Two recent developments suggest that we're starting to find answers to that question -- and more importantly, that there's a growing number of people trying to find these answers. Duke University has released an interesting report, and a group of journalists and technologists has begun meeting in Silicon Valley to address challenges that journalists and technologists might tackle together.

The February 2008 conference at Georgia Tech, entitled "Journalism 3G: The Future of Technology in the Field," introduced many of its 200+ attendees to the idea of computational journalism -- applying computer programming to the challenges facing journalism, journalists and a society that needs original reporting to provide information for citizens in a democracy. Two of the other attendees were the first Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners: computer programmers enrolled in the master's program at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

When the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded the scholarship grant to Medill in 2007, the idea of teaching journalism to technology professionals seemed odd to many people -- both journalists and technologists. But now there seem to be a lot of initiatives aimed at addressing the same set of issues.

Duke University, through its DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, built on the ideas generated by the Georgia Tech conference in a couple of ways. First, the center created -- and has now filled -- a faculty position specializing in the field. The new Knight professor of the practice of journalism and public policy is an old friend, Sarah Cohen, previously database editor for The Washington Post, where she contributed to countless enterprise reporting projects, including a Pulitzer-winning investigation of child welfare agencies in the District of Columbia. Besides teaching courses, Cohen is expected to lead the development of open-source reporting tools designed to make it easier for journalists to discover and research stories.

Earlier this month, Duke released "Accountability Through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism," a report based on a workshop held in July. The report is full of interesting ideas for applying technology to journalists' challenges. Here are a few of them.

Information Extraction, Integration and Visualization

A new set of tools would help reporters find patterns in otherwise unstructured or unsearchable information. For instance, the Obama administration posted letters from dozens of interest groups providing advice on issues, but the letters were not searchable. A text-extraction tool would allow reporters to feed PDF documents into a Web service and return a version that could be indexed and searched. The software might also make it easy to tag documents with metadata such as people's names, places and dates. Another idea is to improve automatic transcription software for audio and video files, often available (but not transcribed) for government meetings and many court hearings.

The report also suggests developing "lightweight" templates that enable journalists to create data visualizations based on XML or spreadsheet files, and tools that help them organize their findings in a timeline. As the report points out, reporters working on in-depth projects often create chronologies in lengthy spreadsheets or text documents. A better tool would let journalists "zoom in, tag events for publication, turn on and off players or events and otherwise use them effectively," the report says.

The Journalist's Dashboard

Here the Duke report suggests that journalists need "a tool with which to spot what's new and what's important in the flow of daily information." A dashboard could include:

• A news alert system similar to Google News that scanned only the sources specified by a beat reporter,identifying the originating publisher and the number of other sites that linked to the item;
• A tool helping journalists keep track of their sources, including news items about that person and citations from the reporter's own archived stories mentioning him or her;
• A "trends and outliers" tool that might generate an alert any time a data source reveals a significant change in a piece of data -- say, a surge in monthly expenditures by a government agency, or a flurry of crime reports in a short period of time.
• A timeline generator that would display incidents related to a particular story as well as coverage on blogs and news sites.
• An annotator that would allow a reporter to see past stories, images and contextual information while writing -- for instance, by displaying background information about the person being written about. (This idea bears some similarity to the EasyWriter tool developed this spring by students in a Northwestern University journalism/technology class.)

Reader-Reporter Interaction

Philip Bennett, formerly managing editor of the Washington Post and now a professor at Duke, is quoted in the report describing a new approach to investigative projects that engages and taps into reader interest. Instead of seeing long-term investigative projects ending with publication of a package of stories, the initial investigation could serve as just the midpoint in the reporting process. Stories could be presented in ways that enabled each reader to explore the story in layers, giving each a "differentiated news experience depending on her interests." Bennett suggests that a series like the Post's Pulitzer-winning investigation of Walter Reed Army Medical Center could have become a focal point for readers interested in veterans' issues. "If the paper could nurture a community of interest around the story, readers might use the site as a discussion place for the action that follows from the investigation," the report says.

Applying 'Sensemaking' Approaches From Other Fields

The Duke report points out that academic researchers are wrestling with many of the same challenges that journalists face and suggests that their solutions could be helpful. For instance, Georgia Tech researchers have built a tool called Jigsaw that creates visualizations to display connections between individuals and entities mentioned in different documents -- something every investigative reporter would lust for. And the Muninn Project, an interdisciplinary research project focusing on World War I records, is seeking to convert images of handwritten forms into machine-readable databases -- a problem faced by journalists in many states that allow political candidates to file handwritten campaign contribution reports..

Another new development worth taking note of: a new "Hacks and Hackers" Meetup group formed in Silicon Valley by former Associated Press foreign correspondent Burt Herman, who is on leave from the AP and recently completed a Knight fellowship at Stanford University. The group -- billed as being "for hackers exploring technologies to filter and visualize information, and for journalists who use technology to find and tell stories" -- held its first meeting Nov. 19.

The first gathering attracted about 30 people, including people from Google and Google News, Yahoo, sfgate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, Current TV, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and Topix.com, Herman reported. "It felt like the seeds of a movement, and the many lively conversations showed that everyone was able to find common ground," he wrote in an email to me.

Herman said his Knight fellowship -- during which he focused on innovation and entrepreneurship -- taught him that innovation requires bringing people from different disciplines together.

"I started the Hacks and Hackers meetup group to open a broader dialogue between technologists and journalists, so we can move past the endless hand-wringing about the future of news and get down to work building it," Herman said. "Technology and media come together here in Silicon Valley like nowhere else in the world, and there was no group yet focused on this. I'm hoping it will lead to better understanding and perhaps even spawn new ventures."

As some readers of this blog will remember, "Hacks and Hackers" is also the name that Aron Pilhofer and I came up with to describe a new organization and Web site for people working at the intersection of technology and journalism. At the Future of News and Civic Media Conference in June, Aron and I won a $2,000 prize to create an online community for people with these interests.

The Web community idea is still in the early stages of development, but Aron and I would welcome your ideas about how best to make it work. The original concept was to create a place where members can seek help solving problems and provide assistance to their peers by, for instance, sharing a tutorial for a project using Django or Ruby on Rails or Drupal. We know there are people -- in journalism and technology, in industry and academia, scattered through organizations such as the Online News Association, Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Society for News Design -- who can use each other's help and support. We like the idea of having some kind of reputation management system -- say, like Stack Overflow -- that would reward members based on the quality and quantity of their contributions to the community.

If you have ideas for the Hacks and Hackers site, please post them in the comments below or email me at richgor - at - northwestern.edu.

Manya Gupta, a software engineer for telecommunications companies in her native India, is the fourth winner of a Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarship. She's now in her second quarter studying journalism at the Medill School at Northwestern University. She blogs occasionally at http://manya-myvoice.blogspot.com/.

Learn some more about Manya from the following edited Q&A.

Tell us about your background.

I am from India. I received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from JSS Academy of Technical Education in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.. While working on projects I realized my passion for programming and decided to make it a career.

So, I moved to Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, to work as a software engineer for Infosys Technologies and worked in the telecommunications domain. Three years later I decided to move to Ordyn Technologies, a small company, to gain some startup experience. My stint at Ordyn as a senior design engineer was very fruitful, and among many things I learned Python.

But I am not a complete geek. I am a traveler, a big sports buff, a trained dancer and an avid reader. I love playing football, tennis and volleyball and won a best player award for football in a tournament in Infosys. 

How did you get interested in journalism?

Four years ago I participated in a national level anti-reservation protest. [Editor's note: Here's a BBC article about the protests and the policy change that spurred them.] It was then that I realized the power of journalism to effect change. I experienced, for the first time, the positive impact journalism can make in creating a better society. What started as a small protest by a group of students in the national capital soon turned into a youth movement and it was because of effective, strong and powerful journalism. The reach to the youth through different media was amazing. There were traditional sources like the television and newspapers, but there was Twitter and Orkut and Web images and blogs. So, there was this curious mix of new and old and everyone, with whatever means he could, was participating in the movement.

That experience stirred me. It made me want to take the plunge into journalism and explore the new avenues that appeal to today's youth -- because the whole idea is to get the message to them, and adapting to their tools is important.

What have you learned by studying journalism so far? How has the experience changed your outlook?

So far I have thoroughly enjoyed the Medill experience. First and most important, I have learned to report, write and think like a journalist. I look for a story in everything around me! But it is not just old-style writing that I have learned. Medill is a place where the old meets the young -- because with every print story I also created a multimedia piece and that is how I learned the importance of storytelling in the most effective manner.

Beyond that, I have met amazing people, participated in some very intriguing discussions and learned from people with tremendous amount of experience. What I have liked most is that everyone is so willing to share what they have learned.

Moreover, it has given me the opportunity to explore; by interacting with people from different walks of life, by understanding their problems, issues and lives, and by telling stories through creative media.

The experience has enriched me. It has given me the power to bring people's day-to-day issues to light. At the same time, I have learned not to tie my emotions to one side and be balanced and fair by listening to other points of view. In short, I have learned to walk the tightrope.

That's partly why we've launched Izwi Labahlali (The Voice Of The Citizens), Grahamstown's first radio show with content that's largely produced and presented by citizen journalists and transmitted mainly in iziXhosa, the dominant local language.

The show, which airs on Radio Grahamstown on 102.1 FM, gives citizen journalists who have completed a six-week course in the Grocott's Mail Citizen Journalism Newsroom an extra platform to report what's going on in their communities. (Their contributions also appear online and in Grocott's print edition.)

The show is being aired on a trial-run basis every Wednesday in November between 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. It will become a permanent show in early 2010, possibly with a longer time slot.

For the trial run, Khaya Thonjeni is hosting the show. Khaya is the schools outreach officer for our Knight News Challenge-funded project, Iindaba Ziyafika ("The News is coming"). Khaya is joined by different young citizen journalists each week. (You can listen to the shows online here.)

The radio show is intended to play a significant role in realizing our project's aim of making news something that is increasingly consumed -- and produced -- by all citizens of Grahamstown. The idea is that it will get people talking about issues that matter to them, thereby giving them more of a sense of belonging in their community.

At this stage, we have given two six-week courses in citizen journalism. Thanks to the content our students are producing in print and our new radio experience, we are learning a great deal about what works and doesn't work in this multi-lingual, low literacy area.

Providing Guidance to Citizen Journalists

We give our trainees the latitude to write about anything they want, but we are also discovering it helps to focus their energy around specific themes. Some of the current group of 40 adults taking the training will soon be working on issues of waste management. We have myriad of waste issues in Grahamstown, from uncollected garbage on the streets to landfill usage. Others will be put into groups to look at issues such as local democracy.

Just as it takes a professional journalist a long time to work out the dynamics of a beat, the same is true for a citizen journalist. It takes time, energy and dedication to build up an understanding -- and contacts -- related to a specific topic. We realize we need to create more opportunities for these specializations to grow, and we need to seed and suggest these opportunities to our citizen journalists.

Dealing With Power Issues

We are also encountering issues of power and respect. Many government officials often won't speak to full-time journalists, so why would they take a call from someone describing themselves as a citizen journalists? We issue graduates of our CJ course a citizen journalist press card that identifies them and gives our contact number at Grocott's Mail. This is so that any prospective interviewee can check out if a person is who they say they are.

These uneven power relations are particularly acute for our younger reporters. They often want to write about conditions in their schools, but fear the power of their teachers. This is part of the reason why we are now focusing their energy towards other social challenges in their areas, and away from their schools. Poorly functioning schools are not keen on being exposed by their own pupils, and we hope that some of our brave adult CJ reporters can tackle this issue.

In order to tackle controversial issues, we realize we need to spend more time talking about being how they can stand up in the face of power, and learn to push their sources. We find some people just persevere more than others. For example, this is a well put together piece of reporting that one of our current course participants researched and wrote. It's really worth reading, just to get a sense of what is possible. It even includes a quote from a municipal official!

Different People, Different Reasons for Trying Reporting

The above article is written by Andile Ecalpar Nayika, a 21 year-old student from Joza Location. This is some of what he wrote about his motivation to get into our oversubscribed CJ course:

I survive in Phumlani Location in the eastern part of Grahamstown, Joza Location. I am 21 years of age and I am a student at East Cape Midlands College... I have been a prominent member of my high school newspaper, Edu Buzz of EduCollege. Then a year later, I went on to become one of six Founders of East Cape Modlands College's of the very first Newspaper, 'The Midlands Voice'. At the moment I am a newsreader at Radio Grahamstown 102.1 FM. I have a lot of intent on scribing and telling more stories about my life experience and the surrounding I am in because it is what makes me.

It is clear why Andile wants to do the CJ course. Some people simply want to get the news out about their church's activities. Others take the course to see if this is something that might interest them. And then there are those who feel compelled to try this in the hope of finding work -- adult unemployment rates are above 50 percent in Grahamstown.

We're thinking through what these multiple motivations might mean for our courses, and whether we can (and should) screen harder for those candidates who want to "change the world," "make a difference," or "speak truth to power," for example. (Currently, prospective candidates have to provide a written account of their motivations, and some are interviewed.)

In this vein, we're also having to think much more broadly about what "building social capital" (one of our project's overarching goals) means, and how that intersects, or not, with our other overarching aim: enlarging the public sphere in Grahamstown, and deepening democracy.

Preparing for the World Cup

It's been an exciting few weeks as more and more elements of the overall Iindaba Ziyafika project get off the ground. It is early days (even though we've been at it for a year), and 2010 will be a big year for testing how our citizen journalism newsroom, our CJ training courses, the multiple input and output methods we are creating (and, in some cases, pioneering), all come together.

Next year is especially important because South Africa will host the World Cup in June 2010, and the second World Journalism Education Congress, titled "Journalism Education in an Age of Radical Change," will convene July 2010 in Grahamstown.

We are excited by what we're achieving -- and we're confident we'll have more and more stories to tell about the Citizen journalism that is happening in Grahamstown, and what we're learning from it.

In part one I looked at the history of media development, the major players in the field, and some of the current obstacles - from regulatory reform to the linguistic divides - that stand in the way of a healthy media ecosystem. In this folow-up post I will continue to summarize the discussions which took place at a meeting earlier this month at Salzburg Global Seminar where representatives from the field of media development and funders who have supported their work all gathered to discuss how to more effectively "strengthen independent media."

The week-long meeting was divided into two parts, first convening practitioners involved in media development projects for three days, and then representatives from funding organizations for a separate, succeeding three-day meeting. (Some funders were resistant to participation from non-funders, I was told as an explanation for why the two meetings were held separately.)

Better Access or Training?

A recurring tension during the meeting of practitioners was whether investment in the field should focus on lowering the barriers to participation (by bringing down the cost of connectivity and making intuitive tools easily accessible), or on training programs which teach participants how to use new media tools to build community, monitor government, and promote development. Erik Hersman, one of the co-founders of Ushahidi, feels that if enough citizens have access to participatory media tools like Ushahidi, then a culture of tinkering will necessarily follow without costly training programs. Josh Goldstein echoed Erik's observation, pointing to the pervasive use of MXit, a mobile social network in South Africa. Ramsey Tesdell of 7iber, however, was skeptical of the "if you build it, they will come" mentality. "Technology is easy," he said, "it's building a community that is hard." Others added that there is no shortage of online tools available to all, but that active participation is still restricted to mainly elites.

The role of "quality" in media development was another repeated tension. Joyce Barnathan of the International Center for Journalists felt that the conversation was too focused on quantity - in terms of encouraging a larger number of media producers - and not enough on the quality of the content that is produced. Ivan Sigal of Global Voices, in language reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu, observed that "quality" is often a coded word to distinguish those who are allowed to speak and those who aren't; that the concept is often meant to serve individuals inside exclusive institutions. Benjamin Glahn, the facilitator of the meeting, put it in more diplomatic terms: "quality is a process, not a static achievement."

Rob Faris of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society noted that much of the conversation over the three days focused on augmenting the supply of media - that is, encouraging more people to produce more and better content - but that there was little discussion about the issue of demand for content, especially from developing countries. All participants agreed that media literacy education is a fundamental component of a healthy media system. At Global Voices, for example, we have been encouraged by high school teachers and university professors who integrate our content into their syllabi.

During the second and third days of the meeting a number of the participants presented their projects. In addition to some of the latest work of Appfrica Labs and Overmundo, which I wrote about previously, we also heard from Tihomir Loza and Alexey Leonchik of Transitions Online, Serhii Danylenko of the pro-am journalism Ukrainian journalism portal Highway, Alex Park of Moby Group, John West of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, Arturs Mednis of Jaffa.lv, and Ramsey Tesdell of 7iber.com.

Generational Divide

A generational divide between younger activists who grew up using digital tools and older representatives from major institutions who are wary of the changes taking place in the media field was readily apparent. Arturs, Ramsey, and Sergii - all in their late 20s - said they couldn't be bothered with the paperwork, bureaucracy, and reporting requirements that are necessary to receive funding from major foundations. They would rather spend their time holding workshops, building websites, and creating community. Older participants in the room were all appreciative of their work and their voluntary ethos, but were concerned that the lifestyle isn't sustainable once marriage, mortgage, and children enter the picture.

By the end of the three-day meeting the participants agreed on a summary of major discussion points to be presented to the funders for their consideration. There was agreement that funders need to find ways to support the work of passionate and talented individuals like Arturs, Ramsey, and Sergii. One possible solution is to support intermediary funders like Rising Voices and Mobile Active which can give more attention to small scale innovation that often stays off the radar of large philanthropic foundations. Funders should keep in mind the need to reduce barriers to access as much as implementing training programs. This can be done by working with telecommunication companies to convince them that lowering their fees will increase their number of customers, or by working with regulatory agencies to increase competition and encourage more service providers to enter the market.

There should be more cooperation among donors so that successful media development projects have a clear pathway from initial start-up funding (for example, a microgrant to test the idea) to second stage funding in order to scale up, and finally sustained funding of staff and recurrent costs. Donors can also cooperate to streamline the application process so that media development project leaders spend more time on their work and less time writing separate proposals for each funder. Donors should avoid financing closed, proprietary tools and rather invest in open source tools and open source communities. Funders should be more up-to-date with innovations and trends in digital media and there should be more open communication between the funding community and the media development community. Funders can also take better advantage of their role to encourage cooperation between complementary (and even competing) projects.

In the third and final part of this series I will summarize the discussions that took place in the funders' meeting. Were they receptive to the suggestions made by practitioners? How do funders measure the impact of their investments? What do they see as the hallmarks of healthy media? What can be done from the funder's perspective to encourage sustainability in a field that is as chaotic and fast-paced as media? All this and more coming soon.

The software, the first version of which was developed this spring by a team of computer science and journalism students at Northwestern University, has evolved significantly since then. John Templon and Nick Allen (a "programmer-journalist" attending the Medill School of Journalism on a Knight News Challenge scholarship) were two of the students who worked on the initial version of the software, which has been made available on an open-source basis. John and Nick, both Medill grad students, developed the software with Tian Huang of Medill and Thu Cung, a student in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The software, then called "Machine Generated Sports Stories," was one of five projects developed in an experimental collaboration with the McCormick School's Intelligent Information Laboratory, or InfoLab. The class brought together students from Medill's Interactive Innovation Project and from McCormick's practicum in intelligent information systems. Two professors from Medill (me and Jeremy Gilbert) and two from McCormick (Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum) led the collaboration.

If you want to know more about the class and the software the students developed, you can read the class blog, watch the students' final presentation, or download their comprehensive report that includes recommendations for journalists, media companies and journalism education.

Since June, Nick and John have kept working on the baseball project as paid interns at the InfoLab. They've reconstructed the code, built a greater variety of game narratives and begun to incorporate details about trends in player and team performance over time.

Earlier this month, an article in Medill's alumni magazine brought StatsMonkey to the attention of a lot of journalists. A couple of them didn't like it:

• "Soon enough, sports reporters could be obsolete," wrote Andrew Greiner at NBCChicago.com.
• Rick Green of the Hartford Courant, asked, "... isn't something lost when the reporter isn't there at the games, talking to players, paying attention to what's not said and feeling the mood?"

These weren't the first journalists to express concerns about StatsMonkey. Back in August, Gregory Hardy of CBSSports.com worried about what might happen "if robot sportswriters take over."

Given the turmoil in the news business these days, it's understandable that journalists -- especially sports journalists -- would be nervous about StatsMonkey. But I don't think sportswriters need to be worried -- if StatsMonkey becomes a commercial product, it is highly unlikely to put sports journalists out of work.

To understand why, let's start by explaining what StatsMonkey actually does:

• It imports the box score and play-by-play information, information routinely captured for games in professional leagues, college baseball and some lower levels (high school, youth leagues, etc.).
• It uses some baseball-geek stats (leverage index and win probability added) to identify high-stakes at-bats and key plays that significantly change the probability that one team will win.
• It determines a game narrative -- for instance, a come-from-behind win, a pitcher's duel, etc. -- from these key at bats and plays
• It constructs a headline and story from the options for game narratives and incorporates key events from the play by play
• It uses historical data -- about teams and players -- to add context (for instance, that a particular player's hit broke a 5-game hitless streak, or that this was the team's third win in a rwo).

Of course, the program will have a limited number of possible game narratives, and it cannot account for events that don't show up in the box score or play by play (for instance, the infamous play in a 2003 Chicago Cubs playoff game in which a fan caught a foul ball that might otherwise have been fielded for an out). A StatsMonkey story will be a very poor substitute for richly textured narrative by a professional sportswriter.

But think of a few ways StatsMonkey could add to what professional journalists do:

• It could instantly write a game story as soon as the last out is made, freeing a reporter to go down to the field or the locker room to do interviews
• It could generate a story about any game in progress, at any point during the game -- just what someone might want when checking on a favorite team during the work day.
• It could create stories about games -- for instance, college baseball -- that are not routinely covered by professional journalists.
• It could generate stories about each player in a game for whatever people are especially interested in particular players (not hard to imagine for college baseball)
• If Little League coaches start to enter game information through a mobile device (and there already is at least one "app for that"), it could generate game stories about Little League games, which have a passionate following but will never be covered by professional journalists.

Beyond that, even given my background and identity as a journalist, I would have to say to any sportswriter: If your game story CAN be generated by a computer, at some point it WILL be generated by a computer. Human journalists will do -- and should do -- the kind of reporting and storytelling that computers can't.

Beyond that, StatsMonkey is just a first experiment in identifying formulaic stories could conceivably be generated by software rather than people. Some other possible examples: corporate earnings reports, obituaries, even accounts of what City Council did last night. As with StatsMonkey, software that generates these kinds of stories most likely wouldn't replace journalists. The software would create stories that would otherwise not be written, or free up journalists to do more important work that can only be done by humans.

Got any other ideas for topics that would be a good fit for computer-generated stories? Post in the comments below.

The Iindaba Ziyafika newsroom has 10 computers and the ability to download photos and content from any cellphone (both wirelessly and through the most amazing collection of cables!). This means anyone can walk in, write a story, download a photo and get it published on the Grocott's website, or in the twice weekly print edition of Grocott's Mail.

You can watch this great SoundSlide show which captures the vibe and importance of the launch. Even the local mayor attended and cut a ribbon!

The newsroom is being used to provide ordinary South Africans with computer, cellphone and journalism skills. About 2,000 people will be trained over three years, and a third group of 40 teenagers from a local school have just completed a six-module, 10-hour course. For many of these students, this was their first time on a computer. Being able to send an SMS story (almost everyone has a cellphone) and see it show up on a website was an amazing experience.

First time on a computer, first email address

Most of these initial learners have had no prior access to computers or even email, and opening up their first email account and getting an email address was a big deal for them. If you can remember the thrill of sending your first email -- do you remember? -- you'll probably recall that something in your head told to you 'this is important and cool.' That's exactly what happened for the young people who completed the first course. They were thrilled to have a Gmail account and to be able to use it!

Check out this little video that some journalism students at Rhodes made about this first group of young citizen journalists. It's amazing to see how such a short course can open up so many possibilities.

Many of these students will be working on creating school newsletters and a school yearbook or annual magazine. All the well-resourced schools in Grahamstown produce these items, but none of the poorer schools can afford them. We're also hoping to receive more photos from their cellphones as well as stories and story tips. We are working on creating a new half-hour weekly show on community radio, "What's Up Grahamstown," that will launch next year and be filled entirely with citizen journalism content.

The Nika content management system

The launch of Nika content management system was also very successful. We have an online version of this very powerful CMS, which is build on Drupal. Nika is a citizen journalism platform that incorporates SMS and other forms of mobile messaging. In order to explain what it does, below I have included the text of the invite we sent out to all the attendees at Highway Africa. It covers all of Nika's new features and explains a bit about our decision to launch first with an online version and only supply the stand-alone LAMP based system to newspapers who want it later on. The text:

FOR DELEGATES WHO WORK ON NEWSPAPERS, OR ARE INVOLVED IN MEDIA DEVELOPMENT

At this year's Highway Africa conference we will be running two workshops on Nika where we will demonstrate how to use the system. Each workshop participant will be given a CD containing the installation software for the online version, as well as a user manual and installation guide. The costs for this are being met by our funder, and the software and documentation will be made available under a Creative Commons licence.

I'll blog more about Nika soon, but we've received a lot of great feedback, and we're looking forward to helping South African and African community newspapers get going with this powerful CMS.

News Mixer, the "conversations around news" site created by a team of master's students including the first two programmer-journalists, is one of four finalists for a new prize: the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism. The site is in some pretty good company; the other finalists are two important startup companies (Attributor and Publish2) and the Associated Press (for its AP Mobile initiative). As one of the two professors who directed the project (along with my colleague Jeremy Gilbert), I am incredibly excited and proud of what our students (Brian Boyer, Ryan Mark, Angela Nitzke, Joshua Pollock, Stuart Tiffen, Kayla Webley) accomplished. There's some wonderful student work represented in the contest's two academic categories, but the screening judges are saying that News Mixer is in a different league -- competitive with significant professional and commercial ventures.

Meanwhile, ChangeTracker, a project developed by Boyer during his internship at Pro Publica, won a finalist spot in the "Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies, Small Site" category. The award winners will be announced at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco, Oct. 1-3.

The awards announcement gave me an excuse to catch up with the News Mixer students (who dubbed themselves Team Crunchberry) to see what they're up to now. Here's a rundown:

• Brian Boyer is news applications editor for the Chicago Tribune, where he leads a team responsible for creating news-based applications for the Tribune's Web site..
• Ryan Mark, the other programmer-journalist on the News Mixer team, works with Brian at the Tribune as a news application developer.
• Angela Nitzke is Web content associate at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she edits and publishes content and is helping redesign its Web site.
• Joshua Pollock is an information technology project manager for Granite Telecommunications, where he's using project management skills he learned with News Mixer.
• Stuart Tiffen is working in Bonn, Germany, at Deutsche Welle, the international broadcast news organization, where he writes, edits, creates Flash galleries and manages the organization's Facebook presence.
• Kayla Webley recently completed a 15-nation Asia trip, including an internship with Time magazine in Hong Kong.

I was particularly excited to get updates from Angela and Joshua, both of whom told me their innovation experience at Medill played a critical role in helping them get their current jobs, and gave them skills and knowledge they are applying daily. Their experiences speak to the value of having journalism students collaborate with computer programmers; both Angela and Joshua clearly learned a lot from working on a software-development project at Medill.

It's noteworthy, I think, that the five jobs listed above did not exist before the digital era. The Crunchberry students' career trajectories demonstrate clearly that while there are fewer jobs in some journalism categories (for instance, newspaper and TV reporters), there are rich digital opportunities for students who have both journalism skills and an understanding of the interactive world.

Meanwhile, Brian and Ryan are showing through their work at the Tribune (such as searchable databases on pollution caused by dry-cleaning businesses and political influence in college admissions) that programmer-journalists can play a significant role in the reinvention of journalism for the digital age.

The Blogging Positively project began two years ago when Kenyan blogger Serina Kalande, volunteered to lead a working group to discuss how citizen media can best be implemented in the field of HIV/AIDS. Many of the project proposals we've received at Rising Voices have been related to spreading awareness about the pandemic. We wanted to learn from those proposals - and also from existing citizen media initiatives - to better understand how new media tools can be used most effectively to spread awareness and encourage discussion about HIV/AIDS-related topics. We also wanted to better understand some of the risks and obstacles facing bloggers who are HIV-positive, or who regularly write about HIV/AIDS-related topics.

Three online chats brought together people from all over the world, and from a wide range of fields. In addition to the creation of this guide, the participants of the chats collaborated on the creation of a map-based directory of HIV-positive bloggers who bravely defy stigma and discrimination to communicate their situation to the rest of the world.

To celebrate the release of the Blogging Positively guide, which has been two years in the making, today we begin a one-week campaign to update our map of HIV positive bloggers. If you are a positive blogger, or if you have suggestions for links to add to the directory, please send a message to Global Voices Public Health Editor Juhie Bhatia.

The Blogging Positively guide was authored by Janet Feldman of the Kenya AIDS Intervention Prevention Project Group and ActAlive, which encourages the use of the arts and media to address HIV/AIDS and other human-development challenges. Additional contributions were made by Solana Larsen, Sahar Romani, and Juhie Bhatia. Daudi Were coined the term "Blogging Positively."

The importance and impact of this guide depends on our collective ability to get it into the hands of activists, and to encourage their contributions to the global conversation that is curated and amplified everyday on the Global Voices website. Please consider sharing this with your network of friends and blogging about it. If there are HIV/AIDS organizations and support groups in your region, please send them a copy of the guide.

Finally, if you would like to learn more about what bloggers around the world have to say about the AIDS pandemic, don't miss our Conversations for a Better World series which has so far featured commentary about HIV/AIDS from bloggers based in Africa, China, Cambodia, and the Middle East & North Africa.

Laxmi was amazed that there is no equivalent on the Internet to paying for a postage stamp to send a letter. The first twenty minutes of this workshop on digi-activism being held in Goa, India were over her head, but when she saw her own language, Telugu, appear on the Google.co.in search page, she jumped to attention. For the first time, Laxmi is seeing something on the Internet that she can actually read. She smiles and begins chattering away in her own language as she reads through the search results for "human rights" on the Google Telugu page.

Laxmi is a community producer with a community video unit in Andhra Pradesh called Manyam Praja Video. All of its producers are so-called "tribals," meaning they are members of India's indigenous communities that live mostly in the remote mountainous parts of the country. Laxmi was one of 130 participants at Video Volunteers' (VV) 5-day Community Video Training Camp held at a resort in Goa from August 11 to 14. Roughly half of the participants were VV's community video producers. Other participants included college students studying journalism and communications and workers in NGOs.

Participants signed up for different workshops on topics including music videos, creative camera work, digi-activism, silent film, video blogging and animation. Each morning and evening featured presentations by different community media groups and media activists, and the last two days featured panel discussions with academics and NGO leaders.

When Mary Joyce, an workshop instructor and the founder of digiactive.org., was observing Laxmi, she understood her challenge for the rest of the workshop -- to balance the amazing skills and experience she can share from her days working for the Obama campaign's new media department with the needs of some participants who were seeing the Internet for the first time in their lives.

In the next room next to her, instructors Kamayani Bali and Freeman Murray were projecting videos made by the community video producers in attendance. The producers were amazed when they saw their work on YouTube.

"12,000 people watched our video! Youth can change things!" one said.

"Can you translate the comments?" asked another.

The instructors obliged and translated the comments. "This is democracy in action," read one comment. "Media that is of, for and by the people."

Another person commented that "You, Samta [the producer] are a hero to young girls. You give a voice to those who aren't heard."

A video about the demolition of slum houses sparked a typical Internet rant about the "filthy people in the slums," and some of the producers who live in those slums were introduced to the whole concept of freedom of speech on the web.

For the past two years, VV had been bringing our community video producers together for joint training workshops. This year, we wanted to widen the group of participants to include NGOs and students who'd expressed interest in community media, or were carrying out successful projects of their own. We'd talked about the idea of community video as a movement, and we wanted to test out that concept. The response was overwhelming: more than 250 people applied for only 130 seats. We had applications from roughly 55 NGOs from all over India, all of whom want to get into community video.

Below is a brief rundown of what happened.

Workshops

All participants were assigned to different tracks such as music videos, creative camera work, digi-activism, video blogging, silent film and animation. Each of these workshops was led by an outside facilitator, such as well-known documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra and Bollywood director Arjun Bali.

These tracks were all areas that producers had previously asked to learn about. Freed from their usual pressures of making work with a focus on social change, these workshops on "fun" subjects like animation and music videos stimulated their creativity in fantastic ways. In each workshop, the participants made 3 to 4 videos that were later screened on the last night of the workshop. Many of the videos were funny and clearly inspired by Bollywood. They also had a strong romantic subtext. Watching all 20 videos together on the final night gave everyone a tremendous sense of accomplishment.

The videoblogging workshop had producers create a video blog where each week they would select one online video that relates to a specific theme. The exercise was simply to search YouTube for videos of water, for example, and select the one they liked best. But for people who were seeing the Internet for the first time, this process opened up their minds to new possibilities. One learning I took away from the workshop is that we must get the community video units online because it can help them conduct independent research and learning.

For those of us at Video Volunteers who have put so much emphasis on developing the critical thinking skills of the community producers, it was really important to see what a shared learning environment would be like. The mixing of groups turned out really well. The NGO workers became convinced of the potential of community video when they worked side by side with such articulate, empowered individuals.

The producers, some of whom had had traveled on a train for the first time in their lives to attend the workshop, had a chance to make videos with people who had a high level of expertise and life experience.

As for the college students? Well, the typical response was, "I've studied film for three years, and I've seen hundreds more films than they have, yet these community producers know so much more than me."

Another response I heard was, "When I saw their videos, all my stereotypes went away. I had no idea they would be making films better than our own student projects."

Another volunteer expressed it quite simply: "I'm humbled."

For the producers, the positive feedback they received was immensely motivating and confidence-building. The conversations that took place around the poolside bar each evening between the community producers and the highly experienced facilitators gave everyone a sense of being valued professionals.

This was only a small experiment. But it certainly made me feel that universities and schools could successfully put students with formal and informal education in the same classrooms.

Panels

The two days of panels started off with producers from each community video unit telling "impact stories." Neeru, a young Dalit producer from Gujarat, recounted what had happened to her a few weeks back.

She was making a film about migration that described how people need to leave the villages for work. The "call to action" of the film was that people should access the government's program that guarantees 100 days of employment to all rural unemployed, as this is a way to stem migration. On her own accord, Neeru led a rally of villagers to her local government employment office. Three hundred people joined her in the rally and demanded work. The government officials tried to push her -- and especially her camera -- out of the office, but they persevered.

The next day, all 300 people were given work assignments. It was apparent through Neeru's breathless retelling of the story, which included details about her background and childhood, that she feels deeply about the importance of what occurred.

On August 13th, we held a one-day panel for Goan activists and journalists to discuss how community video could be strengthened in Goa, a place where Video Volunteers only recently arrived.

Newspaper editors from three different papers had a healthy debate about whether the Goan press is representative of, and responsive to, community needs. In many ways, the Goan press is better than the press in other parts of India because Goa has strong social movements with support from a large middle class. It is therefore in the interest of the papers to fill the need for community organizing.

However, as anti-mining activist Sebastian Rodriguez pointed out, most papers are owned by the mining industry, which is the biggest player in the local economy. The editors acknowledged this and added that they are not allowed to report on anti-mining activity.

On August 14th, we had a panel on how community media in India can become sustainable and scalable. Rajen Varada of Unesco talked about the business models the government is using to scale the Internet kiosk model to a national level. Dominic D'Souza, director of Laya, VV's partner organization, gave tips to other NGOs who are thinking of starting Community Video Units. Vinod Pavarala, the dean of the S N School of Communications in Hyderabad, spoke about the history of community media in India and talked about how colleges can better equip students to be facilitators of community media. I presented VV's new community journalism program as a possible way to scale community video and partner with the mainstream media for financial sustainability.

Sajan Venniyoor from All India Radio explained government policies around community television and public access broadcasting. Many of the people present had been active in the successful struggle for community radio licenses, and we discussed whether community television is a cause that media activists should rally around. If community television is made legal in India, we can equip the community video units to broadcast within a 20 mile radius for roughly $10,000 per CVU.

Focus Groups on Sustainability in Community Media

Each morning from 7.30 a.m. to 8.30 a.m., we conducted focus groups to discuss how community video can earn revenue. VV recently started a research project with the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India's leading business school, to investigate if community video groups can become financially sustainable through partnerships with mainstream media and local communities. On the morning I attended, we discussed the benefits and possible pitfalls of sharing the financial details of a CVU with the communities they work in. We also talked about how CVUs could receive donated space and rent from the community much in the way that one our partners in Andhra Pradesh does with their community TV centers.

Morning and Evening Group Presentations

The participants met each morning and afternoon in a big hall for group sessions. Different groups, such as Amnesty International's Asia campaigns, the Modern Story Project, and the Maraa Media Collective in Bangalore, presented their work. The community producers also performed skits, street plays and music performances that they had prepared in advance.

The highlight of these sessions was a presentation by the community filmmakers from Malegaon. Malegaon is a largely Muslim town south of Bombay where local people have started their own small film industry to make spoofs of Bollywood films. Their latest film, "Superman in Malegaon," is their first attempt to take on Hollywood. It features a shambling, bathroom slipper-wearing Superman.

This small film industry, run by director Nasir Shaikh and Akram Shaik, the actor who plays the lead villain in the films, is an amazing community media success story. They mobilize local talent in order to celebrate -- and poke fun at -- local communities. Their films cost about $500 to make, and they fund them via local DVD sales and people paying to be featured in the videos.

This group is the subject of a fantastic documentary by Faiza Ahmad Khan that has been winning tons of awards. Amazingly, this was the first time that they had been invited to speak about their work and share their techniques for low cost media production. They left Goa with a huge new fan base. We're proud to have given them the first platform to share the details of their work. We're also incredibly grateful to them for teaching the community producers about humor, drama and entertainment.

A different kind of sustainability

Overall, perhaps the strongest impression that stayed with people was the sense of family shared by the producers. Rob Goddin of Amnesty told me how impressed he was by the sustainability of this model. I thought he meant financial sustainability, but he corrected me and said that the real sustainability was the commitment and dedication of the young producers.

We have learned that the success of the community video unit rests on the intellectual curiosity of the participants. Their jobs are very tough. They not only make the films, but are responsible for showing them and ensuring that they have an impact. These people are filmmakers and social workers, which is more than most filmmakers can say.

As members of their community, they navigate pitfalls and prejudices that an outsider wouldn't encounter. Celebrating their work is critical to keeping them motivated and sustaining the entire process. So too is building a sense of community and friendship. The singing, music-playing, dancing and skit-making sessions that went on late into the night will be the single most important experience that for some of the producers and participants.

In order to recognize the amazing work they're done, we organized the "C-Oscars," or "Community Oscars," and handed out awards for best impact, best filming, best editing and best online videos, among others.

We also made sure the conference was held in a nice place -- a resort with a pool and access to the beach -- in order to provide them with another reward. We had to explain that they should complain if something didn't work in their room We also told them that every day, perhaps for the first time in their lives, someone would come in to clean their rooms.

We also took a moment to celebrate two marriages between producers. One couple consists of a girl from the slums in Mumbai and a boy from rural Gujarat, a highly unlikely pair. Off-stage, the two young husbands talked to Mahima, a reporter from Delhi, about their choices of wives. "Because we worked together with these girls in the CVU, we know how talented they are," one said, "and we will never treat them like housewives who are supposed to be our servants."

There are some things that we will do differently next year. Translation and language is an issue that must be dealt with, because each workshop required simultaneous translation into three languages. We wish we'd been more successful in bringing in more local Goans, because this was a chance for us to announce our presence in Goa. Next year we will also try to bring in more funding agencies, directors of journalism schools, and people from mainstream media.

Overall, the workshop was a great success. Hard-working staff and volunteers handled the logistics and people are filled with enthusiasm about the idea of community video. This is the beginning of a movement.

"This workshop changed my life," said one young man from an NGO in Delhi and Assam. "Before I came here, I thought communications was just something an NGO needed to do. But now I see how it can change people's lives."

Our friend Rajen from Unesco told us, "What you guys have here is the groundswell of support from the grassroots. This is the thing that is missing from other similar efforts. Now if you can keep growing this groundswell, and simultaneously others can work at a policy level to gain more support for programs that empower people with a voice, then real change can be created."

In the next few weeks, we'll be creating a Wikispace site with all the workshop materials for modification and addition by others. You can also read two articles (1, 2) about the workshop.

News Mixer was one of the first Web sites to take advantage of Facebook Connect to build an engaging social experience around news. It won praise from people interested in conversations around news and, more recently, was recognized by the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism.

News Mixer, though, was just a demonstration Web site, a prototype designed to show the potential for increasing engagement and improving the caliber of news conversations. This week, one of the top news sites on the Web -- the Huffington Post -- launched a new service (HuffPost Social News) that delivers on that potential. I've been playing around with Social News this week, and it's quite compelling.

As you can see in the screenshot I've posted on the right, now that I've registered for Social News, every page of huffingtonpost.com displays recent activity by my Facebook friends on the site. I can see what my friends are reading and the most popular stories among members of my Facebook network. I can also choose to highlight my Facebook friends' comments on each story, rather than see comments from every user.

Furthermore, as you can see from my second screenshot at the end of the article, each user's profile page looks very much like the one the News Mixer team created. It displays recent activity by your Facebook friends and a list of friends who have accounts on the Huffington Post.

Why is all this important? Because the biggest problem facing content creators today is what I call the "awareness gap." This refers to the fact that every piece of online content reaches only a fraction of the people who would find it interesting or relevant. On the Web, because the volume of content continues to grow dramatically, many others who might be interested in a particular piece of content never know that it exists.

How can we close the awareness gap? For a long time we've been waiting for better personalization engines to produce the "Daily Me" predicted in the 1990s by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. The problem is that it's hard to build a good personalization algorithm. Just because I found one article on a topic interesting doesn't mean I want another one on the same topic. But I'm very likely to be interested in content my friends are interested in, in part because my friends and I inevitably share some content interests, and in part because I'm inclined to keep up with what my friends are interested in so we have a common converational foundation.

Filtering news based on my friends' interests does raise some troubling issues -- especially the risk that my friends and I will build an echo chamber in which we close ourselves off from information that challenges our preconceptions, or that relates to topics that are important but not interesting to us. But the more I look at HuffPo Social News, the more I agree with Chadwick Matlin of Slate's The Big Money that it is in part "the future of journalism."

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

The seminar was held on July 30 and 31 at the peak of the hot Black Sea summer, and at a time when the students are on break from their studies. We invited them to come learn about new media and share their experiences and knowledge. Most of the students turned out to be active web users who already had profiles on the leading Russian social networks. That was a good sign.

Presentation of SochiReporter

On the first day, I gave a lecture about the state of traditional and new media. I also discussed multimedia storytelling principles, demonstrated the difference between a newspaper article and a blog post, and talked about how to choose a topic for a blog, build its audience, and make it successful. The students definitely showed interest in blogging. We also focused on international user-generated content and citizen journalism projects, and the way Web 2.0 is empowering people worldwide.

My session culminated in a multimedia presentation about the SochiReporter project: its concept, structure, design, use of Web 2.0 tools, innovative features, and the opportunities the website offers the citizens of Sochi as they prepare to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.

One goal of the seminar was to let the students, who are the most active web users in Sochi, be the first to learn about the project. We also want to give them the tools and knowledge needed to document and report on the changes in their city. SochiReporter is the first ever initiative to build a multimedia archive about the preparation of a host city for the Olympics. We expect to have many contributions from students.

SochiReporter's First Partners

Joining me as a presenter at the seminar was Sergey A. Stalnov, the director of public relations for Kodak Russia. He gave an exciting lecture on the invention, development and current state of photography in the digital age. One highlight came when we discovered that there was a 12-year-old girl in the hall with us. We presented her with a free camera, much the same way that Kodak did in 1930 when it introduced the Eastman Anniversary camera. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the company gave away roughly 500,000 cameras to 12 year olds in Canada and the U.S.

After that, each student introduced themselves and shared ideas about how they could contribute to the project. At the end of the first day, the students were given 20 portable HD Kodak Zx1 video cameras (they're waterproof, which is an important feature in a seaside city like Sochi) and 10 voice recorders, all of which were provided by Kodak and Olympus, SochiReporter's first partners. The students chose topics and themes to cover using the new devices and headed out into the field. On the second day, they presented their work. These stories and photographs will be the first content available at SochiReporter when the project launches in September.

The students showed a lot of enthusiasm and seem to be excited about the project. "I acquired new multimedia reporting skills at the seminar," said Artem Shehovtsov, a student at the Sochi Institute of Information Technologies. "I definitely think that SochiReporter is a breakthrough, a really timely project for our city, which is now in constant change. I am anticipating SochiReporter's launch [in order] to start uploading my content."

At the end of the two days, each student was given a certificate commemorating their participation. They also received T-shirts decorated with the project's logo and a few words that I hope they will take to heart: "I am a SochiReporter."

Of course, not everyone sees J-schools as reflective entities. For years, editors worldwide have complained that the schools don't in fact reflect the mainstream media enough. J-teachers are blamed for a shoddy supply of new cogs to the newsroom machines.

The industry's assumption has been that it knows exactly what's needed; that it's the J-schools that need changing. Educational institutions, in this view, should be service providers to the status quo, generating graduates who can do "the job."

In a nutshell, this perspective condemns J-schools as generally lagging behind; as falling short of what they are "supposed" to be doing. It's a model of J-education "manqué."

The other side of the coin is avant-garde J-teachers who regard the industry as endemically conservative, and whose innovative work qualifies graduates with a mindset that's out of synch with restrictive newsroom practice.

For industry, this is a model of J-teachers as irritants rather than disappointments. From the J-educator side, however, it's the industry that's the problem and in need of change.

These two polarized perspectives -- J-schools behind, or J-educators too far ahead -- do reflect some realities. But their appeal can conceal the systemic situation. This is that J-education has generally correlated, more-or-less, industry patterns in regard to a manifesting both a predominant conservatism and fragmentary pockets of innovation.

Two Education Conferences

So it was that two recent conventions about university-based programs exhibited this "mirror" status -- of mimicking the trends in broader society. In Boston, the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) consisted of those teachers resisting change (most delegates) and those embracing it (a minority). A sizeable constituency felt that "journalism is in major upheaval and journalism educators don't know exactly what to do about that."

In Accra, the African Council for Communication Education (ACCE) revived itself after ten years of inaction to draw its constituency into an academic conference. Here the mix was between the bulk of delegates interested in development communications, and a fringe focused on mass media and journalism.

Only a handful of AEJMC participants blogged and twittered their conference, and packed out appropriate sessions that generally squeezed into small venues. Yet, the predominant refrain at the event seemed to be one of J-teachers clinging to vanishing models and urging "back to basics." This despite the prize-winning entry to a conference competition by Jane Singer about the need for new kinds of graduates.

For example, titters of approval arose in response to one speaker criticizing the shortness of Twitter (140 characters). A lone voice (backed online by a few Twitter fans using the tag #aejmc) had to point out that the truncated format is an advantage for skimming, and that posts often include links to content of greater depth.

Impressionistically, the overall balance of views at AEJMC seemed to be widespread reluctance regarding change -- thereby echoing what seems to be the situation in the media industry. There was much nostalgia for the old certainties, and a display of defensive fears of the unknown future.

Alfred Hermida had the same sense, following the conference via the limited blogging. My own experience was that excitement at change was in short supply.

Former Washington Post multimedia editor Tom Kennedy earnestly urged AEJMC teachers to become change agents, but his appeal seemed puny against the inertia of two similarly cumbersome institutions: big media, and university academia. For now, the revolutionaries appear to be pretty marginal.

Barely Touching on New Media

In Accra, the ACCE barely touched on new media. Although there were a few research papers on Information and Communication Technologies, these mainly focused on the significance of these for health care and development purposes, rather than for journalism.

The dominant thrust at ACCE was that communications in Africa is much wider than journalism and the mass media, and that priority goes to word-of-mouth communications, culture and community radio. Only a minority of research papers dealt with mass media, journalism and democracy.

The bulk of participants also seemed to have little inkling about how cell phones are game changers for so much social life in Africa -- not least media and journalism. In all this, the ACCE event also seemed to duplicate much of the communications and media environment in Africa.

In summary, two conferences -- despite being continents apart -- both seemed to miss making a mark in terms of changing journalism education. That may not be very surprising, but it also doesn't have to be this way.

Fortunately, at both events, some attention was given to the forthcoming 2nd World Congress on Journalism Education (WJEC-2), scheduled for South Africa, 5-7 July, 2010. The theme of that gathering, based on a suggestion by this writer, is: "Journalism education in an age of radical change."

The character of this occasion will be a chance to focus energies on going beyond the nature of J-schools as we know them.

Experience of difference is a great stimulus for change -- in part, because looking at others helps you to see yourself in different ways. So, by mashing up a myriad of international experiences at WJEC-2, there's a prospect for imaginations to really break free, en masse.

Anyone out there agree that journalism education needs re-booting?

Postscript: Suzanne Yada (below) directed me to her blog and some good links too:

Her post: "Throwing social media in J-school curriculum isn't enough"

* Mark Hamilton's "Remaking Journalism Education: Some Thoughts"

* Vin Crosbie's "Anatomy of a 21st Century Media Executive" (Plus Joey Baker's Publish2 links.)

* Greg Lynch's posts on "Wanted: Resident Butt-Kicker (Thoughts on journalism education)" and "Rich Beckman discusses how to reshape journalism education"

One product is a tool for working reporters, one is a new way of organizing content for mobile delivery, two leverage the growing power of Twitter and one generates baseball game accounts from box scores. All of the projects demonstrate what's possible when journalists and technologists collaborate.

Details of the new concepts will start rolling out with a final presentation Wednesday to faculty, students and invited media industry guests. We'll be live-streaming the presentation. If you're in the Chicago area, come on by: 3:30-5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 10, in the Forum of the McCormick Tribune Center, 1870 Campus Drive.

The five projects are the results of the first-ever collaboration between a Medill "innovation project" class, taught by me and my Medill colleague Jeremy Gilbert, and a computer science class run by Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, who run Northwestern's Intelligent Information Laboratory. Here are descriptions of the projects:

Tweedia

Tweedia is a widget that presents tweets relevant to an article and displays those results adjacent to the article. It is positioned as a tool that publishers can use to enhance engagement with their content. In its appearance and functionality, Tweedia bears some resemblance to the short-format comments (or "quips") included in the News Mixer demonstration site created by the fall 2008 innovation project at Medill. But while quips were posted by users on the same page where an article appeared, Tweedia aggregates tweets on a topic automatically.

EasyWriter

EasyWriter is a tool for journalists to use while crafting an article using Microsoft Word. As the journalist writes, he or she can highlight text and EasyWriter automatically displays news articles and Web pages related to that topic. The idea is to make it easy for the journalist to check facts or do additional research without leaving Word.

News Feed

News Feed is a mobile Web site, optimized for iPhone users, that is designed to help users choose just the right amount of information for the amount of time they have available: 5 minutes, 10 minutes or 20 minutes. This is the project that most directly addresses a consumer need, I think.

Twitter Publishing

Another Twitter-based project, this is a tool designed to help publishers distribute their content to people who have demonstrated interest in a topic by tweeting about it. The basic concept is to identify a target audience based on people's tweeting behavior, then deliver them content they are likely to find relevant by analyzing the content of their tweets.

Machine-Generated Sports Stories

This project doesn't have a clever name (yet), but it is in some ways the most interesting -- and could be the most controversial -- of the projects. This team, which includes "programmer-journalist" scholarship winner Nick Allen, has built a system that reads the box score and play by play of a baseball game and automatically generates a story about the game. It's interesting because the team's software addresses a very real need among a variety of publishers -- from ESPN to college sports information directors to high school athletic directors -- who would like to produce baseball game stories quickly and inexpensively. It's potentially controversial because one might argue that this software will make it possible to eliminate journalists' jobs. I don't think that's the case, because most of the articles the team's software might write would not have been written by a human reporter at all. Furthermore, a tool that auto-generates game stories would free up beat reporters to focus on enterprise coverage rather than game accounts.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll write a bit more about each of the five projects. If you want to know more now, check out the students' Web site, writeclick.org.

VV gives writing exercises to community producers to help them develop their ability to think through an argument. I am sharing below two recent pieces of writing by community producers. These were written by a Community Video Unit in rural Gujarat. This is an all-Dalit (a.k.a. "Untouchable") team. Neeru, who wrote the first story, is the youngest of 11 girls from a very poor family. Even though being Dalit, female and the last in your family is as unlucky a fate as you can have in India, the girl is a firecracker. The second story is written by Jitu, who used to work polishing diamonds in a small factory.

The two stories are on impacts of the community video unit - what changed in a village after a video was screened. Both Producers would be thrilled if someone on the "world wide web" posted them a question. If you want to start a small dialog with these rural journalists and changemakers, write it as a comment and I'll get on the phone and ask their response, and post their response.

Impact story by Neeru Rathod, about a film on domestic violence, translated from Gujarati:

Hi friends. I am Neeru Rathod. I will tell you about the impacts, solutions offered, changes in people and the actions taken by communities that the film about violence against women has initiated.

We screened the film in 39 villages. This film was screened in Bhalgamda village on the 17th of October 2008 by Kanchan, community video producer and Girishbhai, distributor. Around 100 people attended the screening of the film in this village.

There were 17 women who attended the screening and out of these 17, one woman, Kashiben Kalubhai Makwana got up and spoke on the microphone and put her thoughts across to the community. No woman in Bhalgmada village was ready to speak about domestic violence on the mic until Kashiben, who is 60 year old, got up and spoke in public for the first time in her life. She said, 'If there is any violence against women in our village then we must from now on take action against it, file a police case and help and support that woman. This (violence) is a question for all our sisters and daughters. Harrassment, mental torture, rape, all these acts will not be accepted.' She left this message for all the community members.

After the screening, we collected opinions and reactions of the people and they said that for the first time in their village a woman has come up and spoken in public like this on a mic. She had taken a lead on this issue in her village.

This is just one story from a village, where the screening of this film led to empowerment. After watching this video, 3 women have filed a complaint against such violence and have sought legal help from Navsarjan, the NGO I work with, which gave them phone numbers to call on and promised to provide legal help.

This way all our films lead to some action taken by people and awareness on social issues and with the same hope we are making our next video on primary education to initiate more change.

Impact story by Jitu Makwana of a film on toilets and sanitation.

Our video stopped water pollution and improved people's health!!

Friends, we have seen that we have a lot of issues around us. Dirty surroundings, polluted water, and badly built toilets are some of them. Our Community Video Unit made a film on the issue of toilets. We showed this film in many different villages including in Choraniya village on 29/08/08 in a night screening.

After watching this film, for the first time, the villagers in Choraniya village talked about the problems of their village. We had done a story in the film about Hotel Bhagyodaya, which is on the highway near the village. This hotel used to empty its toilet waste and dirty water directly into the village pond in Choraniya village, which was the only source of drinking water in the village. Obviously, many many people were falling sick after drinking the water from this filthy pond. But people were not able to protest against the owner of the Hotel because he was very influential and an "upper" caste and they were afraid he would attack them if they protested.

At the screening, the villagers asked us producers to help them in their struggle to make their drinking water safe again. We decided we would help, and so we worked with the villagers over the next month to establish a Women's Council in the village. This Women's Council would be able to take up this water issue, but also other issues in the future.

The Women's Council and the CVU team took out a rally together protesting against the disposal of the dirty water in the village pond. They gave application letters to the Taluka Officer [local district official]. They also filed a case against the Hotel owner.

And we won the case! This way, unity and humanity had a big win! The community people were also able to get rid of their fear of the Hotel owner because of this. The Hotel owner dismantled the earlier toilet from which the dirty water used to enter the pond, and built a new flush toilet. The dirty water stopped flowing into the pond and this also solved the issue of health in the village.

The XO-1 laptop. OLPC is now engineering the next version.

Designing the laptop, it turned out, was probably the easiest piece of the puzzle. OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte had originally touted the XO as the "$100 laptop", but in order to produce the machine at such a low cost they would need to convince dozens of national governments to purchase tens of millions of laptops. Instead, the program was until very recently only able to convince the government of one single country, Uruguay, which ordered 100,000 machines back in October of 2007 at $188 per machine. Fast-forward 20 months - and 200,000 more laptops - and the Technological Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU) is just a couple month's away from delivering the very last green and white laptops into the hands of every single Uruguayan primary school student.

As I described in an earlier article, the first two years of the OLPC deployment in Uruguay "have been characterized by implementation and incubation. The laptops have been deployed to schools, manuals have been created, tech savvy volunteer groups have been formed, wireless internet connections have been established, teachers have slowly learned how to implement the laptops into their curricula and classrooms, and, as Rezwan has covered previously, a community of open source programmers has developed educational applications for the laptops."

Last week I visited Uruguay myself to witness how teachers and students were incorporating laptops and wi-fi connections (now in over 1,000 schools) into the classroom environment. My first gray blistery morning in Montevideo I joined a van full of professors and students from the Universidad de la República who were headed to Santa Lucía, a small town in the department of Canelones just an hour's drive from the capital. After a few accidental detours and several thermoses of mate tea, we pulled up to Santa Lucía's one and only primary school. Dozens of primary school students in white frocks were sitting on steps and tree trunks with their XO laptops, pecking away as if they were in a wi-fi café in Tokyo or New York City.

Santa Lucía's "Escuela 104" (every school in Uruguay is given a number) teaches all of the town's young students in morning and afternoon shifts. That is, half of Santa Lucía's students come early in the morning and stay until lunch, and the other half arrive in the afternoon and stay until the early evening. When Pablo Flores, a professor of engineering at the Universidad de la República and a coordinator of Flor de Ceibo, asked the school's teachers if they had any problems or complaints regarding the XO laptops, one immediately responded, "the kids hang around here all day long. We can't get them to go home. Is there anything you can do to helps us?"

Pablo later told me that such reactions are typical during his frequent visits to schools around the country. However, while I found the comment to be entertaining, Pablo smiled softly with discouragement. On the way to Santa Lucías several of the volunteer students from the Universidad de la República shared their stories of teachers who felt threatened by the presence of the laptops in their classrooms. The younger teachers, they all agreed, tended to embrace the change and try to incorporate the laptops as much as possible into the classroom environment. But some of the older teachers felt that their position of authority in the classroom was threatened by the presence of the laptops and the power they gave the young students. As many university professors have discovered in recent years, laptops and internet connections in the classroom often lead to students chatting behind the professor's back. Or, as George Landow put it in Hypertext 3.0, "Technology always empowers someone. It empowers those who possess it, those who make use of it, and those who have access to it."

I do not want to overstate the point. After all, this particular morning we were in the school's humble computer lab surrounded by eight or so teachers who all took time out of their busy schedules to learn more about the XO laptops and how they can make better use of them in the classroom. They were eager to learn and quick to make entertaining jokes about their frustrations with the new technologies. I imagined myself as a primacy school instructor - with over 20 years of teaching experience - having to learn new teaching techniques from volunteer university students who have never experienced the enormous challenge of keeping a classroom in order.

We were in Santa Lucía to give workshops explaining how to use the EduBlog blogging platform developed by a team of Uruguayan and American programmers. The XO laptops have been great at bringing information from the wider world to Uruguayan students, thanks to projects like Wikipedia and Conozco Uruguay, both of which come pre-installed on the machines. But, as Pablo explained to the gathered teachers, the laptops also permit Uruguayans to contribute content, stories, and knowledge to the vast repository of civilization that is the internet:

Each of the teachers created her own individual blog, and they then created a group blog for the entire school titled, appropriately enough, Escuela 104 de Santa Lucía.

One teacher, who registered under the username "sancac", wrote:

Te cuento que soy una maestra de primer año de la escuela Nº 104 "Leticia Volpe" ubicada en la ciudad de Santa Lucía ,depto Canelones .Se encuentra ubicada en las calles R. Argentina, Tajes, Brasil y Tajes.Es una escuela de doble turno con un total de 700 niños aproximadamente. Estos son mis hijos........

Another teacher, "ladelsanta" published a post with photos of nearby landmarks:

La Escuela Nº 104 se encuentra ubicada en la ciudad de Santa Lucía, a orillas del río del mismo nombre. En sus comienzos, fue escuela sólo para varones, con el correr del tiempo eso cambió y se transformó en escuela mixta como sigue siendo actualmente. Mi madre concurrió a esta escuela, que la llamaban la "escuela grande" porque ocupaba toda la manzana (actualmente compartida con el liceo Nº2). Se destaca en nuestra localidad el primer hotel turístico del país, el hotel Biltmore

You can use Google's machine translation to read the rest of the teachers' entries.

The morning blogging workshop was facilitated by Pablo Flores and Mariel Cisneros Lopez, both professors from the Universidad de la República. But in the afternoon session, attended by over a dozen teachers, the university students took the lead, facilitating an outstanding workshop that got the teachers enthusiastic about the possibilities of blogging in the classroom. Flor de Ceibo will continue to organize expeditions to primary schools across the country in order to show teachers and students how they can share their stories, articles, and homework assignments online by using the EduBlog platform. Later in the year, with the financial support from their Rising Voices microgrant, they will organize a competition which awards prizes to students who publish the best entries about particular topics chosen by a committee of judges.

In the second part to this post, we will examine how EduBlog was created and how the CeibalJam movement is creating a local, dedicated community of open source volunteers who program for the XO laptop.