and how they are created then to actually do it ... with really large helium balloons and digital cameras!"

After reading that, I can't believe we had ever considered doing this project without the middle school students.

Adam Griffith, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, is a co-founder of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science and serves as their director of Science and Coastal Environments. He received a B.S. in Biology from Roanoke College in 1999 and was subsequently accepted to Teach for America. He taught 6th grade science in the Houston Independent School District in Texas for three years before becoming a kayak instructor and head raft guide for the Nantahala Outdoor Center. He received his M.S. in Biology in 2008 studying the native bamboo Arundinaria gigantea (rivercane) and continues to work with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and community members in Western N.C. as coordinator of the Rivercane Restoration Project. Adam is currently a coastal research scientist in the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University and is based in Asheville, N.C.

"It comes down to credibility," said Greg Franczyk, who helped arrange the partnership with Northwestern's Medill School and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to offer scholarships to computer programmers interested in earning a master's degree in journalism.

"When someone has studied journalism, they are confident and have that credibility and can walk into a room of editors and journalists and make a decision. That's what really makes the difference. They can say they've been where you (the journalist) are, in a real way."

The Post is the first industry partner in the second phase of the Knight programmer-journalist scholarship program. In the first phase, financed with a Knight News Challenge grant, nine people with computer programming backgrounds earned master's degrees in journalism at Medill. All nine are now working in jobs at the intersection of journalism and computer science. In the second phase, Medill is seeking industry partners to provide scholarship aid beyond what is available through the Knight grant, as well as paid internships upon graduation.

The Post expects to provide scholarship support and paid internships to three Medill MSJ students with programming backgrounds over the next three years. It is a significant financial commitment -- more than $80,000 in tuition support plus the cost of the internships. But the investment is worthwhile, Post leaders say.

"It's part of our overall strategy to help people build their careers here at the Post over time," Franczyk said. "The target here is someone who is interested in having a career with us, but is looking for something more."

how it works

• Candidates apply for admission to Medill through the normal admissions process. As part of the process, they fill out a separate essay question and provide information about their technology and programming experience.
• If they meet Medill’s admissions standards and have the desired programming background, candidates are awarded a Knight scholarship, covering half the tuition for the 12-month MSJ program).  They will also be encouraged to pursue the supplemental Post scholarship.
• The Post will review applications and recommend those that should be awarded the Post scholarships. In return for the scholarship funding, the candidates will commit to the paid internship at the Post after graduation.

Candidates for the Post scholarships might be identified through the normal Medill admissions process. The Post also has the option of referring candidates who currently work at the company or are being recruited for engineering positions.

Mitch Rubin, sports production editor for the Post, initiated contact with Medill about the scholarship program because of his experience developing the Post's high school sports site, allmetsports.com.

"The developers I was working with really didn't understand the product," Rubin said. Programmers who understand journalism are hard to find, he said.

Scholarship recipients must meet Medill’s normal admissions requirements.  They complete the same academic program as other MSJ students. The first academic quarter is spent learning reporting and storytelling skills in multiple media.  At least one other quarter is spent in Medill’s Chicago newsroom, covering a beat and creating multimedia stories.

As part of the program, scholarship recipients have an opportunity to apply their technology skills to journalism in an “innovation project” course. In these classes, teams of students create new products or work to solve a problem facing a media company.

Scholarship recipients also can consider courses in other schools at Northwestern, such as computer science classes in the McCormick School of Engineering.

They also have the opportunity to work in the school's Knight Lab and Watchdog/Accountability Initiative.  The Knight Lab, a joint project of Northwestern’s journalism and engineering schools, is developing innovative technologies to be used by journalists, publishers and journalism audiences. Medill Watchdog reports on systemic flaws in government and public institutions.

The hacker-journalist

"When a journalist is chasing something, there's a passion there. They are going to find the answer one way or another, whether they have to stay up seven nights in a row or travel around the world, Franczyk said. "In computer science, it’s kind of the same thing -- that’s why many programmers start work at 11 a.m. They were up late trying to solve a problem."

Among previous scholarship recipients are Brian Boyer, who directs the news applications team at National Public Radio; Ryan Mark, director of digital product strategy and development at Chicago Tribune Media Group; Manya Gupta, Web technical editor for theworld.org; Steven Melendez of the data news team at WNYC, public radio station in New York; and Shane Shifflett, data engineer at the Center for Investigative Reporting.

More information about the scholarship program is available at http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/knight/.  News organizations interested in joining the Post as an industry partner may contact me at richgor@northwestern.edu.

Rich Gordon is a professor and director of digital innovation. At Medill, he launched the school's graduate program in new media journalism. He has spent most of his career exploring the areas where journalism and technology intersect. Prof. Gordon was an early adopter of desktop analytical tools (spreadsheets and databases) to analyze data for journalistic purposes. At The Miami Herald, he was among the first generation of journalists to lead online publishing efforts at newspapers. At Medill, he has developed innovative courses through which students have explored digital content and communities and developed new forms of storytelling that take advantage of the unique capabilities of interactive media. In addition to teaching and writing about digital journalism, he is director of new communities for the Northwestern Media Management Center, where he is responsible for a research initiative focusing on the impact of online communities, including social networks, on journalism and publishing.

In my Social Media for Reporters class at UNC, 20 percent of each student's grade will be based on the number of points that his or her Klout score goes up over the course of the semester. But the best thing about doing so is probably not that it's easy, but that it is flawed.

Boiling a semester's worth of effort and accomplishment down into a single number has always seemed to me to have a certain false sense of precision to it. More than once I've looked down at the end of the semester and wondered to myself how one student or another ended up with a grade that was so much worse -- or better -- than I would have handed out just based on gut instinct.

That's the problem that many folks seem to have with Klout and other similar social media metrics tools. Boiling continuous interaction across a variety of social networks down into a single number opens lots of room for argument -- sort of like debating whether the impact of Angel outfielder Mike Trout's 129 runs and 49 stolen bases is more deserving of the MVP award than Detroit third-baseman Miguel Cabrera's .330 batting average, 40 home runs and 139 RBI.

Boiling multiple data points from disparate contexts down to one, final judgment is often overly simplistic. But we do it.

Room for improvement

The question for me is whether we're doing it the best way possible, and how we might do it better in the future.

Klout doesn't release the algorithm it uses for calculating scores, and it doesn't disclose the distribution of its scores. The most precise piece of data they share is that the average Klout score is 40.

How is that possibly fair to students who are struggling to raise this arbitrary number that's contrived inside a black box? It's fair because it transforms the class from a workshop on button-pushing to an exercise in hypothesis testing, strategy and critical thinking. Students -- who often approach grades with calculating economy of effort -- don't know what they have to do to boost their Klout scores, so they are forced to design simple experiments, isolate variables, and generalize their findings.

We aren't totally shooting blind. Here's what we know about how Klout creates its scores:

• There are more than 400 variables in its calculation.
• New variables were added and scores were redistributed in August, just before the semester started.
• It only counts networks it can see -- so either public posts, or private posts that you've connected to Klout.
• Your Klout score is a reflection of your activity within the last 90 days.
• New Klout scores are released each morning. Older data is decayed in favor of newer data. (But Klout doesn't say at what rate data is decayed.)
• The score factors how much content you create compared to how much engagement you are receiving
• Klout says it attempts to measure engagement equally across all the networks it monitors, so that it doesn't favor activity on one network over another.
• On Twitter, Klout looks at retweets and mentions. And it is better to be re-tweeted or liked by people who do those things rarely than by people who do those things often.
• On Facebook personal profiles, Klout measures comments, wall posts and likes. Since late last month, you can have Klout measure your Facebook page instead of your personal profile. For Facebook pages, Klout measures the number of fans and how many people are talking about your page. Having a Facebook page increases scores by an average of seven points. A Klout user with a score between 70-80 has an average of 13,000 users talking about their Facebook page. (Although we don't know which is the cause and which is the effect.)
• On Google+, it measures comments, reshares, and "+1"s.
• On LinkedIn, it measures comments and likes.
• On Foursquare, it measures Todo's and Tips.
• Since August, if there is a Wikipedia page about you, Klout measures the page's rank, number of inlinks and outlinks.
• Since late last month, you get extra Klout credit if people search for your Wikipedia page on Bing. And if you appear as an expert in the "People Who Know" section of Bing's sidebar.
• Some networks -- YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Last.fm and Flickr accounts -- can be connected to Klout, but don't affect your score.
• There is no reward for just adding networks that you do not participate in. Neither is there punishment.
• Adding a new account is reflected in your Klout score within 24-48 hours.

What's missing

But there's also a lot we don't know. Perhaps the most important piece of missing transparency is the "difficulty rating" that students should receive for each additional point increase in their Klout score.

Two students who had almost no social media activity when they started the semester registered initial Klout scores of 12 and 18 within the first week, but have had little movement since. But the two students who started at 55 have also seen little growth.

The most rapid growth in Klout scores during the first four weeks I've been tracking them has come from the students who had scores in the 30s and 40s. One student jumped from 33 to 52 and another from 42 to 58. But another moved only from 43 to 46.
I wanted to measure only growth that happens during the semester, so as not to punish students who started out with little or no social media experience. But what I may have ended up with is a system that punishes students who began with extensive social media engagement.

In an effort to prevent sandbagging, I'm distributing the Klout portions of their grade on a curve relative to the class. But that means all of my students could end up with a number that's in the top 10 percent of all Klout scores and still get an average grade. The only safety valve for that is my promise that I will give an "A" Klout grade to any of my students who end the semester with a score higher than mine, regardless of where they started. Right now, that bar is set at 62 -- third among my UNC colleagues, below Chris Roush and Paul Jones.

In the end, I'll add my own judgment about my students' effort and ability to use social media as reporters. I'll consider qualitative measures such as how trusted they are on their beat, whether they used it to give voice to the voiceless, hold powerful people accountable, shine light in dark places, explain our increasingly complex and interconnected world, and get the right information to the right people at the right time.

A high Klout score is something I'd expect from a solidly average student. A B student will be able to pick apart and critique Klout's system. And an A student? Someone who will one day build a better Klout.

Ryan Thornburg researches and teaches online news writing, editing, producing and reporting as an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has helped news organizations on four continents develop digital editorial products and use new media to hold powerful people accountable, shine light in dark places and explain a complex world. Previously, Thornburg was managing editor of USNews.com, managing editor for Congressional Quarterly's website and national/international editor for washingtonpost.com. He has a master's degree from George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management and a bachelor's from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Photo by Tyler Ingram on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

I've just finished teaching a course that was, in part, inspired by the lack of young journalists who have these skills. And, as is almost always the case, I learned at least as much as the students -- mostly that teaching the tools and techniques of data-driven accountability reporting takes much more than a semester.

The idea for the class began more than a year ago during conversations with Sarah Cohen -- my former Washington Post colleague and current Knight Chair in Computational Journalism at Duke University -- to try an unheard-of experiment -- teach a class that would include both Duke and University of North Carolina students and that would provide a soup-to-nuts workshop in investigative reporting and digital publishing. How do you find, report, produce and distribute information that's so tough to do and so valuable that nobody else would do it for free and that everyone would pay to not just know the information in your report -- but experience and engage in it?

Looking for model classes that our friends were teaching elsewhere, we found many classes dedicated to production and digital publishing -- especially visual communication -- and a few that focused on conceptualizing investigative story ideas. But as we talked, our conversations kept turning back to the blurring of lines in many newsrooms between web production and computer-assisted reporting. We wanted our students to be able to data crunch in a way that would make it easy to data viz.

find a story, not a report

Our class met once a week for 16 weeks -- first at Duke University, then at UNC. The first half focused on basic reporting tools and techniques to background both an individual and a corporation. We introduced TimeFlow and DocumentCloud, as well as how to find story ideas in digital public records and newspaper archives. Our mantra: Find a story, not a report. Both have data, to be sure, but stories have characters, movement, conflict, and heroism and villainy -- sometimes in the same person. And news stories must have impact.

The 11 students came up with probably four good story ideas that we thought we could pursue. So the second half of the semester was turned to story reporting and production. During the second half, we simply tried to do too much -- introduce them to Google Fusion Tables, Tableau Public, OutWit and web scraping with Python, Excel and a little Access -- all while writing public records requests and interviewing principals in an effort to better understand the work of a $4.6 billion statewide charity funded with half of North Carolina's take in the settlement with the tobacco industry.

A story like this would likely take a team of pros six to 18 months to do well, including interactive and multimedia features. We tried to do it in eight weeks. So, as we suspected going into it, there was just too much ground to cover. It was an experiment, and here's what I learned.

key takeaways

• As a student suggested after it was over, this class really needs to be three semesters long. In her ideal world, she said, she'd spend a semester on data tools, such as Excel, Access, web scraping and GIS; another semester on reading and watching great investigative stories and talking to the journalists who produced them; and a final semester on reporting and production. She said that we should force every journalism student to at least learn the data-reporting tools. I tend to agree with her points.
• Students want to focus on the tools more than the data, when their priorities should be reverse. But it's easier on the instructor to go get the dataset, and then simply give students a recipe for managing it. I'll have to find a way to manage those expectations and the workload.
• If getting the kind of long-term commitment and teamwork required for multimedia investigative projects is tough in a newsroom, it's twice as tough in an undergraduate classroom. Many of the students haven't met each other before the class; they know they're leaving "the job" in three months and are spending -- at most -- nine hours a week on the project. Individual projects are better during the confines of a semester. Group projects work great over a one- or two-year extracurricular commitment.

I hope to tackle a similar class in the future. And while I'd love to integrate OpenBlock directly into the class, the application is really suited now as a publishing tool. It lacks a native way to use it for data analysis and story idea generation, but I could see it integrating into a newsroom/classroom suite of tools that might include ScraperWiki, DocumentCloud and PANDA. I wonder if one day the Knight News Challenge will yield the Knight News Curriculum.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Tyler Ingram and used here under the Creative Commons license.

• Start with an interesting problem in journalism, media or publishing.
• Catch some journalism students.
• Mix in some computer science students.
• Mold into interdisciplinary teams.
• Stick in the oven for 11 weeks and see what happens.

For three years now, Northwestern University has offered classes in which journalism and computer science students form teams and try to solve a problem in media, publishing or journalism. What they come up with is almost always interesting -- and sometimes, sufficiently promising that the software deserves to be developed further.

One project from the class led to the creation of a startup company, Narrative Science. Others have fueled the work of the Knight News Innovation Laboratory, a joint program of the journalism and engineering schools at Northwestern.

Nine teams in the latest class, "Collaborative Innovation in Journalism and Technology," will be presenting their work in Evanston, Ill., on Wednesday, June 6. If you're in the Chicago area, you are welcome to attend. (RSVP here or at Chicago Hacks/Hackers.) If you can't attend, the event will be live-streamed (and archived) at http://bit.ly/Collab-Innovation-Spring2012.

INNOVATIVE IDEAS

Here's a rundown of some of the projects that will be presented on June 6:

• Local Circle: A lightweight app that makes it easy for groups of websites to share and display related content.
• CampaignTrac: A tool for tracking and visualizing the language by political candidates, as well as identifying shifts in rhetoric over the course of a campaign.
• TweetSweep: A utility for publishers that analyzes the content of an article and recommends hashtags that would maximize its audience on Twitter.
• Untangld: A tool helping investigative reporters save and annotate the results of research on the web (as well as proprietary databases such as Lexis-Nexis).
• Refine: A visualization system that helps users find and explore the comments they're interested in within a long stream of comments like what you'd see on a high-traffic news site.
• PrintF, a WordPress Layout Engine: A WordPress plugin making it easy for a web publisher to change home page layouts based on different mixes of content on a particular day.

You can read more about the projects at the class blog, Tech Media Street.

Faculty for the class are me, Associate Prof. Larry Birnbaum (computer science) and Associate Prof. Darnell Little (journalism). Jeremy Gilbert, Zach Wise and John Sullivan of the Medill faculty have helped advise some of the teams.

From experience with these classes, the best projects will demonstrate "proof of concept" ideas that deserve to be developed further. The faculty and the leadership team of the Knight Lab will decide which of these projects have the greatest potential to be useful to journalists, publishers and/or media consumers. The most promising projects will be developed further by the students themselves, by Knight Lab developers or by a combination of the two.

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science community is a massive petri dish for low-cost science tools. Our balloon-mapping tool is in its mature phase having evolved out of the agar during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This success was due in large part to the feedback provided by the community of tool users and consumers of tool data and their revisions to the tool. As we've broadened our development, we've asked, how can this success be replicated with other low-cost science tools still in the petri dish?

Rather than looking at specific breakthroughs in the balloon success story, we must examine why the agar in the petri dish was perfect for cultivating such a tool. What environmental conditions existed that pushed rapid development? Four clear features come to mind.

Key to Rapid Development

1. An urgent need for the tool emerged: The public was hungry for images, and the government had implemented a restriction on flights below 3,000 feet, preventing image acquisition.
2. The right tool developers were talking to users in the field: We had first-rate programming assistance and an online community of map lovers to tackle problems as they arose. As an example, the need for easier image sorting, as articulated by users in the field, led to Mapmill.org.
3. Advanced consumer technology was easy to leverage: The low-tech balloon, wedded to cheap, ubiquitous digital cameras produced excellent high-resolution imagery, and the balloon is free of burdensome use restrictions when compared with drones or manned aircraft.
4. The data is accessible to a broad audience: Real-space photography is interpretable without substantial scientific training.

The urgent need for the tool is the most important factor -- we aim to answer questions in communities that have environmental health threats. Without a use case, a tool is not a tool, it's merely a tech demo-- like a web-enabled toaster. The tool must produce data that answers a compelling question. In order to answer a community's question, the answer, and therefore the form of the data, must share a few features.

how to answer a community's question

Clear data by design: Ideally, no one should have to ask, "What does this mean?" Realistically, asking the question, "What does this mean?" shouldn't be intimidating. Where possible, data should contextualized in real space -- either captured as visual imagery or projected within real space during data acquisition. New information is more legible when couched amid a familiar situation; capturing and preserving the context of data collection should be an integral aspect of the tool and its workflow. Acronyms, jargon, and disassociated quantitative data should be minimized.

Allow users to be tool designers: Those who need data should collect it, and those who use the collection tools should be able to design them. Open source is central, but accessibility of the design process plays out in a variety of material choices -- in our balloon kit, we prefer a rubber band over the camera's shutter to re-programming the camera. Rubber bands aren't intimidating, and don't have an off-putting aura of expertise around them. Everyone suggests newer, better rubber band techniques.

Build data authority through engaging stakeholders: Authority is granted by people, not by any specific technical process. Data standards should conform to the necessary end use -- if those who need to handle data accept it, it's authoritative. If needed in court, then follow appropriate chain-of-custody requirements by engaging lawyers. If needed to compete with industrial data, engage industry professionals in how to meet their standards.

As our tool development process moves forward, the principles outlined here may change shape or be re-prioritized. But the core principle of progress with purpose will remain. A motivated community can make rapid progress, and if the environmental conditions are met, success is inevitable.

Update: This post stated the incorrect altitude for a government-implemented flight restriction. The correct number is below 3,000 feet.

Mathew Lippincott lives in Portland, Ore., where he works on design issues in sanitation through the Cloacina Project, is faculty at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and designs civic science tools as a founding member of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science.

Adam Griffith, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, is a co-founder of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science and serves as their director of Science and Coastal Environments. He received a B.S. in Biology from Roanoke College in 1999 and was subsequently accepted to Teach for America. He taught 6th grade science in the Houston Independent School District in Texas for three years before becoming a kayak instructor and head raft guide for the Nantahala Outdoor Center. He received his M.S. in Biology in 2008 studying the native bamboo Arundinaria gigantea (rivercane) and continues to work with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and community members in Western N.C. as coordinator of the Rivercane Restoration Project. Adam is currently a coastal research scientist in the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University and is based in Asheville, N.C.

The site has launched with two major components:

• What sites are saying: An aggregation of top news sources from around the world, allowing users to see how news media in different countries are reporting on NATO and the summit.
• What tweets are saying: A look at popular one- and two-word terms included in tweets about NATO.

"What sites are saying" is an application fed by feeds from 292 English-language news sources from around the world. The Lab has pre-selected a sampling of popular terms (such as "Afghanistan," "Secret Service" and "Protest"). By the weekend, users will also be able to enter their own terms. Once a term is selected, a map displays, by country, articles in major English-language news sources that include that term.

"What tweets are saying" displays popular terms being used in tweets related to NATO. It also represents graphically the relative popularity of those terms among all Twitter users and among users who indicate in their profiles that they are from Chicago. As I write this, for instance, the word "protests" is more prevalent among Chicago Twitter users than among Twitter users as a whole. Meanwhile, the opposite is true of "Afghanistan"; that word is more popular overall on Twitter than among Chicago users.

WHAT WE'RE LEARNING
The site is an experiment in live news coverage. We'd like to understand how it might help news consumers -- and journalists -- keep up with the news related to a major event that takes place over a limited period of time.

Tracking conversations on Twitter may be especially important as thousands of people plan to protest in Chicago during the NATO Summit and are using social media to organize their efforts. In addition, ordinary people in downtown Chicago during the summit and the protests may provide first-hand observations via Twitter.

"In a way, the website will give journalists an additional set of eyes and ears that they can train on an event that they are covering in person," said Owen Youngman, Knight professor of Digital Media Strategy at Medill and one of the Knight Lab's founding faculty. "Smart use of social media is not a substitute for the work of journalists on the ground, but it is an interesting supplement."

The Knight Lab will report its findings and observations of the digital conversation surrounding the NATO summit at www.natoinchicago.com/what-we-are-learning/.

The Knight Lab launched last year with a $4.2 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Other Lab projects include a site that provided information about Illinois congressional primaries and a widely used tool for creating interactive timelines.

Generally, storytellers have had to choose between easy-to-use, not-very-attractive timeline generators requiring few technology skills (like TimeToast, Dipity and Vuvox), and more sophisticated tools (like ProPublica's Timeline Setter) that require access to server-based technologies or some programming knowledge.

Not any more.

The Knight News Innovation Lab has just announced the release of a new, free and open-source timeline tool developed by Zach Wise, a multimedia journalist and faculty member at Northwestern University (where the Knight Lab is a joint program of the journalism and computer science programs). You can check out the tool at KnightLabTimeline.com.

"The tools that already exist on the web are almost all either hard on the eyes or hard to use," said Wise. "Timeline is an open-source, JavaScript and HTML/HTML5 based tool that creates elegant timelines."

The first version of the timeline tool allows incorporation of tweets from Twitter (a la Storify) as well as media from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps and SoundCloud. More media types will be supported in the future.

Here are some sample timelines created with the new tool:

• Whitney Houston 1963-2012
• The Republican presidential campaign
• Chicago's old coal-fired power plants
• Revolutionary user interfaces

Wise's tool renders the timeline entirely in the browser, using JavaScript and CSS. It can pull content from a JSON feed or from content stored in a Google spreadsheet. The open-source code is available on GitHub.

Wise and the Knight Lab plan to continue developing the software -- for instance, by creating a WordPress plugin to make timelines easier for WordPress-powered sites.

The making of Timeline

KnightLabTimeline illustrates the potential innovation opportunities that can emerge from a development laboratory at a university with strong connections to the media industry.

Wise, who joined Northwestern's Medill School from the New York Times last year, was familiar with good timeline-building tools because the New York Times had developed its own -- to create timelines like this one about the U.S. financial crisis. But when Wise wanted to assign students to create timelines in his digital-storytelling classes, he wasn't happy with any of the free options available online.

He assigned his students to evaluate the existing tools and help him develop the requirements for a better timeline-building technology. The Knight Lab, launched last year with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, provided financial support and arranged for student labor to test, document and improve the pre-release versions of the software.

At KnightLabTimeline.com, you will find simple, clear instructions for creating a timeline. Nothing more than a basic understanding of HTML is needed.

To spur interest in the tool and learn how to make the timeline builder more usable for journalists and publishers, the Knight Lab is making an offer to Chicago area websites: You provide the story idea (and the media assets), and the Lab will provide students who can help you build one for your site. (Student support for this project is underwritten by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.)

Publishers of all sizes -- ranging from small neighborhood sites to large media companies -- are eligible for the assistance. For more information, contact the Lab at knightlab@northwestern.edu.

Lawrence Lessig sees the American people, enthroned as sovereign of the nation by the U.S. Constitution, as a sleeping giant. It's OK to sleep; in general, we'd all rather focus on things other than politics. But there are times when our political system is so broken, we must awaken and flex the powers granted to us by our Constitution. Lessig argues that now is one of those times.

The first event in the spring Media Lab Conversations Series at MIT featured a conversation between Media Lab director Joi Ito and lawyer, professor, author and reformer Lawrence Lessig. Joi and Larry met in Japan in 2002, and their paths crossed a number of times over the following years as each took on campaigns for creative culture and against state corruption.

Lessig most recently shifted to focus entirely on fighting corruption, despite his fame in intellectual property. He began his talk with an apology for distracting us from our research. In an ideal world, he said, it'd be absurd for us to sit and listen to him. What's happening here at the Media Lab is some of the most inspiring, creative work there is, and it's absurd we should have to take time away from these pursuits to listen to a talk about politics.

But he was here to recruit us, to distract us from our machines for a moment, because it's critical that people like us pay attention and contribute to the solution of an extraordinary problem. Every 100 years or so, society finds itself at a point where even the geniuses are forced to confront the messy world of politics. In Europe, the physicists working on atomic power and other wonders had to stop their work and confront fascism. Lessig said we're at a similar place now, where the scientists must look up from our pure research and take action.

Rootstrikers

Lessig led with this Thoreau quote that inspired the name of his Rootstrikers campaign:

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

In July of last year, Rasmussen reported that 46 percent of Americans believe Congress is corrupt. The institution isn't filled with Rod Blagojeviches. It's filled with people who came to Washington for a public purpose. Richard Nixon said he wasn't a crook, and so does Congress.

The framers of the Constitution gave us a republic, by which they meant a representative democracy, with a branch of government dependent upon the people alone. The model described in the Constitution places the people as the marionette, pulling the strings of Congress.

And yet it's the campaign funders pulling the strings. Members of Congress spend 30-70 percent of their time raising money to get back into Congress, or to get their party back in power. They develop a sixth sense, as any of us would, of what will raise money, not on important issues 1 through 10, but on issues 11 through 1,000, where a questionable position will draw less attention.

The Funders are Not the People

• 0.26% of Americans donate to political campaigns
• 0.05% max out their Federal Election Commission limit
• 0.0000063% of Americans gave 80% of the SuperPAC money so far in this election.

This is corruption. It's not the corruption of cash in brown paper bags, or of Blagojevich selling access. It's corruption of dependence, and a corruption of the framers' intent that the Congress be dependent on the people.

Political scientists have trouble estimating the effect of money on policy, which people like former FEC Commissioner Brad Smith spin to suggest that there is no evidence of corruption. A lack of evidence does not suggest an absence of evidence, however.

Ask the public. Across party lines, Americans believe that money buys results in Congress (71-81 percent). ABC has recently found that 9 percent of Americans approve of Congress. More Americans supported the British Crown at the time of the American Revolution.

Rock the Vote has found that youth voting rates in 2010 were deflated by the expectation that a vote isn't enough to make a difference in a corrupt system. The same reason is given by voters of all age groups. Regardless of the issue, from healthcare to global warming to financial reform, reform is essential. The system of government where the funders control Congress will systematically block change as long as it's in place.

Lessig knows what rational creatures he's speaking to at MIT. He beseeched us to realize that our current political system will block reason within the halls of Congress, no matter the issue. We are the 1 percent of people whose very occupation is the pursuit of reason, and we get to spend all day finding the right answer. When you recognize the privilege of living life in terms of doing what makes sense, and realize that our government never gets to ask that question, "What makes sense?", you realize the responsibility you have to change the system.

Congress is fundamentally corrupt, and they are responsible for that corruption.

So what do we do?

If the problem is systemic, and not just a matter of some corrupt people, then the solution is to give Congress a way to fund their campaigns without Faust. They need a way to behave that doesn't involve selling the country's future each financial quarter.

Citizen-Funded Campaigns

Should citizens fund our campaigns? Or should foreign nationals and corporations fund our campaigns? The Constitution is pretty clear about how it feels about the latter arrangement.

As of now, a miniscule percentage of Americans privately funds our campaigns. While the framers of our Constitution worked extremely hard to make all voters equal on Election Day, our current system allows the tiniest slice of the wealthiest among us to gain the most influence.

One alternative is government-funded elections, where the government dispenses funds. But people complain that their money is used to subsidize speech they don't believe in. And, like other government funding systems, it becomes bloated.

Lessig proposed a mix between private and government funding. It's a mix we see in some states, where small donations are amplified by public matching funds. Arizona, Maine and Connecticut have such systems in place.

In 2010, the House came close to passing the Fair Elections Now Act. Lessig is proposing what he calls the Grant & Franklin plan. It's based on the fact that each of us contributes at least $50 (the bill featuring Ulysses S. Grant) to the federal treasury. If we rebated that $50 in form of a democracy voucher, candidates could run entirely on these funds. We could match democracy vouchers with another $50 (making it $100, featuring Benjamin Franklin).

This would amount to a campaign funding system funded with $7 billion, multiple times the $1.8 billion spent in private donations in 2010. Such a plan would remove a source of incessant cynicism.

Would that be enough, given the SuperPACs out there?

We've entered the age of the SuperPAC, with the Tony Soprano model of influence. Evan Bayh, retired senator from Indiana, described the impact of the Citizens United case: Every incumbent is now terrified that, 30 days before their election, some Super PAC will come in and drop millions of dollars in advertising against them.

Candidates feel that they need some form of Super PAC insurance, so that when a (money) bomb is dropped on one side, another (money) bomb gets dropped to neutralize it. You get insurance by paying premiums in advance. Super PACs have succeeded in aligning votes with mere promises of insurance -- they actually call members of Congress with scripts saying things like, "We need you to support us 80 percent of the time for us to support you."

A plan like Lessig's wouldn't ban independent political expenditures, but it would limit them within 90 days of an election. If we had these two features, it'd make trust in our institutions possible again.

But is all of this possible? It's easy to see a problem, and not so difficult to see a solution, but it can be quite difficult to enact a solution.

Congressman Jim Cooper, of Tennessee, described Capitol Hill as "a farm league for K Street." Many in Congress are focused on their lives after government, as lobbyists. Fifty percent of the Senate and 42 percent of the House left to become lobbyists and cash in on their contacts and experience.

Insiders vs. Outsiders

Lessig just published "One Way Forward" to chart the course ahead. He sees the primary divide in American politics not between left and right, but between inside and outside. Outsiders have become so disgusted with how things are, they've put aside their lives for a moment to try and find an answer. The year 1998 saw Americans rally behind MoveOn.org. In 2009, the Tea Party took the spotlight, followed by Occupy in 2011.

These waves are building over time. The challenge, Lessig argues, is for these waves to have some awareness of their combined potential, of their latent power. Right now, they're extremely passionate, but also polarized. We should look at each of these waves and see the cross-partisan potential they have to move and act together, even if right now there's very low recognition of that potential. That's what we need to change.

This giant -- the people -- is sleeping most of the time. It must be awakened. Think of the Allied Forces against Naziism. We must stand on common ground, not because we have a common end, but to recognize the common enemy of corruption.

Lessig doesn't try to predict the complete arch of this movement. But we do need to engage more ordinary citizens in the practice of teaching. Rootstrikers.org is recruiting citizens who will teach fellow citizens about the connection between the things they care about and the root of it, corruption. If Thoreau's math found that there are 1,000 striking at the branches for every 1 hitting the root, we'll need 311,000 teachers for all 3.11 million Americans. That's their goal.

There's corruption happening around the world, and around the world, people are rising up in fury against it. Lessig's asking people to pledge to end corruption, and to specify how they'll do so. The branding resembles the various Creative Commons licenses.

We Are All Enablers

Lessig played the audio from the Exxon Valdez's return transmission alerting the dispatcher of the collision and ensuing oil leak. It was clear to everyone listening that the pilot was intoxicated. The captain escaped conviction, but there was little doubt to observers that he was drunk.

There was no doubt, however, that he had a problem with alcohol. His own mother testified, and there are records of his license being revoked for DUIs. At the time he capsized a supertanker, he was not allowed to drive a VW Beetle on the highway. But consider everyone else around him: all the people who did nothing while a drunk was driving a supertanker. We are those people.

We have many problems today. And yet our institutions are distracted, too busy to focus. And so are we, too busy doing the real work that produces value and contributes to the world, too busy to focus on this critical problem and give it the serious attention it needs. So who's to blame?

It's too easy to point to the evil people. They have their share of responsibility. It's the good people, the decent people, the most privileged, who have the obligation to fix this. Corruption is permitted by the passivity of the privileged.

A republic depends on the people alone. We have lost our republic, and it's time for all of us to act to get it back.

Sign up to volunteer here.

Lawrence Lessig photo courtesy of Joi Ito and used under the Creative Commons license.

There are 25 contested primaries in Illinois' 18 congressional districts, the first elections under newly drawn district boundaries. As a result of the redistricting, many people will be choosing among candidates they know little about.

The primary elections initiative takes into account the new realities of media and politics today, including candidates' extensive use of social media and the fragmentation of the news audience. The project's three main elements are:

• Candidate profiles from a social media perspective, including analysis of what the candidates tweet about and what their followers tweet about;
• An aggregation tool that collects coverage of individual congressional primary races from many sources;
• A simplified snapshot of campaign contributions that focuses on the geographical profile of each candidate's contributor base.

To see the full range of capabilities built into the site, I'd recommend you look at the most active contests: for instance, the Democratic primary in the 2nd District (Debbie Halvorson vs. Jesse Jackson Jr.) or the Republican primary in the 16th District (Don Manzullo vs. Adam Kinzinger).

The mission of the Knight Lab, a joint program of Northwestern University's journalism and computer science programs, is to "accelerate media innovation" in the Chicago area. The primary elections project aims to accomplish this by providing new elements of campaign coverage to web publishers of all sizes. The Lab's goal is to have the election coverage distributed through as many news outlets as possible.

News organizations can use the Lab's congressional coverage by adding their own branding and navigation to pages hosted by the Lab. Or news organizations can use "widgets" that incorporate elements of the coverage into their websites. Either way, they get coverage of the campaigns that goes beyond what any one organization can provide itself.

Between now and the primary, the Lab will be adding elements to the showcase site. After March 20, the Lab's leadership team will review the results of the elections initiative and consider expanding on it for the November general election.

Details about the congressional primaries project are available in two PDF files on the Knight Lab website: a project overview and FAQ. There is also a project blog, which includes an "About this project" post. Potential partners may contact r-graff@northwestern.edu. 

In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, editor and co-founder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN.

PLN operates in a unique media environment, where the very act of distributing a magazine to their customers might first require winning a lawsuit. You see, their primary audience is made up of prisoners themselves. Prison Legal News is the longest-running publication put together with the help of people who are incarcerated, and since its first issue in 1990, it has become a critical resource for discussing issues facing these populations. It's an independent, monthly magazine that reviews and analyzes prisoner rights, court rulings, and news about prison issues. PLN focuses on state and federal U.S. prisons, as well as some international coverage. Paul himself has become a distinguished advocate on behalf of the U.S. population. Asked whether we could blog his talk, Paul responded, "Secrecy is the antithesis of publishing."

From Newsletter to National Publication

Prison Legal News started as a newsletter, in 1990, covering only Washington state's prisons. It was 10 pages and hand-typed for 75 subscribers. It launched into the publishing world with a $50 budget. The organization was completely volunteer-run until 1996. The first run of six issues ended up becoming a 22-year, 224-issue run (and still going). Some of their earliest subscribers are still with them -- a great sign for the publication's longevity, but a less great reflection of these subscribers' sentences.

PLN's perseverance has paid off: In 1990, there were 30 or 40 prisoners' rights news publications, but many have since ceased publishing. Prison Legal News has expanded its coverage as its subscriber base expanded. At one point, they realized they had more subscribers in California than in Washington, and that they had graduated to a national publication. Yet Paul considers himself one of the few people in print publishing these days who welcomes competition. He wishes there were other publications and institutions engaged in this work.

Prison Legal News is not light reading -- there's no horoscope, no advice column, just hard news and information. But that's what their customers want. An annual reader survey draws a 30-40% reader survey response, and the feedback is consistently asking for more useful information rather than lighter fare. There was a publication in the 1990s called "Prison Life," which covered prison life and the prison experience, and they were somehow surprised when they were unsuccessful, because prisoners would rather not read about this in their leisure time.

An expansion into book titles has focused on self-help and non-fiction reference books for prisoners, especially titles that aren't viable for traditional book publishers. Paul mentions books including "How to File a Lawsuit and Win," and books on hepatitis C (a dangerous health threat within the incarcerated population). There's great interest in books on health, including "Our Bodies, Ourselves," which Paul notes has been banned in some prison systems. They also provide "radical critiques of the criminal justice system", including edited volumes titled "The Celling of America," "Prison Nation" and
"Prison Profiteers." Paul notes that the books reach a different audience than the magazine, that there are people who prefer reading the long form of arguments.

Who Reads Prison News?

Prison Legal News is a niche publication. It's not trying to reach the whole incarcerated population of the U.S. It's targeting activists and lifers interested in improving prisons. Paul said they want to reach the activists, the 1% of people who make change. Men are 95% of the U.S. prison population, and make up a higher percentage of PLN's readership compared with women. Paul attributed this to the fact that women generally receive shorter sentences, and their subscribers tend to have long sentences ahead of them. Paul has found that it's the people who are in prison for a long period of time that make things happen. These are the lifers, the ones filing the lawsuits and organizing other prisoners. These are people who have accepted that prison is their life now, and who are working to do something to improve it.

There are around 7,000 subscribers to the print publication, but the reach is much broader. Reader surveys suggest that copies reach more than 10 prisoners each -- Paul estimates a readership of 80,000-90,000 readers. Additionally, the website gets around 100,000 visitors per month. The subscriber base includes judges, court officers, lawyers, journalists and academics, including Noam Chomsky, who Paul told us proudly was one of the first subscribers. All the big investment banks subscribe, Paul told us, because they follow news on the private prison industry. "I was happy when Lehman Brothers went under, but we lost a subscriber," he said. Lehman Brothers had been one of the biggest bankrollers of the private prison industry, so it was a happy day when they went down.

Publication Litigation

A big focus these days is making sure the target audience in prisons can actually receive the magazine. This requires extensive litigation. Prison Legal News has obtained consent decrees in nine states, ordering state prisons to deliver the magazine. PLN is currently litigating in New York and Florida to enable subscribers to receive their publication, both the magazine and the books they publish.

Almost every state's prison system has censored and banned the magazine at one point or another, Paul told us. The organization has won nine lawsuits, receiving consent decrees that order state prison systems to deliver the publications. The bans are generally pretextual. They're bans based on postal rates used to deliver magazines, or whether prisoners are allowed to pay for the magazine from their trust accounts. Sometimes there are arbitrary blocks on sending publications to prisoners in certain types of custody. In Washington, PLN discovered they needed to become an "approved vendor" and had a very difficult time figuring out "who's brother-in-law we had to work with" to gain "approved vendor" status, Paul said.

It's not just PLN getting banned. In one case, in South Carolina, the American Civil Liberties Union had to sue when a prison banned all books except the Bible. These pretextual excuses can get pretty absurd -- Paul is currently facing an argument that the staples used to bind the magazine might be used as dangerous weapons. While we think it's funny, these are the issues PLN is forced to litigate (marshal the resources to sue the government, and win). "Think of every magazine held together by staples, delivered by mail. TIME, Newsweek. We're the only publisher in America who routinely challenges this censorship," he said.

Many of these rules are designed to prevent prisoners from having material to read, far beyond PLN's magazine. It would help if other American publishers would join in the fight to ensure publications are able to reach prison populations. When an Indiana judge upheld a ban on gay publications "Out" and "The Advocate," Paul asked the publishers to file suit, because it would stand up better in court than a suit from a prisoner. But publishers aren't seeking the prison population. "They tell us that they're not part of our targeted advertising demographic," he said. For PLN, the core audience is prisoners, and there's no point in publishing if the core audience can't get it. In recognition of this, they realized that funding staff attorney positions was a priority.

I noted that some critics of PLN have argued that it's as much a litigation platform as it is a publication. Paul countered that "our initial goal was always just to publish the magazine. But we got to to the point where we're just consuming ever greater amounts of organizational resources just getting the magazine into prisons." Paul estimated that he can spend as much as 40% of his time focusing on being able to distribute the publication, rather than producing and editing it. "The editor should be worried about being (an) editor, not worrying about why one prison system or another is censoring content," he said. For there to be any litigation, the government has to illegally censor the magazine, then PLN has to sue, and then they have to win. "If you don't like the consequences, don't break the law," Paul said.

Isolation from Society

Restrictions on what can be sent in and out of prison harm PLN in another way: It makes it very hard to hear from the incarcerated. In some prisons, prisoners can no longer send or receive information beyond what fits on a postcard. Other layers of draconian restriction include rules that postcard communication has to be in ink, can't use a label, etc. These mechanisms tend to be arbitrary and are designed, Paul argued, to prevent prisoners from having communication to and from the outside world. His organization has challenged a couple of these successfully, with a couple more pending. Paul told us that they are trying to nip this trend in the bud before it gets entrenched.

"Part of the goal is to get prisoners information. But conversely, we want to hear from them," he said. The bulk of the magazine's content is provided by contributing writers, who are mostly prisoners, some of whom have been working with PLN for over a decade. In the hopes of ensuring widespread distribution of the information, PLN doesn't demand exclusive publishing rights -- and people are free to copy and disseminate the information.

This is an area of close overlap with one of the Center for Civic Media's projects, "Between the Bars." BTB is a blogging platform for prisoners that gets around the lack of Internet access by scanning and publishing letters to a blog, and then mailing comments back to the authors on postcards. In addition to helping the incarcerated publish to the web, it helps the rest of the U.S. population by ensuring that we are able to hear from these voices, who comprise 1% of our entire populace.

Prison News Online

The Internet has greatly improved the visibility of Prison Legal News. Paul told us he conducts 3-4 interviews a week about the publication and the issues it raises. He's fluent in Spanish and noted that there's a great deal of interest in these issues from programs in Colombia and Venezuela. One of his associate gives interviews in Russian media, which seems to have an endless appetite for stories about the U.S. prison system. Some have observed that the U.S. prison system must be pretty bad when the Russians enjoy making fun of it.

The online presence of the magazine has allowed PLN to build a publication library online, with more than 6,000 documents available in its Brief Bank. "We've got the biggest, and I would say, the best, repository of prison documents online," Paul said. As a result, PLN generally shows up in Google's first page for prison-related queries, except sometimes when the "Prison Break" program is on TV.

Prisons can be a bit of a timeless place, said Paul, where the equipment you see is 50-60 years old. PLN's print publishing business still thrives here (advertising levels for the print magazine are actually going up), and web publishing is almost nonexistent. PLN hasn't figured out how to make money online, like other publishers. Its content performs poorly with online advertising. On the site, the news content is free, legal content is paid, and these fees cover basic staff time put into the site. Advertising and subscription income and book distribution bring in about the same amount. Payroll is the biggest expense. They get some foundation funding and donations, and when all of this revenue is cobbled together, it's enough to move forward.

Staying Human

The acts of reading and writing are core to helping prisoners maintain their humanity, especially when everything else in these punitive systems is working to degrade that humanity. A publication like PLN lets prisoners connect with others, when the rest of the system is designed to isolate and alienate.

Paul is wary of the dehumanization that takes place before genocides and in prisons. We lose sight of the people in prison. We need to keep in mind that they're someone's father, someone's son, regardless of what they've done. When someone's been murdered in a prison, it's almost always that person's mother who calls PLN.

Paul closed his presentation by noting that he's now 264 issues into this project, and that since 1990, "everything to do with the criminal justice system, by objective or subjective standard, has gotten worse."

There are 25 contested primaries in Illinois' 18 congressional districts, the first elections under newly drawn district boundaries. As a result of the decennial redistricting process, many people will be choosing among candidates they know little about. Many of the districts are huge, extending across the circulation areas of multiple newspapers and even different television markets. At a time when traditional news organizations are shrinking, it can't be good for democracy that it could take a reporter most of a day to travel from one end of a district to the other.

The mission of the Knight Lab, a joint program of Northwestern University's journalism and computer science programs, is to "accelerate media innovation" in the Chicago area. The primary elections initiative takes into account the new realities of media and politics today, including candidates' extensive use of social media and the fragmentation of the news audience.

The project's three main elements are:

• Candidate profiles from a social media perspective, including analysis of what the candidates tweet about and what their followers tweet about;
• An aggregation tool that collects coverage of individual congressional primary races from many sources;
• A simplified snapshot of campaign contributions that focuses on the geographical profile of each candidate's contributor base.

All of these components will go live on www.congressionalprimaries.org in early February. More importantly, they are being offered -- at no charge -- to web publishers large and small. The Lab's goal is to have the election coverage distributed through as many news outlets as possible.

News organizations can use the Lab's congressional coverage to serve their users, adding their own branding and navigation to pages hosted by the Lab. Or news organizations can use "widgets" that incorporate elements of the coverage into their websites. Either way, they get coverage of the campaigns that goes beyond what any one organization can provide itself.

The elections initiative incorporates technology approaches that my Northwestern computer science colleagues have specialized in for years: powerful web searching, content categorization and extraction of meaning from editorial content and social media. By making these technologies available to local news media in connection with an important news event, the Lab seeks to whet publishers' appetite for innovation and build their interest in collaborating with media they might also consider to be business competitors.

After the primary, the Lab's leadership team will review the results of the elections initiative and consider expanding on it for the November general election.

Details about the congressional primaries project are available in two PDF files on the Knight Lab website: a project overview and FAQ. The Lab is reaching out to potential partners throughout Illinois and adjacent media markets to explain the project in greater detail. Potential partners can also contact r-graff@northwestern.edu to get a head start on customizing the services. 

By contrast, on that very same day, my office was buzzing with students seemingly in no hurry to pack up for the holidays and head home. And, interestingly, only one of them was my actual student. One was a Cronkite School of Journalism freshman who had heard me speak to her class and wanted to run an idea past me. A Cronkite sophomore had a major media company interested in a Microsoft Word plug-in he had come up with and wanted to make sure it was actually doable. Another was a business major at Arizona State University's Carey School who needed some advice on developing an iPad application that he got $5,000 in seed money to build. An ASU engineering major wanted to make sure he could get on my schedule before the end of the year to talk through plans for his new business for the coming year.

As I was looking into the earnest faces of the students who paraded in and out of my office that day, with their Power Point presentations and legal yellow pads filled with sketches for their big ideas, I thought about what made the difference between my friend's institution of higher education and my own.

encouraging innovation

At ASU, innovation and entrepreneurship are being pushed everywhere you go. Funding contests abound such as the Edson Student Entrepreneurship Initiative, which funds up to $20,000 per student team; the ASU Innovation Challenge, in which each student team can win up to $10,000 for an idea; the Performing Arts Venture Experience gives away up to $5,000 for student ideas, and the new 10,000 Solutions provides up to $10,000 to fund good ideas from students, staff, faculty and community members on how to impact local and global communities.

Additionally, Cronkite School students (and faculty) are encouraged to submit ideas for Knight News Challenge and J-Lab Women Entrepreneurs grants, and those winners are heralded as much as winners of journalism contests.

Professors at Cronkite and other schools bake pitch session into their syllabi so students are thinking of the practical as well as the theoretical. I recently sat in on a pitch session at the College of Nursing and Health Innovation where nutrition and health majors were trying to answer two questions with fresh ideas: How do we get Americans to drink more water, and how do we get sedentary office workers to move more?

The university also tries to make it easier for like-minded entrepreneurs to find each other. Each of the four ASU campuses have Changemaker Centers where students from different majors can hang out and kick around the "what if" questions. I've always kept an open door policy at my own lab, Cronkite's Digital Media and Entrepreneurship Lab, where students from any major can pop in to talk, and they do. In the past academic year, I've helped a public policy major think through an iPhone app to help track lost pets and a social work major create a proposal for a volunteer matching site for high school students and non-profits. Journalists for local media companies stop by to hash out ideas as well, and I am really excited about a couple of projects in the works.

University President Michael Crow employs Entrepreneurs-in-Residence who help student startups get their footing but who also help faculty working on innovation and entrepreneurship at such a large university find and support each other. It helps that professors at the College of Technology and Innovation know that I'm looking for Objective C engineers to hire or that faculty at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning might be interested in collaborating on a mapping project.

like minds unite

Lastly, like minds like being around each other. At Cronkite, we've hosted News Foo for two years running, and a fall Where Camp attracted several dozens of data nerds for a weekend hack fest. Cronkite students are encouraged to attend local startup weekends around the area and conferences out at the university's Sky Song business incubator. It was at such a startup weekend last spring that one of my graphic design students hacked together his latest venture that is attracting angel investments; a few weeks ago, he dropped out of school to move to Silicon Valley to give it a try.

Several adjunct professors at Cronkite are working on startups, and the school employs both a technologist-in-residence and an entrepreneur-in-residence. Next door to my lab, a startup Network, Magicdust Television, has launched a hybrid digital media/television show called RightThisMinute that is produced in the Cronkite building and employs Cronkite students.

So it's no wonder that a lot of students at Cronkite and other ASU schools have the entrepreneurship bug, and especially a penchant for social entrepreneurship. Yeah, it's a cold, cruel world and a god-awful economy, but the message over here, at least, is that such a reality only provides another opportunity to do something about it.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Nick Bastian.

"Beyond J-School 2011" is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers an intensive, cutting edge, three semester Master of Arts in Journalism; a unique one semester Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism; and the CUNY J-Camp series of Continuing Professional Development workshops focused on emerging trends and skill sets in the industry.

I had a brief exchange on Twitter recently with ProPublica's Scott Klein about how high school poets end up as journalists and how he hopes that high school mathletes start to follow the same path. The basic idea was that kids are turned onto something at a young age and then search for viable career paths to follow. So for a high school poet, they look around and think, "I like to write -- what professions are going to let me become a kick-ass writer?"

Traditionally, journalism has absorbed a lot of those folks and has been stronger for it. Now, posited Klein, with the ascendancy of data journalism and the growing need for high-level developers to break news by crunching numbers, the hope is that kids who are switched onto math will draw the same conclusion and wind up revolutionizing journalism. But, I countered, how many high school newspapers are doing data journalism right now? That is the first step. My guess? Not many -- and that's a loss.

Because Klein is right: There is ample space for math geeks, stats nerds, number-crunchers and many more in journalism. It's a place they should be playing. And you can see, with each stat-heavy report, with each number-savvy data visualization, that some are starting to. But nowhere near enough.

opportunities for learning

So how do we get them interested? I think we do it in two ways: Leading by example -- doing kick-ass, math-heavy journalism (of course) -- but also by creating opportunities for learning. It's really by demonstrating that the problem sets in journalism are compelling ones -- and offering avenues to learn more about them -- that we're going to start to attract the talent that we need.

But as someone who spent the last three years in journalism education, our J-schools aren't currently tooled to work with those problem sets. They are, by and large, teaching the other side of the equation: the writers.

Yet even on the writer's side we need to be teaching beyond the now accepted J-school norms of Soundslides, iMovie, and maybe a little (shudder) Flash. We need to be building out more fully realized skillsets that include basic coding, an understanding of editorial UX, working with data, and a lot more contextual understanding of storytelling and reporting that is of the web, and not simply an extension of print.

But again, the speed of change in the academy isn't meeting the speed of innovation on the web.

And this is true well beyond the high school and college level -- journalists at all levels are hungry to retool. We need to rethink how we approach these things: How can we do learning at scale that can speak fluently to these different constituencies (and there are plenty more beyond the two examples above), while also bringing them closer together -- not so that one can become the other (because, believe me, in the Hacks/Hackers equation, it's a much quicker route for the hacker to become the hack than vice versa), but because the two need to understand just how powerful they can be when they collaborate together?

The baseline for learning

Of course, at the end of the day, we're fostering different skillsets that compliment each other in the way that the best multidisciplinary teams can. And so one thing to think about is what the baselines for those skillsets are. The math geek doesn't need a primer on statistics, but may need to know how an FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request works, or how to interpret census data, for instance. Meanwhile, the reporter may need to learn how to extend her database skills beyond Excel or how to take a map beyond Google MyMaps. These are simple examples -- the bare minimum of a bare minimum. What do you think the baseline of learning for these (and other) constituencies should be?

Because that's where we need to start: We need to start figuring out how engage different groups of people that are crucial to the advancement of journalism at their level, in their language, and then move them beyond. And I think we can't wait for the institutions to catch up; I think we have to actively recruit each other to do it. Because as individuals, we are brilliant, and we have the ability to share that brilliance with others.

That's a lot, to be sure, and there are plenty who are taking a stab at it. (It was exciting to read that Poynter's NewsU passed its 200,000 registered user mark.) But I think there are real strides possible at the peer-to-peer level, at journalistic learning that's driven by people excited about sharing their own knowledge to the types of folks who they're already comfortable speaking to. I want to see a ton of amazing classes bloom, and the outputs of those classes be new people in the journalism community.

There are a lot of different directions to take this. Where do you want to see learning go in journalism?

Image courtesy of Flickr user therobedscribe.

A version of this post first appeared here.

"Beyond J-School 2011" is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers an intensive, cutting edge, three semester Master of Arts in Journalism; a unique one semester Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism; and the CUNY J-Camp series of Continuing Professional Development workshops focused on emerging trends and skill sets in the industry.