Idea Lab

I Wouldn't Want to Belong to Any Twitter List That Would Have Me as a Member

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Networks are funny. As soon as they get big enough to have a lot of value, it gets harder to separate the signal from the noise. That's obvious enough -- just ask anyone using AT&T in an area densely populated with bandwidth-hogging iPhone users like me. Or ask any Twitter user. But with the launch of Twitter Lists in recent days, it's now theoretically easier for users, news organizations, bloggers, and companies to create little tributaries off the main river of news. Bu building these subsets out of the main stream, you can find tweets from a group of users,...

• November 6, 2009
• No comments

DocumentCloud Going Open Source Every Step of the Way

by Jeremy Ashkenas
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

What does it mean to work on a project where open-source principles are written into the founding contract? A little over a month after receiving a 2009 Knight News Challenge grant, DocumentCloud released its first open-source component. The system, called CloudCrowd, performs the distributed computing that helps process the vast quantities of documents that will eventually be stored in DocumentCloud. It might seem premature to be releasing code so early -- in the past some Knight grantees have chosen to wait until the end of their grant -- but the larger part of open-source is community, not code. We're planning...

• October 29, 2009
• No comments

How to Win a Knight News Challenge Grant

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 28, 2009
• No comments

The New Era of Media Development, Part II

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is a telling sign that Wikipedia has no entry on media development. Rather, the search results suggest that perhaps you are looking for "ICT for development". Indeed, what is the future of media development when we're still unsure about the future of media in general? And, for that matter, where should funders invest their money to ensure that the same social benefits associated with traditional media (a sense of community, good governance, an informed citizenry) remain while journalism increasingly moves beyond broadcast, and beyond financial sustainability. In part one I looked at the history of media development, the major...

• October 25, 2009
• 2 comments

Printcasting Bridges the Digital Divide for Hyperlocal Coverage

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 23, 2009
• No comments

hNews Microformat for News Adopted by AOL and TownNews

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are on the cusp of something exciting. Thousands of news articles marked up with with hNews, a microformat for news content funded by the Knight Foundation, will soon start populating the Internet. Last week, hNews became an official draft microformat. Having been proposed as a new data format and then discussed within the microformats community, it is now in draft 0.1 at Microformats.org. This means it has reached a stage where the microformat community believes it is stable enough for widespread adoption. This also reaffirms hNews as an open standard, free for anyone to integrate to their news content,...

• October 22, 2009
• 3 comments

Machine-Generated News a Threat to Journalists? I Think Not

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Software that writes baseball game stories from box scores and play-by-play information now has a name: StatsMonkey. And it's making some journalists nervous -- needlessly. 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...

• October 19, 2009
• 7 comments

Mobile Phones Give Africans a Voice, Make Governments Nervous

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

User-generated comments, and text messages in particular, are causing umbrage in Namibian government circles. Their unhappiness highlights the historic shift of media away from unidirectional, univocal information. This case underlines the politics entailed when the media becomes a platform for broader communication, which is exactly what's happening with mobile phones in some African countries. Things came to a head in Namibia in early October at a political rally held as part of the build-up to the country's November elections. A torrent of abuse and threats were issued at the event, and they emanated from the Namibian minister of justice,...

• October 13, 2009
• 1 comment

Good, Fast and Cheap: Startups Can Only Pick Two of These

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 12, 2009
• 1 comment

Introducing Switch, A News Game About New York City's Energy Gap

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our latest (and last, for now) news game, Switch, is live. It is no Energyville but we think it is pretty awesome. Not only is it live, the source code and installation instructions are already available. With gadgets guzzling evermore energy, New York City faces a looming energy gap. New Yorkers will have to cut back on our electric use or start generating a lot more power. Our game lets people explore the options that are on the table, along with a few that aren't. Should the city ban air conditioning? Harness the tides? Go nuclear? Warning: the game is...

• September 30, 2009
• No comments

Journalism Teachers Get Mobile-ized in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Most Africans don't have computers or access to the Internet. Cell phones are a different story. So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places -- even in places with access to computers and the Internet. Answers to this challenge were provided in Grahamstown, South Africa last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas, a Knight grantee, ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University. Participants were brought together under the auspices of another...

• September 21, 2009
• No comments

AP News Registry Aims at Most Flagrant Infringers

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry. The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components: • All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc. • The wrapper also will carry a built-in "digital beacon," or tracker, to monitor use of the content by others to track usage and compliance. (As I understand this, the content is not encrypted...

• September 21, 2009
• 6 comments

Overcoming Drupal Challenges as SochiReporter Nears Launch

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

SochiReporter is getting ready to launch on the web and for mobile users. We spent the last three weeks fixing linguistic, technical and design bugs, all with the goal of maximizing ease of use. So far we have drawn a fabulous group of people from both local and virtual communities: garage tech geeks and web schizophrenics, coffee-shop amateurs, and folks who want to use the site and offer feedback. Their comments have helped us to get better. We also attracted an avid gamer in Sochi who spends most of his time in an underground Internet café at the center...

• September 18, 2009
• No comments

New Tools For Journalists From TechCrunch 50

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Earlier this week, I spent two days at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. The conference organizers pick 50 web companies who officially launch at the conference. The overall group was pretty mixed, but a few start-ups offer interesting services or ideas that might be of interest to folks thinking about the future of news and information. Here's a selection: Citysourced: The company has a platform for "citizens to identify civic issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to City Hall for quick resolution." They are launching soon with a project with the city of...

• September 17, 2009
• 3 comments

Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When he's not toasting escapism, our tireless editor Mark Glaser has been asking why reporting costs so much. I can't tell you much about investigative reporting (a $400,000 product of which started the conversation), except to say that six figure salaries do add up. But I can tell you that when it comes to local reporting, improved access to information could make a big dent in the expense of getting a story written. If you want to take a look at distribution of discretionary funds by the New York City Council, you have to start with a 400-page PDF full...

• September 9, 2009
• 1 comment

How Talking into a Mobile Phone Can Help Change Lives

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The pre-cursors to mobile phones were two-way radios, also called Walkie-Talkies, that transmitted voice signals. The first generation of mobile phone networks were similar in that they also only supported voice communications. Second generation networks, and a happy accident, gave us SMS, and third generation networks provide even more advanced mobile data services. Most mobile phone applications now use these newer channels of communication -- SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a major part of mobile phone communications. And when it comes to performing social work, voice communication is actually the most important feature...

• September 3, 2009
• No comments

"Programmer-Journalist" Scholarships Yield Finalists for Online Journalism Awards

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our Knight News Challenge scholarship program to educate "programmer-journalists" at the Medill School at Northwestern University just won some significant external validation. The Online News Association yesterday announced the finalists for this year's Online Journalism Awards, and two of the finalists resulted directly from the scholarship initiative. 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...

• September 1, 2009
• 1 comment

The Power of Proximity: Possibilities for Hyperlocal Journalism in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Whether it focuses on hyperlocal crime, hyperlocal pollution and health issues, local economies (market matching information) and information about the provision of local services, this approach provides an arguably essential missing link between what citizens might find useful to know, and ways that citizens might use the information and analysis to create pressure and increase participation in efforts to change things.

• September 1, 2009
• 1 comment

HuffPost Social News Helps Close the 'Awareness Gap'

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in December, as a team of Medill students (including the first two Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalists") was developing the News Mixer project, I wrote an IdeaLab post called "The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here." It captured my thoughts based on my experience of working with the students on the News Mixer project, which offered new approaches to news commenting driven by the capabilities of the Facebook Connect service. 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...

• August 21, 2009
• 1 comment

When FM Radio Meets the Mobile Phone in Pakistan

by Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the United States, high-end smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry don't have built-in radios. But in Pakistan, even the cheapest cell phones, which don't have cameras or other features, come with the ability to listen to FM radio. Every day, and especially during cricket matches, people walk the streets with their phones pressed to their ears, tuned into their local stations, according to Huma Yusuf, a journalist based in Pakistan. In Pakistan and other countries in the developing world, mobile phones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. In June 2009, Pakistan had 94.3 million mobile subscribers, or about 58 percent...

• August 19, 2009
• 2 comments

Making Progress Toward Launch of Phoenix Light Rail Pub

by Aleksandra Chojnacka
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Daily Phoenix is a website and mobile app for Phoenix metro residents who use or live around the light rail. We are providing news and information per stop. Information includes business and services, events, promotions, gossip, networking opportunities, etc. all on a stop by stop basis. Where are we today? It has been an incredibly busy couple of months! As Adam mentioned in his last post, we were featured on "Good Morning Arizona" last month. They want to have us back when we finally launch the project and have us demo it on live TV. Very exciting! We've made lots...

• August 11, 2009
• 1 comment

Source Code for Balance

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Okay, so you haven't been waiting for this with baited breath the way everyone was waiting for the EveryBlock code. Nonetheless, after a few months of wrangling on and off with Git Hub I finally sat down and worked through a bunch of nagging authentication issues and managed to post the code for Balance! our game about balancing city budgets. Assuming we haven't made any terrible mistakes (I already spotted one little error. If you spot it too you can buy me a beer!), we'll post cleaned out versions of the other games we've developed in the next week or...

• August 10, 2009
• No comments

Using GRINS to Improve Technology and Processes at Community Radio Stations

by Zahir Koradia
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Radio Bundelkhand, one of the early community radio stations in India, started live transmission in October 2008. We visited the station in February 2009 as a part of Community Radio India Forum annual body meeting. During this visit we initiated talks of piloting the radio automation system being developed by us. We released the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System (or GRINS) in June, and setup GRINS at Radio Bundelkhand during our week-long visit in mid-July. This report describes (a) the operational setup at Radio Bundelkhand before GRINS was deployed, (b) the changes in the setup made by deployment of GRINS,...

• August 7, 2009
• No comments

Community Radio in India Includes Report on Eclipse, 'Bundeli Idol'

by Balachandran Chandrasekharan
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gram Vaani successfully launched its first pilot a few days back with Radio Bundelkhand! Radio Bundelkhand is a community radio station operating in the small town of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh (India), and was the first community driven CR station to start broadcasting after the new policy. It is being run by Development Alternatives, one of the largest NGOs in India. This pilot has been an excellent experience for us. We saw the folks at the radio station produce Bundeli Idol, a strong competitor to the American and Indian Idol (!!), and a program on the recent solar eclipse,...

• August 7, 2009
• No comments

Printcasting Launches Paid Ads, Revenue Sharing

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We just reached another big milestone on Printcasting with a feature that we think will redefine how publishers perceive and use the service. Starting now, all ads placed with the Printcasting self-serve advertising tool cost $10, an amount that publishers can mark up per publication. In addition, 60% of every ad dollar is shared with publishers through their Paypal accounts, and 30% of every dollar is set aside to share with participating content providers in the future in proportion to how often their content has been used in Printcasts. We've also made it easier for advertisers to place ads in...

• July 15, 2009
• 2 comments

Ideas for Professional Journalists to Prove Their Value

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• July 15, 2009
• 2 comments

Crowdsourcing Keeps Coming

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Gotham Gazette, we're gathering our bearings and preparing work on a pretty great crowdsourcing project (though this business of talking something up before its even in beta testing does make the developer in me nervous) and I'm increasingly interested in really understanding what makes crowdsourcing work. It is everywhere these days, and it certainly is one way that we can be turning the Internet into a really effective reporting tool. Two new projects I'm watching? Adopt-a-Stimulus -- which I first caught wind of on Twitter -- asks individuals to pick one TARP project and track it. Steve Katz tried...

• July 15, 2009
• No comments

Inzwa: Listen up!

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, Kubatana launched Inzwa, Zimbabwe's experiment with Freedom Fone, providing audio information via mobile phones. We'll be updating our information every Tuesday, and we are interested in any feedback to help us improve the service. How does it work? Tune into Inzwa by phoning +263 913 444 321-8 and . . . - Press 1 for 60 seconds fresh bringing you current news and views - Choose 2 to enter the doorway to chibanzi for job vacancies, scholarships or resources - Press 3 to find out about everyday heroes and take a new look at Zimbabwean activists and activism...

• July 15, 2009
• No comments

Getting the Daily Phoenix Off the Ground

by Aleksandra Chojnacka
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Before I dive in, I'd like to give readers a brief overview of what exactly our project, Daily Phoenix, is. This past December, Phoenix debuted a new light rail system which has changed the physical and social landscape of the city. We will use print, web and mobile technology to cater to these new commuters, offering news and information, games, social networking features and promotions on a stop-by-stop basis so that they can interact with the city on a more meaningful level. The idea developed in a digital media entrepreneurship class at ASU and now here we are almost a...

• July 13, 2009
• 4 comments

Bump: Getting on the Ballot in NYC

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette released our fourth game in our Knight-funded game series this week. Bump, which revisits the maze theme from our Budget Maze sends players through a whole new labyrinth: ballot access. If you can't imagine how ballot access is even remotely interesting, I suggest playing the game! Seriously: we knew we wanted to do two things: to build a game that would stay relevant through the New York City campaign season and to find a topic that would fit nicely into the existing code base for one of our earlier games. Ballot access is an important and relatively obtuse...

• July 8, 2009
• No comments

ReportingOn 2.0 Launches Next Generation of Backchannel for Your Beat

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions. And answers. It's still the backchannel for your beat, but it's an absolute re-imagining of the network. For those of you who haven't been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it's a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source. (You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts right here at IdeaLab.) The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that...

• July 2, 2009
• No comments

Knight Rewards On-the-Spot Competitors at MIT Meetup

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last Thursday, I returned to Moscow from the Future of News and Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass. Organized by the MIT Center of Future Civic Media and the Knight Foundation, this is the annual meeting where all the Knight News Challenge Winners discuss the future of civic media and talk about the digital tools to build local communities. This year, nine new exciting projects joined this community of innovators, raising the total of Knight News Challenge projects to 45. The conference was also a good chance for the past Knight News Challenge winners to talk about their progress on...

• July 1, 2009
• 5 comments

EveryBlock Source Code Released

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today's a big day for us at EveryBlock. We're making our source code available. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "micro-local" news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we're fulfilling that second purpose. You can read more about the open-sourcing and download the code at our source code page. (Keep in mind it'll probably make sense only if you're a web developer/programmer.) We hope this extensive code base helps...

• July 1, 2009
• 1 comment

VLink Offers Robust, Low-Cost Internet Service for Rural Areas

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Internet penetration in rural areas, especially in developing countries such as India, is generally poor. Telecom companies do not find it economically viable to deploy wired broadband such as DSL; satellite connectivity is expensive and often slow; dial-up (if available) is always flaky; and cellular data services such as GPRS or EDGE are quite costly to use. Newer technologies for wireless broadband such as WiMax do promise higher bandwidth, but infrastructure costs for deployment in rural areas remain high. How then can Internet connectivity be provided in such areas in a robust and low-cost manner? One could, of course, ask...

• June 26, 2009
• 3 comments

An Update on ReportingOn 2.0 Development

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's an eight-minute tour of ReportingOn 2.0, as it stood on our development server on Tuesday June 17, 2009. I'm extremely psyched to report that we're on track for a July 1 launch of the second phase of this Knight News Challenge funded project. As a quick refresher, ReportingOn 1.0 launched back in October 2008, as a rather Twitter-like backchannel for beat reporters to connect based on common interests. Some pieces of the first iteration worked out well, and some of them -- well, we learned a lot. What's next? Launching version 2.0 on July 1, releasing the open source...

• June 19, 2009
• 1 comment

Twittering Away the Jobs of Journalists

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jon Steward did a funny bit last night, referencing how the major news networks were forced to rely on the "hearsay" of Twitter and Facebook postings to understand the events unfolding in Iran. But with the State Department requesting that the good folks at Twitter delay their scheduled site maintenance to keep Tweets flowinng from Iran, you know we have turned a corner. So in all seriousness, in the era of twittering and crowdsourced journalism, are journalists themselves still relevant? Obviously I am not the first person to ask this - or to piss people off by asking it again....

• June 17, 2009
• 7 comments

Think Community? Think Maps! (Going to MIT. Part One)

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• June 17, 2009
• No comments

Knocking Down Barriers for Newspapers to Try New Technologies

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

During my time at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I had a chance to learn about some of the harsh realities that come with taking on yet another technology. The general idea was that even if it's "free," there is unfortunate baggage that comes with adding tools to the newsroom -- baggage like increased overhead, learning curves, and brand new risks that have to be mitigated. I hate to think that a newspaper can't take advantage of free, open source, low hanging fruit simply because it would create another system that has to be taught and maintained! At the same time, though,...

• June 16, 2009
• 1 comment

Stuck in a Maze

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, we were honored with an Honorable Mention in the first Knight News Game Award competition, for our (pretty excellent) budget maze. The honor was made sweeter with the knowledge that our little maze -- we estimate the budget at $65,000 -- was up against a massively multi-player multi-issue networked news game project with a budget just over tenfold ours. With competition like that, an Honorable Mention is honor a-plenty. All the finalists in the contest were invited to share their games at the Games for Change Expo where I watched a handful of people play our game for...

• June 12, 2009
• No comments

Saving Journalism, One Idea at a Time

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

True/Slant's hybrid model (reporters find their own advertising sponsors) will save journalism! Or not. The Huffington Post is creating tomorrow's business model for journalism! Or not... Northwestern University's "computer nerds" will save journalism! Really? Ultra-cheap netbooks could save the media industry! Umm... Journalism Online LLC will save newspapers (!) by helping them charge for what they've been essentially giving away for 50 years. Could be.The iPhone will revolutionize mobile journalism! Or not. The recent panic over the demise of newspapers has led to a predictable flurry of omigod, now-what speculation. We're being treated to one hype-filled piece after another about...

• June 11, 2009
• 5 comments

First Release of the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System Is Here!

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

After working countless weekends and days and nights, we are very happy to announce that Gram Vaani's platform for community radio stations is now available for download. We call it GRINS, standing for the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System. GRINS is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations. Built on Gram Vaani's MINP platform, the current release of GRINS allows radio station operators to schedule broadcasts, preview programs, record live transmissions, and maintain an extensive semantically searchable library. In future releases, GRINS will be enhanced to handle telephony calls, sending and receiving SMS messages, and Internet connectivity to...

• June 11, 2009
• No comments

The Need for New Economic Models in the Public Media

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

For most of us, it's clear that there are a few social costs that we can't rely on the market to cover. Most of us, for example, want to ensure that a child born into poverty has access to a good education, even though that child and his/her family could not afford to pay for it. It's only a bit more of a stretch to argue for equal access to the media, and traditionally, our communities and our government have refrained from taking a pure, free-market approach to funding our media systems. In regards to TV, Lyndon B. Johnson and...

• June 10, 2009
• 1 comment

To Save Journalism We Need More than New Software Programs

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• June 8, 2009
• No comments

Student Journalists, Technologists Collaborate on News Innovations

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eight computer science students and 11 journalism master's students -- including the third "programmer-journalist" scholarship winner, whose Medill journalism education was paid through a Knight News Challenge grant -- are putting the finishing touches on five innovative new products that combine journalism and technology. 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...

• June 8, 2009
• 3 comments

Help Me Investigate: Paul Bradshaw on Crowdsourcing Investigative Reporting

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On June 1, Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog and Birmingham City University in the U.K. announced that a project he's been working on for 18 months called Help Me Investigate won funding to build a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism. I spoke with Paul via Skype about the goals of the project, the nature of the funding, and what he calls "slow journalism." You can find Paul on Twitter or follow the project's progress at the Help Me Investigate blog if you have questions for him, or leave a comment here....

• June 3, 2009
• 1 comment

Journalism Graduates: It's Time to Reinvent Journalism

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spring is upon us and with it comes commencement season at universities across the country (Harvard's 358th commencement is this Thursday, FYI). This is a tough time for graduates in almost every discipline, but especially so for journalism grads. At least that is the conventional wisdom. Which is why it is so refreshing to see a shift in perspective occurring (perhaps even, gasp, a paradigm shift?) at two of this country's preeminent journalism schools: the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In commencement speeches last month, Nicholas Lemann and Barbara Ehrenreich both exhorted...

• June 2, 2009
• No comments

Community Journalism in Times of Economic Crisis

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Media Mobilizing Project recently started a new initiative: Community Journalism in Times of Economic Crisis. The initiative is a response to both the economic crisis, which is hitting Philadelphians hard, and the growing problems with the for-profit journalism model, which is making it difficult for local newspapers to cover stories about the struggles of everyday people during the economic downturn. The goal of this project is to report on and collect the real stories of Philadelphia and beyond on MMP's community blog, so we can begin to get a picture of the economic crisis from the ground up. Here is...

• May 28, 2009
• 1 comment

Open Media Project Sprints to Half-Way Point

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With two months remaining in the first half of our Knight-funded Open Media Project, we've got a busy few weeks ahead. Last month, we brought many of Drupal's top video and media developers together with the staff from the 7 OMP Beta-Test sites for the Open Media Camp in Denver. Next week, we're presenting the model at SCAN NATOA, hoping our user-automated model can be part of the solution for the endangered status of public access in LA. The following week, its up to Davis Media Access, where we'll assist them in the implementation of the Open Media tools. In...

• May 15, 2009
• 1 comment

'Hacker-Journalist' Finds Job, Seeks More Coders for Journalism

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For Brian Boyer, the circle is complete. Almost exactly two years ago, Boyer saw a posting on BoingBoing about scholarships for computer programmers interested in studying journalism. He was one of the first to apply for the "programmer-journalist" scholarships, and enrolled in the master's program at the Medill School in January 2008. In December, he was one of the first two scholarship winners to graduate. This past week, Boyer announced that he has a new job, starting soon at the Chicago Tribune. And for good measure, he published a guest post on O'Reilly Radar blog, one of the world's most...

• May 11, 2009
• 1 comment

Journalism's 3.0 Business Model(s)

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• May 6, 2009
• 8 comments

Rethinking Community Information Needs

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Following up on the Knight Commission's work and musings on "community information needs in a democracy", Mark glaser poses a much more targeted question which has yet to be fully addressed: "What is missing in terms of local community needs"? Most of the discussion in this area focuses on what you and might want in our own communities - things like crime reporting, new local ordinances, and hyper local happenings and events on your block. As David Sasaki points out Everyblock and Oakland Crimespotting are great tools to address these needs. But what about the folks that are not at...

• May 5, 2009
• 3 comments

PolitiFact Pulitzer Validates Journalism-Technology Collaborations

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If the survival of journalism depends on technology innovation, one or more of three things will have to happen: Journalists will learn technology development; Technology developers will learn journalism; Journalists and technology professionals will learn to collaborate. The Pulitzer Prize awarded last week to the St. Petersburg Times for PolitiFact, a database-powered website assessing the truth of political statements, is proof that journalists can learn computer programming. The idea behind PolitiFact came from Times reporter Bill Adair; the database and software development under the hood was built by reporter-turned-developer Matt Waite, whose job title is news technologist. The Knight News...

• April 28, 2009
• 3 comments

Maps for Social Change and Community Involvement

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

2008 was the year of aggregating data related to local communities and displaying that information on maps. Knight News Challenge grantee EveryBlock, for example, labored to convince city governments to make their data more open and accessible, and then created a beautiful map interface to display what is happening where in real time. Map of the 132 calls made to police on April 22nd in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. Other examples of projects which have set out to add geographic locations to information found on the internet, and to display that information on map interfaces, include outside.in, WikiMapia,...

• April 24, 2009
• 2 comments

Tech Design Decisions Behind Gram Vaani's Radio Platform

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a post more for the technology minded, but even others should find it interesting to get an inside view of what goes into designing appropriate technological systems in rural contexts that we are addressing. We've made many design decisions along the way, based on our prior experiences, foresight into expected problems, and observations made while visiting and learning about community radio stations in India. I will first outline some important technological goals that we want to achieve, then describe details of our platform, and finally show how our platform will be able to meet these goals. There will...

• April 22, 2009
• 2 comments

Pounding the Pavement and Planning Ahead for Printcasting

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been about a month since Printcasting launched in Bakersfield, and our local grassroots outreach is well under way. Every week our marketing evangelist meets with several new groups and individuals. Many of them see immediate uses for Printcasts, and we're starting to see a stream of new activity. As of today, 180 Printcasts have been set up that have published 734 editions (You can peruse them all in the Printcasting directory ), and 144 registered content feeds. Because we're seeding the market with our own content and magazines some of these are ours, about half of this comes from...

• April 20, 2009
• No comments

Waiting for the Bill (Gates) in Qatar

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It has been an exciting few weeks for Freedom Fone. We finally got back a version of our prototpye software which works with SIM cards, so we can use it here in Zimbabwe. We've been having focus group discussions with a range of people to help inform our first local deployment. And our Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, has been at ICTD 2009, giving a demo of Freedom Fone. She sent us this feedback: Here I am in Doha, Qatar with my jacket on inside a spectacular building on the Carnegie Mellon campus. I'm seated amongst hundreds of others listening to...

• April 20, 2009
• No comments

Cultivating a Community Garden, not a Public Toilet

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently attended the Integrated Media Association conference in Atlanta and sat in on a panel of web content providers addressing public radio folks about online content. Jesse Thorne moderated a great discussion about how to provide content your audience wants to hear, how to listen and how to foster online communities around your content. Online community building is of particular interest to our project as it is a key feature Radio Engage will provide. The Sound of Young America Merlin Mann made the following observation about how to handle community and conversations: Creating community is not as simple as...

• April 16, 2009
• 8 comments

Going Beyond SMS for Cheaper Cell Phone Journalism in Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Although newspapers have gone through 150 years of evolution away from popular contributions and towards fully professional writing, technology is rapidly re-empowering non-professionals. Anyone who has rudimentary access to technology can blog or Twitter, take cell phone photos and video of dramatic moments, and quickly get them 'out there.' But does the input method matter when it comes to encouraging cell phone journalism, and particularly journalism for a 'formal' publication, like a community newspaper? Does slow bandwidth dampen amateur reporters' enthusiasm, and if cell phones are going to become significant input devices, what input medium -- short message service (SMS),...

• April 14, 2009
• 4 comments

Making a Map Mash-Up with the G1 Phone and Flickr

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Combining mobility, time and location is becoming one of the most valuable techniques of media creation. Last week, some students and I did a small experiment that demonstrates how easy this is to do, and suggests all kinds of possibilities for journalistic follow-ups. This Flickr map has more than 120 photos, taken by me and Arizona State University journalism students Chris Cameron, Adriane Goetz, Travis Grabow, Chrystall Kanyuck, Bailey MOsier, Elizabeth Shell and Evan Wyloge. We chose, for this experiment, last week's Phoenix "First Friday Art Walk" -- a monthly, self-guided tour of a downtown-Phoenix district that contains a number...

• April 6, 2009
• 4 comments

Freedom Fone at W3C - Maputo

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone's Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, is currently at the W3C workshop in Maputo: Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development. The workshop has organised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), particularly the Mobile Web Initiative, and its Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group. As the organisers put it. "There are today more than half of the population living with less than 3$ a day, and lacking all kind of services (health, education, government...). The incredible growth of the mobile penetration rate last few years is providing a new hope. The potential of...

• April 2, 2009
• No comments

Where Citizens Gather: An Interview with The Future of Public Media Project's Jessica Clark (Part Two)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, we continue our discussion with Jessica Clark, co-author of Public Media 2.0, an important white paper recently issued by American University's Center for Social Media. What does your research suggest about the relative roles of professional media producers and Pro-Am media makers in the new ecology of public media? Professionally produced content is central to public media 2.0--right now, more people than ever are consuming and linking to newspapers and broadcast news sources. Some forms of public media are expensive to produce and difficult to make using only volunteer energy and resources: investigative journalism, long-form documentary, international coverage. Those...

• March 31, 2009
• 1 comment

Where Citizens Gather: An Interview with The Future of Public Media Project's Jessica Clark (Part One)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amidst all of the dire talk these days about the fate of the American newspaper, the Center for Social Media at American University has issued an important white paper exploring the future of public media more generally. When most of us think about "public media" these days, we are most likely to be talking about Public Broadcasting, where the Public refers as much to Public Funding as it refers to any conception of the Public Sphere. The report, Public Media 2.0, embraces the affordances and practices of an era of participatory culture and social networks to identify strategies for public...

• March 31, 2009
• 2 comments

ReportingOn: Phrased in the Form of a Question

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I last wrote here to report on ReportingOn's progress, I talked about the work I was doing with my development and design team to define the terms of the RO pitch. A dozen or so whiteboards later, the Lion Burger team is actively putting together mockups and the beginnings of the database for what we're calling "Phase 2" of the project. And it's a huge rethinking of what a "back channel for your beat" looks like. While it's been easy to tag the initial version of ReportingOn as simply "Twitter for journalists," journalists already have a Twitter. It's called...

• March 26, 2009
• 8 comments

Second Implementation of the Open Media Project Complete

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ten members of the Deproduction team traveled to Austin this month to implement the Open Media tools at the second of 6 Beta sites, ChannelAustin. We traveled down in two RV's and scheduled the visit to coincide with SXSW, where we hosted a core conversation as part of the interactive festival. Austin is the first of the large Access Stations that we've worked with in this Knight News Challenge project, and it presented a whole new slate of challenges in comparison with the comparatively simpler implementation at Urbana Public TV. The entire process was documented, and the new ChannelAustin dev...

• March 24, 2009
• 1 comment

Introducing the 3rd "Programmer-Journalist"

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Nick Allen, a computer science student who got intrigued by journalism as a college senior, is the third "programmer-journalist" enrolled at the Medill School through the Knight News Challenge scholarship program. The first two (Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark) graduated in December. As he approaches his final-quarter "innovation project" class (like the one in which Brian and Ryan helped invent News Mixer), it seemed like a good time to introduce him to the Idea Lab audience. (And to re-emphasize that we still have scholarships available to our one-year journalism master's program to people with backgrounds in computer programming.) 1) Tell...

• March 23, 2009
• 1 comment

The Intelligence is in the Network, Social Media and Local Public Life Gathering in Boston Thursday

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Join me this Thursday evening at Harvard's Berkman Center for a discussion of Social Media and Local Public Life. It should be an interesting conversation, particularly if you bring examples with you. On a related note, I am getting ready to speak on Saturday at the Newout.Org conference in Boston which is described as: _NEWSOUT: What to do when the newsroom lights go out: _ _In the last 18 months, some 15,000 U.S. working journalist have lost their jobs through retirement, buyouts or layoffs. New England newsrooms have not been immune. _ _If independent, watchdog journalism is critical to participatory...

• March 18, 2009
• 2 comments

Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week we publicly launched Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. While our focus is on outreach to the 330,000 people who live there, anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine. I invite you all to give it a try at http://www.printcasting.com and let us know what you think. The more early usage we have the better. One easy way to get started is to browse through a list of recently updated Printcasts and subscribe to a few. For those of you who haven't followed the progress of our Knight News Challenge funded project, the...

• March 17, 2009
• 16 comments

Media Cloud and Calais

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Berkman Center launched a project called Media Cloud this week, a toolkit that facilitates analysis of trends in the news. The sample visualization on the site now shows world maps that illustrate the number of mentions each country got in Talking Points Memo, the New York Times and the BBC, respectively. I, of course, immediately tried to create a visualization comparing Gotham Gazette to a few other local papers. Lo, though: no Gotham Gazette in Media Cloud. I've been hearing about Calais lately. I at least got the memo that I'm supposed to know what it is. I gather...

• March 12, 2009
• 7 comments

Ease of Use Matters

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We spend a lot of time talking about why people don't comment more on Gotham Gazette stories. By "a lot of time," I actually mean about 20 minutes every three weeks, but nonetheless as a project with a mission to improve public discourse and engage New Yorkers in public policy conversations, we gauge our impact in part by how many people are reading and responding to our reporting. When popular blogs reference our reporting we see lively and contentious conversations. But rarely do we get much discussion on our own site. This week, though, I made an interesting discovery. After...

• March 11, 2009
• 8 comments

The Community Radio Movement in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

India has been quite a latecomer to this promising channel of people empowerment through community media. Until late 2006, only educational institutions were allowed to set up campus radio stations having a transmission range of 10-15km. The scope was only recently expanded to also include non-profit agencies, agricultural research institutes, and schools, to set up community radio stations that would involve local communities in the content production process. The progress has been steady since then, although arguably somewhat slow. As of now, there are four stations that are broadcasting, and around six stations that are in advanced stages of their...

• March 10, 2009
• 3 comments

Printcasting in BusinessWeek Story about Newspaper Innovation

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Printcasting is mentioned in a BusinessWeek story about "online experiments that could help newspapers". The story leads with Bakotopia.com, the social networking site I started for The Bakersfield Californian back in 2005. This is fitting, as Bakotopia's later success with a printed magazine helped inspired the Printcasting concept. The story also cites other good examples of things newspaper companies are doing to change with the times, including collaboration with Outside.in and Yahoo and the upcoming Plastic Logic e-reader. This is great timing for us, as we recently opened our beta site to the public and are putting the final pieces...

• March 9, 2009
• 5 comments

Change Tracker

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This one is for the "wish I'd thought of that" files. Brian Boyer at ProPublica got the bright idea to write a wee widget that uses Versionista to track changes to a handful of White House websites including whitehouse.gov. Since I heard about Change Tracker on Twitter I've been following it on Twitter. They're still getting their bearings: I was surprised to see that the biography of Andrew Jackson was edited on March 4. and couldn't resist looking up the edit, which turned out to be a change to the site navigation. Not all that interesting. Luckily, ChangeTracker had a...

• March 6, 2009
• No comments

Mobile Voices and the Ethical Responsibilities of Citizen Journalism Training

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I gave a guest lecture to USC's COMM620 "research seminar on mobile phones, online community, and social change." The course is the academic component of an ambitious project called Mobile Voices, funded by the Annenberg Program on Online Communities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Nokia Research Center. It is a great example of academia, for-profit, and non-profit coming together to work on something that stands to benefit them all as well as the community they are targeting - in this case, migrant day laborers. In partnership with the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California the...

• March 5, 2009
• 2 comments

News [metadata] from Porto

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the IPTC worry about labelling data at source, we’re concerned with how to make sure those labels (or at least those ones that are relevant to the public) don’t get lost along the way. Which is why the Transparency Initiative – the MacArthur and Knight funded news project – and IPTC metadata standards, are so complementary.

• March 4, 2009
• 1 comment

Using Social Media in the Newsroom

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm working with the Poynter Institute to put together an online class for senior newspaper executives on how to use social media in the newsroom. From what I can discern, it's one of the least understood concepts in traditional media. For the Knight Digital Media Center program conducted through the Poynter, I'll likely be giving a webinar and taking part in online instruction around how journalists are already using the tools of social media. So I'd love to see some specific examples of how you're using social media (aside from blogs), or examples of how other sites are using...

• March 4, 2009
• 3 comments

A Cool (and Easy) Project from a 'Programmer-Journalist'

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we put together our Knight News Challenge application to offer journalism scholarships to computer programmers, the premise was that journalism needs people with the mindset of software developers. Here's one little example of why this premise was on target: ChangeTracker, a new service offered by Pro Publica and developed by Brian Boyer, who just graduated from the Medill School as one of the first two "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners. ChangeTracker is a service that "watches pages on whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov and financialstability.gov so you don't have to." It identifies changes made to any of these pages and allows people to track...

• March 3, 2009
• 2 comments

Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the most powerful sessions of my class on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement last fall came as a result of a visit from Dayna Cunningham from MIT's Community Innovators Lab shortly after the 2008 election. Cunningham challenged me and my students to think about whether new media tools and platforms might help address the erosion of the black public sphere. She argued that the structures that had sustained the black community during the Civil Rights era were collapsing without the emergence of new structures that would provide the basis for strong critiques of the operations of power...

• March 3, 2009
• 2 comments

Messages From Hot Places

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• February 27, 2009
• 1 comment

Army of Geeks

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As communications change and the demand grows for local networks, our mission becomes clear: we are being called upon to organize an army of geeks to accomplish the tasks that lie ahead. The Background Joaquin Alvarado presented the plan for National Public Lightpath to public broadcasters at the Integrated Media Association conference last week in Atlanta. He called on the audience to actively build partnerships in their local communities and apply for economic stimulus grant money to make the network a reality. This is a common goal to be shared by NPR, PBS, CPB and all the stations. Doc Searls...

• February 27, 2009
• 1 comment

Breaking Even While Staying True to the Margins

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We recently applied to present Freedom Fone: Dial-up Information Service at an upcoming ICT for Development workshop. Our application was eventually accepted, but not before concerns were raised that Freedom Fone might be on its way to becoming a for-profit entity, which would be inconsistent with the conference sponsors' objectives. This was an ironic obstacle for us to encounter, particularly at a time when we're beginning to think through what our business model is going to look like as we move toward self-sufficiency. We are committed to making information accessible to people at the margins of society. And Freedom Fone...

• February 27, 2009
• 3 comments

Digital Newsroom Wireframes Available

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm happy to announce the availability of annotated wireframes for the Digital Newsroom portion of the Populous Project. The functionality, as eloquently described by Gary Kebbel at the Center for Future Civic Media Conference, is being able to "edit from the beach." I'll never forget that description because it elegantly describes the core of what we're trying to accomplish with this software: allowing editors and reporters to get out of the office and into the communities they're covering more often. At UCLA we'll probably have to forgo the beach and just attend class more often, or after 10 hours...

• February 26, 2009
• 6 comments

House Exploded? Try Software for Community Collective Action.

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've written before about the extrACT suite of software tools we have been developing at MIT: information and communication technologies that promote community collective action. We have started to introduce the first of these tools, Landman Report Card, to communities in Texas and Ohio that are being confronted by the impacts of natural gas extraction. The experiences that citizens are recording with it are as remarkable as they are heartbreaking. Residents out west, in some of the most scenic and (until recently) unspoiled parts of the US have called their regions a "national sacrifice zone" where their health, welfare, and...

• February 25, 2009
• No comments

More Thoughts on TimesOpen

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I spent last Friday admiring the views of the Hudson from the 15th floor of the NY Times building, alongside Lisa Williams. Thought it was billed as a "hack day" there wasn't much actual hacking going on that I could find. There was a steady stream of presenters, most of them funny, all of them plenty worth listening to. It was a day well spent, but not a day spent hacking. Fair warning: I wasn't trying to capture the essence of the day so much as taking notes that struck me as relevant to my own work, with an emphasis...

• February 23, 2009
• 6 comments

How Can Disadvantaged Citizens Learn to Be Journalists?

by Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do I even have the gall to write here? I do not have any special knowledge of the media to impart. I am not a journalist with a degree or newspaper experience. I am just an everyday person who has realized... I have to be a journalist. This might be a strange dilemma, but it is one that has become increasingly common. Many everyday people have looked at their communities and tried to answer for the lack of information that exists. This is especially important when such a lack is a root cause at the persistence of many other...

• February 22, 2009
• 2 comments

Playing the News Ready for Testing

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a lot of fits and starts, we are ready to deploy two different versions of the "Playing the News" prototype games. One uses a simulated environment that allows the user to visit various locations to interview stakeholders on the topic of the use of ethanol as fuel. The user plays the role of a legislative research assistant helping a U.S. Senator prepare for hearings on the topic. The user can visit a variety of locations and talk to auto dealer sales reps, farmers, advocacy groups for and against corn ethanol, environmentalists and others. After the user visits the locations...

• February 21, 2009
• No comments

Using Technology in the Fight Against Cholera in Zimbabwe

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week we gave our first targeted demonstrations of Freedom Fone, aimed at encouraging local health organisations to use Freedom Fone as one of the communications tools in the response to Zimbabwe's cholera crisis. We believe that given the rapid spread of the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe, greater use should be made of the country's most ubiquitous communication tool - the mobile phone - to share information that can help address the suffering and limit the number of deaths. Since August last year, WHO reports there have been over 80,000 cases, and over 3,615 people have died. This is an...

• February 21, 2009
• 5 comments

Turning Print Upside Down and Inside Out

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Scripps executive and media consultant Jay Small has a shout-out to Printcasting in his Small Initiatives blog. Here's what he says about Printcasting in a post about decapitalizing printing. "Watch Dan Pacheco's Printcasting developments closely. My read: This project attempts to cut cost, waste and inflexibility out of producing printed periodicals, while adding customization and speed to market for publishers of most any scale. I don't know if it will work -- Pacheco doesn't either, I'd guess. But it represents a creative, logical and valiant effort, with realistic chances of success." And later ... "I imagine, therefore, that Pacheco's experiments...

• February 20, 2009
• No comments

Janet Robinson's Remarks at TimesOPEN

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• February 20, 2009
• 1 comment

Spot.Us Deals with the Good and Bad of Limitations

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• February 16, 2009
• 2 comments

BarCamp NewsInnovation Chicago: Join the Conversation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you've been following my posts to this blog, you know that I'm always interested in exploring ways to connect journalists and technology professionals. The Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarships are one approach. So is the idea of a "computational journalism" conference like the one held last year at Georgia Tech. (Early indications are that the second conference will be held this fall.) Here's a new opportunity: BarCamp NewsInnovation, a series of user-generated conferences focusing on the future of journalism. The next conference in the series will be held Saturday, Feb. 21, at the Medill School newsroom space in downtown...

• February 15, 2009
• 4 comments

Putting Our Plane on the Runway

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing, entered closed beta last week. An open beta is just around the corner, and we're doing everything we can to officially launch in Bakersfield in early March. To make that happen, two camps -- development and marketing -- are busy getting everything into place for a successful launch. In development, all of our focus is on completing a few last critical features, including the creation of automatic, self-updating Printcast editions. And we're making great progress! In the marketing camp, we're busy tweaking messaging, writing FAQs, giving live demos and building...

• February 12, 2009
• 2 comments

Strategizing Media Software Development: Some Lessons Learned

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a story showing the extent of complications in getting a system going, so I'll tell it simply. It's my non-geek experience of work for a community newspaper that aims to produce world-class code for community papers that is singing-dancing, super-portable and open-source. The history started in the buzz around the World Summit on Information Society which helped to move OSS into the mental horizon of non-techies like me. When the Rhodes journalism school where I work acquired Grocott's Mail, the local newspaper in 2004, we had to install a load of new PCs to accommodate students who would now...

• February 5, 2009
• No comments

First Beta Site in the Open Media Project is a Success!

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• February 2, 2009
• 3 comments

Philadelphia's Community News Portals

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As part of Our City Our Voices, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) in partnership with Juntos has launched a new drupal based participatory website. The Our City Our Voices portal is part of a network of community portals MMP has developed to create dynamic spaces for communities across the city to tell and share stories and get information. The aim of the network of community portals is to develop new spaces for folks disenfranchised by the digital age to have a place to speak and listen. The project entails 4 steps: 1) find and distribute low cost internet access to...

• January 30, 2009
• 1 comment

Partnerships to Watch (and a Crowdsourcing Project I'm Envying)

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A small local website from Brooklyn has partnered with NBC to build neighborhood pages for a handful of NBC markets. I haven't followed Outside.in for more than stoop sales (which is New Yorkerese for garage sales or yard sales since most New Yorkers have neither yards nor garages), but it looks like they've taken up EveryBlock's approach to local news aggregation as well, though they want posts explicitly geo-tagged for their maps. Speaking of EveryBlock, they recently announced that they're working with the New York Times to track Times reporting on political districts. Presumably they'll be taking advantage of the...

• January 29, 2009
• 1 comment

Online-News@ reborn as News-Online@ -- E-mail List Nostalgia or the Best Way to Interact?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As spaces for those interested in online news like WiredJournalists.com and Poynter's online groups go completely web-centric, my heart pangs for the simple e-mail list. Something I can easily read and post to in those rare idle moments in transit on my handheld or from the place I still spent the majority of my time online - conveniently from my desktop e-mail. On a whim, I decided to contact those who posted to the Online-News e-mail list (Steve Outing started it way back in the early 1990s) in the months before it was retired. Poynter's moved on with their conversion...

• January 27, 2009
• No comments

Building a Social Entrepreneurial Garage Startup in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Moving from ideas to execution is an ultra cool feeling. Gram Vaani is finally on the go and we are all extremely excited to see our dreams taking shape. The garage startup mode I always used to wonder what a Silicon Valley garage startup would feel like. Well, here's what it looks like -- a social entrepreneurial garage startup in India. This is Bala in his pyjamas, with dozens of audio cables and connectors strewn out on his desk in a manner that only he understands. Bala spends part of his day reading Kafka, and the rest of his day...

• January 24, 2009
• 8 comments

Each Culture Should Communicate News Their Way

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the "Community Video Unit" has lots of potential for great programming on arts and culture. But rural Rajasthan is a deeply conservative and feudal place, where the women are veiled, and there is very high incidence of child marriage and female foeticide. My hat goes off to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, the NGO who has set up this Community Video Unit...

• January 24, 2009
• 5 comments

Phase 2 of the Open-Media Project Begins This Week

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deproduction's KNC grant was designed in 4 distinct six-month phases. The first phase included an updated release of our Open-Source Drupal tools: the set of Drupal modules which enable Denver Open Media to function as a user-driven Public Access Community Media Center with no operating support from the city or cable provider in Denver. The process of developing these modules, and the features they are designed to include, can be seen at http://groups.drupal.org/open-media-project. The second phase officially launches this week, and involves a group of 6 beta-test partners who we will guide through the process of implementing the modules, and...

• January 23, 2009
• No comments

"We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part Two)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

You describe a range of projects in the book including those involving youths and senior citizens. What generational differences, if any, did you observe in the ways they thought about their roles and responsibilities as journalists? Young people are much more technologically adept in general. Older citizen journalists often get tangled up in the technology. They approach issues differently. The youth have strongly held opinions and aren't afraid to express themselves, be they nationally or international in scope. The older generation tends to shy away from letting fly with their political opinions especially. They have sort of a been-there, done-that...

• January 23, 2009
• No comments

Obama's Open Government Imperatives Must Trickle Down to Cities

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today President Obama issued two eloquent orders with the following subject lines: "Freedom of Information Act" and "Transparency and Open Government". Published on the first full day of his presidency, they constitute a sweeping manifesto about how he wants to govern at the Federal level. Those leading municipal government in this country-- mayors, commissioners, and department heads-- would do well to read closely. Change is coming. In the first memo, he writes that "the Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." He goes on to "direct the Director of...

• January 21, 2009
• 3 comments

Two Coders Head Off to 'Fix Journalism'

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are a lot of words I could use to describe Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, but perhaps the first one is: fearless. About 21 months ago, they heard (Ryan through a friend, Brian on Boing Boing) about a new scholarship program offering computer programmers a chance to earn a master's degree in journalism at the Medill School. Neither of them had journalism experience, and neither of them had ever considered studying journalism. But they decided to apply anyway, and as of December they became the first "programmer-journalists" (or "hacker journalists") to graduate from Medill. The vast majority of programmers...

• January 16, 2009
• 2 comments

Digital Community Builders Can Roll Their Own Economic Stimulus Package

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I come from the "citizen" side of citizen media and work a lot with community building online. Everyday, I an privileged to live in a neighborhood with a vibrant online community far from the wretched shores media hosted mostly anonymous and frequently disturbing online reader comments. So, from my non-profit perspective, when I look at all the money the U.S. government might be throwing into cement, I figure we digital folks need to come up with similar job-creating ideas that provide real value to community infrastructure. So below is my proposal. (Also in PDF format.) Community Infrastructure Builders - The...

• January 13, 2009
• No comments

Populous Is Adopting News Mixer (And More)

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're chugging along over at Populous, and getting closer and closer to a public release of our CMS beta and demo. Right now we have an alpha of our CMS we're using to test and get selected feedback on, and we still have a bit more refinement to do to get things up and running for public consumption. I'm excited to discuss some of the other projects and features we're incorporating into Populous. We realized a long time ago that we weren't going to be able to make a viable platform for online publication unless we included a number of...

• January 12, 2009
• 5 comments

News Mixer Generates Widespread Interest

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since we announced the launch of News Mixer, a Web application developed by Medill master's students to demonstrate new ways of fostering conversations around news, the site has gotten a lot of positive feedback. News Mixer is the final project for six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending Medill on Knight News Challenge scholarships. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system. The class officially ended Dec. 12, but the students and I have...

• January 5, 2009
• 7 comments

Preview the Printcasting Local Ad Tool

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tonight is literally the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, so first I want to say Happy New Year to all of you. We've learned a lot since winning a Knight News Challenge grant 9 months ago, and are extremely grateful to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for making it possible for us and so many others to continue to experiment at a time when so many companies are eliminating into their research & development budgets. Even though it's the holidays, the Printcasting team is not slowing down. All we can think about is March...

• December 31, 2008
• 3 comments

Community-Owned Media: What Does It Mean?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many people today who work in social change are convinced that the typical 'top down' approach to development, where bureaucrats and international agencies design large-scale social programs and then impose them on millions of poor people, isn't working. Instead, they favor the idea of 'community-led development', in which communities themselves design the social programs, and interventions only arise from the stated needs of the communities. The goals of all these programs is the idea of eventual 'community ownership' of programs themselves and of the social change process. It means that communities won't only participate, but they will be able to...

• December 24, 2008
• No comments

Ethnic Hyperlocal News Network Launched in L.A.

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A project billed as the "first-ever online network of ethnic citizen journalists" was launched last week in Los Angeles. Called LA Beez, the effort is a project of New America Media with support from the Ford Foundation. It brings together six L.A.-area ethnic media outlets with the goal of providing a more diverse representation of views. The participating local publications include: Arab-American Affairs Magazine, Asian Journal, Carib Press, Impulso, Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, and the Los Angeles Watts Times. Despite a healthy appetite in general for locally relevant news and information in ethnic communities across the U.S., it will...

• December 22, 2008
• 2 comments

News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a year of study, countless meetings, and at least two conferences, a team of researchers at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society have released a series of papers exploring the potential and challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment (note: I played a small role in this work). If you are sitting there thinking that this is a BIG topic rife with thorny questions about the future of journalism, you're right. Which is why the papers' authors conceived of the project as a conversation, facilitated by a series of papers that look at different facets of...

• December 18, 2008
• No comments

Freedom Fone Interviewed on the BBC

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone's technical director, Brenda Burrell, was recently interviewed by Digital Planet, the BBC's weekly world technology update. Read the article, or listen to Brenda speak about Freedom Fone, and the potential of mobile phones as a vehicle for voice based information services....

• December 17, 2008
• No comments

The Day Print Didn't Stand Still

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 16, 2008
• 2 comments

'News Mixer' Offers Better Engagement

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project -- six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending the Medill School on Knight News Challenge scholarships -- set out this fall to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults. Here's what they came up with: News Mixer. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system. News Mixer is already getting some positive buzz thanks to some Twittering last week after Team Crunchberry presented...

• December 16, 2008
• 5 comments

Study on Digital Inclusion and Civic Engagement

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 16, 2008
• 2 comments

ReportingOn: Changing Horses Mid-Stream is Easy When You're the Horse

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

DIY development, design, community management, and marketing isn't for me (this year). This is an update about what's going on with ReportingOn, which is to say, there's not much going on with ReportingOn. For now. My Knight News Challenge-funded project to connect journalists on the same topical beat with their peers launched on October 1. I continued development work on it through the month of October, and then was completely tackled by a pack of wild bears known as my day job, life at home, and a need for some brief moments of sanity in between the rest. Now that...

• December 12, 2008
• 2 comments

Why Spot.Us Should Have Used Drupal (and Why It Doesn't Matter)

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 12, 2008
• 3 comments

Hiring for Change: How to Staff a New Media Project

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 11, 2008
• No comments

Making News More Transparent

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With our Knight News Challenge grant we (the Media Standards Trust and Web Science Research Initiative) are exploring and developing ways in which to help the public find and assess news on the web (for which we have also received a MacArthur Foundation grant). Part of this initiative includes developing tools for making online news more transparent. What does that mean? It means enabling journalists, and people creating journalism, to embed basic information to their online news articles which helps the public establish an article's authorship and provenance (the same methodology applies to photos and video but I'll stick with...

• December 11, 2008
• 1 comment

Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Politics to Poetry

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Go to Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog and you don't know if you're going to find a post on politics, poetry, the NFL or the world of videogames. A journalist who has worked at Time Magazine and the Village Voice, Coates started his own blog after being laid off from Time Magazine. Then, back in August, the author of the recently released "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood," was added to the magazine's roster of bloggers at the Atlantic.com. There he continues to interweave culture and politics in posts that ruminate on topics ranging from...

• December 8, 2008
• No comments

RadioEngage on the Move

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We were awarded this grant as technologists to build a tool for public radio. We are fulfilling this grant as social media-infused journalistic technologists. The road has been bumpy.

• December 7, 2008
• No comments

When a Cell Phone Is Bigger Than a Yacht

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Despite the global warming reports snow covered the Moscow roads and rooftops just on time this year, preluding to the urban installation of the New Year trees all around the city, bringing romanticism into the hearts of the Muscovites, and inspiring citizens to upload new Christmas-related videos (along with those featuring car crashes) at the http://mreporter.ru/, a citizen journalism project recently launched by the Rossiya TV channel. 'Mobile Reporter' is similar in its concept to the CNN iReport. A cell phone is called mobile phone in Russia, and videos are often taken by the mobile phone cameras, and the most...

• December 7, 2008
• 2 comments

The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Social software -- technology that enables interactions among multiple people -- has existed for almost a half century now. (Clay Shirky, in a widely linked essay on this topic, traces the roots of social software to the PLATO system, built at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s.) I'm using the term "social software" because the more popular "social media" increasingly feels like an oxymoron. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg aren't media. Media refers to one-way communication -- like publishing or broadcasting. Today's social sites are, fundamentally, computer programs -- software that determines what users can (and can't)...

• December 2, 2008
• 6 comments

Freedom Fone Goes on the Road

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone had its first public debut at the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) 2008 Forum in Cape Town, 14-17 November. The event was a great opportunity to deploy Freedom Fone -- even in its software prototype state. We prepared different content for each of the four days of the conference, and ran four "channels," or options which users could access when they phoned in: Highlighted Sessions, Interviews with Presenters, Culture and Inspiration, and the Feminist Tech Hunt, which was run in association with Take Back the Tech. We took advantage of South Africa's deregulated VoIP and rented...

• December 1, 2008
• 1 comment

The Includer
Episode 12
Wisdom In Characters

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• November 28, 2008
• 8 comments

Populous Code Released

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I have an exciting, albeit brief, announcement to make about our progress on the Populous project (formerly known as the Community News Network). Today we publicly released all of our code, in alpha, on the social coding site GitHub. The entirely of our progress so far is there, which at this point is an extremely powerful and flexible content management system. We've released it under an open source BSD license, and highly encourage anyone interested to check it out and contribute. We're coding Populous in Django, a Python rapid development framework specifically designed to quickly build robust news sites. So...

• November 24, 2008
• 1 comment

The Includer
Episode 11
$100 Solar Project

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Peter noted that many people are weak from HIV/AIDS and they need alternative work to laboring in the fields. He also notes the great need for electricity because, for example, people in his part of rural Kenya typically turn off their mobile phones after 6:00 pm because they are saving the battery power because they have to walk a long ways to recharge their batteries.

• November 21, 2008
• 7 comments

Student R&D Can Show the Way for Media

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Placeblogger, a Knight News Challenge winner from 2007, has launched a new design and announced that it is now indexing more than 3,000 "placeblogs" -- Web sites that deliver, as founder Lisa Williams puts it, "an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time ... about the lived experience of a place." The new design served to remind me -- yet again -- of how much has happened in online media in the past few years. About 4 1/2 years ago, I directed a team of Medill master's students who explored the potential of what they called "hyperlocal...

• November 17, 2008
• No comments

Toward a National Journalism Foundation

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amid so much talk of federal bailouts for the banking and auto industries, what would a national bailout plan for journalism look like? If you were given $700 billion to save journalism, how would you use it? How would you fix the system? The End of Commercial Media Several months ago I watched Roger Alton, the new editor of the Britain daily, The Independent, get absolutely skewered by Stephen Sackur on the BBC evening talk show, Hard Talk. Their 30 minute discussion boiled down to 15 minutes of Sackur asking how The Independent planned to stop losing money and 15...

• November 17, 2008
• 8 comments

Stack Overflow Sets an Example for News Commenting Systems

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a poorly-kept secret: I hang out with Web developers all day. And by their nature, Web developers tend to be Web savvy, and Web natives. Which means they are already using and hacking and rebuilding the next big thing online before most of us have ever laid our eyes on it. Like this one: Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a service where programmers can ask and answer questions. That's all. Not too complicated when you describe it that way. But hidden in that description is a valuable system of voting and rating, where users earn points (call it Karma...

• November 14, 2008
• 4 comments

The Includer
Episode 10
Our Good Idea

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Includer grows wings.  An idea can't fly on a single wing or even two or three.  An idea soars when inspired from every angle.  Just as a gangster's heart can't shut out love from all directions.  Who among us can take credit for a miracle?  It's the logic of the Glory of a greater Inspirer.I was disappointed that I didn't submit proposals to the HASTAC or Google calls for projects.  I was simply overwhelmed with my new job, teaching algebra at the American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  I am delighted to learn that Ricardo championed the Includer with...

• November 14, 2008
• No comments

Whither Online Social Networks?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My "innovation project" team of master's students at the Medill School is tackling two interesting challenges: (1) improving the tools available for online interaction around news (for instance, better ways of commenting) and (2) engaging young adults in local news. They've decided to take advantage of Facebook Connect in building a news-interaction site. This means Facebook users will be able to log in using their Facebook ID, and it also means that this ID will serve as their persistent identity on the site. Read/Write Web, one of my favorite sites/blogs, posted last week about Facebook Connect. The post points out...

• November 10, 2008
• 1 comment

Job Openings at Social Entrepreneurial Startup

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Company background: Gram Vaani is a social entrepreneurial startup focused on building innovative models of media delivery for rural areas of India. Media is an important agency to bring social change and responsible politics, but novel technological and business methods are required to successfully and scalably enable services in the challenging rural environments. Our open-source product line is aimed at low-cost systems co designed with local communities, and has been funded by the Knight Foundation of the US as part of their prestigious global news challenge competition for 2008. Join our young and high powered team for an extremely satisfying,...

• November 9, 2008
• No comments

The Includer
Episode 9
Africans Want to Chat With You

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our scheduled chats are how we bridge single tasking and multitasking. ... Fred Kayiwa of Uganda staffs our chat room on Saturdays thanks to a $100 gift from St.Benedict the African's choir. We're taking our first steps to link Chicago and Africa with our chat room.

• November 5, 2008
• No comments

enviroVOTE: Side Project for Two Programmer-Journalists

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some more evidence that interesting things can happen when computer programmers spend some time learning (and thinking about) journalism: enviroVOTE. The site, built by "hacker journalists" Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, aggregates election results from around the country (contests for president, governor, U.S. Senate and U.S. House) through the prism of how environmentally friendly the winners are. Mark and Boyer, the first two Knight News Challenge scholarship winners, are now completing their final term in the journalism master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. The site was developed using the Django framework in what Boyer describes as a...

• November 5, 2008
• No comments

The Challenge of Bringing Net Access to Poorest Areas

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, I've given a lot of thought to how poor communities on the other side of the digital divide are able to connect. The Internet is now only accessible for a tiny portion of humanity. Probably less than 20% of humanity has regular internet access, and in rural India, where 700 million people live, it must be a far, far smaller number. When all of us English-speaking urbanites have forums to share and learn and grow, but vast numbers of people don't, it only increases the inequality of the poor. In addition to their financial poverty, they are becoming...

• November 3, 2008
• 1 comment

Not All Journalism Students Hip to Social Media

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Right now I'm attending a national conference in Kansas City (Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers) for student news organizations, and I must say I've been underwhelmed. There was a keynote yesterday afternoon from Rich Beckman, a professor at the University of Miami School of Communication. I think he started off strong, outlining where newspapers need to go on the Internet and mentioning the recent announcement from the Christian Science Monitor to go online only. Later in the speech (see attached YouTube video, recorded in very low light from my Flip Cam) he outlined how the Internet is changing things for...

• October 31, 2008
• 1 comment

How Philanthropy, Education and Industry Can Partner

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project is now officially past the halfway point, and I'm getting a clearer picture of what our student team can accomplish in the remainder of the fall quarter at the Medill School. The students' vision is coalescing around a Web site that enables young adults to interact with news and information via different types of "comment structures," which we're defining as forms of user interaction. The features in the software they are developing are: integration with Facebook (using Facebook Connect), with the following results: Users can log in using their Facebook ID's and have their Facebook identity carry...

• October 31, 2008
• No comments

Agile Programming: Good Model for Collaboration?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my experience in media companies and academia, developing or implementing new software is almost always a painful process. The people who are going to use the software can't communicate what they want, and the developers don't understand the end users' needs. The developers think the end users have unreasonable expectations, while the end users think the developers are dragging their feet. Software projects are always behind schedule, and even after completion, everyone involved is dissatisfied with the results. Such a scenario is bad enough when it plays out in the workplace. But the journalism "innovation project" I'm directing this...

• October 28, 2008
• 1 comment

Who's Watching the Elections?

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Every election, Gotham Gazette publishes a last minute voters guide. We almost always include every local race along with a round up of our coverage of the issues in that district and the race itself. From Surrogate Court and judicial convention delegates to NYC congressional races; and sometimes we're the only publication in town that can tell you whether there's a race in your precinct. Every election, we also provide a roundup of basic information for voters: how to find your polling place, voting rights, special instructions for first time voters. And, who to call to report problems at the...

• October 24, 2008
• 1 comment

The Five Biggest Barriers to Online Participation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Team Crunchberry -- so-called because we're thinking about Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home of a large Quaker Oats cereal factory responsible for the nickname "City of the Five Smells" -- has emerged from its ideation process with a core idea and a target audience. The six-student team has created three personas representing 20-34-year-olds in eastern Iowa, and is brainstorming what the barriers are that keep them from participating in online conversations related to news and information. The brainstorming process, in turn, has begun to yield some very interesting ideas for improving online-news conversation systems. Like many online news sites, the sites...

• October 18, 2008
• 3 comments

Microblogging Tools for your Newsroom

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I thought about ReportingOn for more than a year before the public beta launched on October 1; I turned the idea over in my head, scrawled back-of-a-napkin sketches, and built several HTML prototypes before I ever got close to building something with dynamic code. While I was going through that process of refining the idea and deciding which features were crucial and which would just be gravy, it turned out that a lot of other people were trying to solve the same problem, although not strictly with journalists in mind. Here are some of the ways you can build a...

• October 16, 2008
• 4 comments

Interactive Literacy

by Mitchel Resnick
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What does it mean to be truly literate with new media? Certainly, it means more than the ability to send email and browse websites. Recent commentaries on new media literacy have emphasized the importance of the ability to analyze media critically and the ability to participate actively in online communities. Those abilities are clearly important. But I feel these commentaries haven't paid enough attention to another important aspect of new media literacy: the ability to express oneself with new media. This aspect of literacy is sorely lacking in today's society: very few people are able to express themselves fluently with...

• October 13, 2008
• 1 comment

Student Innovation Team Explores Needs of Young Adults

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project -- the innovation class that includes the first two Knight News Challenge programmer-journalists -- is moving forward rapidly. The six journalism master's students involved in the project started out exploring "conversations around news." As their instructor, I challenged them to build some kind of site or service that connects people to one another and to community news and information. After meeting with the staff of Gazette Communications (which, among other businesses, owns the daily newspaper and ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa), the class decided to target its work toward young adults, ages 20-35 in the Cedar...

• October 13, 2008
• No comments

The Includer
Episode 4
Phone + USB = Brilliant

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the ability to connect to peripherals, the phone becomes an open, expandable system. People can use phones as the heart of a computer system, in a similar way to a laptop or PC. They can write emails more easily, type messages for discussion groups, enter text into web-forms, etc. The ability to download information from the web and print it out will benefit the wider community.

• October 12, 2008
• 1 comment

Can the Internet have a heart?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I attended a conference on "Online Giving Marketplaces" at Stanford University this past week, which was a great gathering of online donation, volunteer, and social matchmaking sites like Kiva.org and GlobalGiving. The kind of organizations that are doing in the social service sector what sites like Prosper.com are doing in the commercial peer to peer space. One site among many worth checking out is ModestNeeds, which gives grants of up to $5,000 to average folks - for things like paying off overdue bills and rent, etc. In these challenging economic times it's a welcome and important service. One of the...

• October 11, 2008
• 3 comments

Printcasting Prototype Video

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I mentioned in my last post, Printcasting is finally beginning to take shape. We're very excited to have a working prototype that performs the very basic tasks: pulling in RSS feeds, flowing feeds into print templates, and placing targeted self-serve ads. You can see it in action in this 8-minute video: Printcasting Prototype Demo from Dan Pacheco on Vimeo. There are a lot of things that still aren't working in the prototype, which I get into in the video, and the design is still intentionally "wireframy" at this point. So why are we showing it? First, since our public...

• October 10, 2008
• No comments

A Talk with the Creator of Drupal

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here at the IdeaLab, we've been hearing a lot over the past year about Drupal, the open source content management system that is now powering tens of thousands of websites, including Ourmedia, The Onion, Sony Music artists (I really like myplay.com) and a host of citizen media sites.The other night I had dinner with Dries Buytaert, the self-effacing founder and creator of Drupal. Buytaert chiefly credits the tens of thousands of volunteer programmers who contributed to the platform's code base over the years. (Ourmedia is about to relaunch on Drupal 6; here's our beta site.) In this 11-minute interview,...

• October 8, 2008
• 1 comment

Medill Student Innovators Focus on Conversations Around News

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been almost a year and a half since a grant from the Knight Foundation allowed the Medill School to offer journalism master's program scholarships to experienced programmer-developers. Since then, on this Web site, I've been documenting the experience of the first two "programmer-journalists." Now things start to get interesting. For graduate students majoring in new media, Medill's one-year academic program ends with one of our "innovation project" classes. These are team-based classes in which the students are challenged to create a new digital or cross-media product. Sometimes these classes seek to apply proven technologies or business models to a...

• October 5, 2008
• No comments

Denver Open Media Close to Selecting Beta Sites

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you know of a Community Technology Center, Public Access TV station, University Media Program, or other non-commercial, community media outlet who may be interested in participating, please invite them to apply at http://deproduction.org/ombeta.

• October 5, 2008
• No comments

Why ReportingOn Launched on Django

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

First things first: ReportingOn is live, it's a public beta, and it's built in Django. Whoo-hoo! I have a long list of things to polish, add, tweak, revise, and rethink, but it was time to open the site up to users and let them help me figure it out. Last time I wrote about the options I was considering for Web development, I was leaning toward Django and away from Drupal. Here's why I gave up on Drupal for this project and moved on to Django: Drupal is a fantastic content management system out of the box, with little --...

• October 3, 2008
• 7 comments

The Includer
Episode 2
Year 2

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ricardo and I agreed on four priorities, in the order below, for our work on the Includer and marginal Internet access: What would you like to share online? What is our business value? What are new technical solutions? What technical skills might we encourage?

• October 3, 2008
• 3 comments

Are We Ready for Citizen Journateerism?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Thanks to massive adoption of blogging and other do-it-yourself Web 2.0 tools like Twitter we have seen an explosion in citizen journalism in recent years. That goes without saying on a blog like this. But there is a related trend emerging which is perhaps not so apparent. Lets (rather clumsily) call it Citizen Journateerism. Citizen Journateerism = Citizen Journalism + Volunteerism. Basically that means ordinary folks leveraging social media tools to help people in need. I'm not talking about political or community-relevant reporting and opinioning, which is certainly a kind of volunteer community service, but about the re-purposing of citizen...

• September 28, 2008
• 4 comments

Innovations in Storytelling: Using Comics for Journalism

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the summer, I saw an incredibly exciting piece of visual journalism over at USA TODAY. The production involved a mash-up of sorts between one of USA TODAY's bloggers, Twitter, some comic book artists, and a nifty bit of flash animation. You can check out the results here. There are a couple of things that got me excited. First, I just find it visually engaging. Next, it involves an unusual collaboration between comic book artists, a blogger, and online developers to produce something distinct. On a personal level, it warmed my heart that a "newspaper" was trying something this daring....

• September 25, 2008
• 1 comment

Wiki Our Next Segment

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I was pretty sad when Radio Open Source went off the air, because I thought they were tugging at the loose threads of something interesting, and they never got to properly unravel it. Breaking news and reporters getting leads from the short message service Twitter are interesting phenomena but I don't think they can create the kind of community that you need to bring an audience into reporting. Radio Open Source never quite got it -- they had great comments but the community stayed tiny. Still, they were breaking new ground. I've been keeping an eye on The Takeaway for...

• September 24, 2008
• No comments

Open Invitation to the Alliance for Community Media Conference

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Denver Open Media is hosting the Western Regional Alliance for Community Media Conference, Oct 23-25, 2008 in Denver, CO. We will be showcasing the Drupal Modules being developed to empower user-generated media in our communities through Public Access TV stations and Community Technology Centers. The conference will be highlighting the new media technologies and efforts that allow access centers to operate on a streamlined, user-driven model. Deproduction has assembled a stellar Drupal Development team since being awarded the Knight NewsChallenge award, and they are making significant progress towards the first benchmark of our process: developing a robust set of custom...

• September 20, 2008
• 1 comment

Meet The Printcasting Team

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the most exciting times in the development of any new product is when concepts begin to give way to reality. That's the phase we're entering now with Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing and make print advertising affordable for local businesses. After three months of working with conceptual mockups and user interface flows, we're finally able to click through a set of Web pages connected to a database that generates simple magazine-style PDF files. In the coming weeks and months we'll be sharing more of that with you, starting with videos and, as soon...

• September 16, 2008
• No comments

iamnews: A Global DIY Newsroom

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As one of the very early members of the Online News Association, I've attended my share of ONA conferences over the years. This year, I wasn't able to attend the annual gathering that ended in Washington, DC, over the weekend. Instead, I spent most of last weekend at TechCrunch50, a technology conference in San Francisco now in its second year put on by TechCrunch, one of those upstart startups that may put the San Jose Mercury News out of business some day. Reviews of the ONA conference have been mostly positive, especially for the keynote delivered by my friend...

• September 15, 2008
• 2 comments

Start with the Low Hanging Fruit with Software Development

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A key component of Freedom Fone is the software development we will undertake over the next two years. Last weekend Brenda and I met with a handful of people who have experience with open source development projects like those we'll be undertaking. We got to share our ideas and experiences to date developing the Freedom Fone prototype, and we benefited from their contributions and suggestions. Much of what they recommended resonates with some of David Cohn's blogs and the importance of being iterative. See for example: Eliminating the Fear of Being Open Growing a Community and The Importance of Being...

• September 15, 2008
• 1 comment

The Travails of Taking a CPU Tower from Zimbabwe to France

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brenda and I went to Paris recently for a development launch and brainstorming meeting for Freedom Fone. In addition to picking the brains of a small handful of experts in the field, we thought it would be a good opportunity to have some of our equipment assessed. So in my bag I packed my own laptop, and digital audio recorder, a Voice Blue 4-SIM card GSM Gateway, and a full sized CPU tower, as well as the various power cables and USB connectors for this equipment. The tower didn't fit in the elegant, cabin sized roller bag we'd hoped it...

• September 15, 2008
• No comments

Challenges for the Collegiate Press, Part 2

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my opinion everything the new media people are working on equals better journalism, and more accessible content. But it's not enough. Newspapers have to find a way to become central to the exchange of information and ideas in their communities if they want to start making more money.

• September 12, 2008
• 2 comments

Public Information Done Right

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I spent Tuesday in Washington DC at Websites Without Walls. A nine hour trip for a four hour meeting always makes me nervous, but we're passionately interested in seeing New York City match Washington DC's astounding wealth of open public data. Never knew that the District publishes an astounding wealth of usable public information? Me neither. I made the trip to find out more. While New York City busies itself posting PDFs of city agency documents within 10 days of their publication, the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technical Officer is churning out no less than 261 live...

• September 10, 2008
• 1 comment

Listen and Learn: Recording in Harare's Cafes

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Even though we're still a few months, and a telephony server with a PCI slot, short of our first deployment, the Freedom Fone creative team has been hitting Harare's arts scene. In an effort to train our ears and give our digital audio editing fingers a work out, we've been recording some audio at a few public events. A few lessons we've learnt along the way: 1. If you're at a public event with a sound system, make friends with the sound engineer At a discussion evening at Harare's Book Cafe on 21 August, we were able to get right...

• September 3, 2008
• 3 comments

Gustav Information Sources

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There is a great selection of new media information channels already to go even before Gustav has touched down in the U.S. These include: A Gustav Information Center on the social networking site Ning: A government Gustav Twitter feed A Gustav Wiki with centralized information: And a whole slew of live video feeds and news broadcasts on LiveNewsCameras.com Please help spread the word to those who can benefit from the resources now in place, many put together by volunteers....

• August 31, 2008
• 1 comment

What's a Good Challenge for a J-School Innovation Class?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I noted in my last post, the first two programmer-journalists (whose journalism education was financed via scholarships from the Knight News Challenge) will be among the students enrolled in a Medill School "innovation project" class. Between now and when the class starts (Sept. 23), we have to decide what the focus of the project will be. In my experience with previous projects, the key is to come up with an interesting challenge or question for the students to explore. Right now there are two competing ideas, neither of them yet specific enough to organize the class around: Civic engagement...

• August 25, 2008
• 4 comments

An Olympic Moment for Mobile Media?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There has been a lot of hype in mobile media circles about how the Summer Olympics are signaling a watershed moments in broadcasting and media access on the fly. According to Nielson, 23 per cent US and 17 per cent of UK mobile internet users will be tracking the games through their phone browser, and 45 of US mobile video users will watch the Olympics on their handsets. Are those significant statistics and if so HOW significant? Depends on who you talk to. Based on the fact that only 3 of US cell phone users regularly watched video via...

• August 19, 2008
• 2 comments

Partner With a University to Jump-Start Innovation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dan Pacheco and Chris O'Brien wrote recently for IdeaLab about ways newspapers (or other media) can innovate successfully. One approach that wasn't mentioned (yet): partner with a university. Academic institutions are full of smart faculty members, including experts on innovation, technology, audience behavior, journalism and the business of media. Even more important, they are full of young people who are "wired" for the contemporary media world and can do amazing things if given an interesting challenge and the right amount (not too much, not too little) of coaching and direction. At the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where...

• August 15, 2008
• 1 comment

From iPhone to Facebook to Live Photo-Blogging

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On some level I was live photo blogging (plogging?) from that party, complete with comments on some of the images. If we could create an application, which wouldn’t be hard, to upload iPhone pictures automatically to a blog or to the front page of a newspaper website the possibilities are endless.

• August 14, 2008
• 2 comments

None of Your Business Model

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"What's the business model?" It's a question I hear again and again at meetings and events. The existing model for newspapers is quickly unraveling, so we need a 'new new thing' to serve some of the vital functions that newspapers used to. Whatever that new new thing may be, it is supposed to have a business model: a business model is what separates the well-meaning amateur from the sustainable enterprise. It is vital for securing loans or venture capital. You can't be serious about sustaining a venture unless you have a plan for a business that will sustain that venture....

• August 10, 2008
• 6 comments

Maps Worth Looking At

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette learned this week that two of our recent projects, Who's Running for What and The Garbage Game were listed among the notable Knight-Batten entries this year. Most notably, that means we aren't finalists. Some of the finalists, though, are pretty noteworthy. One I hadn't seen before is JD Land, which maps real estate development projects (proposed, completed and underway) in Washington DC's Southeast area. It is pretty smart stuff, and it reminded me that I've been looking for an excuse to point people to another mapping project that has really taken off: Habitat Map is a crowd sourcing...

• August 6, 2008
• No comments

Five Ways to Gather and Report News with Twitter

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I read Chris O'Brien's IdeaLab post about the latest Twitterquake and the 10 (so far) comments with a great deal of interest. After all, ReportingOn borrows a great deal from Twitter, and I've been writing about the exponentially growing micro-blogging service for around a year now. I can't help but notice that a commenter or two seem to think that anyone actually takes is seriously when Twitter asks its base question of "What are you doing?" This is what makes it easy for those who haven't sipped from the Tweetstream to write it off as crap for tweens. Actually, that's...

• August 3, 2008
• 3 comments

Is Twitter the Newsroom of the Future?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I was sitting at my desk at the San Jose Mercury News on Tuesday when I first heard about the Los Angeles earthquake through an inter-office message from a colleague. My next instinct was to click over to my Twitter account to see what was going on. Like a lot of folks who have developed a cultish appreciation for the microblogging service, I've increasingly found that Twitter has become the place get breaking news before it hits online news sites or television. I follow Twitter through a desktop application called Twhirl. Since I only follow a limited number of folks...

• July 30, 2008
• 13 comments

My Advice to Knight on Local Democracy Online

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight Foundation is beginning to make some waves in local democracy circles. And I am not just saying that because they fund this blog. Earlier this year they hosted a conference with community foundations on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, then they announced the Knight Center of Digital Excellence focused on universal access to the "digital town square," and most recently announced a commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy and $24 million in matching funds for community foundations (see my collection of online civic engagement resources for community foundations referenced in a...

• July 30, 2008
• 3 comments

The Blogosphere Needs to Mature -- But How?

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm leaving Chicago, physically tired but mentally invigorated. 1. I was inspired by the loft and good natured vibe of Knight's mission. 2. Took time to rethink my personal blogging motivation and experience. 3. Worked more on pushing spot.us into existence. (latest design work here). But in this post I want to take a moment to examine the evolution of technology reporting, particularly from large/mainstream technology blogs (think TechCrunch). I am in part inspired by a blog post from Robert Scoble on how tech blogs have failed. The reason I'm interested in this space isn't just because I'm a huge...

• July 29, 2008
• 1 comment

Use Ready-to-Wear to Avoid the Custom CMS Albatross

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It’s always tempting to be cutting edge and build custom web publishing tools for a new web site. But we've found real benefits to using off-the-shelf content management tools -- especially for a small operation without an in-house web developer.

• July 26, 2008
• 2 comments

Is There a Marketplace for Local Storytelling?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently took another look at Organic City, a project launched in 2006 to provide residents of Oakland, California with a place to listen to and share stories about happenings in their respective neighborhoods or to take audio and video tours of the city - all created by locals. The stories are tagged to specific locations in the city via a Google map, and the site also offers a special mobile version allowing stories to be uploaded and downloaded via a cell phone or other mobile device. Organic City is one of thousands of locative media projects created over the...

• July 24, 2008
• 1 comment

Visualizing the News

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Visualization tool: ManyEyes from JD Lasica on Vimeo. At the Future of Civic Media conference at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from the co-creator of Many Eyes. Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, described some of the uses for this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don't know" and "I don't recall." Here's a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and...

• July 21, 2008
• No comments

Huang Qi, Journalist, Formally Arrested

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Huang Qi, the Chinese dissident who had been working to uncover information about school buildings that collapsed during the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, China, was formally arrested last week for illegally possessing state secrets. He had been in detention for weeks. Huang had already served five years in prison on charges of inciting subversion after publishing many articles critical of the government on his Web site, http://64tianwang.com/. He claimed that he was badly beaten in jail, and suffers headaches and depression. The parents of children who died in collapsed school buildings have been considered a possible threat to the...

• July 21, 2008
• No comments

Hero Reports Website

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The "Hero Reports" website project turns the anti-terrorism "See Something, Say Something" campaign on its head, to visualize security as civic connectedness.

• July 17, 2008
• No comments

Participants of 'Our City Our Voices' Release First Videos

by Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• July 16, 2008
• No comments

Polymeme Diversifies the Echo Chamber

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The iPhone is released. The world stops. While surfing around on the Internet today, you would be entirely forgiven for assuming that the only news worth talking about is the release of Apple's 3G iPhone. Of course, there are plenty of other notable and interesting conversations taking place online (among them: the ethics of for-profit fundraisers, a Danish island's march toward energy independence, and how English is "evolving into a language we may not even understand") but most of us don't know how to find those conversations as we navigate through our personal echo chamber of bookmarked websites, subscribed RSS...

• July 11, 2008
• 2 comments

What Gets Talked About Most on Idea Lab

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rather than trying to talk about what is being talked about and covered most on this blog, here's another way of representing it: The above is a "word cloud" created on Wordle, a tool that sorts through text on a webpage, blog, or document and spits out a visual representation giving prominence to the most frequently appearing (source) words. Not surprising that words such as "news" are large and prominent on IdeaLab, but look at the size of "data" and such words as "can" and "will".BTW, it appears that Wordle only indexes current discussion, a kind of snapshot in time,...

• July 10, 2008
• 2 comments

Coder-journalist: Governments Should Open Up Their Data

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan Mark, one of the first two winners of our journalism scholarships for computer programmers, wonders why it's so hard to get usable government data. I wrapped up my second quarter of journalism school and my daily reporting class a couple of weeks ago. Learning firsthand what goes into a simple news article gave me a new-found respect for the work that's required. Making call after call, leaving messages with people who will never call you back, and then taking notes while paying attention to what somebody is saying is quite a difficult way to spend a day. The Internet...

• July 10, 2008
• 2 comments

Defining Civic Media at MIT

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here at MIT, summer means time to dig into our research. A group of us at the Center for Future Civic Media is working on a white paper defining "civic media." We are interested in how civic media is empowering new user-creators, with related effects on governing elites. Inspiring people to take action, through access to information and the public spotlight, is a familiar goal to those of us on the team who used to be journalists. We used to facilitate the agency of an isolated person or community to make the government act for justice or change. It often...

• July 7, 2008
• No comments

Life in a Failed State Certainly Isn't Boring

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's hard to convey how important it is for those of us "left behind" to vicariously experience the richness of these networking opportunities.

• July 7, 2008
• 1 comment

Two Videos on Participatory Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I believe IdeaLab readers would benefit from a wide range of posts related to important developments taking place in the participatory media movement. With that in mind, here are two interviews that bear on that subject: The first is an 11-minute talk with Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, maker of Miro at getmiro.com. Miro's an important, rapidly maturing application that lets you watch and subscribe to millions of channels of content created by anyone with something to say (you can pull down any videos with an RSS feed, for example). You can also browse...

• July 7, 2008
• No comments

Starting Small and the Importance of Being Iterative

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The short story: People are starting to ask me how they can get involved in Spot.Us. The site won't really be ready until the Fall, but I hate telling people to wait. In an effort to start community building, so we don't lose track of ideas and to keep everything transparent, I'm happy to point people to the Spot Us Community Wiki. It's not high-tech but this wiki, combined with a blog and a third party e-commerce solution is enough to organize "community funded reporting." If you are a citizen and have a story idea or a reporter and want...

• July 3, 2008
• No comments

$100 Laptop Redesign

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A new laptop design for the one-laptop-per-child project is being worked out. They have removed the keyboard and replaced it by a touch screen. This turns into a touch sensitive keyboard during normal operation, and the laptop can be used as an e-book reader otherwise. The price is $75, which sounds too good to be true. I used to be very critical of the OLPC project during its earlier stages because I could not understand the rationale behind giving a personal laptop to each child, instead of having them access a shared PC in a kiosk for example. The kiosk...

• July 3, 2008
• 3 comments

The Print on Demand Revolution

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As I delve more into Printcasting, I've been learning about the relatively new and growing POD movement -- which stands for Print on Demand. And every new leaf I turn over is another confirmation of what we suspected when we originally entered Printcasting into the Knight News Challenge. There's an all-out technology revolution happening with print which, until now, newspapers have largely missed out on. Here are just a few examples. For this first one, I have to thank Medill student and journalistic-programmer Brian Boyer who introduced me to the service. When I met Brian at the MIT Future of...

• July 2, 2008
• 11 comments

Try Basecamp to Organize Tools for Projects

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the past several years I've been involved in a variety of projects ranging from education to startups. All have involved collaboration, and in most cases the people involved were not in a single location.One tool has risen above the others for helping keep projects running smoothly. It's called Basecamp, an online collaborative-organizing system, and it's gaining adherents all the time.Basecamp was created by the team at 37signals, a company that offers a suite of Web-based applications aimed at helping you get things done. 37signals is also the crew behind Ruby on Rails, an open-source Web development framework that has...

• July 2, 2008
• 1 comment

A "Programmer-Journalist" Contemplates Careers

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Halfway through his Medill graduate journalism education, programmer Brian Boyer reflects on the paths that might lie ahead: When I first spoke to Rich Gordon about becoming a "programmer-journalist," the meaning of the term was unclear. Not being the sort to be concerned by ambiguity, I dove into journalism school with no plans for what might come after. Six months into my re-education, I still don't know what to do with myself, but the potential jobs for which a programmer-journalist would be well suited are becoming clear. I will try and enumerate them here. Also, I will try and avoid...

• July 1, 2008
• 1 comment

Prepping Printcasting for Mass Adoption

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've spent the last couple weeks with my head in the wires, so to speak, thinking about things like technology platforms. And lest you hear that term and begin to tune out, stay with me. The reality is that in today's media, all of us are need to be a little semi-geek (to quote Amy Gahran from last year's News Challenge contest). First, I have a significant decision to report. After a lot of thought, discussion and hand-wringing, we've finally settled on a technology platform for Printcasting: Drupal. And we have contracting needs galore. If you're a Drupal developer (or...

• June 30, 2008
• No comments

Exploring a Range of Development Options

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the past few weeks, I've ramped up development of ReportingOn. Of course, for me, that means I'm spending time early in the morning and late at night exploring different options, creating mockups, ditching everything I've done and starting over again. Here's a few paths of exploration I've been down lately: Drupal: Drupal 6 isn't ready for what I need it to do. The Views and CCK modules aren't up to speed yet, or maybe I just haven't found the right set of instructions yet. That brings me to my biggest complaint about Drupal: Although there's a huge open source...

• June 30, 2008
• 8 comments

How Technologists Can Boost a Journalism Classroom

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• June 29, 2008
• 1 comment

World of Digitalmediacraft

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There is one reason and one reason alone that I haven't catastrophically dropped out of college yet: I avoid World of Warcraft as though it were the plague. In case you are unfamiliar, World of Warcraft is an incredibly popular game made by Blizzard Entertainment in which players take on the role of an adventurer in a Tolkein-esque virtual world alongside thousands of other people. Obviously the game must be fun, but what makes it dangerously addictive is that the more you play the more you can do and the better you can do it. The result is an incredibly...

• June 27, 2008
• 3 comments

Journalists Need to Update Stories Online

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For people without their own web site or blog, a newspaper article can become their primary identity online. Local news sites face this responsibility most often and most intensely. Every article or blog on the internet can become part of the permanent record, but the publisher doesn't control how and when people access this information- for the most part, search engines become the gatekeepers. However, news organizations can and should take responsibility for ensuring their piece of the permanent record provides their best understanding of reality. JD Lasica (also an Idealab blogger) quoted Terry Heaton riffing on a post by...

• June 26, 2008
• 3 comments

How Community Radio Becomes the 'Voice of the Village'

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It all started in the Tetherless Computing Lab at the University of Waterloo. Our research group led by Prof. S. Keshav prototyped an extremely low-cost software and hardware platform called KioskNet, for providing Internet connectivity in rural areas. The first pilot deployment was done in May 2006 in the village of Anandpuram in the Vizag district of Andhra Pradesh (India), and has since been followed by deployments in West Bengal (India) and Ghana (Africa). But we soon realized that providing a communication infrastructure to rural areas is not even half of the story. It is useless unless appropriate applications are...

• June 23, 2008
• 2 comments

Empowering Poor Communities through Mobile

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is one vision of the mobile future aimed at one of the most (technologically) overlooked segments of the U.S. population...low income and ethnic communities. Imagine a Latino youth living in East Oakland, California - one of the toughest urban neighborhoods in America: "My name is Jose Gutierrez. I am 18 years old and live in East Oakland, off of International and 24th Streets. We don't have a computer in my house, and other than Spanish language TV and radio we get all of our information on our mobile phones on LOCOBEAT (fictional). -On my cell phone I have my...

• June 22, 2008
• 11 comments

TimesPeople a Puzzling Piece of NYT Development

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

TimesPeople is the beginning of a social network from the New York Times. Sort of. It's a pleasant interface and a clever application, living in the browser as a Firefox add-on that doesn't get in the way of my NYT browsing. It's simple: Hit the recommend button on any story or blog post and a link shows up in your activity stream and your friends can see that you recommended a story. The app is supposed to notice when I rate a restaurant or add a comment to a story, too, although I don't see that happening after a quick...

• June 20, 2008
• 2 comments

Making Print Pubs a Vital Part of Web 2.0

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the 13 years I've been involved in online media, I've learned firsthand how dangerous it can be to be lead by ideology. Ideals are great, but if you become too invested in them they can blind you to the real needs of the customers you're trying to serve. And when it comes to innovation - which is part of the brand of The Bakersfield Californian newspaper where I work - the temptation to drink your own Kool-Aid is huge. So it's not without some humility that I come to you today with a confession. My name is Dan Pacheco,...

• June 18, 2008
• 6 comments

Takeaways from the Future of Civic Media Conference

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some takeaways from the Future of Civic Media conference, showcasing Knight News Challenge winners, that ended yesterday at the MIT Media Lab in Boston: • All in all, it was a fascinating gathering of some of the real thought leaders who will be driving new media forward in the coming years. The program grew stronger as it went along. • The Media Lab setting was inspirational. This was my first visit here, and the mix of astonishingly bright students and faculty meshed well with us ruffians from the outside world. One suggestion for future gatherings: Invite student and members of...

• June 14, 2008
• No comments

Live-Blogging Future of Civic Media Gathering

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- I am in the swanky Stata Center at MIT for the conference on "The Future of Civic Media," put on by the new Center for Future Civic Media. Nearly all the Idea Lab bloggers are here in attendance as the Knight Foundation is using this gathering to help all News Challenge winners get to know each other and collaborate more. It's also a chance for this new Center at MIT (which got $5 million in funding from Knight) to show some off some of its early work and thinking. Mitch Resnick, another Idea Lab blogger who...

• June 12, 2008
• 4 comments

Civic Media Innovation Camps

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• June 11, 2008
• No comments

Election Day Could Be Our Own Pangia Day

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When the filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED), her wish was to create one day where people across the world gathered at the same time to watch films produced by international filmmakers. Best known for her film Control Room(film), Noujaim believed the power of the films could help the audience see beyond our differences to the humanity that binds us together. Or, as the tag line declared, "4 hours. 24 films. A new way to see the world." Pangia Day, as it came to be called, took place on May 10th at 18:GMT, 11 am PDT, at...

• June 10, 2008
• No comments

Will 3G iPhone Help Push Geo-Based News?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Apple's announcement yesterday of a GPS-enabled iPhone is further fanning the flames of excitement around location based services and mobile social networking. Being able to connect with friends (and strangers), and to interact with your immediate environment via your smartphone is the new new thing. But we still have a ways to go with all of this mobile-enabled location activity... The economic opportunity is a big one, which is precisely why so many services are coming on line, and why so much attention is being paid to open mobile platforms (i.e., Android and LiMo) that will fertilize the space. In...

• June 10, 2008
• No comments

Smart Mobs for News Participation

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Following is part 3 of my 3-part series on open APIs and crowdsourcing community news. Part 1, Part 2.At the NetSquared conference for nonprofits in San Jose on May 27-28, one of the most intriguing projects I heard about was Social Actions, a project to tie together disparate cause movements through an open API that would aggregate information about dozens of different campaigns and allow users to take action to further a cause. "Our mission is to put actions in front of people who are most likely to take part," Peter told me. A few hours after our chat,...

• June 8, 2008
• 2 comments

Laptops in the Most Disadvantaged Areas of Uruguay

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The following is a translation of a post by Rising Voices grantee and Plan Ceibal coordinator Pablo Flores, who details some of the upcoming challenges and opportunities as the OLPC project in Uruguay spreads to the capital city, Montevideo. If we look at how the next phases of expansion of Plan Ceibal (OLPC in Uruguay), it is apparent that we are about to face some new challenges. The arrival of the plan to the capital, Montevideo, next year will bring a new unprecedented dimension to the project which involves the most marginalized communities in the country. For the first time,...

• June 7, 2008
• No comments

Reforming Media Will Help Reform Conferences

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Journalism That Matters "The New Pamphleteers," held earlier this week in Minneapolis, every session meant horizontal communication: no one on a stage, a circle of chairs with the facilitator at the same level as anyone else. John Nichols is most certainly one of my favorite organizers of the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), going on now in Minneapolis. He visited the earlier, far smaller New Pamphleteers and represented what is wrong with the NCMR model of conference. He dropped in without having attended the rest of the New Pamphleteers, without having had the experiences all the rest of...

• June 7, 2008
• No comments

We Need a PowerPoint to Make Games

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"Playing the News" Update - Distil Interactive I just returned from Ottawa where Nicole Rinerand I went to collaborate with Distil Interactive. We spent two days in their office and it was a positive learning experience. I should make a premise that Distil is trying to build a system that will allow non tech-savvy users, with little knowledge of coding, to create a game or game-like environment in a simple way and in a short time. The system is based off XML, flash and C. Right now the XML code is what controls what is being displayed on screen and...

• June 6, 2008
• 1 comment

EveryBlock Does Special Report on Corruption Case

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've launched our first EveryBlock "special report" -- an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation "Operation Crooked Code." As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We've been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web. However, over the past few months as we've been building the site, we've come across a number of types of information that don't exactly fit the EveryBlock mold....

• June 3, 2008
• No comments

Give the Public Access to Public Records

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm on an open API kick here at IdeaLab, so here's the second of three entries on the potential of application programming interface for news organizations. (I'll post a final video interview on Monday.) This is a way to give the public true access to public records. Oddly, that rarely happens now, with media organizations playing gatekeeper and releasing stories through the editorial process -- but not the raw data itself. In this 8-minute video interview I conducted yesterday at the NetSquared conference -- notice the venue: Cisco, not a media company -- founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle discusses Louisville-based YourMapper.com,...

• May 29, 2008
• 1 comment

Should We Teach with Open Source Software?

by Pam McAllister-Johnson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Western Kentucky University if one of seven academic programs working on a joint Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge grant (Ithaca College, Kansas State, Michigan State, Saint Michael's College, the Univeristy of Kansas, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas). Three student-developed projects were presented at the Online News Association conference last year. This summer, the innovative digital news projects are being tested at newspapers. We were instructed to use open-source software for our projects. Open-source is free. In the open-source community, there are comparable programs for every retail package produced by the big companies. Open-source software can be well- documented...

• May 28, 2008
• 6 comments

NY Times to Test Crowdsourcing Its Data

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

News about a potentially big deal in the newspaper industry broke just before the holiday weekend. No, not another story about a chain swallowing another chain, or news about the formation of yet another online advertising platform that's doomed to underperform. Instead, this was a kind of news that only a geek would love: MediaBistro reported, and Read/Write Web republished, word that the New York Times is planning to release an open API this summer. Huh? An API, as Wikipedia reminds us, is short for application programming interface. Those of us in or near Silicon Valley are well aware of...

• May 27, 2008
• 1 comment

Still Seeking Coders Interested in Journalism

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's now been almost exactly a year since we announced (thanks to a Knight News Challenge grant) that programmer-developers could earn full scholarships to study journalism in the master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. We've got plenty of scholarship money still available -- but we have not been overwhelmed with applications. Here's where we stand: Two scholarship winners are now almost midway through their Medill studies. A third candidate will enroll next month. And we still have the equivalent of six full scholarships yet to award. From the beginning, I've felt that this project's biggest challenge would...

• May 26, 2008
• 13 comments

From GeoGraffiti to GeoJournalism

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently began playing around with a new service called GeoGraffiti, which allows you to post or access voice notes or "markers" while at a specific physical location using any cell phone. I like the idea of localized, user generated information which GeoGraffiti is a platform for. Everything from getting traffic tips to the real time reviews and tips on local restaurants or places of interest. Think of it as a kind of mobile Yelp (user generated reviews on business services, entertainment, and events) using voice instead of just text. The other nice feature of GeoGraffiti is that is allows...

• May 25, 2008
• 2 comments

YouTube Lauches New Citizen News Channel

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week YouTube announced it's very own citizen news channel, and assigned a news manager named Olivia Ma, to run it. You can apparently reach her at citizennews@youtube.com Just for fun, here is our own Dan Gillmor, talking on YouTube about how web censorship is affecting citizen journalism, posted prior to the launch of the YouTube Citizen news channel. Hopefully we will see more of him and his students, and the great work of such projects as Global Voices there....

• May 22, 2008
• No comments

Any There at Where 2.0?

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Where 2.0 happened May 12-14 at the San Francisco Airport Marriot just south of the city. This annual event, now in its 4th year, is a strange mix of grassroots geo-enthusiasts and entrepreneurial geo-hackers. Where 2.0 is primarily a developer's conference, so the majority of time and certainly the focus was on tools and how they function and less on how these tools are being used. (Or not being used. For the most part, location apps are in beta.) There was definitely the Field-of-Dreams-feeling, "build it and they will come." The exceptions were the tools and apps in the social...

• May 19, 2008
• 3 comments

Ceibal Jam! Developing Apps for the XO Laptop

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• May 14, 2008
• 2 comments

Knight Announces News Challenge Winners

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hello from sunny Las Vegas! I am here for the E&P Interactive Media Conference at the Rio Hotel, but also to welcome the next round of winners in the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge. These folks will soon be blogging here on Idea Lab, and it's quite a group of winners. (To see the whole list of winners, go here, and for Knight's press release on the winners, check this out.) Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibarguen (pictured below) announced the winners at the conference this morning. I think the most exciting aspect of the next round of winners is...

• May 14, 2008
• 2 comments

Medill Grad Students Study Locative Journalism

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At least once a day I ask myself how locative media can be used to more fully engage and connect folks to their communities. The question for this blog is a bit more focused: how can locative media and geo-localized content find form in the art and craft of journalism. And then to my surprise and excitement, LoJo, a new voice, enters the frey and expands the discussion. From www.lojoconnect.com: Shorthand for locative journalism, LoJo is the name of a project launched by a team of Northwestern University graduate students to study the intersection of journalism and emerging location-based technologies....

• May 12, 2008
• No comments

Newspapers Suffer from Marketing Myopia Online

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• May 11, 2008
• No comments

Connecting People, Content, and Community

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the main goals of online information design is to present content in a way that allows users/readers to find what they want. Tagging, the digital extension of newspaper sections, is one technique used on just about every modern news website as a way to help users browse or search, but that isn't the only way it can be useful. Through tagging we can use computers to intelligently distribute content and enhance the media conversation. I'll take the context of a global aggregation system and go through the way I think this can be done, walking through the steps...

• May 10, 2008
• 2 comments

Journalism Class Should be Mandatory in High School

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today I'm publishing a guest post from Ryan Mark, one of the first two journalist-programmers attending the Medill School of Journalism on a Knight News Challenge scholarship. Ryan is a 2004 graduate of Augustana College, where he earned a BA in computer science. He later served as technology director for ZapTel Corp., a company that sells prepaid long-distance phone cards. Ryan's guest post: One thing I’ve discovered through talking to people, including teachers and others in education, is that the Internet is encouraging more people to contribute. Well, obviously, right? I think we are just starting to learn how to...

• May 6, 2008
• 1 comment

Related Content in 100 words: An Update

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Related Content will provide an easy way for people visiting a Drupal-powered newspaper site to connect articles to past reports, opinion pieces, letters to the editor, or feature stories- to relate any piece of content on the web site to any other piece. This engages readers with the lowest barrier to participation while providing to other readers and the news organization the value of deep links. A plug-in interface for other modules to suggest related content to be connected and a data architecture that could allow relating content between sites has been completed, and work continues on the user interface....

• May 6, 2008
• No comments

A Collage of Business Models from NewsTools2008

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some of the most interesting discussions and demonstrations at last week's NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley centered around making the changing news landscape sustainable. Here are some of the ideas I heard, along with a few of my own: 1) News Consultancies: Leveraging local information channels & relationships to connect average people with local influencers and experts. Examples: -An online/offline service which people pay journalists to help them navigating local political/business channels. i.e, the fastest way to get a building permit approved or knowing which local developer to talk to about a project. -recommending a trustworthy plumber of mechanic. This idea...

• May 5, 2008
• 8 comments

Finding Local Community Online

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been thinking a lot about just how "local" most people want to be online. The greatest myth about the Internet is that people only want to go to world online. That they only care about creating social networks with friends or people like themselves with similar interests from thousands of miles away. It is as if the cross-dressing organic gardener from Sweden connecting with those like themselves on the other side of the world (someone I met once who shared his tipping point experience with the power of the Internet) has more virtue than enabling a plant swap online...

• May 2, 2008
• 2 comments

13 Ways to Talk to a Programmer

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

[With apologies to Wallace Stevens.] If you decide to venture beyond talking about how your news organization's site should work into actually changing how it does work, there's one essential skill you'll have to learn: how to talk to a programmer. Most nonprogrammers have no idea how to communicate their idea for a new feature or a whole new website in a way that's going to be useful to the person who's actually building that site. Here are thirteen tips to get you started on the road to fluency: Learn how to write a spec. One of the biggest frustrations...

• April 30, 2008
• 1 comment

Signal-to-Noise and Related Content

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Related Content: If you're in California's bay area, don't miss Drupal Day on Friday May 3, a special open session of NewsTools2008's mixing up journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs. Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio. Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools. I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can't. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem. As mentioned by IdeaLab bloggers and elsewhere, solving this problem is a...

• April 29, 2008
• 1 comment

Tying it All Together

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• April 27, 2008
• No comments

Locative Media in the Newsroom

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a short sampling of some of the ways that mainstream media in integrating locative (location-based) technology tools - some of which already been discussed on this blog. The folks at LoJoConnect are also conducting a survey of how newsrooms are using locative media. Take the short survey here and pass it along...they will be sharing the results. For folks intersted in locative media and news, it will be one of the topics covered at this weeks NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley. Hope to see you there!...

• April 27, 2008
• No comments

Seero Makes Location the Center of the Story

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Seero, a new startup, is a "live on location," geo-broadcasting online app that mixes gps and video streaming by broadcasting and mapping in real-time. With the service, you broadcast live video, geo-tagging the content in real-time as you go. If folks are logged on to the site, they can follow in you in real-time; or if they aren't online at the moment, the content, including the geo-tag is archived and accessible. The application highlights exploration. And to date, their most prominent geo-broadcasters are those journeying the world, but as with any broadcast, it's only as good as the content. I've...

• April 27, 2008
• 1 comment

Open Source Flash Games

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is another update from our research assistant on the "Playing the News" project. The team has been exploring "mini-games" that would provide a challenge as players move through the information from the news stories. Fabio has discovered some open source flash sites that might help. "As I mentioned in my earlier post, this week I started looking into open source flash games that could be adapted for our purpose. After some research on the web, I found this website http://www.flashadvisor.com/movie/index.php?viewCat=24 . It's called Flash Advisor and it's a collection of resources for Flash programmers and what not. I went...

• April 25, 2008
• 6 comments

Tell Me You Hear the Writing on the Wall?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Microsoft's Tell Me subsidiary announced the launch of a new audio service for the BlackBerry which allows the user to conduct local business search, get directions or traffic information, etc. using voice commands. Apparently, by uttering a singe word like "coffee" your GPS enabled Blackberry will do an automatic search (in this case via Microsoft Live Search) and provide you with the nearest cafe links, directions, phone numbers, etc. That's a cool feature to have, especially as our "smart" phones get smaller and their screens way too damn small to read. Of course voice activated software has been around for...

• April 24, 2008
• No comments

A Coder Practices Multimedia Journalism -- with Open Source Tools

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, the first two programmer-journalists whose Medill education is being financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships, have begun their second academic quarter (of four). They are reporting in Medill's Chicago newsroom and taking our introductory new media class, Interactive Techniques. For the new media class, they (like all the other students) are required to identify a topic that they will monitor and blog about it at least five times per week. All the students are required to set up and manage the technology underpinning the blog as well -- using Wordpress. Ryan's blog is called Digital...

• April 23, 2008
• 4 comments

ManyEyes: Data-Rich Features on the Cheap

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The web offers news organizations whole new ways to present complex stories to readers, but even the emergence of free tools hasn't made online databases or Google Maps mashups a daily commonplace in your average news organization's website. Often, that's because the effort involved in building a rich, complex visualization is just too high for it to become an everyday occurrence. But what if those days are coming to a close? Enter ManyEyes, a free service created by one of IBM's research labs that allows near-instant interactive visualizations of a data set. Your Excel spreadsheet of public job salaries and...

• April 23, 2008
• 1 comment

'Digital New Deal' Needs Real Life Counterpart

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

An interesting piece appeared in the Friday, April 11 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, calling for a New Deal-like investment by America in youth and technology. The basic argument is that a new generation of technology savvy youth could be put to work leveraging their digital skills to create socially useful tools and engage in 21st Century public service. The OpEd sites a study listing the US as much lower down in rankings for broadband penetration (24th among industrialized countries), and uses this as reason to put millenials to work bettering our nation's online offerings. What such studies often...

• April 18, 2008
• No comments

Tools the Power Geeks Use

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We just wound up our Innovation Israel tour of Israel's tech community, and I'm in awe of the Silicon Valley alpha geeks I traveled with during the week. (Here's our group blog: Travelinggeeks.com.) Anyone in the media, publishing or tech business should be interested in the software applications and Web 2.0 tools (on the Web and on the desktop) that these folks use on an almost daily basis. Robert Scoble Scobleizer Firefox (web browser)FriendFeed (social media sharing) Google Reader (RSS news reader)Techmeme (a tech news dynamic link aggregator)Twitter (social network) GoogleTalk (live chat on Windows) Gmail (email) WordPress (blog software)Flickr...

• April 18, 2008
• 1 comment

Using a Database to Track NY Politicians

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago, I asked a question that I'm still chewing on: what good is all this data ? Sitting the programmers down with reporters is a great advance over abandoning them to some cold dark dungeon, but I think we've got a ways to go to come up with really smart uses of data and database driven content. So, here's one idea: what about a database that tracks local representatives and their plans once they've been pushed out by term limits: the next election will see the first term-limits enforced turnover on New York's City Council. Here's what...

• April 17, 2008
• 2 comments

Journalism Will Survive the Death of Its Institutions

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

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

• April 15, 2008
• 5 comments

Testing News Game Concepts

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is another report from our research assistant Fabio Berzaghi on the progress we are making on "Playing the News." Our struggle is to come up with embedded games that do not clash with the content of the topic or issue being addressed by the news organization. One of our "test" issues is a feature-type article on whether a potential pet owner should consider getting a cat or a dog. Here is a glimpse into what Fabio and Jesse Crafts-Finch were testing. Today I finally had a chance to work closely with Jesse, the producer/game designer at the Johnson Simulation...

• April 14, 2008
• No comments

Google Earth, New York Times Team Up

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In early March, the amazing Amy Gahran and I presented at Knight Digital Media Center seminar talking about new tools. I spoke about locative media, showed examples, learned a lot, and assured all the participants that they too could create multimedia editorial pieces using Google Earth's very simple toolkit. One participant from a medium-sized paper in New York State took me up on my offer to walk her through the process. She thought it was cool and wanted to bring it into her newsroom. We soon hit the wall: systemic infrastructure issues like only administrators can add applications (standard operating...

• April 13, 2008
• 3 comments

News Is Code #1: Attack of the Podium Weasels

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How can technology improve on even the best journalistic work and help journalists hold officials to account? In the first of the News Is Code series, we take a look at the recent Pulitzer won by Dana Priest and Anne Hull of the Washington Post for their series on conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

• April 13, 2008
• No comments

A Blogger Posse in Israel

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been busy the past two weeks readying for a last-minute trip to Israel. I'm honored to be past of a blogger/citizen journalist delegation heading to the Holy Land. The trip was arranged and paid for by the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest, which covers California and the greater West, though we'll be paying for some items. The goal is to meet and mingle with some of the best and brightest in Israel's tech field. Here's who's going: Robert Scoble, Craig Newmark, Susan Mernit, Cathy Brooks, Deb Schultz, Jeff Saperstein, Brad Reddersen, Renee Blodgett, Sarah Lacy...

• April 9, 2008
• 1 comment

Early Adapters Don't Conform to Conventional Use

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a recent meeting, a representative from Verizon and a former BET executive were discussing the seeming contradiction between the fact that African American males were early adapters of mobile technology, yet have a very low rate of posting videos on internet sites such as BET.Com and Youtube. BET tested the waters with two experiments. One involved fashion/entertainment and the other involved politics. Neither resulted in a flurry of posts, such as the ones MTV receives when it puts out a call for videos. What makes this interesting is that by all accounts African American males are not only early...

• April 8, 2008
• 1 comment

"Serious Game" Design 101

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we continue to develop the "Playing the News" game, we wanted to share the inside workings of the process. Our partners at the Johnson Simulation Center submitted this report on their production process. An Overview of the JSC Production Process This is a short description of the Johnson Simulation Center's production process; that is, how we go about designing and then producing a game. There are two stages to this process, pre-production and production. Pre-production is a time during which everything about how the game will play and be built is written down on paper. We define the...

• April 7, 2008
• No comments

How Will We Find the Programmer- Journalists?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Thanks to the Knight News Challenge, the Medill School of Journalism can offer full scholarships to our master's program to people with computer programming backgrounds. The first two are on campus now. We're looking for seven more -- and they're not easy to find. Part of the problem lies in the nature of what we're trying to do: attract people to journalism school who might not even be thinking about journalism school as an option. And part of the problem is that journalism school requires students to do things -- like interview strangers and do a lot of writing --...

• April 6, 2008
• 1 comment

Maps That Bring Issues & Places to Life

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent seminar I helped to facilitate, health organizations and online mapping experts came together to discuss how mapping could be used to address health disparities in California and the U.S. Some current examples of useful online mapping tools in the health arena include: Healthy City: Gathers census and other locally relevant data in Los Angeles and overlays that information on maps to provide insight on health, education, and social issues. Health Map: Tracks global outbreaks and provides up-to-date information on diseases via a mapping tool Whoissick: A user-generated site that allows anyone who has the flu, etc. to...

• April 6, 2008
• No comments

My Brief, Torrid Affair with the Nokia N95

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mobile media isn't just the future -- it's the present, big time. Recent research from the Pew Internet and American Life project shows that mobile devices (especially cell phones) are already the can't-do-without-it media tool of choice for many US demographics, especially among Hispanics and Latin Americans. (Read more analysis of this research, and what it can mean for community media at the Knight New Media Center.) Mobile is becoming a key channel for all kinds of content and communication -- so it should be a key focus for anyone providing news and information to almost any community. So why...

• April 2, 2008
• 5 comments

Keeping it All Together

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I wrote a long-ish piece that's up over at poynter.org about how we organize and manage our crew of three dozen citizen journalists. We've had to take some unexpected detours into CRM software, etc., to make sure people and stories don't fall through the cracks, but it seems to be working fairly well....

• April 2, 2008
• No comments

(Only) Two Visions for the Future of Blogging?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

An interesting battle of the blogging titans was covered in the "Bits" section of today's New York Times. It's basically an exchange between popular technology bloggers (and blog owners) Michael Arrington and Rafat Ali. Their differing views are worth examining because they touch on a hot button issue in blogging and journalism: How are new for-profit business models impacting blogging and the journalistic integrity of bloggers? In their personal scrap Mr. Arrington and Mr. Ali are tackling the difficult question of profitability models for blogging. Mr. Arrington seems to favor a monopoly approach, where blogs are brought together to form...

• March 30, 2008
• No comments

How Would You Engage People in Public Policy?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The one million figure is my number, but seriously, the UK government wants advice on how to engage lots of people online. Engage is the key word, the British Prime Minister already receives e-petitions online (nothing like that with the White House, Congress, or even one U.S. governor despite our constitutional right to petition) which is more about political expression than engagement. From the UK-based OpenDemocracy site you can learn about UK government's "desire to hold a national debate on a British Statement of Values as part of the Governance of Britain Green Paper." You can read a summary of...

• March 25, 2008
• 1 comment

Mini-Games As Bait?

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we work to create a news game that will engage readers, we are exploring what types of incentives we can use to meet the "gaming" expectations of hard-core players. We've decided to try embedding "mini-games" into the news game scenario. For example, a news game might create an environment where the reader is exploring the different aspects of the use of ethanol fuel. The player moves from one NPC to another to talk about the pros and cons. But before the player can talk to each of the NPCs, he or she will have to successfully complete a mini-game...

• March 24, 2008
• 2 comments

Nuestra Ciudad, Nuestras Voces

by Gabriel Berrios
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Versión en español más abajo. Greetings all, for some time now we have been deeply involved in developing our project and carrying out the audiovisual production workshops with the immigrant population in Philadelphia. The workshops have had a good turnout, and as you may know already from my colleague Todd Wolfson, the first 20 participants finished the course successfully and are now in the process of making their videos. The first round of workshops was directed at the Spanish-speaking immigrants who came to Philadelphia looking for a better quality of life; soon we will be screening the videos they have...

• March 20, 2008
• No comments

How About a Chris O'Brien New Media Business Model Award!

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Returning to Chris O'Brien's Business Model Challenge, here are some suggested approaches and models from the perspective of an entrepreneur and strategic consultant. For a more rigorous approach I would absolutely check out Chris's recommended NewspaperNext report. That said, let's try and smash some boxes or at least poke some holes in existing ones... 1) MyPaper model: Going beyond the trend in news aggregation and self-customized news portals like NetVibes, why not think about physical papers that are delivered to your door (or on the Web/mobile device) which combine your specific preferences for local, national, and international news + features...

• March 20, 2008
• 1 comment

What Good is All This Data?

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine a website that would show you, not just how many copies of some book are available for sale from Amazon, but which libraries near you carry the book. Oh wait, that already exists . Between WorldCat and Steven's thoughts on the Sacramento Bee salary database I'm thinking a lot about what really good data driven content looks like. How could we, as news reporters, use our readers as more than passive observers in meaningful ways. WNYC has been doing some interesting work with crowdsourcing and I'd like to see some ideas for introducing the concept to public salary databases...

• March 19, 2008
• No comments

Is Citizen Media Skipping Small Town America?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am on a hunt. While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic "user-generated" content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America. As part of E-Democracy.Org's Rural Voices project in Minnesota we seek to discover bloggers, social networking groups, wikis, online community forums, etc. from rural/Greater Minnesota. This map of 200 blogs aggregated by MNSpeak, shows just three outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area....

• March 19, 2008
• 1 comment

How Far Should Transparency Go?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Government Technology reported on public employee protests to seeing their names and salaries online via a database on the Sacramento Bee. What about public employee salaries - should all be publicly posted online? Should only management level and above be listed specifically with others displaying the salary range per pay scales for various classifications? I have a hard time imagining a democracy where any and all legally public government information is not on the Internet for all to see in a decade or so. This means the ethics filings of public officials will be liberated from the dusty paper files...

• March 18, 2008
• 7 comments

Creating a Game-Building Tool for Newsrooms

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For those of us working on creating "serious games," the experience we've had with the "Playing the News" project might be instructive. We are working with the Johnson Simulation Center at Pine Technical College in Pine City, MN to develop a tool that will allow journalists (read, non-techies) create engaging games built from news coverage of ongoing coverage in a community. After much to-ing and fro-ing, we think we've hit on a strategy for the type of utility that will work. But it has taken some "technical fortitude" to get to this point. The JSC folks are working on what...

• March 17, 2008
• No comments

Gaming, Seriously.

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I crossed paths with "serious gaming," in a serious way twice in one week. First at the Knight Digital Media Center's Editorial Writers seminar in Los Angeles last week. Later in the week, I attended a gaming session at the Computer Using Educator's conference in Palm Springs. Both of the gaming presentations were intriguing and relevant for my work. Much of locative media work I do is with HP proprietary's Mediascape software. It's been in beta for a couple of years, but finally HP landed in a partnership with the UK's Futurelab in Bristol to put a friendly face (and...

• March 14, 2008
• No comments

A News Mashup

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The good folks at Netsquared in San Francisco are sponsoring a Mashup Challenge, designed to encourage civil society and social benefit organizations to submit innovative new ideas for Mashups(web_application_hybrid) supporting social change. Of the 50 or so entries submitted so far, a number of them have a news angle that may be of interest to journalists and the larger media community. For example, a submission called Community News & Caring Map is aimed at allowing writers to know where their readers are geographically located. The idea being that if you know more about who your audience is, the better you...

• March 12, 2008
• 2 comments

The San Jose Mercury News and Gary Webb

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• March 11, 2008
• 2 comments

Is it a Game Without Moving Parts?

by Amanda Hickman
2007, 2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're knee deep in our second game and I realized that I never came through with my promised recap of our last minute technical decisions on the Garbage Game. For one thing, as I mentioned, we jumped ship from OpenLaszlo in the interest of expedience. As I've noted here before, the game design field isn't exactly awash in programmers eager to work in anything but Flash. We found a local programming shop that was game for the challenge, though, and sat down with them to iron out our technical specifications. They'd never worked in OpenLaszlo before, but it looked like...

• March 3, 2008
• No comments

Is Old Media Really Dead?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

According to this new report released by We Media/Zogby, two thirds of Americans think traditional journalism is out of touch with what they want from their news and nearly half now get their news online. The report suggests that 29% of Americans get their primary news information fromTelevision, 11% from radio and only 10% from newspapers. Is traditional media really dead or dying? Is journalism itself the problem or is it all about a shirft in medium and not the quality of journalism itself that is itself the cause of our dissatisfaction? Or are these the wrong questions to be...

• March 2, 2008
• 4 comments

Going Beyond Point A to Point B

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Phones use one of two methods to figure out where they are (and if you happen to be carrying it, where you are). The first is built-in gps. Nokia is leading the way with these smart phones, having announced four new phones earlier this month at the Mobile World Congress 2008, where 50,000 people (including keynote Robert Redford) gathered in Barcelona to talk all things mobile (but mostly about devices and less-than-innovative uses of these devices). The second way to locate your device is how Apple is doing it. Late to the game and experimenting with workarounds, location-based applications found...

• February 26, 2008
• 1 comment

Computation + Journalism Confab: Exciting, Disappointing and Confusing

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• February 25, 2008
• 1 comment

How Do You Know When to Take Mobile Seriously?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How does mainstream media know when to take mobile seriously as a distribution platform? 1) When the New York Times unveils a mobile-to-PC application? The NYT's new ShiftD application allows you to move its content from one device to the other, insead of having to save and move them separately. A bit of a time saver perhaps, but not all that exciting really. 2) When key online social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook develop their own mobile applications? We're getting warmer here. When we can seamelessly do all the social stuff on our cell phones that we really like...

• February 25, 2008
• 2 comments

Journalists and Technologists: An Uneasy Courtship

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first Computation + Journalism Symposium, held Friday and Saturday at Georgia Tech, is over. It's been widely covered in the blogosphere -- you'll find some of the most thoughtful reflections here and here and here and here. As I said before the panel I moderated (on "Advances in Newsgathering"), the event was truly remarkable. More than 200 people -- a mix of academics and professionals, editors and reporters, journalists and Web developers (including the two Knight Challenge journalist-programmer scholarship winners) -- came together to talk about the ways technology is changing journalism and what journalism needs to do to...

• February 25, 2008
• 4 comments

Every Nonprofit Tries to Give People Information, Which is Power

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At this year's SalesForce.com Foundation gathering, "Innovation for Nonprofit Success," the recurring theme was less the SalesForce software than the broader topic of the social web.  This is to SalesForce's credit; Suzanne DiBianca, cofounder and director of the Foundation, set the tone when she introduced Holly Ross, Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, as the keynote speaker. "What I really want to talk about is power," Ross said early in her presentation.  "Because powerful people can make change." "At the heart of every nonprofit you are trying to give people information, and information is power." Ross and other presenters...

• February 20, 2008
• 8 comments

Databases as Entry Points to Investigative Stories

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you want to know what the future of investigative reporting might look like online, check out what the Las Vegas Sun has done with its special section on Flight Delays. It's an interactive map and database on plane delays at McCarran Airport. You can check a particular flight, look at patterns in delays to other airports and find out how long it takes to go through security checkpoints at different gates at different times of the day. And there's a video of interviews with people at the airport, along with time-lapse videos showing planes arriving at the airport and...

• February 18, 2008
• 7 comments

WikiLeaks Block Hurts Anonymity Everywhere

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Anonymous communication online is becoming quite a theme here on Idea Lab. The web site WikiLeaks.org (if you're in the United States, right now you'll have to access it through their IP address) reports that it has been censored by U.S. court injunction (it is also banned in China). The point of the web site is to allow people to post anonymously information - in large quantities - that governments and corporations don't want people to know. This is bad. Taking down a domain name is a drastic measure for suppressing information on the Internet. If this is not pushed...

• February 18, 2008
• 6 comments

Is Your Blog Login Secure?

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Several News Challenge projects, including ours (the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker), feature blogs as a publishing tool. So consider this a friendly tip: If you or anyone who will be posting to your blog even occasionally uses net access of unknown or uncertain security (such as public wifi, or a hotel's network), make sure you use a secure login to your blog's back-end.

Why? Because it's pretty common for unscrupulous folks to monitor networks used by many people with the express purpose of "sniffing" userIDs and passwords. This can have obvious bad consequences if they get access to your web-based e-mail -- but it can also mess up your blog, too.

I learned my lesson last November...

• February 18, 2008
• 2 comments

Computation + Journalism = ?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When the Knight News Challenge awarded me (and the Medill School of Journalism) a grant to offer journalism scholarships to computer programmers, I thought teaching journalism to technologists was a pretty novel idea. But it turns out some faculty at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing were thinking along similar lines. Last spring, Prof. Irfan Essa and Ph.D. candidate Nick Diakopoulos taught an experimental course, "Computational Journalism," for computer science students at Georgia Tech. The course is being offered again during the current (spring) semester. Through readings and guest lectures, students in the two classes have learned how journalism is...

• February 17, 2008
• No comments

Wearing Your Media on Your Sleeve

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some really interesting experimentation is being done with "wearable media" these days. Wearable media is simply clothing or other accessories that allow for the transmission or display of digital information. Some examples... Wearable Resistance a dress adorned with LED that can be programmed to depict images or text. Check out some of the other work being done by Dutch artist collective De Geuzen, "a foundation for multi-visual research". The Internet of Things: The University of Washington is conducting an experiment to understand the next step in social networking by connecting objects and people in a wireless, monitored network. Beginning in...

• February 17, 2008
• No comments

Open Media Publishing: One New Option

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

EngageMedia, an Australia-based open media organization that promotes social justice and environmental issues, has just released a major open source software package called Plumi. Based on the Plone content-management system, it's designed to let citizen publishers create their own video-sharing communities out of the box. Given that websites like YouTube and Yahoo Video retain extensive rights to your video while keeping their own distribution platforms under lock and key,  Plumi is one of the important new forces pushing toward democratic, independent and open media. For the announcement and technical details, head here. To download Plumi, head here. A demo...

• February 14, 2008
• 4 comments

NewsTools2008 to Bring Geeks and Journalists Together

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One truism that has remained constant over the years is that journalists and technologists rarely cohabit the same physical plane. Even when they cross each other's path, they rarely speak each other's language. And yet, any great leap forward in the new media space requires great technology. As much as journalists like to imagine that careful reporting, balanced writing and the oldtime verities of the craft are what matters most in the new digital world, upstart startups like Digg, TechCrunch and Facebook are proving otherwise. So it came as welcome news that MediaGiraffe's Journalism That Matters project will be...

• February 11, 2008
• 2 comments

Toward a Community Media Toolset

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the past three years, since I co-founded Ourmedia.org, a lot of would-be community publishers have asked me the same question, which more or less is this: How can I get a site up and running without investing a lot of time or resources into building a content management system and technology infrastructure from scratch? There's good news and bad news, I tell them. The good news is that there are now hundreds of free, open source content management systems to run your publication or social network on. Some of the more popular ones include Drupal, Plone/Zope, Joomla, Ruby...

• February 11, 2008
• No comments

News That Moves

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

More and more cities are begining to offer digital maps to help tourists navigate their way around and locate points of interest via a mobile device. The city of Stuttgart, Germany for example, rents Stuttgart2Go - a Pocket PC device with GPS capabilities that allows a visitor to locate and map tourist attractions while on the go. As you physically approach a particular point of interest more historical information appears on your device about that site. Such devices and software like PocketMap are very useful for tourists and others needing to find their way in an unfamiliar environment. But wouldn't...

• February 10, 2008
• No comments

Guiding Principles for the Next Newsroom

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Next Newsroom Project began last summer with a question: If you could build the ideal newsroom from scratch, what would it look like? We were asking that question on behalf of The Chronicle, the independent student newspaper at Duke University. Since receiving our News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation, we've interviewed journalists, digital media experts, architects, campus media advisers, academics, and innovation specialists. We profiled professional and campus newsrooms (and some organizations that had no newsroom). And we looked for ideas outside journalism from folks like innovation consultants Jump Associates . And we studied buildings like the Stata...

• February 4, 2008
• No comments

A Discussion of Mobile Technologies and News Making

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is an interesting academic review of how mobile technoligies are changing the news landscape. A number of important points are made, including... 1) The notion that mobile technologies in the hands of the public may be resulting in event-driven news overtaking institutionally based news. See this monster of a study on this topic. but here are some interesting stats from the BBC on how the public is engaging news organizations directly: "...In the aftermath of July 7 (2005) bombings, [14] BBC received 20,000 written accounts via e-mail, 1,000 photos and 20 videos from citizens. Similarly, in the summer floods...

• February 2, 2008
• No comments

National Night On(line)!

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The other night it was -10F with a windchill of -40F here in Minneapolis. When things get that cold, we Minnesotans start thinking about ways to get warm. I think this is why we have a reputation for public innovation, we have a lot of indoor time to think up schemes when the rest of the country is out on their deck enjoying a beer. So I started thinking about ways to better connect with my neighbors despite the cold. I am a huge fan of National Night Out when neighbors around the U.S. put up road blocks and hold...

• January 31, 2008
• No comments

Kenyan Bloggers Innovate to Heal Country

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• January 31, 2008
• 2 comments

Crowdsourced Election Coverage

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What with the nonstop drumbeat of presidential campaign news these days, it's easy to forget that we've actually got some other elections coming up. On Feb. 5, primary voters in Chicago will cast ballots for ward committee leaders, the county's chief prosecutor and a slew of other positions. From my point of view this is an interesting deal, because I've never run a news organization's election coverage before. I'm always the guy who comes in afterwards to do the big project on voter fraud. Which is a good thing, because I can't plan my way out of a paper bag....

• January 25, 2008
• 2 comments

A Private Picture is Worth How Many Words?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For those of you who attended the Consumer Electronics Show last week, you may have seen this new "TV Glasses" gadget that allows you to watch a movie played on an MP3 player or cell phone. It appears to be the next evolution of what began with the Walkman and personal digital devices toward the further privitization of the public media space. While old schoolers might compain that the "iPodization" or tuning out of our culture is bad enough as it is, others might argue that such devices are no worse than someone reading a book or checking their blackberry...

• January 19, 2008
• 2 comments

Ubiquitous Networks: The Trails Of Our Digital Identities

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• January 15, 2008
• 1 comment

A Developer's Dilemma: Who's a Journalist?

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• January 14, 2008
• 6 comments

When Phones Become Reporters

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent post I shared some thoughts about the trend toward mobile phones being used to connect people in the real world - so called mobile social networking. Applying that same idea and tools to news reporting, some interesting possibilities appear on the horizon. First, a little context. Experts on the social and anthropological aspects of mobile phones, like Jan Chipchase, talk about how these devices give us the power to transcend space and time, and how our mobile devices allow for our identity to become portable and not merely attached to a particular place like our home or...

• January 13, 2008
• 2 comments

Will Online Video Make the World a Better Place?

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The impact of the digital divide (or at least the bandwidth imbalance) is most pronounced when it comes to online video. In regions where lightening-fast internet connections are taken for granted, such as North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, it has become a common occurrence to observe teenagers watching YouTube videos on their iPhones or Korean businesswomen watching the nightly newscast on their mobile phones. Even those who have yet to transform their mobile phones into television sets, still regularly catch up on the latest and most popular YouTube videos. In fact, much of the world has already moved...

• January 5, 2008
• 5 comments

When our Phones Do the Social Networking

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the more interesting mobile media trends we may see more of this year is mobile social networking. Simply put, that means the ability for one person to connect with another via a mobile phone or other device while on the go. Think of your cell phone saying "hello" to another cell phone within a certain geographic proximity, based on identified shared interests on publicly available profiles. Typically one must sign up for or opt in to a service designed for this purpose, set up a profile, and make one's cell phone available via wireless technologies like GPS or...

• January 5, 2008
• 2 comments

One Location Doesn't Cut It

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two months ago I made a post about the fun little news application on the Nintendo Wii. Dan Burd responded to the post with this comment criticizing some of Wii News' interface assumptions: "I think it's limiting to say that each news story only pertains to one location. Many news stories are overviews of the relations between two or more countries. I'm guessing the AP thing would place them at whatever city the reporter is reporting from. I think that's a bit misleading." If you ask me, he is spot on. Burd's comment refers to global news, but the...

• January 3, 2008
• 4 comments

Progress on 'Playing the News'

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hi folks. Our top-flight research assistant, Fabio Berzaghi, has written a narrative of the work we've been doing on the "Playing the News" project. Our goal is to design a game creation tool that allows news professionals to author engaging games around ongoing news issues in a community. The intention of the tool is to allow journalists to create a game that takes no more than 20 - 30 minutes to play through. We've been through quite a number of iterations on game design and Fabio provides the background. "The very first idea for our project was to focus on...

• January 2, 2008
• 1 comment

The Year of Mobile Media Ahead?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many are already proclaiming 2008 to be the year of mobile media. (Apparently 2007 was the Year of Social Media?). That means that more people will be using their cell phones and other mobile devices to access the Internet, view content, and make purchases, respond to ads, do banking, etc. Here a good discussion 7 major mobile content headlines for 2007 that helped to push or delay the mobile trend. One of the most interesting bellweather points raised in this posting is that "in just five months since its commercial debut, the iPhone has secured a 0.1 percent share of...

• December 28, 2007
• 1 comment

Traditional Tagging is Important Too

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 24, 2007
• No comments

It's All About the Maps

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today we're unveiling some site features on ChiTownDailyNews.org that represent, in my humble opinion, a huge step forward in the way people and content are connected on the internet. The features are focused on what's become known as geotargeting, and they're things that you won't find on any other website. Basically, we're making it easy for you to see the news and ads that are relevant to you because they take place near you. If you're a registered user on the site, you'll have the opportunity to give us your address. Our frontpage will then display a map centered on...

• December 20, 2007
• No comments

Categorizing and Contextualizing Locative Media

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 19, 2007
• No comments

Google and OLPC's Move to Create Global Pen Pals

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Google, UNICEF, and One Laptop Per Child recently announced the launching of the Our Stories project. The effort records the stories of children from different parts of the world and places them on a Google Map. But more than just an oral/video history project combined with geotagging, the effort claims to be: A joint initiative to preserve and share the histories and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using laptops, mobile phones and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends....

• December 17, 2007
• 1 comment

Making Maps Work with Geo-Filtering

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's finals week here at Carnegie Mellon, and now more than ever I don't want to spend unnecessary time digging around for information. I want my notes organized and easy to flip through, I don't want to have to look at 5 different course portals to find the study guides that my professors put online, and I definitely don't want to download and read half of an assigned paper only to realize that it doesn't matter for the test. In fact, these desires sound a lot like the desires of an information consumer in general - I would like my...

• December 13, 2007
• 2 comments

Twitter Posse for Reporters

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jon Funabiki of SFSU and Steve Chen, CTO and co-founder of YouTube The just-ended Roundtable on Mobile Media and Civic Engagement, held by the Aspen Institute and San Francisco State University in San Francisco, was more than a two-day brain jam attended by mobile industry execs, academics and reps from civic and social justice organizations. Sessions were structured to come up with recommendations regarding mobile's emerging role in the news media, politics and e-governance. One snippet worth sharing here was an idea embraced by the editor of Wired News. I mentioned to my breakout session that in1996 I wrote...

• December 13, 2007
• 5 comments

Meet the First Two Journalist- Programmers

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first two "journalist-programmers" -- experienced Web developers who won Knight News Challenge scholarships to attend the one-year master's program at the Medill School of Journalism -- will start their studies here at Northwestern University in just a few weeks. Let me tell you a little bit about them -- and, in the process, remind folks that we're looking for more programmers who are interested in studying journalism and exploring ways they might apply their technology skills to the media world. Brian Boyer is an experienced Web developer and software architect who most recently served as a co-founder of Daixo,...

• December 12, 2007
• No comments

Why the Slow Uptake on the Mobile Web?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

According to a just released report by Jupiter Research, only 16% of U.S. subcribers are browsing the mobile web. According to the report, the low uptake is due primarily to lack of interest (73%) and the high cost (47%). Messaging remains the major non-voice mobile activity, with about about one-third of subscribers surveyed having used either text or picture messaging once in the last six months. The report also indicates that mobile video had only a 1% adoption rate in the mobile market. Jupiter recommends that content providers need to offer easier access to things like news and video through...

• December 8, 2007
• 3 comments

More Than Just Finding A Toilet

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 3, 2007
• 3 comments

Lies about Venezuela: If NYT.com ran Related Content

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Lara, Venezuela, lacks widespread internet access, cutting off Agaric Design Collective from our sysadmin. If you want to tell us Hugo Chávez's administration in Venezuela is doing a bad job developing the country, we have reason to listen, with prejudice. But the accusations slipping unchallenged into news articles that Venezuela is anti-democratic, that Chávez is unpopular, and that the proposed constitutional reforms up for approval tomorrow are unlikely to pass - these are lies with consequences. These unsourced and poorly sourced claims, dripping like acid rain showers on the informed public's understanding of Venezuela - are lies where the truth matters....

• December 1, 2007
• 9 comments

Geotagged News and Drupal: Why Wait?

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A week or so ago Dan Schultz posted here about the potential for geotagging. Technically, the basics of geotagging is coming along: the Drupal shop Development Seed announced today "We Will Geocode Anything," using a news-tagging service and a Python script to add locations to news stories. (This is part of their larger project Managing News.) Dan, however, outlined a list of things he needed for geotagging news to be exciting. A commenter on his blog reiterated that the ability to geographically tag things by region or a shape drawn on the map (and defined by multiple pairs of coordinates)...

• November 29, 2007
• 4 comments

When Mobile Media Becomes Political

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MobileActive.org posted an interesting interview with "Artivist" Ricardo Dominguez, who is working on a locative media project designed to assist immigrants crossing the border to the U.S. from Mexico. His work-in-progress concept, called the Transborder Immigrant Tool, leverages GPS enabled cell phones to aid in the safe passage of desert border crossers. "The device seeks to reduce the number of deaths along the border by helping immigrants locate resources such as water caches and safety beacons." Not only is the tool seemingly well designed (read below) for the population it targets, but it seems relevant for remote and wilderness emergency...

• November 23, 2007
• 2 comments

"Locating" the Mississippi Blues in 3 Platforms

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

lat 33.4043 long -90.3055 Mississippi Blues Trail Tour in Google Earth (download Google Earth for free, then launch the kmz file) ScreenCast of Mississippi Blues Google Earth Geo-Tagged Project (a screencast is a video capture of what happens on the computer monitor.) Friday night arrived, our round-the-clock week's worth of work was done and it was finally time to present to all the participants and guest of the National Black Programming Consortium's New Media Institute. Prominent leaders in the Public Broadcasting world and NGO filmmaking community had participated in panels all week: Notables from PBS, CPB, NPR, PRX, ITVS,...

• November 22, 2007
• 2 comments

What Will Journalist- Programmers Do?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• November 18, 2007
• 2 comments

'Cheatin' Mamas and Dirty Lowdown Papas'

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• November 16, 2007
• No comments

My, What a Pretty Face[book]

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been ignoring Facebook for as long as I can. And most other social networking applications, too. I already get several dozen e-mails a day. Add to that a dozen or so phone calls, voice mails and letters, and I begin feeling like I need to be less networked, not more. But I finally sat down and looked at what the site has done with its publicly available APIs -- programming features that let web developers like me build stuff on Facebook. Yes, it is cool. Cooler than I'd imagined. It took me about three hours to slap together the...

• November 15, 2007
• 2 comments

Tapping the Potential of Geotagging

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I saw someone wearing a shirt that said "Think Globally. Act Locally. Eat Noodles." The noodles part still confuses me, but I think the rest of the message does a really good job of summarizing what I want digital media to facilitate. It seems that the key to bringing local into the inherently non-physical Internet is Geotagging and geographic interfaces. These