Idea Lab

Pay Walls and Social Media Could Shift the Public Agenda

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

If conversations around digital journalism have been dominated by anything in the first quarter of 2012, it's probably been about subscriptions, also known as pay walls. Walls are going up at the L.A. Times and Gannett papers, and getting higher at The New York Times. And the editor of The Guardian asked his readers, "What would you give the Guardian? Money, time or data?" At the end of last year, Raju Narisetti proposed a pay wall alternative he dubbed the "'Why don't we pay you?' pay wall" ... and then left the unwalled Washington Post for the walled Wall Street...

• April 17, 2012
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At SXSW: Building Trust With a Penny Press for the Digital Age

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

As Americans turn more to online news sources, a panel at this week's SXSW Interactive conference will look at the Americans who aren't going online for news. They are, among other things, often rural and poor. And that's exactly the audience at which the OpenRural project is aiming. The panel was organized by Fiona Morgan, a researcher at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, who worries that as newspaper companies try to harvest more revenue from a shrinking audience, they are catering both content and delivery to a wealthy, educated, white audience. She asked me...

• March 6, 2012
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OpenBlock: Can You Explain Data to a Computer AND a Human?

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since the OpenRural project started in November, one of my primary efforts has been to lift the hood on the OpenBlock application itself and find the "unknown unknowns," as a former defense secretary once said. We saw data go in, and maps and lists come out. But what happens inside the belly of the beast? Over the course of the next several posts, I'm going to give you an X-ray view into the guts of the OpenBlock application. Together, we're going to watch how data gets ingested and processed into information and insights that residents of rural communities can use...

• December 22, 2011
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Feeding OpenBlock: A New Newsroom Pet That Eats Elements

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few months ago, my kids hit an inevitable, but still terrifying, milestone -- they began asking for a pet. Being a complete Scrooge, I quickly set to work explaining that pets are hard work and expensive. Showing a strong knack for journalism, they demanded proof of my assertions, so we set off to the pet store where my son quickly was ready to invest his birthday money in a small bird. "Sure, you can buy the bird," I told him. "But what are going to feed it?" With the launch of our OpenBlock project in North Carolina, rural newspapers...

• November 17, 2011
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OpenBlock to Help Rural Newspapers Get Access to Public Data

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A visit to one of America's small, rural communities that are called home by more than 60 million of us is sometimes like a step back in time. Cars downtown still park parallel to the curb, and not too far beyond downtown are fields and maybe even a factory or two still. Go to a town like Whiteville, N.C., on the right day -- any Monday or Thursday -- and you'll see a woman standing in the middle of the road selling newspapers to cars lined up on either side of her. This is an America where people still read...

• October 28, 2011
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