Idea Lab

Can Google Maps + Fusion Tables Beat OpenBlock?

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

WRAL.com, North Carolina's most widely read online news site, recently published a tool that allows you to search concealed weapons permits down to the street level. It didn't use OpenBlock to do so. Why?Or, if you're like many journalistically and technically savvy people I've spoken over the last few months, you could ask why would they? There's plenty of evidence out there to suggest the OpenBlock application is essentially a great experiment and proof of concept, but a dud as a useful tool for journalists. Many of the public records portions of Everyblock.com -- OpenBlock's commercial iteration -- are months if...

• August 1, 2012
• comments

How SahelResponse.org Used TileMill, Open Data to Respond to Food Crisis in Africa

by Nate Smith
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

To bring key aid agencies together and help drive international response, the SahelResponse.org data-sharing initiative maps information about the ongoing food crisis in the Sahel region of West Africa. More than 18 million people across the Sahel are at risk and in need of food assistance in the coming months, according to the United Nations. Recent drought, population movements, and conflict have created a rapidly changing emergency situation. As in any crisis, multiple agencies need to respond and ramp up their coordination, and access to data is critical for effective collaboration. In a large region like the Sahel, the band...

• July 25, 2012
• comments

Why Code in the Newsroom? New York Times, ProPublicans Answer

by Dan Sinker

As the deadline to apply to become a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow approaches, there’s one question often comes up: Why would I want to work as a developer in the newsroom? There are all sorts of reasons—from being in the room when news breaks, to working with a community of people creating the future of an industry, to helping move civic dialogues into new directions. But the most compelling answers come from the very people doing it. So when I was in New York a few weeks ago, I visited our news partners at the New York Times and ProPublica and...

• July 24, 2012
• comments

A Look Back at News Hack Day SF

by Aine McGuire
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a guest column by ScraperWiki's Thomas Levine, an awesome data scientist who spends his time roaming the globe finding interesting data and doing stuff with it. Blogging about News Hack Day SF, which brought together journalists, developers and designers for several days of creative news coding and data reporting, is so three weeks ago, but indulge me nonetheless as I brag about what I did four weekends ago. Before the weekend I arrived in San Francisco on Tuesday and stayed with a friend in his crazy warehouse in Oakland until Thursday, attending a nerdy talk every night. On...

• July 20, 2012
• comments

How TileMill Is Mapping Support of the International Justice System

by Dave Johnson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amnesty International's latest campaign features a map front and center. The Campaign for Global Justice, launched this week on International Justice Day, which celebrates the creation of the International Criminal Court 10 years ago, asks people to demand justice for the victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The map, integrated on the campaign homepage, tells the story of where these crimes -- and their perpetrators -- are located as well as countries' support of the international justice system and payment toward reparations. Technology Tells Stories Development Seed worked with Amnesty International's team to design the map using...

• July 19, 2012
• comments

SocMap.com Debuts Map App PublicConsultation

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we mentioned in a previous post, this spring we at SocMap.com discovered the best path for further development -- namely, by creating small, specialized map apps. The first application of this kind was our HotBills app, which allowed journalists to reach 2% of the population for their investigation and uncover facts which were mere hunches before. Now we've launched the second map app! PublicConsultation, like the name suggests, is a map app that allows one to hold public consultations on a city map online interface. We developed this app together with ManaBalss.lv, one of the most successful civic initiative...

• July 18, 2012
• comments

DocumentCloud Hiring a Developer to Work on Its Open-Source Software Platform

by Ted Han
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We have a lot of projects going on at DocumentCloud, and to serve those goals, we're looking for others to join us! For those who may be unfamiliar with our project, we've included the full details below. DocumentCloud is a web-based platform allowing journalists to upload, analyze, annotate, and publish primary source documents. We want give journalists the tools to show their audience their source material, not just tell them about it. In addition to the newsrooms worldwide that use DocumentCloud, our open-source software projects, such as Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Docsplit, and Jammit, are relied upon by companies such as LinkedIn,...

• July 18, 2012
• comments

Watchup's 'Lasagna Design' Creates a Newsreel on the iPad

by Adriano Farano
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's 7 a.m. You want to catch up with the news on your iPad, but you don't want to jump from one app to another -- tap here, tap there. You just want to discover the best and latest news videos in a snap. Meet Watchup. Available in Apple's App Store, Watchup lets you create your newscast in seconds with a unique tap-and-play interface. We pull up a lineup of your favorite news channels, and all you have to do is tap the clips you want to watch. They get all queued up in a beautiful playlist column, you get...

• July 17, 2012
• comments

The Tiziano Project Debuts StoriesFrom

by Jon Vidar
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

On Saturday, The Tiziano Project launched StoriesFrom -- a new, open platform for community-based storytelling. The site allows individuals and organizations to easily create immersive documentary projects that combine the work of both community members and professional journalists and filmmakers. The resulting projects display beautiful and engaging online packages. We launched at the Dokufest International Film Festival in Kosovo, where we are concurrently teaching a two-week video storytelling workshop entirely using the new iPad. The resulting work will be screened on the last day of the festival and used to populate a new showcase from Kosovo within StoriesFrom. StoriesFrom...

• July 12, 2012
• comments

At Datafest: Journalists, Scientists, and Engineers Face Off in Campaign Data Crunch

by Teresa Bouza

Datafest, a two-day contest to analyze campaign finance data that I organized last month at Stanford, was one of the best experiences of my wonderful year as a Knight Fellow. The event was a lot of fun and a great opportunity to learn. It produced very interesting insights and illuminated possible ways forward for data journalism. It was also great to see how much can be accomplished in just a day and a half when you have the right people in the room. Ten teams of journalists, scientists and engineers worked incredibly hard and with a lot of enthusiasm, some...

• July 10, 2012
• comments

Behind the FrontlineSMS Redesign

by Laura Walker Hudson
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Three weeks ago, FrontlineSMS launched its first new full release in more than a year. Now, we're releasing Version 2.0.2, which includes useful bug fixes and small tweaks to the functionality that make it even easier to use. You can expect regular releases from us from now on, with new features coming out every couple of months. Check out our launch blog post, and our Version 2 microsite, for more information about the software. We'd also like to share more of the background to the decision to rewrite our software from the ground up, and some of the key principles...

• July 9, 2012
• comments

When News Organizations Geocode, How Accurate Are They?

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my intro news writing class at UNC-Chapel Hill we ding students 50 points for allowing a fact error to creep into a story. If the fire happened at 123 W. Main St. and it really happened at 123 E. Main St., it's an instant F. But I've learned from working on OpenBlock that online maps seem to have been put into the same category as horseshoes and hand grenades. Which creates an interesting problem for copy editors and AP style sticklers alike -- how do you ensure that, in a county with 38,000 addresses, each shows up on the...

• July 2, 2012
• comments

How the Tulsa World Used AP's Overview to Report on 8,000 Police Department Emails

by Jarrel Wade

In May, I published a story which described how the Tulsa Police Department in Oklahoma purchased millions of dollars of under-powered and under-tested computer hardware, resulting in a multitude of problems. Emails showed complaints from the field in which officers were unable to get basic police information about dangerous calls when they were en route to scenes, or network dead spots around town that officers were completely avoiding. But leading into April, I had no idea how I was going to read all these emails by myself. Three weeks away from receiving the documents, I called my city records official...

• June 26, 2012
• comments

Knight-Mozilla OpenNews to Offer Source for Journalism Code, Community

by Dan Sinker

Way back in November, as the ideas that led to Knight-Mozilla's OpenNews relaunch were starting to be articulated, I wrote about the need for something to "shine a spotlight" on the code being written in journalism: I think that there's real work to be done in advocating for, shining a spotlight on, and helping to generate community around the code that's being written in journalism. Because the more community that can be built, the better the code is and the better off journalism is because of it. Well, since earlier this year, that's what we've been working on: a website...

• June 19, 2012
• comments

Knight Announces Winners for News Challenge on Networks

by Desiree Everts

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation today announced the winners of its first round of this year's Knight News Challenge contest at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference held in Cambridge, Mass. Networks is a theme you'll see running through the winners. That's because that was the focus of this year's first round. What sort of networks? "The Internet, and the mini-computers in our pockets, enable us to connect with one another, friends and strangers, in new ways," Knight's John Bracken wrote in a release when the round was first announced. "We're looking for ideas that build on the...

• June 18, 2012
• comments

iWitness Launches Tool for Exploring Social Media By Time and Place

by Jesse James Garrett
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are very excited to announce the launch of iWitness, a free tool created by Adaptive Path for exploring social media content by time and place. We designed iWitness to enable people to explore content in new ways. We wanted it to be a vehicle for discovering what's happening in the world, in cases where time and place really matter. But we didn't just want to create an interesting, new product. We also wanted to see what could be done with the latest web techniques and technologies. As a result, iWitness runs entirely in the browser -- it has no...

• June 15, 2012
• comments

FrontlineSMS Version 2 Provides Intuitive, Scalable Messaging

by Laura Walker Hudson
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mobile phones are everywhere. There are now 6 billion active mobile phone connections across the world, an increasing number of which are in emerging markets, in communities that have previously been hard to reach. Recognizing this potential, our founder, Ken Banks, envisioned FrontlineSMS six and a half years ago as a means to harness the power of mobile to lower barriers to social change. Since then, our open-source SMS-messaging software has been downloaded more than 25,000 times, and helps organizations in more than 80 countries overcome their communication challenges to reach millions. Over the last two years, we've focused on...

• June 14, 2012
• comments

How Upworthy Makes Important Content Sharable

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A talk by Upworthy's Sara Critchfield and Adam Mordecai at Netroots Nation (#nnupFTW) was less-than-standing-room only, so I've combined the parts we were able to catch with a similar talk by their colleague Peter Koechley at the Conversational Marketing Summit. Thanks to Deepa Kunapuli for her notes. Upworthy's goal is to amplify content worth spreading online. If you mixed the earnestness of a TED talk with the brevity of a LOLcat and Coca Cola's distribution network, you'd end up with something like Upworthy's network of crack content. They don't necessarily produce the content themselves, they just make sure it goes...

• June 12, 2012
• comments

For Poderopedia, It's All About Semantics

by Alvaro Graves
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the first technological decisions we made in Poderopedia, a project by Poderomedia Foundation that aims to promote greater transparency in Chile by mapping and visualizing the relationships among the country's elite, was to adopt semantic technologies to store and query data.These technologies allow us to represent a diverse set of relations between entities (people, companies, organizations) in a flexible way. The goal is to identify and express relations of power and influence of people and organizations. While we're focused on Chilean political, civic and business leaders, this vocabulary can be used in other contexts with minor or no...

• June 11, 2012
• comments

Human-Assisted Reporting Made Easier With PANDA Search Notifications

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Wouldn't it be sweet if you just got an email when something newsworthy happens? Wouldn't that make your job easier? Well, have we got news for you. Today's release, PANDA beta 2, has an awesome new feature: search notifications. Think of it like a Google News search: Go to PANDA and search for something. Check the box that says you want emails, and your PANDA will send you an email when there are new results for your search! How does it work? Every night, PANDA looks at everybody's saved searches and checks for new results. New results may have arrived...

• June 8, 2012
• comments

Study Results Show Truth Goggles Helps Combat Misinformation

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last month, I ran a user study to test the effectiveness of Truth Goggles (a credibility layer/B.S. detector for the Internet). The tool attempts to remind users when it's important to think more carefully. If you're curious, you can check out the demo page. Now that the study has officially concluded, the numbers have been crunched, and the thesis has been submitted, I want to share what I learned from the resulting data and feedback. I'll warn you upfront: All conclusions drawn here should be taken with a grain of salt. The participants were not a random sample of the...

• June 7, 2012
• comments

Building a LocalWiki Is About Community and Having Fun

by Philip Neustrom

LocalWiki is all about community, and we believe that starts with people coming together and having fun. Here are a couple of recent examples of ordinary people hanging out, having fun, and building out LocalWiki projects! San Francisco parklet ride A couple of weeks ago, we were slated to have an absolutely beautiful weekend here in San Francisco, and I thought, "You know, it's gonna be a beautiful weekend -- it'd be great if we could just bike around, take pictures, enjoy the beautiful day, and toward the end of the day get on our laptops and work on...

• June 6, 2012
• comments

Internews Maps the Media Landscape in Afghanistan

by Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a country where only 9 percent of the population has access to the Internet and more than half never uses a television, it's critical for journalists and organizations supporting the media to understand how people get news and other information. As part of its efforts to support independent journalism in Afghanistan, Internews mapped the results of a recent media research survey to tell the story of where people tune in for news. The map shows the percentage of people who have access to a radio, television, mobile phone, and the Internet by province throughout the country, and combines this...

• May 31, 2012
• comments

How J-School Students, Developers Collaborate to Innovate at Medill

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a recipe for innovation: Start with an interesting problem in journalism, media or publishing. Catch some journalism students. Mix in some computer science students. Mold into interdisciplinary teams. Stick in the oven for 11 weeks and see what happens. For three years now, Northwestern University has offered classes in which journalism and computer science students form teams and try to solve a problem in media, publishing or journalism. What they come up with is almost always interesting -- and sometimes, sufficiently promising that the software deserves to be developed further. One project from the class led to the creation...

• May 30, 2012
• comments

Next Knight News Challenge Is All About Data

by Desiree Everts

As the Knight Foundation gets closer to announcing the winners of its News Challenge on Networks, it's opening up its next round of the contest, which now occurs three times a year instead of annually. Round 2 of the 2012 Knight News Challenge will focus on data. Why data? "The world has always been complex, but we are now challenged with making sense of the rapidly increasing amounts of information that we are creating," John Bracken, director of journalism and media innovation at Knight, explained in a blog post announcing the contest. Plus, data journalism was a strong theme running...

• May 29, 2012
• comments

LocalWiki Now Speaks Portuguese, German and Russian

by Philip Neustrom

While LocalWiki's roots are in the United States, we've seen increasing interest in starting projects all over the globe. One barrier, however, has been that our interface is entirely in English -- at least it was until now. Thanks to the hard work of Pedro Lima and Nuno Maltez in Portugal, LocalWiki is now completely internationalized and can be easily translated into any language! Pedro and Nuno have started a beautiful LocalWiki project for the city of Porto, Portugal: por.to. So far, they've been using their LocalWiki to collect information about the remarkable architecture around the city. Porto residents are...

• May 25, 2012
• comments

How the AP's Overview Turns Documents Into Pictures

by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Overview produces intricate visualizations of large document sets -- beautiful, but what do they mean? These visualizations are saying something about the documents, which you can interpret if you know a little about how they're plotted. Same documents, different visualizations There are two visualizations in the current prototype version of Overview, and both are based on document clustering. The first is the items plot, which grew out of the proof-of-concept system we presented a year ago. Every document is a dot. Similar documents get pulled together to form visible groups, that is, clusters. All the dots start grey, but become...

• May 24, 2012
• comments

Public Lab's Keys to Developing Low-Cost Science Tools

by Adam Griffith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• May 22, 2012
• comments

Top 12 Social Technologies from MIT Media Lab and Beyond

by J. Nathan Matias

During my work on Social Mirror, tablet tech for social checkups, I have been inspired by other amazing Media Lab social technologies. Here are 12 of the projects which I have found most inspiring, including one or two from other universities. Did I miss a project you love? Post your favorites in the comments. Social Empowerment through Networks Can social checkups empower marginalized teenagers? In 2001, Leo Burd, now a researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media, conducted several paper-based studies at Computer Clubhouse, with positive results. Leo is now an adviser on the Social Mirror software. Leo Bonnani's...

• May 21, 2012
• comments

Knight Lab Aggregates News, Tweets Around NATO Coverage

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

World leaders, diplomats and hundreds of journalists -- as well as protesters with a wide range of grievances -- are coming to Chicago this week because of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit. NATOinChicago.com, a new project from the Knight News Innovation Laboratory at Northwestern University, aims to help people make sense of what's happening. The site has launched with two major components: What sites are saying: An aggregation of top news sources from around the world, allowing users to see how news media in different countries are reporting on NATO and the summit. What tweets are saying: A...

• May 18, 2012
• comments

ROFLCon Attendees Get a Memes Blast From the Past

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's 2012. Nerds are in, and Internet memes can actually make you famous IRL. But way back in 2000, things were different. YouTube didn't exist, and a video had to be sent around as an email attachment. (Remember RealPlayer?) Your mom yelled at you for tying up the phone line, and GeoCities plastered banners all over your creations. At ROFLCon, the past was well-represented during a recent presentation by Eric Wu of Eric Conveys an Emotion (founded in 1998); Zblofu of Zombocom; and Jonti Picking of Weebl's Stuff. They were all online in the '90s, but things really exploded in...

• May 9, 2012
• comments

How the Indie Audio Community Is Transforming Storytelling

by Jesse Shapins
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A version of this post also appeared in the Association of Independent's in Radio monthly AIRBlast. I first started working with independent producer Kara Oehler in 2005. Almost a day didn't pass without her telling me about something that happened on the "AIRDaily" listserve. I'd been on listservs before, but I had never actually talked to other people about them. These conversations with Kara were my introduction to the network of more than 800 makers brought together by AIR. At the time, I was living in New York but was partially still in Berlin, where I was completing the multimedia...

• May 8, 2012
• comments

Jonathan Zittrain Takes the Stage at ROFLCon

by J. Nathan Matias

Today with MIT Civic Media Center's Matt Stempeck and Stephen Suen, I'm live-blogging ROFLCon, a conference for things and people who are famous on the Internet. The livenote index is here. Christina Xu, the event organizer, starts off ROFLCon to cheers. It's an amazingly packed venue. "One out of eight people in this room have done something crazy on the Internet," she says. Zittrain on memes and society Jonathan Zittrain is an Internet phenomenon. Emerging from humble beginnings as a longtime CompuServe forum sysop, he is now professor of law at Harvard Law School where he co-founded the Berkman Center...

• May 4, 2012
• comments

How We Got Here: The Road to Public Lab's Map Project

by Stewart Long
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, Public Laboratory announced that public domain maps are now starting to show up on Google Earth and Google Maps. But how did the projects get there? Here's a timeline of a Public Laboratory map project. Making a map Public Laboratory projects take a community-based approach to making maps that differs depending on where you are and the reason you want to create a map. People map areas for a number of reasons, including because there's a need to monitor an area of environmental concern, a dynamic event is happening that there's a desire to capture, or you cannot...

• May 3, 2012
• comments

Mobile Security Survival Guide Helps Journalists Understand Wireless Risks

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Mobile Security Survival Guide for Journalists from SaferMobile helps reporters better understand the risks inherent in the use of mobile technology. The guide covers both local journalists and those on assignment in another country. As someone working with sensitive information, mobile communications are inherently insecure and expose journalists working in sensitive environments to risks that aren't easy to detect or overcome. This guide is designed to help navigate these challenges. (It should be noted that this guide does not guarantee safety. Rather, it's a foundational resource to understand and minimize the risks of mobile communication in the field.) The...

• May 1, 2012
• comments

How to Contribute to OpenStreetMap and Grow the Open Geodata Set

by Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hundreds of delegates from government, civil society, and business gathered in Brasilia recently for the first Open Government Partnership meetings since the inception of this initiative. Transparency, accountability, and open data as fundamental building blocks of a new, open form of government were the main issues debated. With the advent of these meetings, we took the opportunity to expand an open data set by adding street names to OpenStreetMap. Getting ready to survey the Cruzeiro neighborhood in Brasilia. OpenStreetMap, sometimes dubbed the "Wikipedia of maps," is an open geospatial database. Anyone can go to openstreetmap.org, create an account, and add...

• April 30, 2012
• comments

At the International Journalism Festival: Can Data Journalism Save Newsrooms?

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

PERUGIA, Italy -- Here at the International Journalism Festival the launch of three large initiatives have generated a lot of the buzz around the topic of data journalism. The School of Data Journalism, organized by the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation, is composed of three panels and five workshops and dives into some of the key issues that media organizations are currently considering: "Is it worth my while starting out trying to do data journalism?", "Will data journalism make us money?", "How do you get data that you can search, filter and analyze with a computer?" and...

• April 27, 2012
• comments

ScraperWiki: How Legal Is Scraping?

by Francis Irving
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Lots of people, when they hear about ScraperWiki, ask, "Is scraping legal? How can you build a business off that?" Usually, they follow up by saying, "We do it in our company, but we would never tell anyone." This is strange to us, as we have come from a world of good scraping: taking government data and making it easier for people to use for things that benefit all of society. We're in favor of that kind of scraping. It's obviously a spectrum. At the other extreme, the most evil scraping would be to steal content that somebody else sells,...

• April 27, 2012
• comments

Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Sponsors Dual Journalism Hack Days

by Dan Sinker

There's no better example of the global scale of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project than the dualing hack days we recently sponsored in New York City and Buenos Aires. In New York, we gave money for travel scholarships to bring top-notch developers to town to take part in the Wall Street Journal's Data Transparency Weekend, which brought more than 100 developers and privacy experts to town to create tools to help people see and control their personal data online. The "hackathon" grew out of the Wall Street Journal's excellent ongoing series that looks at how your online footprint is being used...

• April 24, 2012
• comments

How Ushahidi Deals With Data Hugging Disorder

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Ushahidi, we have interacted with various organizations around the world, and the key thing we remember from reaching out to some NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Kenya is that we faced a lot of resistance when we began in 2008, with organizations not willing to share data which was often in PDFs and not in machine-readable format. This was especially problematic as we were crowdsourcing information about the events that happened that year in Kenya. Our partners in other countries have had similar challenges in gathering relevant and useful data that is locked away in cabinets, yet was paid for...

• April 20, 2012
• comments

Top 5 Tech Ideas for Creating Better Explanatory Journalism

by J. Nathan Matias

How can technology help journalists make sense of complex issues and explain them to the public in a clear, understandable manner?Last year, Jay Rosen's journalism students spent an entire semester researching and making explanations in partnership with ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom which focuses on investigative journalism. The class did amazing work to highlight notable examples and develop their own "explainers," essential background knowledge to help people follow events and trends in the news. One of my favorite examples is this project from 2011, where students redesigned the same ProPublica background article as a video, a podcast, and an FAQ.NYU's...

• April 13, 2012
• comments

SocMap: Why a Small Map App Can Be Better Than a Big Geo-Social Platform

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

We experimented with various concepts for SocMap.com for a whole year in an effort to create a map-based social network for connecting and informing people in local neighborhoods. The conclusion: Even though we can reach commendable levels of new user registration, our users don't create content and so the platform doesn't grow. Experimenting with usability didn't solve this, so we dug deeper. We came up with the idea of decentralizing SocMap -- creating small and useful map applications instead of a big geo-social platform. Creating applications are cheaper and easier than managing a large website, so we find them to...

• April 12, 2012
• comments

Knight-Mozilla Partnership Evolves, Seeks New Fellows

by Dan Sinker

It's only the start of April, and already it's been a big year for the Knight-Mozilla Partnership. We've placed four fellows at the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, and Al Jazeera. (A fifth fellow, at the Boston Globe, will be starting a little later this spring.) We've renamed and refocused the partnership under the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews name. We've begun sponsoring hack days around the world. (In fact, two are coming up this weekend!) And we've started having biweekly open conference calls with the larger journo-code community. (One is happening this Wednesday.) And we're only getting started -- there is a...

• April 10, 2012
• comments

'Water Hackathon' Aims to Understand Brooklyn's Water Pollution

by Leif Percifield
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

My arm was up to the elbow in water classified as unfit for human contact. I was staring down a double-barreled shotgun of pipes that release some 90 million gallons of untreated sewage and storm water annually into the very water I was canoeing in. This is the Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn, N.Y. I was there as a participant in a hackathon created to develop tools to better understand the nature of urban water pollution. The Water Hackathon, held March 23-25, brought together a diverse group of people all interested in better understanding the complex issues affecting water in urban...

• April 9, 2012
• comments

Bills Are Not a Changelog: Why You Can't Turn Legislation Into Laws

by Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

There is a common belief that since laws are the result of legislation, then surely one can automatically assemble an amended version of the code based on the bills that have passed the legislature. This is both a really cool idea and a wrong one. Your standard narrative of how a bill becomes law doesn't really cover what it purports to cover. Usually what's really being explained is how a bill passes, but not how it becomes law. There's a whole process between the passage of a bill and the encoding of that bill in a state's codified laws. Legislatures...

• April 6, 2012
• comments

Spending Stories to Dive Into Data at the International Journalism Festival

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Spending Stories team's experience in leading data journalism workshops, such as the one last year on EU spending in Utrecht and EuroHack in Warsaw, has shown that there are still a lot of barriers hindering data journalists from reporting on spending. This month, April 25-29, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, we'll continue our mission to help journalists find, decipher, remix and report on spending data. In the Spending Stories workshop, Friedrich Lindenberg and I will be aiming to focus the participants on "following the money" by taking a closer look at EU spending data. In past workshops,...

• April 4, 2012
• comments

Reporters Observe PANDA in Its Natural Habitat

by Joe Germuska
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

First and foremost: Thanks to our early users for helping us make PANDA better! At the NICAR conference in St. Louis, we helped almost two dozen PANDA servers enter the world in less than an hour. We're hoping this is a sign that we've made PANDA easy enough for many newsrooms to install. Plus, our early users flushed out a few bugs. We also solicited ideas about new features. One request that we heard from nearly everyone was the ability to search a single column of a dataset for specific values and ranges, especially in columns of numbers and dates....

• April 3, 2012
• comments

Colorful City Tracking Maps Launch Under Creative Commons

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Maps.stamen.com, the second installment of the City Tracking project funded by the Knight News Challenge, is live. These unique cartographic styles and tiles, based on data from Open Street Map, are available for the entire world, downloadable for use under a under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, and free. takes deep breath There are three styles available: toner, terrain, and watercolor: Toner is about stripping online cartography down to its absolute essentials. It uses just black and white, describing a baseline that other kinds of data can be layered on. Stripping out any kind of color or image makes...

• March 28, 2012
• comments

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Developing iWitness

by Jesse James Garrett
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

iWitness, our project to create a tool to aggregate social media by time and place, is now well underway, and we're looking forward to sharing some of our thinking about the design of the tool with you in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we've asked our development partners at EdgeCase to provide their perspective on the technical side of the process. Here's what Mike Doel, project manager at EdgeCase, had to say: the Process At EdgeCase, we use an agile development process to rapidly produce functionality with a minimum of waste. We combine elements of "Extreme Programming" and "Behavior...

• March 26, 2012
• comments

New Knight Lab Tool Makes Great-Looking Timelines Easy

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A timeline is one of the most useful and versatile storytelling forms, suitable for everything from "tick tock" accounts that unfold over a short period of time to events that unfold over decades, centuries or millennia. But the tools available to journalists to create online, interactive timelines just haven't been very good. Generally, storytellers have had to choose between easy-to-use, not-very-attractive timeline generators requiring few technology skills (like TimeToast, Dipity and Vuvox), and more sophisticated tools (like ProPublica's Timeline Setter) that require access to server-based technologies or some programming knowledge. Not any more. The Knight News Innovation Lab has just...

• March 23, 2012
• comments

How Overview Visualized 4,500 Pages of Declassified Iraq War Documents

by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Reporting on an incident where private security contractors fired at civilians in Iraq is one thing, but reporting on all such incidents is something else entirely. That's the situation we were faced with when, in reporting on the role of private security firms in Iraq, we wanted to analyze 4,500 pages of recently declassified material -- the raw reports generated every time a security contractor working for the U.S. Department of State fired a weapon in Iraq, from 2005 to 2007. There was more material here than we could possibly read on deadline, so we used our prototype Overview document-mining...

• March 21, 2012
• comments

Massachusetts Supreme Court Rules in Favor of OpenCourt's Live Stream

by Joe Spurr
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The highest court in Massachusetts has just ruled in favor of OpenCourt's ability to video record, stream and archive public court proceedings online, writing that restricting rights to publish would violate First Amendment press protections. The decision arrived during Sunshine Week, a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. You can read the full decision here. Here are some excerpts from the decision: On First Amendment: We conclude that any order restricting OpenCourt's ability to publish -- by "streaming live" over the Internet, publicly archiving on the website or otherwise --...

• March 20, 2012
• comments

LocalWiki Launches TriangleWiki

by Philip Neustrom

LocalWiki is incredibly excited to announce that our second focus community, the TriangleWiki, has just launched. Check it out! The TriangleWiki launches with over 1,000 pages -- more than three times the amount that the Davis Wiki had at its launch. Interestingly, the TriangleWiki wasn't spearheaded by college students like the Davis Wiki or the DentonWiki. The core group that's driven the build-out of the TriangleWiki met at City Camp Raleigh and is really far-reaching -- consisting of everyone from college students to City Council members. At more than 1,000 pages, it can be hard to get a quick...

• March 15, 2012
• comments

Introducing MapBox Streets, a New World Map Powered by Open Data

by Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

We recently released MapBox Streets, a zoomable web map of the world that's powered entirely by open data through the OpenStreetMap project. Our main focus with MapBox Streets was to provide a beautiful street map alternative to the ones normally seen online, primarily Google Maps, and to make it incredibly easy for people to start using it on their websites. We created a step-by-step tutorial on how to use MapBox Streets on a website and add data to it using our open-source map design studio TileMill or pulling from an external source, like a database or API (application programming interface)....

• March 15, 2012
• comments

How SourceMap Reveals the Backbone of Civilization

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A longer version of this post first appeared on the MIT Center for Civic Media's blog. A recent lunch at the Center for Civic Media and MIT Media Lab featured a graduate of the program, Leo Bonanni, and his beloved SourceMap project. He channeled professor Hiroshi Ishii's description of the ideal Media Lab project being one that could go in a museum, an academic paper, and could be a business. SourceMap has checked all three boxes. SourceMap works as a business because there is a competitive advantage to knowing your supply chain and knowing your producers. There are two reasons...

• March 13, 2012
• comments

The Faces Behind Public Lab's Grassroots Research Community

by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was co-authored by Sara Wylie, a a Public Laboratory co-founder. Public Laboratory is an open-source software and hardware development community dedicated to producing low-cost tools for environmental research. The nonprofit portion of Public Lab grew out of using aerial mapping to address the BP Oil Spill. Since then, we've grown enormously as a community, expanding to more than 400 contributors. As part of a series, we'll be discussing contributions to open hardware projects by people other than the initial seven founders of Public Lab who write for the PBS IdeaLab blog. We're focusing on these individuals as Public...

• March 12, 2012
• comments

At SXSW: Poderopedia, Others Spotlight Civic Media in Latin America

by Miguel Paz
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Citizen heroes who are recognized by their fellow citizens in Juárez City; how people from Panama fight corruption and denounce violence and crime; what we're building in Chile to show you who's who among the elite and their possible conflicts of interest -- all of these are part of the Latin American experience you'll be able to see and hear about at the Civic Media Projects in Latin America panel at SXSW. The panel takes place Monday at 3:30 pm in Room 5ABC at the Austin Convention Center.In this panel, you'll hear from Yesica Guerra, director and research affiliate of...

• March 9, 2012
• comments

How Designers Can Imagine Innovative Technologies for News

by J. Nathan Matias

A version of this post first appeared on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog. How can designers imagine innovative technologies for news and journalism? I think I know one answer. In this post, I propose the Journalism Innovation Spiral and demonstrate it by picking apart the "profile article" for innovative ideas. The resulting design is a browser plugin which can attach writers' tools to any text form on the web. I'm currently taking Ethan Zuckerman's MIT class on News in the Age of Participatory Media, a compressed intro to journalism for engineers. In principle we're a group of engineers...

• March 9, 2012
• comments

How the State Decoded Makes Sense of Messy Real-World Data

by Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Those of us who deal with big data have a tendency to describe working with it in cavalier terms. "Oh, I just grabbed the XML file, wrote a quick parser to turn it into CSV, bulk loaded it into MySQL, laid an API on top of it, and I was done." The truth is that things very rarely go so well. Real-world data is messy. Data doesn't convert correctly the first time (or, often, the 10th time). File formats are invalid. The provided data turns out to be incomplete. Parser code that was so straightforward when written for the abstract...

• March 8, 2012
• comments

iWitness Aims to Aggregate News By Time and Place

by Jesse James Garrett
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Let's face it: The great promise of citizen media has not really been fulfilled. News organizations have struggled to find ways to supplement their coverage of news events with contributions from citizens -- and finding citizen media related to a news event is currently difficult at best. Keyword searches and hashtags provide partial solutions, but still do not differentiate between first-person accounts and other kinds of content. And although more and more services allow their content to be geotagged, few tools take advantage of this data in meaningful ways. That's where we come in. My company, Adaptive Path, is a...

• March 5, 2012
• comments

Triangle Wiki Day a Win for Open Source in Raleigh

by Philip Neustrom

This post is a guest column by Jason Hibbets, chair of Raleigh's South West Citizen Advisory Council (SWCAC). A version of this post first appeared on southwestraleigh.com. Almost 50 people collaborated on Saturday at Red Hat headquarters, currently located on Centennial Campus in Raleigh, N.C., to participate in Triangle Wiki Day. The event was a soft launch of trianglewiki.org, an effort to document the Triangle region and increase collaboration and knowledge sharing across the area. The wiki uses open-source software LocalWiki as a content management platform that includes wiki pages, images and mapping. The day started off with a brief...

• March 2, 2012
• comments

Journo-Coders Take NICAR 12 to a Whole New Level

by Dan Sinker

I spent a rapid-fire 23 hours in St. Louis this weekend at the NICAR 12 conference. For those who don't know, NICAR stands for "National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting," and, as the slightly antiquated name might suggest, was founded long before the commercial Internet, back in 1989. Traditionally, the organization (which is run by IRE, Investigative Reporters and Editors), has been about helping reporters use computers to comb through data, but over the years, it has become the de facto organization and conference for news apps developers. And this year, it felt like the journo-coders in attendance took to it...

• February 29, 2012
• comments

As TriangleWiki Gets Ready to Launch, LocalWiki Reflects on Its First Year

by Philip Neustrom

Hey friends! Whew! A lot has happened since our last PBS Idea Lab blog update! Our first focus community, DentonWiki, has been doing great, and several of our other focus communities are close to launching. Just recently, nearly 50 people came together in Raleigh, N.C., to join a massive in-person content-building sprint to build up the soon-to-be-launched TriangleWiki.org. Folks from all walks of life joined in -- two city council members and Raleigh's chief planning director even came by to help out. Read more about the event on our blog. And our new software has been rapidly adopted by communities...

• February 28, 2012
• comments

How Spending Stories Fact Checks Big Brother, the Wiretappers' Ball

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This piece was co-written with Eric King, human rights and technology adviser at Privacy International, and comes as Privacy International launches a new data release about companies selling surveillance technologies. Today, the global surveillance industry is estimated at around $5 billion a year. But which companies are selling? Which governments are buying? And why should we care? The OpenSpending platform can be used to speed up fact checking, showing which of these companies have government contracts, and, most interestingly, with which departments. Behind the scenes Big Brother is now indisputably big business, yet until recently the international trade in surveillance...

• February 24, 2012
• comments

Knight Lab's Election Project Mines Social Media, Multiple News Sources

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

CongressionalPrimaries.org, the first major initiative of the Knight News Innovation Laboratory, went live officially this week. The site demonstrates several technologies that enhance coverage of this year's congressional primary elections in Illinois -- while also providing components that publishers can incorporate into their own websites between now and the March 20 primary election. There are 25 contested primaries in Illinois' 18 congressional districts, the first elections under newly drawn district boundaries. As a result of the redistricting, many people will be choosing among candidates they know little about. The primary elections initiative takes into account the new realities of media...

• February 23, 2012
• comments

Your PANDA Is Here, and It Demands Data! (Beta 1 Launch Details)

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're excited to, for the first time, put PANDA into users' hands! After roughly six months of development, we are releasing our first beta version. This release implements nearly all of our "must have" features. We've written several times (1, 2, 3) about specific parts of PANDA in development, but until now haven't paid much attention to the user interface of the application itself. With this release we feel we've reached a level of usability that will demonstrate exactly why you need a PANDA in your newsroom. Store your datasets ... and find them again One common problem with handling...

• February 16, 2012
• comments

Ushahidi's 'Disruptive Deployers': The People Behind the Stories

by Heather Leson

One spark and it happens: An individual or a team of people create a deployment using Ushahidi or Crowdmap. Their motivation and the inspiration are telling tales. These citizens, diaspora and a global community collaborate near and far to make change happen. Motivated often by the simple act of giving voice and building momentum for their ideas, most do so without payment. Who are these deployers? One thing connects all of them irrespective of location or topic: They want to do more in their communities and world. Ushahidi gives us a window into many varying disruptive movements, large or small:...

• February 14, 2012
• comments

Spending Stories Makes Progress Toward Fiscal Fact-Checking

by Martin Keegan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The people have a right to know, but sometimes they're a bit too busy to find out for themselves. Informed citizens have both the need and the desire to know about public affairs, whether public or of a more private nature. For as long as there has been democracy, there's also been a free press, with journalists carrying out the business of matching stories and information with the citizens interested in them. Now there is a firehose of information available, and some of the clearest is about how governments spend people's taxes; this is what Spending Stories concentrates on. A...

• February 13, 2012
• comments

Knight-Mozilla Partnership Morphs into Knight-Mozilla OpenNews

by Dan Sinker

Change is awesome -- it's a necessary component to anything remaining vital and a required ingredient to facilitate organic growth. And so it's with real excitement that today I'm announcing changes to the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. Before we get to the changes, some quick background: Conversations around the original partnership began in 2010, with the program launching at the start of 2011. That means that the program design, by necessity, reflected 2010's problem sets. Two years is an eternity on the Internet -- it was time to rethink and retool for today. The community around code in journalism is...

• February 8, 2012
• comments

TileMill Now Lets You Design Maps for the Web on Windows

by Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

TileMill, the free and open-source design studio for creating beautiful web maps, is now available for download on Windows. With the latest release, the map-making tool is fully operational on the three leading operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux. With Windows still dominating the marketplace, this is a huge development that will open the door to many more users being able to use TileMill to make custom maps. This was possible because Node.js, the blazingly fast open-source software that's at the core of TileMill, recently gained Windows support. Quick Start To get started making custom maps with Tilemill, download the...

• January 31, 2012
• comments

Zeega + Localore = Innovative Local Storytelling for Public Media

by Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, I sat in a conference room in Dorchester, Mass., with some of the great minds of public media to recommend which 10 producers and public media stations should be supported for year-long projects to transform the industry. Localore is a new $2 million national competition produced by the Boston-based Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), with $1 million in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to catalyze producer-led innovation teams at local stations. Here at Zeega, this is particularly exciting because we'll be teaming up with several of the winners as creative technology partners. (For more info...

• January 26, 2012
• comments

Knight Lab to Help Illinois Publishers Cover Congressional Primaries

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When it comes to the mission of journalism, it's hard to imagine any function more fundamental than providing people with the information they need to choose their elected representatives. That's why the first major initiative of the Knight News Innovation Laboratory, announced this week, will focus on coverage of the March 20 congressional primary elections in Illinois. There are 25 contested primaries in Illinois' 18 congressional districts, the first elections under newly drawn district boundaries. As a result of the decennial redistricting process, many people will be choosing among candidates they know little about. Many of the districts are huge,...

• January 25, 2012
• comments

ScraperWiki Lets You Make Magic Out of Web Data

by Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's a wonderful magic wand that every member of a digital newsroom wants to get their hands on. Take control and you can work wonders, untangle the world wide web of information, and even decrease your workload to fit in that extra cup of coffee. "What is this wand?" you ask, and "How can I get my hands on it?" It's the wondrous API (application programming interface). At ScraperWiki, we provide the tools to custom fit your wand to your magical purpose. Learn a couple of incantations in either Ruby, Python or PHP and you can concoct an API of...

• January 25, 2012
• comments

Pew Report: Tablet Ownership Doubles. What's Left for Print?

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The shift from print to mobile reading went into overdrive this holiday season, with ownership of e-readers like the Kindle and tablets like the iPad doubling in a single month. A new survey-based study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that the percentage of adults owning tablet computers went from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January, with the same growth rate seen among black-and-white e-readers like the Kindle. Source: The Dec. 2011 and Jan. 2012 Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life ProjectSo how should content providers and publishers react to this news? As the...

• January 23, 2012
• comments

How to Create a Minimalist Map Design With OpenStreetMap

by AJ Ashton
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mapping can be as much about choosing what data not to include as to include, so you can best focus your audience on the story you are telling. Oftentimes with data visualization projects, the story isn't about the streets or businesses or parks, but rather about the data you're trying to layer on the map. To help people visualize data like this, I've started to design a new minimal base map for OpenStreetMap. What's great about OpenStreetMap is that the data is all open. This means I can take the data and design a totally custom experience. Once finished, the...

• January 20, 2012
• comments

How Public Lab's Thermal Flashlight Could Improve Home Insulation

by Sara Wylie
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In December, Public Laboratory members made themselves a "public lavatory." Six members of the online DIY science community gathered in the well-appointed, but small bathroom of staff member Liz Barry with the lights off -- for citizen science. Two staff members (Leif Percifield and Jeff Warren) stood in the bathtub lofting a laptop so the webcam pointed downward to capture the scene. Another (Chris Eichler) perched precariously on the sink with a camera, snapping photos of the path of light on the wall cast by the newest research tool -- a thermal flashlight. The thermal flashlight, still tethered to a...

• January 17, 2012
• comments

Why Unions Should Not Support SOPA

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A version of this post first appeared on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog. I was supposed to speak on a panel about SOPA recently with the Northeast chapters of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. It was to serve as an educational discussion for local members, but at the national level, both unions have already officially endorsed SOPA. I spent the weekend preparing remarks, but the panel has been postponed, or possibly canceled, on account of AFTRA and SAG failing to provide representatives to discuss the bill. I can only hope...

• January 13, 2012
• comments

NextDrop's Dashboards Look Great, But Mobile Content Would Be Better

by Ari Olmos
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

One year ago, when we were just a team of graduate students with a big idea, our teammate Thejo Kote came to Hubli, India and demoed a web-based dashboard to the executive engineer and commissioner here. The dashboard uses Google Maps to show the status of valves and other system components in real time, using information provided via voice or SMS. Building that dashboard marked a turning point for NextDrop, which informs residents in India about the availability of piped water in order to help them lead more productive, less stressful lives. It was our first real "pivot," as we...

• January 11, 2012
• comments

The Top 10 Data-Mining Links of 2011

by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Overview is a project to create an open-source document-mining system for investigative journalists and other curious people. We've written before about the goals of the project, and we're developing some new technology, but mostly we're stealing it from other fields. The following are some of the best ideas we saw in 2011, the data-mining work that we found most inspirational. Many of these links are educational resources for learning about specific technology. Some of this work illuminates how algorithms and humans treat information differently. Other are just amazing, mind-bending work. 1. What do your connections say about you? A lot....

• January 10, 2012
• comments

Al Jazeera, Ushahidi Join in Project to Connect Somalia Diaspora via SMS

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the Horn of Africa, Somalia makes headlines, but often only because of drought, famine, crisis and insecurity. Al Jazeera launched Somalia Speaks to help amplify stories from people and their everyday lives in the region -- all via SMS. Somalia Speaks is a collaboration between Souktel, a Palestinian-based organization providing SMS messaging services, Ushahidi, Al Jazeera, Crowdflower, and the African Diaspora Institute. "We wanted to find out the perspective of normal Somali citizens to tell us how the crisis has affected them and the Somali diaspora," Al Jazeera's Soud Hyder said in an interview. Added Souktel's Jacob Korenblum: "The...

• January 6, 2012
• comments

Feed Your PANDA With New APIs and Excel Import

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last time I wrote it was to solicit ideas for PANDA's API. We've since implemented those ideas, and we've just released our third alpha, which includes a complete writable API, demo scripts showing how to import from three different data sources, and the ability to import data from Excel spreadsheets. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. Try Alpha 3 now. Hello, Write API Our new write API is designed to be as simple and consistent as possible. We've gone to great lengths to illustrate how...

• January 5, 2012
• comments

Public Lab Produces Wetlands Maps From Balloon and Kite Flights

by Stewart Long
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) is an organization and membership community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. Public Laboratory's mapping tools, openly available and easy to use, are putting the ability to do processes such as georectifying in the hands of people who may have never created a map. Using aerial mapping techniques, residents and volunteers of the Gulf Coast region began field mapping trips in 2010 to document the impact of the BP oil spill. Between May 2010 and April 2011, tens of thousands of images were collected and 50 regional...

• January 4, 2012
• comments

If We Were Starting NPR's Project Argo in 2012

by Matt Thompson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the past two years, I've been working on Project Argo -- a collaboration among NPR and 12 member stations in which the stations launched 12 niche websites on a platform we developed (built on WordPress), each putting their own spin on a common editorial model. As the pilot phase of Argo comes to a close, and we turn our attention to spreading and operationalizing what we've learned more broadly throughout the public media system, the question I get more than any other is, "If you were to start back at the beginning, what would you do differently?"I'd reframe the...

• December 27, 2011
• comments

OpenBlock: Can You Explain Data to a Computer AND a Human?

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 22, 2011
• comments

FrontlineSMS Shows News Foo Why Mobile Innovation Matters

by Ryan Jones
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

With new smartphone apps making headlines daily, it's too easy to overlook the innovative potential of more basic technology like SMS on low-end phones. At FrontlineSMS, we're leaders in helping organizations around the world realize that potential, and we build tools to help turn SMS into an effective and ubiquitous channel for communication and data collection. One of the most exciting contexts for our work is among community journalists who are using SMS to create participatory news environments and deepen the reach of their work. We had the chance to provide our perspective on mobile innovation in journalism at News...

• December 20, 2011
• comments

What I Want for Christmas: A Frictionless Blogging Platform

by David Cohn

For those who don't know -- the Carnival of Journalism is something I restarted in January (coming up on a year!) where a bunch of journalism-bloggers get together and write about the same topic once a month. The question is posed by the host -- who rotates. This month's host is the Guardian's developer blog, and they ask: If you are a journalist, what would be the best present from programmers and developers that Santa Claus could leave under your Christmas tree? And, correspondingly, if you are a programmer or developer, what would be the best present from journalism that...

• December 19, 2011
• comments

Trust Me: Credibility Is the Future of Journalism

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My colleague Matt Stempeck said it best: "Dan, I know that your life has been a tornado wrapped in a hurricane wrapped up in a whole box of tsunamis this week, but you really need to start wearing pants to work." It turns out only part of that quote is accurate, but you'll never know which one for sure! This is why, before I can graduate from MIT, I have to create an automated bullshit detector. The basic premise is that we, as readers, are inherently lazy. It isn't just that we'll believe almost anything. (Remember that time in 1938...

• December 15, 2011
• comments

ScraperWiki: Wrapped Up in Time for Christmas

by Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Come the holidays, we all like to do ourselves up -- a new frock for the party season, or a post-Movember shave. We all like to look our best in preparation for the Christmas glut. This extravagance now extends to the web. But instead of adding a bit of snowfall, ScraperWiki has driven that further mile and added a whole host of UX features to our site! ScraperWiki is a developer platform that aims to liberate data from the web, build upon this information to make useful applications, and get journalists and developers working together in a wiki-like fashion. There...

• December 14, 2011
• comments

Grassroots Mapping in Butte Goes Analog

by Mathew Lippincott
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This article was co-written by Olivia Everett, Butte site coordinator for Public Laboratory.  As a newcomer to Butte, Mont., and as a grassroots mapper, I've learned a lot about a neighborhood's memories of itself, and the role that mapping can play in reasserting a human-scale sense of place. My experience here has since led to a collaboration between Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, of which I'm a founding member, and the National Affordable Housing Network, which is engaged in redevelopment in Centerville. While mining still occurs in Butte, it's no longer central to the city's economic life. But...

• December 13, 2011
• comments

SwiftRiver Throws a Lifeline to People Drowning in Information

by Erik Hersman
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's a problem that constantly plagues us in this day of information overload, and that is the ability to sift the stream of incoming information into the bits that are valuable from those that aren't. It's a tough issue that we've been working on at Ushahidi for a while now. Our solution is called SwiftRiver. SwiftRiver is a free and open-source intelligence platform that helps people curate and make sense of large amounts of information in a short amount of time. In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as SMS, email, Twitter and...

• December 9, 2011
• comments

Mapping the Story of Climate Change

by Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

For this week's climate meetings in Durban, the World Bank released a series of maps showing the predicted impact of climate change on the world between now and 2100. The data is dismal. If climate change continues unmitigated as it has for the past century, temperatures around the world will increase 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 -- the equivalent increase between today's climate and the last ice age. This change won't impact the world equally, with local changes varying from almost none to more than 10 degrees Celsius, depending on scenario, location and season. All of these...

• December 8, 2011
• comments

PANDA Project Releases Alpha 2 (and Needs Your API Ideas!)

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last Friday, we closed out our eighth iteration of PANDA Project development and published our second alpha. We've added a login/registration system, dataset search, complex query support and a variety of other improvements. You can try out the new release now by visiting our test site here. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. We've incorporated much of the feedback we got in response to the first release, though some significant features, such as support for alternative file formats, have been intentionally put off while we focus...

• December 8, 2011
• comments

SocMap.com's Location-Based Data Maps Becoming Real

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

SocMap.com is pleased to announce that we've launched the "tweets" and "places" features on our site, and we hope to debut "local initiatives," "local questions," and a city-planning game on February 1st. SocMap, a 2010 Knight News Challenge winner, is building a map-based interface for location-related data such as tweets, local initiatives, local news, public hearings, city-planning games, etc. We want to turn a city into a neighborhood, a place where everybody can see and hear their friends, communicate with each other, and get involved based on their geographical location. The project was started on Jan. 1, 2011. Here's an...

• December 7, 2011
• comments

How Spending Stories Spots Errors in Public Spending

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This article was co-written by Martin Keegan, project lead for Spending Stories. How public funds should be spent is often controversial. Information about how that money has already been spent should not be ambiguous at all. People arguing about the future will care about the present, and if data about past or present public spending is available, many will certainly look at it. When they do, occasionally they will find errors, or believe themselves to have found errors. OpenSpending, which aims to track every (public) government and corporate financial transaction across the world, encourages users to: augment the existing spending...

• December 2, 2011
• comments

LocalWiki Launches First Pilot, Announces Major Software Release

by Philip Neustrom

Hey friends! We've got two extremely exciting announcements for you. Our first focus community, serving Denton, Texas, has launched. And we're making the first major release of the new LocalWiki software today! The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned, living information repositories that will provide much-needed context behind the people, places, and events that shape our communities. We were awarded a 2010 Knight News Challenge grant to create an entirely new sort of software to make our vision of massively collaborative local media a reality. Launching our first pilot The DentonWiki, serving the community of Denton, Texas,...

• December 1, 2011
• comments

Public Media Should Mind the Developer Gap

by Jake Shapiro

Early on in PRX's history we faced a critical decision. Do we outsource the development and maintenance of our main web application, or take the plunge and bring all coding in-house and become a technology-driven company? We took the plunge, and since then have grown an award-winning tech team, responsible not only for PRX's web-based services but for a growing portfolio of successful mobile apps. I'm not myself a developer, have not written a line of code, and other than being a super user and obsessive early adopter, I have little claim to true tech skills. But as a non-profit...

• November 30, 2011
• comments

Can Ushahidi Rely on Crowdsourced Verifications?

by Heather Ford
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

During the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake last year, the Ushahidi-Chile team received two reports -- one through the platform, the other via Twitter -- that indicated an English-speaking foreigner was trapped under a building in Santiago. "Please send help," the report read. "i am buried under rubble in my home at Lautaro 1712 Estación Central, Santiago, Chile. My phone doesnt work." A few hours later, a second, similar report was sent to the platform via Twitter: "RT @biodome10: plz send help to 1712 estacion central, santiago chile. im stuck under a building with my child. #hitsunami #chile we have...

• November 28, 2011
• comments

Mobile Phones Are Key to a Free Newspaper in Mozambique

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

MobileActive recently posted a call for guest posts on its site. A version of this guest post, which was written by Janet Gunter, originally appeared on MobileActive.org's Mobile Media Toolkit blog. MobileActive chose to highlight this piece because it demonstrates how a free newspaper in Mozambique is using mobile tech to inform and engage readers, and help shape the paper's identity. For three years, the @Verdade newspaper in Mozambique has been delivering the news for free to Maputo's outer neighborhoods, mostly large, informal settlements. The idea, according the paper's founder, social entrepreneur Erik Charas, is to bring information to those...

• November 22, 2011
• comments

#DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Good ideas aren't enough. They need champions and constant vigilance, or Congress will take them from you. Many problems arise when your country's legislature is consistently more responsive to its donors than its constituents. One of these problems is that simple good ideas can't just be left alone to bask in their goodness. The Internet is clearly a good idea -- not tautologically good, but certainly one of the better things that's happened to human communication and the spread of knowledge in recent centuries. But now some people in Congress who didn't know what an MP3 was until their granddaughter...

• November 21, 2011
• comments

DocumentCloud Shows Off Popcorn.js Plug-in at Mozilla Festival

by Ted Han
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

DocumentCloud visited London at the beginning of November for the Mozilla Festival. This year's festival focused on media, freedom and the web. DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web, fit comfortably alongside a variety of interesting participants and projects from the news space, software development and beyond. By bringing together open-source software developers, creatives, educators, activists and industry folks, Mozilla does a remarkably good job of facilitating collaborations on projects that serve the public interest. Best of all, the Mozilla Foundation holds weekly Drumbeat calls, open to the...

• November 18, 2011
• comments

Feeding OpenBlock: A New Newsroom Pet That Eats Elements

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• November 17, 2011
• comments

Public Lab's 'Barnraising' Focuses on DIY Infrared Camera Development

by Adam Griffith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Stephen Debique, a student from Trinidad, carefully removed the screws from the digital camera, trying not to destroy it in the process. His hands shook a little as he hesitated just before popping the hot-filter off the heart of the machine with exactly the correct amount of pressure. After a few minutes of nervous reassembly, Stephen and several others had successfully modified off-the-shelf $49 cameras to take infrared (IR) images instead of regular images in the visible light spectrum. IR images are useful in determining how much photosynthesis is happening in an area and have traditionally been used by governments,...

• November 16, 2011
• comments

Journalism in the Open: Are Our Systems for Learning Making the Grade?

by Dan Sinker

This week on MediaShift, we're exploring the moving target that is teaching journalism. Stay tuned as we offer tips, tools and insights on educating tomorrow's journalists. "Beyond J-School 2011" is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers an intensive, cutting edge, three semester Master of Arts in Journalism; a unique one semester Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism; and the CUNY J-Camp series of Continuing Professional Development workshops focused on emerging trends and skill sets in the industry. I had a brief exchange on Twitter recently with ProPublica's Scott Klein about how high school poets end up as...

• November 14, 2011
• comments

Open Source Meets Mobile in Ashoka's Citizen Media Competition

by Desiree Everts

As world events like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the Japanese tsunami disaster have shown, YouTube and social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook have the capacity to turn just about anyone into a journalist. It's a trend that leaves some traditional media outlets skeptical, or even downright disgruntled. But when media has the chance to spread out to include more voices, particularly in regions where it's a challenge to get the news out, citizen journalists can offer news and insight on critical events that would otherwise go under-reported. That's why Ashoka Changemakers came up with a...

• November 10, 2011
• comments

Knight Foundation Extends Medill Journalism Scholarships for Programmers

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Four and a half years ago, Northwestern University and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a novel program: scholarships for people with computer programming experience to study journalism in the Medill School's master's program. It was such a sufficiently unusual idea that it got the attention of BoingBoing, one of the most popular tech/culture blogs, which ran a short item under the headline, "Turn coders into journalists (hint: add spellcheck, subtract Skittles)." Today, the idea that journalism needs more software developers is mainstream. And that's why Medill and the Knight Foundation are announcing an extension of the...

• November 10, 2011
• comments

OpenCourt Goes Back to High School

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the live-stream of Quincy District Court is the cornerstone of our project to open the court through digital technology, OpenCourt is in the process of expanding. One of our hopes is that the project will be used as a resource for high school civics classes. I asked one high school social studies teacher we got in touch with, Jack Buckley at nearby Cohasset High School in Cohasset, Mass., how he would use OpenCourt in his classes. He teaches an elective called "Intro to Law" that he says is like a traditional civics class -- save for the fact that...

• November 9, 2011
• comments

With Tools, Tables and Tours, ScraperWiki Wants to Liberate Data

by Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

As part of the Knight News Challenge entry, we at ScraperWiki said we would roll out Journalism Data Camps across the U.S. We had done what we called "Hacks and Hackers Hack Day" events across the U.K. and Ireland, bringing journalists and coders together. This happened at the same time as HacksHackers in the U.S. -- great minds and whatnot! Now we're scaling up when it comes to exploring the data prospects of the new world. We are heading across the U.S. on a data liberation front. But where do we start, and where do we go? Well, firstly...

• November 7, 2011
• comments

Knight-Mozilla Announces 2011 News Technology Fellows

by Dan Sinker

This week I've spent a lot of time writing about the opportunities that lie at the intersection of open-source philosophies and journalism. Today the "thinking out loud" stops, and the "making it happen" begins. And that begins with the announcement of the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla fellows. But before I get to that, a quick background: In 2011, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership's pilot year, the goal was to place five technologists in partner newsrooms through a selection process that included an open-call design challenge that received over 300 applicants, a 60-person learning lab, and a 20-person hackfest in Berlin. At each...

• November 4, 2011
• comments

PANDA Project Releases a First Alpha

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In September, the complete PANDA team met at ONA in Boston to review our survey responses, organize them into features, and plot a development road map for the year. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. On our wiki, you can see transcribed versions of the documents we created during that planning session: Users, needs and use cases Features, prioritized Release schedule, with features The last link is particularly important, because it documents that today is an important day: Today is Alpha 1 release day! PANDA is...

• November 4, 2011
• comments

VIDEO: Civic Media Session Explores Civic Maps

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For those who may not know, we at the MIT Center for Civic Media have doubled down on our events schedule. In addition to co-hosting events with other groups around MIT as we have the last few years, we now have two major event series: Civic Media Sessions and Civic Lunches. The latter is an import from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, courtesy of Ethan Zuckerman, our director/Berkman researcher. They're informal and free, and full of food. The former -- the Civic Media Sessions -- are remarkable evening talks. Held at the MIT Media Lab, they bring together...

• November 1, 2011
• comments

TileMill Helps Activists Make Maps in Pakistan, Afghanistan

by Eric Gundersen
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week I'm at Innovation Lab Pakistan, helping train journalists and media activists from Pakistan and Afghanistan on how to better leverage technology in their stories and media advocacy. We've blogged before about how maps can quickly tell the story behind complex issues like the famine in the Horn of Africa and violence against journalists in Afghanistan, and it's thrilling to be working with media folks directly and helping them learn how to do this themselves. Specifically, I'm teaching folks how to use our open-source map-making tool TileMill, an easy-to-use toolkit for designing custom online maps with any available dataset....

• October 27, 2011
• comments

3 Difficult Document-Mining Problems that Overview Wants to Solve

by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Overview project is an attempt to create a general-purpose document set exploration system for journalists. But that's a pretty vague description. To focus the project, it's important to have a set of test cases -- real-world problems that we can use to evaluate our developing system. In many ways, the test cases define the problem. They give us concrete goals, and a way to understand how well or poorly we are achieving those goals. These tests should be diverse enough to be representative of the problems that journalists face when reporting on document sets, and challenging enough to push...

• October 26, 2011
• comments

Public Lab Aims for Affordable Hydrogen Sulfide Gas Sensors

by Sara Wylie
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was co-authored by Shannon Dosemagen. In September, members of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) met with residents of Garfield County, Colo., to discuss the growing hydrogen sulfide problem in their small, rural community. Public Laboratory is an organization and membership community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. Hydrogen sulfide, a neurotoxic and potentially lethal gas, can be produced by bacteria growing in natural gas wells, or can natively occur within reserves of natural gas. Natural gas development is booming across North America, and with it, cases of hydrogen sulfide poisoning...

• October 25, 2011
• comments

How NextDrop Beat the Indian Bureaucracy to Get Back on Track

by Anu Sridharan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

I knew something was wrong when I got 28 text messages from the NextDrop system at 9:02 a.m. on Sept. 28. All 28 messages were supposed to go out between the hours of 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. to our residents (giving the different areas advance notice of water arrival as well as real-time water delivery information) but for some reason, they only got delivered to everyone at 9:02 a.m. -- which basically defeats the purpose of our entire business. NextDrop, winner of the 2011 Knight News Challenge, informs residents in India about the availability of piped water in order...

• October 24, 2011
• comments

No Internet? No Problem. Use SMS, Radio, Software, and Creativity

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Uganda, where many lack access to the Internet, people can engage with local radio stations to make informed choices and hold their leaders accountable. Using SMS and a new tool, TRAC FM, listeners can respond to poll questions such as: What service delivery should be a priority: health care, education, security, sanitation or transport? TRAC FM was the focus of a larger case study we did for the Mobile Media Toolkit. The Mobile Media Toolkit is a project of MobileActive.org. The Toolkit provides how-to guides, wireless tools, and case studies on how mobile phones can (and are) being used...

• October 21, 2011
• comments

LocalWiki Builds Out Pilot Communities, Updates Software

by Philip Neustrom

Hey friends! It's time for another LocalWiki update! What's happened since our last update? Erg, a lot! Pilots The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned, living information repositories that will provide much-needed context behind the people, places, and events that shape our communities. We've selected our very first few pilot communities. So far, we've been working with folks in Denton, Texas; Sydney; and San Francisco. Do you (or did you) live in or near Sydney, Denton, or San Francisco? Shoot us an email at contact@localwiki.org and we'll get you involved in the pilot buildout! Several more pilots...

• October 18, 2011
• comments

What Would a Nutritional Label for the News Look Like?

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The standard U.S. Food and Drug Administration nutrition label is well-known here in the United States because it is both consistent (for better or worse) and ubiquitous: You'll find it on almost all packaged foods, excluding certain foods like fresh meat (until 2012) and fresh-baked goods (creating an opening in the market for cupcake detectives). As we consider the equivalent of a nutritional label for information consumption, I'd like to strike a balance between the consistent, widely recognized FDA label and the far more creative, dynamic approaches to visualizing information all over the Internet. The Center for Civic Media's MediaRDI...

• October 17, 2011
• comments

Zeega Imagines New Forms of Digital Libraries and Archives

by Jesse Shapins
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since the founding of Zeega, one of the primary areas in which we've been working is the radically changing domain of libraries and archives. In the digital age, we believe libraries and archives pose one of the most exciting opportunities for re-imagining the ecosystem of public knowledge production and sharing. We see the questions posed by the future of libraries and archives to be intimately intertwined with the questions of who will own our digital future. In particular, it's our concern that what we see emerging is a model of the web dominated by private companies that provide an all-encompassing...

• October 12, 2011
• comments

What If We Had a Nutrition Label for the News?

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Alisa Miller's TED Talk brilliantly illustrates what news industry observers have been warning for years: Our news diet is distorted. We get very little news about places outside the United States, and that amount dwindles further when we remove Iraq from the equation. If you look at our supply of news from places outside the United States that the U.S. is not directly involved in, the effect is even more pronounced. Miller points out that demand for international news has actually increased in recent years. It's beyond clear that in this global era, we need to know what's happening...

• October 11, 2011
• comments

How Would You Start a Newsroom's Website From Scratch?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Starting from scratch, where would you start? Last Friday was my last day as program director of DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web. I've got a few more talks lined up (I'll be showing off DocumentCloud at SEJ in Miami and talking about our work at MobilityShifts), and I'll still be part of DocumentCloud's advisory group, but it was time to hand the reins over to the (very capable) staff at IRE. For my next trick, I'm helping get a new accountability journalism project off the ground....

• October 10, 2011
• comments

How Data Can Become an Evergreen Source for Newsrooms

by Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Newsrooms don't fear too much news. They fear not enough news. With news on demand 24/7, the stream of information that journalists work with is becoming the commodity upon which they rely -- which is why "evergreen" stories are becoming a staple for the modern newsroom. What they need now are evergreen news sources. So how can data be an evergreen news source? Traditionally, data was hard to work with. It had to be collected, cleaned, organized, and once the effort was made to produce something consumable, it was left to stagnate and rot over time. With ScraperWiki, we've structured...

• October 7, 2011
• comments

How Mobile Phones Could Bring Public Services to People in Developing Countries

by Miguel Paz
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Santiago, Chile, more than 60 percent of the poorest citizens don't have access to the Internet. In the rest of the country, that number increases to 80 percent, and in rural areas, an Internet connection is almost nonexistent. But there are more than 20 million mobile phones in the nation, according to the latest survey by the Undersecretary of Telecommunications. (That's actually around 1.15 cell phones per capita in a nation of 17,094,270 people.) And in rural areas, cell phones are king. As Knight News Challenge winners FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi and NextDrop have shown, mobile communications are crucial for citizens...

• October 6, 2011
• comments

3 Key Reflections From Knight-Mozilla's Hacktoberfest in Berlin

by Dan Sinker

Last week, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership invited 20 developers, designers, and journalists to take part in a week of hacking and making in Berlin. I forget at what point in the planning one of the participants jokingly called it "Hacktoberfest," but the name stuck. And so now that the jet lag has worn off for the most part, I thought I'd reflect on three of my standout moments of Hacktoberfest and how they're influencing my thinking moving forward on the Knight-Mozilla project. Working in the open Sitting in a meeting with our news partners, I got to witness a...

• October 5, 2011
• comments

With Public Lab, a Camera Flies in Brooklyn to Monitor Pollution

by Liz Barry
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, N.Y., has inspired urban legends from the forensic to the ecotopian. In the year and a half since the Environmental Protection Agency bestowed its Superfund designation, the canal has become a site of even more intense re-imagination by several groups, some of whom are customizing Public Laboratory tools for deepening their work. Designers, developers, researchers and hackers are undertaking their own parallel efforts on issues that even a Superfund clean-up can't fix: the restoration of original watercourses and the mitigation of 330 million gallons of sewer overflow that continue to enter the canal annually. Newtown...

• October 3, 2011
• comments

DocumentCloud: Why Talking to People Matters

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I hopped down to New Orleans this week, to tell even more journalists about DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web, and had the opportunity to sit down with The Lens' Ariella Cohen and Steve Beatty. Steve is doing some great work on a charter school reporting project, covering every New Orleans parish school board and incorporating documents about many of them. Most of what we discussed is what I talk to most journalists about: how they approach their work, what they see as their mission, and the...

• September 30, 2011
• comments

Hyper-Local Heaven at UC Berkeley's Journalism School

by David Cohn

I've said this many times before: The driving force behind my career has been to increase the level of transparency and participation in the process of journalism. That driving force has taken my career in all kinds of fun and exciting directions, and now I'd like to announce a new one. This year I'll be working with UC Berkeley's journalism school. Specifically, I will be working with the school's three hyper-local sites (MissionLocal.org, OaklandNorth.net and RichmondConfidential.com) to come up with new products for their website. Some of these products might be editorial or service-related -- but the main thrust will...

• September 29, 2011
• comments

At Hacktoberfest, Forget the Ode, Show Your Code

by Phillip Smith

“The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership is all about producing kick-ass open-source code, recipes, and ideas to solve real problems, in real newsrooms, with real teams. We do this by tapping into communities of journalists and developers, and getting them to design, invent, and learn with us. And also by deploying fellows into news organizations that have a culture of innovation and resonance in their space.” — Dan Sinker, Knight-Mozilla Partnership program lead Twenty #MozNewsLab graduates are arriving in Berlin this week to take part in a four-day event that we’re calling #Hacktoberfest. This is the third stage of a...

• September 28, 2011
• comments

ONA Boston Succeeded in Diversity of Speakers

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

What a difference a year makes. The Online News Association Conference in Boston looked a lot more like America in terms of diversity than last year's Washington, D.C., gathering. People of color were included in most sessions, including timely discussions on elections and crowdsourcing. From the opening plenary with Vivek Kundra, the former U.S. chief information officer, to the Mini-Law School for Digital Journalists, where five of the nine presenters were women, to the workshop on Augmented Reality, the conference felt more inclusive. The Saturday morning plenary on Diversity was well-attended -- and as the moderator, I thank all who...

• September 27, 2011
• comments

'Spending Stories' to Help Journalists Analyze Spending Data

by Martin Keegan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Data journalism is hard. In particular, when it comes to data about spending, stories hide behind the numbers, veiled with jargon. Holes in the data conceal entire chapters in the great narrative about where the money flows and goes. For many journalists, investing time grappling with tools to analyze spending data is unfruitful or unsexy. Even if they uncover a juicy figure -- an illegal company funneling funds intended for good or an erratic spending trend, for instance -- without context, the numbers can be as useless to a reader as a tour guide with a passion for reciting dates....

• September 23, 2011
• comments

PANDA Survey Shows Newsrooms Swimming in Data

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first PANDA task officially checked off our to-do list was the drafting of our Future Users Survey. We distributed a link to the survey via Twitter, the NICAR-L mailing list and email. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. The survey covers a range of topics that we felt were crucial to understanding our future users, including the technical aptitude of the staff in their newsrooms, the quantity of data they work with, and possible barriers to using the software. So far, we've had 77 responses...

• September 21, 2011
• comments

Knight News Innovation Lab Seeks Software Developers

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight News Innovation Laboratory at Northwestern University is seeking a director of software engineering and several developers interested in working on software that improves the quality, accessibility or distribution of local news and information. The Knight Lab, supported by a four-year, $4.2 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is a joint program of the journalism and engineering schools at Northwestern. It will develop, deploy and test software that fulfills the Lab's mission of "accelerating media innovation" in the Chicago region. The Knight Lab will partner with media organizations ranging from large commercial media companies...

• September 20, 2011
• comments

ScraperWiki Digs Up Dirty Data So You Don't Have To

by Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The best journalism comes from digging. Not phoning up press officers but speaking with those in the know. Not seeking comments from experts but going out onto the streets. The real stories, the scoops and the breakthroughs don't come prepackaged. So why limit data-driven journalism to the relatively few sources of clean, pre-packaged and nicely delivered data? This is where ScraperWiki comes in. ScraperWiki is a developer platform that aims to liberate data from the web, build upon this information to make useful applications, and get journalists and developers working together in true HacksHackers fashion! WHAT WE DO We let...

• September 19, 2011
• comments

With Music Mine, PRX Aims to Reshape Public Media on the iPad

by Rekha Murthy
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Public Radio Exchange just announced the launch of KCRW Music Mine, an iPad app that gives you a unique, exciting way to discover new music. Music Mine is the product of a close partnership between PRX and KCRW, with design by Roundarch and music intelligence powered by The Echo Nest. Nearly a year in the making, the app developed from lengthy brainstorming sessions about what a next-generation station experience on the iPad should -- and could -- be. KCRW excels at a lot of things -- music, news, local Los Angeles culture, food, arts, film. But rather than attempt...

• September 15, 2011
• comments

How Development Seed Mapped a Non-Profit's Donors, Recipients

by Sean Dalby
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you maintain a database of the work your organization does, then you need to be able to learn from that information and communicate about your data effectively. Data visualizations do this quickly and efficiently. Development Seed, which helps organizations use data to explain complex issues and make better decisions, recently worked with A Wider Circle, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit that collects furniture and household goods and distributes them to families transitioning out of shelters or otherwise in need, to map its operations. A Wider Circle uses a database to monitor its work, tracking how many beds, dressers, desks, tables,...

• September 12, 2011
• comments

AP's Overview Will Try to Make Sense of Mountains of Data

by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the last year, my colleagues and I at The Associated Press have been exploring visualizations of very large collections of documents. We're trying to solve a pressing problem: We have far more text than hours to read it. Sometimes a single Freedom of Information request will produce a thousand pages, to say nothing of the increasingly common WikiLeaks-sized dumps of hundreds of thousands of documents, or huge databases of public documents. Because reading every word is impossible, a large data set is only as good as the tools we use to access it. Search can help us find what...

• September 9, 2011
• comments

Taking Steps Toward DIY Spectrometry, So Citizens Can Test for Pollutants

by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Several Public Laboratory groups have emerged around the development of new tools for measuring contamination and quantifying ecologic issues. Among them is an informal spectrometry working group, which is attempting to create an inexpensive spectrometer. Such an instrument offers the possibility of detecting and even quantifying contaminants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs -- exactly the kind of toxic residue which has resulted from the BP oil spill, and identified in concentrations of up to 4.5 percent at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, N.Y. While this is an ambitious and even speculative project, the idea that...

• September 8, 2011
• comments

'The State Decoded' Squeezes Rich Metadata Out of Boring Legal Codes

by Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

At first blush, state legal codes seem pretty simple. You've got titles, which are composed of chapters, which in turn comprise sections -- or something very much like that. It's a straightforward hierarchy, and you might not think that there's a lot of interesting metadata to be extracted from them. But it turns out that a rich mesh of metadata lies just beneath the surface, and by mining that metadata, The State Decoded, a 2011 Knight News Challenge project, is creating an innovative method of navigating state codes. Here are a few of the most interesting sources of metadata that...

• September 6, 2011
• comments

Sourcemap Crowdsources Product Supply Chains, Carbon Footprints

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was authored by Matthew Hockenberry, who co-created Sourcemap as a visiting scientist with the MIT Center for Civic Media. Knowing where things come from is a fundamental part of humanity. Things are very different when they come from different places. The provenance of a work tells us the importance of not only where something has come from, but when it was created and who it was that fashioned it. Ancient vessels in Pompeii bear the eternal mark of Vesuvinum, and shelves of China are still identified by their geographic namesake. With supply chains we talk about traceability, or...

• September 2, 2011
• comments

Journalists Should Join Google+ to Understand What Comes Next

by David Cohn

This month's Carnival of Journalism, a site that I've organized where bloggers can convene to all write about the same topic, was hosted by Kathy Gill, a social media consultant and senior lecturer at the University of Washington, who seized on the new social network that is Google+. Still in its infancy, Google+ has been the topic of many-a-tech blog posts. As a former tech writer, I love and hate this stuff. Sometimes I want to slap Mashable right in the "http" and tell them to never do another "Top X Ways [name your industry professionals] Can Use [new social-networking...

• September 1, 2011
• comments

ATTN-SPAN Personalizes C-SPAN Footage of Your Reps

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last month, I had the privilege of participating in the Mozilla-Knight Learning Lab. This four-week online lecture series pulled together 60 individuals interested in journalism and technology and got them to sit together watching an array of guest lecturers. The end product from each participant was a project proposal. Since it looks like I'm going to be one of the lucky ducks who gets to hack away on my proposed idea in Berlin this September, I wanted to share it here. I would love feedback, of course, but also if you know anybody who might be interested in incorporating their...

• August 30, 2011
• comments

Using Maps to Make Sense of the Unimaginable in the Horn of Africa

by Eric Gundersen
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Development Seed recently launched horn.wfp.org, a mapping tool that visualizes one of the worst famines in recent history that's unfolding in the Horn of Africa. We did this project in partnership with the World Food Programme (WFP), the food aid arm of the United Nations, to leverage data from the humanitarian community to better communicate about the story behind the crisis and relief efforts to the wider public. For many of us living comfortably on the other side of the planet, a famine is impossible to relate to. Putting the crisis on a map brings a sense of place to...

• August 29, 2011
• comments

PANDA Aims to Make Data Analysis Easier for Journalists (And We'll Be at ONA!)

by Brian Boyer
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

What's got rows and columns and sucks at data? Excel. Though to be fair, we misuse it. Excel was built for spreadsheets, but it's become most folks' go-to kit for poking at data. It's installed on your computer. It opens CSV files. It's what you know. Of course, databases are great at data, but they're hard. Microsoft Access is limiting, and real databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL aren't the easiest things for a non-hacker to get up and running, let alone query. Learning a little SQL will make you a better reporter, but digging through many datasets from different sources...

• August 26, 2011
• comments

Zeega Enables Communities to Create Interactive Documentaries, New Forms of Storytelling

by Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at Zeega want to enable anyone to create interactive documentaries and invent new forms of storytelling. For inspiration, we've looked to a figure who challenged the documentary form right when radio and film were being invented a century ago: Dziga Vertov. Best known for the remarkable film "Man with a Movie Camera," Vertov also created the first newsreel program in Russia, each episode a new experiment. This was a time when people were thinking about displaying news and telling stories in totally new forms, like rolling out a camera on a horse and buggy in the town center and...

• August 24, 2011
• comments

NextDrop Tackles Water Availability Issues in Urban India

by Ari Olmos
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Western countries, we take it for granted that we have access to clean water 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At our fingertips is water that is plentiful enough to run our washing machines, warm enough for a hot shower, and safe enough to drink. In much of the developing world, however, this simply isn't the case. In 90 percent of South Asian cities and one-third of African and Latin American cities, water is provided intermittently. The 200 million residents of urban India receive piped water for only a few hours at a time, and they have...

• August 22, 2011
• comments

Mobile Tech Brings Hope to Children in Zimbabwe

by Tina Rolfe
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In Zimbabwe, it's common for people to receive information over their mobile phones rather than using email or the Internet. That's why Kubatana, a non-profit that aims to improve the accessibility of human rights and civic information in Zimbabwe, teamed up with Freedom Fone to broaden access to information about Operation of Hope. Freedom Fone provides a voice database with which users can access news and public-interest information via land, mobile or internet phones. In August, Operation of Hope arrived in Harare, Zimbabwe. Operation of Hope is an American volunteer surgical team that travels to developing countries each year to...

• August 19, 2011
• comments

Public Lab Helps Communities Do 'Civic Science' Investigations

by Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently, a resident of Plaquemines Parish, La., made a striking comment to me about the importance of local involvement and knowledge in post-disaster projects: Listen to the people that have been down here, lived here, fished here, and camped here their whole entire lives and even their parents' lives, for generations. Because they know how these waters are, they know how the tides come and go, they know how the storms affect this area, they provide a lot of valuable information and a lot of valuable ways that people can accomplish what they want to do without destroying the things...

• August 17, 2011
• comments

An Inside Look at Stroome's Metamorphosis in Three Iterations

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you've used Stroome, our collaborative video remixing site, in the last few weeks, you will have noticed, and hopefully enjoyed, a complete redesign of the site. User flow has now been streamlined, and the embedded community and collaborative elements make the process a lot more fun: Clips can be added to a bin using a quick click on any footage; new groups are offered through the recommendation engine; videos can be shared more easily across the web or friends can now be invited to remix together. This is our third iteration of the site, and while most quick definitions...

• August 16, 2011
• comments

With The Tiziano Project, Citizen Media Evolves

by Jon Vidar
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2006, the phrase "community journalism" was exploding as a possible savior for the journalism industry (similar to the much-hyped hyper-local journalism today). Somewhere along the way, however, the concept got washed over by a sea of organizations simply distributing Flip Video cameras and expecting amazing content. Who needed a journalism degree? Promoting local voices is important, and it's easier than ever to have those views be heard. However, "community journalism" has another important word in the phrase -- journalism. The Tiziano Project provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to...

• August 15, 2011
• comments

The State Decoded Aims to Make State Laws Accessible

by Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

State laws are written for and by attorneys. While that might make for a good legal system, it sure makes them hard for regular people to understand. There's code law -- what law books are full of -- and then there's case law, which is how the laws are actually interpreted by courts. Every time each state's legislature meets, they propose thousands of bills that would amend those laws. Attorney generals routinely write opinions about how laws should be interpreted. Law journals publish long articles exploring what laws mean. All of these sources and others still are more than many...

• August 12, 2011
• comments

DocumentCloud Welcomes a New Lead Developer

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As DocumentCloud settles into our comfy, new home in Missouri, we're quite pleased to welcome Ted Han aboard as our new lead developer. Though our prior lead developer, Jeremy Ashkenas, has moved to a full-time position at The New York Times, he continues to be an active and enthusiastic contributor to DocumentCloud's open-source tools and platform. DocumentCloud is a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web. Ted joins DocumentCloud from Videojuicer, an online video platform focused on open standards and software integration. He's a computational linguist by degree, developer by...

• August 10, 2011
• comments

The Argo Philosophy: Capitalize, Synthesize, Harmonize

by Matt Thompson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Part of the mission behind NPR's Project Argo is to construct a software platform that can maximize the output of a one- or two-person team of reporters. Project Argo is a collaboration between NPR and member stations to strengthen public media's role in local journalism. As the project has progressed, we've realized that we evolved a set of design and development principles that have guided our work throughout. This is how software invention looks in the era of the framework: Ten years ago, armed with an unstoppable designer/developer combo like Argo's tech architect, Marc Lavallee, and our designer/front-end developer,...

• August 9, 2011
• comments

FrontlineSMS: Engaging the Audience to Transform the News

by Sean McDonald
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

If some projections are correct, the world is only a year or so from a major milestone: some time in 2012, there will be one active mobile phone connection for every person on the planet. The question is no longer whether mobile phones will transform, well, everything, but how. At FrontlineSMS we've worked with our users to transform everything from health care, to banking, to journalism. After nearly 6 years and more than 16,000 downloads, our open source software, FrontlineSMS, has been used to connect millions of people to vital information using perhaps the most widespread communications medium we have...

• August 2, 2011
• comments

Reporting from Your Mobile Phone? The Mobile Media Toolkit Can Help

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Drumroll, please! MobileActive.org is pleased to introduce the Mobile Media Toolkit, the newest project that's all about Making Media Mobile. The Mobile Media Toolkit helps you make sense of the growing role of mobile tech in media. The Toolkit provides how-to guides, wireless tools, and case studies on how mobile phones can (and are) being used for reporting, news broadcasting, and citizen media. We cover it all, from basic feature phones to the latest smartphone applications. It's an exciting week for us here at MobileActive.org as we launch the Mobile Media Toolkit. We have been interviewing people, researching projects, and...

• July 29, 2011
• comments

Visualizing 10 Years of Violence Against Journalists in Afghanistan

by Paul Goodman
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Internews and Nai, an Afghan media advocacy organization, have collected hundreds of reports of threats, intimidation, and violence faced by journalists in Afghanistan. We recently announced a new site, data.nai.org.af, which features 10 years of these reports. While Nai's data previously resided in spreadsheets, the new site allows the public to access hundreds of reports through visualizations and to download it directly. With this site we're raising the profile of media freedom in a country often characterized as among the most dangerous in the world for journalists. A screenshot of data.nai.org.af. The site is packed with functionality that allows visitors...

• July 28, 2011
• comments

DocumentCloud Weathers Obama Birth Certificate, Palin Emails, Merger with IRE

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When President Obama released his birth certificate and dozens of news organizations turned to DocumentCloud to present it to their readers, I snarked a bit. Though the birth certificate did prompt a few questions -- which we're still navigating -- about the best way to handle duplicate uploads, the secret truth was we were both proud and flattered that so many newsrooms, faced with a document they wanted their readers to see, came straight to us and knew they could count on us. When half a dozen newsrooms turned to us to help them get Sarah Palin's emails out to...

• July 26, 2011
• comments

Prototypes, Visualizations Take Shape in Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab

by Cody Shotwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today marks the end of the second week of the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab, an experiment in which 63 "mad scientists" with ideas for how to improve digital storytelling have been thrown together in a common digital space to learn and refine those digital ideas. In the first week, we heard lab interface designer Aza Raskin speak about the power of the prototype; Storify co-founder Burt Herman offered up the ingredients of a successful news startup; and New York Times graphics editor Amanda Cox demonstrated the power of data and visualizations. In the second week, Chris Heilmann, Mozilla's international developer evangelist,...

• July 25, 2011
• comments

Dotspotting + Embeds = Great Maps of Prisons, Crime, Pavement Dots

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are three basic parts to working with online representations of urban civic data in Dotspotting: collating the data, manipulating it, and then sharing and publishing it. Up until now, we've been focused on the first two, which makes sense. Obviously you need to be able to gather and work with the data before you can share it. Today we're announcing the inclusion of the project's most requested feature: embedding the maps that people make into sites of their own. Dotspotting makes tools to help people gather data about cities and make that information more legible. It's the first project...

• July 20, 2011
• comments

How Social Networking Can Help Neighbors During Disasters

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can social-networking sites be used by neighbors to help each other during disasters, as well as with more pedestrian issues the rest of the time? NPR recently covered political scientist Daniel Aldrich's work looking at how neighbors help each other during disasters. From NPR: Aldrich's findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive ... a disaster. Government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a...

• July 13, 2011
• comments

Stop Yammering and Start Hammering: How to Build a 'Maker Space' for News

by Phillip Smith

Over the next four weeks, a very interesting experiment is going to unfold. The most exciting part about it is that it’s entirely open source: You can observe it, interact with it, and improve it. We’re calling this experiment the “learning lab.” It’s the second stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, which kicked off in May with an online competition that solicited 300 news innovation ideas from people around the globe. With the competition complete, it’s time put on our mad scientist lab coats and start mixing things up. Our aim is to find an antidote to “yammering” about...

• July 12, 2011
• comments

How TileMill Improved Ushahidi Maps to Protect Children in Africa

by Paul Goodman
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In May I worked with Plan Benin to improve its Violence Against Children (VAC) reporting system. The system uses FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi to collect and visualize reports of violence against children. Ushahidi develops open-source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. While in Benin, I was frustrated by the lack of local data available through Google Maps, Yahoo, and even OpenStreetMap -- the three mapping applications Ushahidi allows administrators to use without customization. While these mapping services are great for places rich in geographic data, many places -- like Benin and other countries in the developing world -- are...

• July 11, 2011
• comments

When Moral Systems Miss the Point in Newsgames

by Simon Ferrari
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In "Newsgames: Journalism at Play," we argue that the news quiz "is an incredibly simple type of game, but one that nevertheless can transmit factual information in a refreshing way." Perhaps our favorite example is an op-ed suite from The New York Times called "Turning Points, 2008 Edition," which couples a Trivial Pursuit-style question card with a series of short columns on the 2008 presidential campaign. While I can't speak for my co-authors, I personally believe that we were being a bit generous in this assessment. The truth is that I'm tired of quizzes, and I'm not convinced that the...

• July 1, 2011
• comments

MIT Lesson: Change Happens Everywhere; Activists Need to Think it Through

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I attended last Thursday's afternoon plenary "Civic Media Mobilization," at the 2011 Knight Civic Media conference, expecting to hear discussion about specific activist technologies and techniques. I was also anticipating some juicy political friction between the Tea Party consultant and the immigrant law community organizer who were speaking at the event. Neither prediction came to pass. Instead I witnessed a far more situation-based analysis of what incentivizes action that concluded with a simple, summarizing message: The only thing technology can do is amplify a movement; to instigate actual change you need people on the ground. Hearing this summary launched dreams...

• June 28, 2011
• comments

TileMill Opens Up a World of Mapping Possibilities With OpenStreetMap

by AJ Ashton
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of our favorite collaborative open data projects is OpenStreetMap. We've talked before about the project's goals, how its free and open nature is advantageous for non-profit and commercial applications alike, and how its open and near-real-time editing process is a major advantage in rapidly changing situations, from city construction projects to natural disasters. The map's coverage continues to grow and become increasingly accurate and complete as more people discover it and contribute. The project's main feature is not the interactive "slippy map," but the thousands of other possibilities the underlying data provides. Since OpenStreetMap is open and freely available,...

• June 23, 2011
• comments

Knight Announces 2011 News Challenge Winners

by Desiree Everts

Not so long ago, journalists were playing catch-up in the digital media space. But at this year's MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, it's become evident that journalism 2.0 is growing up. Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, today announced the winners of the Knight News Challenge at the annual conference held in Cambridge, Mass. This year, the contest focused on four categories: Mobile, Authenticity, Sustainability and Community, and winners ran the gamut from popular tools like DocumentCloud to a mobile platform that will help people in Hubli-Dharwad, India find out when water is available. The...

• June 22, 2011
• comments

Find the 'Big Carrot' in Your Mobile App

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the past, I've talked about some of the nuances in creating a location-based mobile app. Now I'd like to share some techniques for how we decided what to include in version 1 of the CityCircles mobile app, and how we accomplished what we did, to help you narrow your focus for any future apps you may be thinking about launching. We had one year to complete the project under the Knight Foundation's guidelines. We spent the majority of that deploying and testing, deploying and testing, adjusting, then deploying again to see how the audience responded. We did this on...

• June 20, 2011
• comments

Dotspotting Launches to Help People Gather Data on Cities

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dotspotting.org is officially live, at long last! The project, which aims to make tools to help people gather data about cities and make that data more legible, has been in a partially completed stage for a few months now, and I've blogged about it before. We've got a few new things to announce as well: The url is now http://dotspotting.org; no more of this stamen subdomain stuff. The cartography is completely revised, with a severe black-and-white style we're calling toner, in a gentle nod to the halftone process that newspapers use. (The project is funded by the Knight News Challenge...

• June 20, 2011
• comments

Tanzania Media Copes with Wild Success of Feedback via SMS

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the largest civil society media platform in Tanzania, back talk is good. 

 In fact, talking back is the objective of a new service at Femina HIP called Speak Up! The service aims to increase access of marginalized youth and rural communities and promote a participatory, user-driven media scene in Tanzania.

 Femina HIP is the largest civil society media platform in the country, outside of commercial mainstream media. Products include print magazines, television shows, a radio program, and an interactive website. Fema magazine, for example, has a print run of over 170,000 copies and is distributed to every rural...

• June 15, 2011
• comments

What Augmented Reality Can Do for the Media Industry

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

I attended the second annual Augmented Reality Event conference in Santa Clara, Calif., in May and it was ... interesting. OK, it was a huge geekfest. The opening session was interrupted by people dressed in hazardous waste -- or maybe they were supposed to be pseudo-astronaut -- outfits, yelling about "free space," while wrapping the audience in yellow caution tape. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, composer, visual artist and free thinker best known for coining the term "virtual reality," opened his keynote speech by playing the khene, a traditional Laotian wind instrument that he says was the earliest conveyor of...

• June 14, 2011
• comments

DocumentCloud Merges With IRE

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

DocumentCloud is beyond delighted to announce we've found a long-term home for our project. We're merging our operation with Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit grassroots organization committed to fostering excellence in investigative journalism. This transition means that DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web, will have a permanent place in a longstanding resource for investigative reporting. IRE has a long and established history of supporting investigative reporting, and we'll be a proud part of their ongoing work to provide journalists with tools that support their reporting. It...

• June 9, 2011
• comments

Reporters Bring Sources Right Into the Story With DocumentCloud

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Embedding notes makes it even easier for reporters to bring source documents right into the story. One of DocumentCloud's primary goals is to make it simpler for news organizations to show their work -- to invite readers to review the very same documents the journalists used to draw the conclusions in their reporting. The latest addition to our toolbox, which we quietly rolled out last month, allows reporters to embed a single annotation in a story online, and we've been delighted to see newsrooms making excellent use of it. City officials in Torrance, Calif., circulated a press release explaining their...

• June 7, 2011
• comments

Time to Bake Smart Correction Tools Into New Publishing Platforms

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A window of opportunity is open right now for online journalists to build accuracy and accountability into the publishing systems we use every day. To understand why this is such a big deal, first hop with me for a minute into the Wayback Machine. It's the mid-1990s. Journalists have just arrived on the web. They're starting sites like Hotwired and Pathfinder, Salon and Slate. They're doing good work, but also, inevitably, making mistakes. Their customary corrections routine -- post a notice in the next edition or issue -- makes no sense in the new medium, where stories are just files...

• June 6, 2011
• comments

CityCircles Explains How to Make a Killer Mobile App for Transit

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

What a difference a year makes. Last year, the CityCircles team was solely focused on building an audience for our unique, web-based publishing platform for the Phoenix light rail community. CityCircles has one of the slickest, easiest experiences for posting geo-tagged content (at least we like to think so). That said, think about everything that has happened in the past year from a technology and user experience standpoint. Safe to say that if we had a crystal ball when we filed our Knight Foundation News Challenge application in 2008, we'd have put our focus on the mobile space instead...

• June 2, 2011
• comments

Stroome Reels Filmmakers Into Online Collaborative Video Editing

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

While speaking in Tribeca a couple of months ago in front of a packed theater of New York independent fiction and documentary filmmakers, I introduced Stroome, a collaborative online video editing community, and was astonished to receive a standing ovation. One filmmaker explained to me that she had been sending clips back and forth with a collaborator in London, and having to take the time to re-edit a sequence to make slight changes or slowly upload finished segments was encumbering her entire filmmaking process. She, like many others in the room, envisioned how Stroome could vastly improve collaboration, and she...

• May 26, 2011
• comments

Why Isn't the Public Radio Player App on Android? Let Us Count the Ways

by Rekha Murthy
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

We know, we know. Android users want the Public Radio Player, too. We've received plenty of comments from our feedback page: "Patiently waiting for bliss..." -- Stephenmm "hurry up please. i love your app and i want it on my phone!" -- ryan "Enjoyed this on my wifes Iphone but was disappointed to find out it isnt on my new Android device. Ohh How will I survive without it? Please hurry up and release it." -- Ben " I cannot help but wonder if this project has actually been...gulp...abandoned!" -- Dan D Oh, the drama. Here's the deal. Public Radio...

• May 23, 2011
• comments

MIT Sessions Address Prison Blogging, Networked Revolt in Arab World

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MIT's Center for Future Civic Media redoubled its public events efforts this past year, thanks to a push by its fellow Ethan Zuckerman. Zuckerman brings a unique perspective -- a civic one -- to media developments so often dominated by politics and business-model debates. This approach couldn't be more evident than in the case of two recent Civic Media Sessions, videos of which you'll see below. Our sessions, spread throughout the semester, are conversations around civic media topics we're just now defining, including the coalescing of the field itself around information needs, geographic communities, and replicable, sustainable technical innovation. "Design...

• May 19, 2011
• comments

SaferMobile Helps Protect Your Cell Phone Data from Threats

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Activists, rights defenders and journalists use mobile devices and communications for reporting, organizing, mobilizing and documenting. Mobile gadgets provide countless benefits -- relatively low cost, increased efficiencies, vast reach -- but they also present specific risks. Mobile communication is inherently insecure and exposes you to risks that aren't easy to detect or overcome. SaferMobile is a project that aims to help people, including journalists and citizen reporters, assess and better protect themselves from mobile threats. The project launched with content and announced tools (currently in beta) in April, and development began in January. SaferMobile is a project of MobileActive.org. Understand...

• May 18, 2011
• comments

Journalists, Marines Find a Middle Ground on Censorship for Basetrack

by David Gurman
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sundev Lohr contributed research and writing to this post. How can you share war stories online, in real time, without compromising operational security? Can a reporting system be designed to ensure that, while in the field, your story can be communicated without giving the enemy information they could use to harm you? Can you censor reporting while maintaining journalistic integrity? These were the critical questions we considered during a Skype conference call in September with Basetrack's Teru Kuwayama, Balazs Gardi and Tivadar Dominizcky the day before the team left for Camp Leatherneck, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Basetrack is an independent, civilian...

• May 16, 2011
• comments

Mapping the Japan Earthquake to Help Recovery Efforts

by David Cole
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the days following the earthquake in Japan, members of the US business community pledged more than $240 million to aid response and recovery efforts. Their challenge was to figure out how to dispense that money to the projects and people who needed it most. To help them visualize the scope of the disaster and identify the areas that were most affected, we worked with the Business Civic Leadership Center to develop an interactive map of the aftershocks felt at more than magnitude 5.0 in the days after the initial 9.0 quake. if (typeof ts_embed === 'undefined') { document.write(""); ts_embed...

• May 13, 2011
• comments

Comments Are Dead. We Need You to Help Reinvent Them

by Phillip Smith

Let’s face it — technically speaking, comments are broken. With few exceptions, they don’t deliver on their potential to be a force for good. Web-based discussion threads have been part of the Internet experience since the late 1990s. However, the form of user commentary has stayed fairly static, and — more importantly — few solutions have been presented that address the complaints of publishers, commenters, or those of us who actually read comments. Publishers, for the most part, want software that will stamp out trolls and outsource the policing to the community itself (or, failing that, to Winnipeg). Commenters, on...

• May 12, 2011
• comments

Much Ado About Obama's Birth Certificate on DocumentCloud

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we watched traffic stats skyrocket last month as newsroom after newsroom uploaded President Obama's birth certificate to DocumentCloud and then embedded it, my reaction was hardly one of joy. Why on Earth is a birth certificate more interesting than, say, the pages and pages of receipts documenting some outrageous meals (15 steaks, two orders of fish and a lamb chop -- for five people submitted by National Grid to the Long Island Power Authority after their Hurricane Earl cleanup)? I like to think these are the documents we built DocumentCloud for -- that we're here to give a leg...

• May 11, 2011
• comments

LocalWiki Dips Into Maps, Search, Feeds

by Philip Neustrom

The weather is starting to heat up here in beautiful San Francisco, and so is our software development! Here's an update to give you a sense of what we've been up to for the past month -- and what's coming up. Software highlights We've worked tirelessly on our new software, and we're starting to see the benefits of all this work and planning. Our goal over the past month was to get the software to a state where our first pilot community could use it to start building out their project and give us feedback about what does and doesn't...

• May 10, 2011
• comments

Unplugging from Social Media Boosts Productivity, Human Connection

by Cody Shotwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Upon returning to stay with family in Olympia, Wash., to continue work on SeedSpeak, our Knight News Challenge Project, as well as complete a long-postponed creative writing project, I decided to commit myself to disconnecting completely from social media for two months. And, to the greatest extent possible, I wanted it to be an all-around web media fast. Apart from the most essential of emails, this post marks my first web communique to the world since my return home. No instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare. (However, as an unapologetic news junkie, I put no such limits on news produced...

• May 9, 2011
• comments

No Need for Violence in Microformat War Between hNews, rNews

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has just launched rNews, a consistent, machine-readable way of expressing news metadata in RDFa (a linked data language). This post explains some of the differences between rNews and hNews and why, if you publish news on the web, you ought to be using one or the other. In a now infamous incident at Cambridge University back in October 1946, mid-way through a seminar, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have threatened the philosopher Karl Popper with a red-hot poker (the exact circumstances and use of the poker are still disputed, 65 years on)....

• May 6, 2011
• comments

Design Decision for Local Online News: What's the Secret Sauce?

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

An awful situation for any parent ... my wife suddenly needed to drive four hours to Boston Children's Hospital to shepherd our son through a medical emergency. He was already in Boston, but Valerie couldn't get out of the driveway. A freak blizzard had drifted four feet of snow across it. If she didn't get on the road soon, the childcare lined up for our younger kids would fall apart. I was out of state and no help at all. What to do? One simple posting to Front Porch Forum and a dozen neighbors materialized. Wielding snow blowers and shovels,...

• May 5, 2011
• comments

Win a Newsroom Fellowship by Rethinking Video Storytelling

by Mark Surman

Recently, we've seen a huge change in video online. The advent of web native video makes it possible to mash up moving images with social media, tie clips to data from across the web or, more simply, create simple transcript-based interfaces for navigating long pieces of video. Yet, despite these capabilities, we've seen almost nothing in the way of new kinds of storytelling. Telling stories with video online today looks pretty much the same as it did when I used to shoot local TV news 20 years ago.This is something we hope to change with the first Knight Mozilla news innovation...

• May 2, 2011
• comments

Why Our Project (and the Country) Needs Cheap, Universal Broadband

by Joe Spurr
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Of all the challenges since November, when we began our Knight-funded project, hooking up the Internet was probably the least expected snag. Our project, OpenCourt (formerly Order in the Court 2.0 ), aims to modernize an old-school district courtroom and stream its proceedings live online. There was so much policy to chisel out. There was the logistical challenge to assemble the myriad of stakeholders necessary to have balanced discussions. Bottom-up site design and development. Content to produce. Community outreach. Surely any one of these would gobble more focus than a procedure typically taken for granted to be slightly more complicated...

• April 26, 2011
• comments

R.I.P. Flip Cam: The Smartphone Did It (Not Cisco)

by Tom Grasty
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the last three years, I've attended all three TEDx conferences on the idyllic campus of my old alma mater, the University of Southern California. And it's been my experience that TEDxUSC is where you go to be inspired, not have your dreams relegated to the heap bin of "what if..." But for a brief, fleeting moment last Tuesday, I was certain that all the hard work done by myself and fellow Stroome co-founder, Nonny de la Pena, was about to go the way of...well, the Flip. There I was sitting in the audience along with my fellow 1,200 TEDxers...

• April 25, 2011
• comments

How to Design Fast, Interactive Maps Without Flash

by Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Until recently if you wanted to create a fast interactive map to use on your website you had two main options - design it in Flash, or use Google. With the prevalence of mobile devices, for many users Flash isn't an option, leaving Google and a few competitors (like Bing). But we are developing open source technologies in this space that provide viable alternatives for serving fast interactive maps online - ones that often give users more control over map design and the data displayed on it. TileMill, our open source map design studio, now provides interactivity in the latest...

• April 22, 2011
• comments

Why Are Newsrooms Resistant to Creating Newsgames?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past weekend a group of 25 game developers, academics and journalists gathered at the University of Minnesota’s Journalism Center to examine the state of newsgames. While it can be a slippery term to define, generally speaking newsgames covers a wide range of game-like experiences from puzzles to graphically-rich presentations that convey some kind of interactive news content.The use of videogame-like narratives is one of the many promising new forms of digital storytelling that have emerged over the past 15 years. And yet for all the potential, and some extremely successful examples, newsgames have not been widely adopted by news...

• April 8, 2011
• comments

Ushahidi's Online Toolbox Helps People Understand the Service

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

[Post written by Melissa Tully and Jennifer Chan. This post is the third in a series of blog posts documenting a 9-month Ushahidi evaluation project in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative supported by the Knight Foundation.] We have made great progress on the Ushahidi Kenya evaluation. Jennifer has been back at the iHub continuing to build the 3-part assessment and self-evaluation tool. The goal of this toolbox is to help interested organizations learn about the Ushahidi platform using a web-based interactive tool. There's also a low bandwidth and no bandwidth option as detailed in our earlier post. In Nairobi,...

• April 7, 2011
• comments

Freedom Fone Helps with Election Monitoring to Agriculture

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The eagerly awaited Freedom Fone Version 2.0 has been released this March 2011. The innovative platform, initiated by The Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe and funded by The Knight News Challenge, was inspired by the desire to reach out to the burgeoning number of ordinary mobile phone users in developing countries. The all-women management team of information activists from Harare, Zimbabwe, came up with the concept in response to the frustrations of trying to communicate in a highly controlled media landscape, where 90% of the population does not have Internet access. There has been a great deal of hype recently around...

• April 5, 2011
• comments

LocalWiki Codes, Talks, Searches for Pilot Community

by Philip Neustrom

Here's a summary of what we've been up to for the past month or so at LocalWiki: coding, coding, coding, coding, talking, coding, talking, talking, coding, coding, coding. Occasionally we take breaks for sleep and nutritional intake purposes. Want more detail? Read on! Code, code, code, code & milestone We've been hard at work on the software side of the project. In the past month, we've: begun serious work on our collaborative mapping system; made the basic functions of our page editor work better; and come up with a way to allow for plug-ins and dynamic content inside pages. We're...

• April 4, 2011
• comments

Map Mashup Shows Broadband Speeds for Schools in U.S.

by Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Department of Education (ED) recently launched Maps.ed.gov/Broadband an interactive map that shows schools and their proximity to broadband Internet access speeds across the country. This is an important story for ED, an agency that has a stated goal that all students and teachers have access to a sufficient infrastructure for learning -- which nowadays includes a fast Internet connection. The map is based on open data released last month by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As you can see below, the result is a custom map that shows a unique story -- how schools' Internet access compares across the...

• April 1, 2011
• comments

DocumentCloud Enables Public Searches, Embeddable Sets

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We quietly opened DocumentCloud's catalog to public searches in January, and we've been working since to do more with the great documents that reporters have added to our catalog. When Vancouver Sun investigative reporter Chad Skelton asked if there was a way to automate display of the growing cache of documents he was retrieving from the city's ferry authority, the best answer we could offer was to point his readers to a search for the DocumentCloud project he was stashing them in. Our goal from the outset has been to help news organizations make their own substantive reporting more engaging...

• March 31, 2011
• comments

How Project Argo Members Communicate Across Time Zones

by Matt Thompson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Project Argo is an ambitious undertaking. It involves networking NPR with 12 member stations spanning three time zones with a different mix of bloggers and editors at each station. The stations cover a variety of regionally focused, nationally resonant topics that range from climate change to local music. Communicating effectively within these parameters has required creativity and experimentation. And we're still learning. I'll break down our various approaches -- what we've tried, what's working, and what we're still working on -- using the three tiers of communication: One-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. One-to-one communication These exchanges with the stations have offered...

• March 29, 2011
• comments

Lessons From Phase 1 of the Ushahidi Evaluation in Kenya

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was written by Melissa Tuly and Jennifer Chan. This is the second in a series of blog posts documenting a 9-month Ushahidi evaluation project in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative supported by the Knight Foundation. The Ushahidi-Kenya evaluation is off to a strong start. Since returning from Nairobi in January, 2011 we have worked on the self-evaluation and assessment tool for individuals and organizations interested in using Ushahidi. The purpose of the tool is to help interested parties learn about the Ushahidi platform via a web-based learning tool, to provide access to community resources, and to actively...

• March 28, 2011
• comments

Using Technology to Aid Disaster Relief for Japan and Beyond

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The March 11 earthquake in Japan triggered a flurry of concern in the Media Lab community at MIT. The natural desire to help was amplified by the fact that the disaster had hit many of our friends close to home in a very literal sense. Most messages suggested donations to support relief organizations -- a worthy cause indeed -- but there was also a more unique reaction: A call for relief technology. It turns out that the use of digital tools in crisis situations is a concept with rich communities and plenty of solid examples. Within the Media Lab there...

• March 24, 2011
• comments

How Grahamstown Now Combines Mobile Content, Daily Deals

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Giving African newsrooms, particularly community media and non-profit organizations, the ability to leapfrog into the mobile era is at the core project of Iindaba Ziyafika's work in South Africa. As Anne-Ryan Heatwole reported last year on this site, our Knight-funded NIKA Content Management System, which was designed and coded in South Africa using Drupal as its base, provides powerful SMS and IM "in and out" service. When combined with the largest citizen journalism program in Africa at Grocott's Mail, it has allowed an unprecedented level of interactivity between our newsroom and our community of about 100,000 people. Last year, we launched...

• March 22, 2011
• comments

Inside Shelbyville Multimedia's Ambitious Immigration Project

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Shelbyville project kicks off with a series of "Welcoming" videos Chances are you haven't yet heard of Shelbyville, a small rural community in Tennessee. If not, then you're probably also unaware of the upcoming "Welcome to Shelbyville" documentary or the online project that is forging a pilot, or prototype, for communities to tell and share their own stories. So let me share my initial impressions of this remarkable, ambitious effort. Last Monday I was lucky enough to be a part of a "digital brain trust" of 20 progressive media and non-profit representatives at the Bay Area Video Coalition headquarters....

• March 21, 2011
• comments

Fresh from SXSWi: 6 Ways to Integrate Hacking in Newsrooms

by Nathaniel James

Going over my notes from the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, the panel that was definitely the most valuable to my work on the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership was Hacking the News: Applying Computer Science to Journalism. What we're doing The Knight-Mozilla Partnership will be embedding 15 techie fellows within news organizations for a year of news hacking. We want to build really useful new open web technologies for the whole field of journalism. We'll recognize success when journalists at newsrooms all over the world use the stuff we build. While we're getting a wonderful response to the partnership,...

• March 17, 2011
• comments

SeedSpeak Launches, Uses Geotags to Solve Local Problems

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the joys of living in Phoenix, besides the winters, is the local airport. Sky Harbor bills itself as the nation's friendliest airport and, while I won't go that far, I love the fact that you can get in and out with minimal hassle. Even with construction to build a tram system linking the economy parking to the terminals and the terminals to the city's new light rail system, getting around the airport is still a breeze. The only issue I've ever had with Sky Harbor is its signage. After a long, late flight from the East Coast, I...

• March 16, 2011
• comments

MIT Produces a String of Civic Media Success Stories

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we wind the way toward the end of our four year grant, I thought it would be nice to describe some of what we've learned at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media (C4). In the coming weeks, I will call on a few of our researchers to offer similar blog reflections on our unique blend of communities, information, and action. First, though, I want to describe some of the exciting project highlights from the last few weeks. Because C4 is a multi-disciplinary institution, different projects end up affecting different audiences, so I wanted to put them all in one...

• March 14, 2011
• comments

Lost in Boston: REALTIME

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the last several months, we have been testing a system called Lost in Boston: REALTIME with a variety of community partners. This video describes a bit about the project. Rick Borovoy loves Boston, but he hates how hard it is to figure out where one is. Boston is tough to navigate, and while our various government entities do their best to keep up, governments are better at long-term infrastructure than quickly updating signage in a fast-moving, dynamic city. So Rick started looking at how businesses could help. He proposed hosting real-time transit signs in local businesses and non-profits. By...

• March 13, 2011
• comments

VoIP Drupal Kicks Off at Drupalcon

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Voip Drupal, a plugin that allow full interaction between Drupal CMS and phones.

• March 13, 2011
• comments

Junkyard Jumbotron

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rick Borovoy just released the Junkyard Jumbotron project, which allows laptops or phones in close proximity to be ganged together to form a large display. The Junkyard Jumbotron requires no special software; it is simply a web page that receives real-time updates from our server, allowing scrolling, zooming, and soon video. Like all software at the Center, it is free and open. Rick developed the project as part of a larger suite of tools that he calls the Brown Bag Toolkit, all oriented around making technology work better with face-to-face interactions, like meetings, canvasing, or chance encounters. Junkyard Jumbotron from...

• March 12, 2011
• comments

How to Design a Simple Newsgame Authoring Tool

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our teams at Georgia Tech and UC Santa Cruz have been working on an authoring tool that helps journalists quickly create bite-sized newsgames. The Cartoonist has been the working title for the tool because our intention is to create games akin to editorial cartoons, in terms of the amount of information being conveyed and the style of representation. But despite this small scope, the promise of this tool requires intense research and design. Over the past half-year, we have been faced with a daunting question: How do you create something that can generate games for a seemingly endless list of...

• March 8, 2011
• comments

Knight News Innovation Lab Seeks Executive Director

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight News Innovation Laboratory at Northwestern University, whose mission is to "accelerate media innovation" in the Chicago region and beyond, is seeking an executive director. The lab, supported by a four-year, $4.2 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is part of the Medill-McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism. When the grant was announced last month, Eric Newton, vice president of Knight's journalism programs, described it as a "pioneering partnership between a school of journalism and a school of engineering." The executive director will oversee the Lab's operations and staff -- which...

• March 7, 2011
• comments

Drupal Now Accessible Via Any Phone

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MIT's Center for Future Civic Media has done a variety of breakthrough civic systems with phones. Examples range from Leo Burd's What's Up platform to the Call4Action class and its cool student projects. We at C4 love these projects, but working with phones has always been a bear. A lot of programming is necessary. In many cases, people start with the phone and end up building custom infrastructure that begin to represent an actual content management system. Projects like Ushahidi or our earlier txtMob are really just simple CMSs with a few custom features for texting inputs. So Leo...

• March 4, 2011
• comments

Open Media Project's User-Driven, New Media Network One Step Closer to Reality

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

“The long-term vision of the Open Media Project focuses on establishing a true network of PEG stations that can share the top-rated content across thousands of community media stations across the globe,” explained Tony Shawcross, OMF’s Executive Director. “Each community media website can serve as a portal, not only to local content, but also to a second-tier of content from hundreds or perhaps thousands of Access stations. Thanks to this collaboration between Archive.org and OMF, this vision is now possible...

• March 2, 2011
• comments

Telling Better Stories by Designing Custom Maps Using TileMill

by Eric Gundersen
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Plotting information -- say survey data in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas or election results in Afghanistan -- on any kind of map adds critical geo-context to the data. These maps quickly become move powerful when you start adding more custom overlays, showing data like where different ethnic groups live, high incidents of corruption, or more complex visuals like the number of deaths per drone strike in Pakistan and which U.S. president ordered it. What is really amazing is how accessible it is now for people to make custom maps to be able to tell more complex stories with data....

• March 2, 2011
• comments

Ushahidi Takes First Steps in Evaluating Kenya Projects

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post was written by Melissa Tully and Jennifer Chan. It is the first in a series of blog posts documenting a 9-month Ushahidi evaluation project in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and supported by the Knight Foundation. A version of the post below was originally published on the Ushahidi blog During the first two weeks of January, we traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, to begin phase one of a 9-month evaluation of Ushahidi's Kenya projects. Ushahidi is a web application created to map the reported incidents of violence during the post-election crisis in Kenya. As part of a team,...

• February 25, 2011
• comments

MIT's Civic Media Session Explores Data in Cities

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

With a redoubled focus on the community in the civic media community, the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched a new series last week. These relaxed, informal conversations about civic media featured ground-level practitioners, activists, hackers, and local leaders. The first session, "Bustling with Information: Cities, Code, and Civics," brought good friends Nick Grossman, Nigel Jacob, and Max Ogden to our Cambridge campus. As you can see from the video clips below, these sessions are unique opportunities to talk about the amazing work that goes on in this sphere, intriguingly out of earshot...

• February 18, 2011
• comments

LocalWiki Tries "Open-From-The-Start" Development Process

by Mike Ivanov
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's time for another project update. We've been hard at work on the core of the software that will power LocalWiki. We've also been spending time running around meeting people passionate about local media and planning out many things to come. Basic groundwork laid Many of you know about the Davis Wiki, but what you may not know is that we developed the custom software that powers it ourselves. Back in 2004, there was just nothing else that could do everything you see on the Davis Wiki while being easy enough for most people to use. Developing the custom software...

• February 17, 2011
• comments

People of Color Must Innovate or Die in Digital Media

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In December in this space I asked about the lack of minorities at new media conferences -- both as participants and as speakers. The blog post generated a lot of comments; a Twitter discussion, and the start of a list of wonderful experts -- all persons of color -- who can help make your next new media conference a success. I heard privately from a dozen or so white digital media leaders who confessed that they often wondered why new media seemed to be getting off on the wrong foot when it comes to diversifying staffs at operations and speakers...

• February 11, 2011
• comments

'Data and Cities' Conference Pushes Open Data, Visualizations

by Jordan Salinger
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I entered Stamen's offices in the Mission district of San Francisco, I saw four people gathered around a computer screen. What were they doing? Nothing less than "mapping the world" -- not as it appears in flat dimension, but how it reveals itself. And they weren't joking. Stamen, a data visualization firm, has always kept "place" central to many of their projects. They achieved this most famously through their crimespotting maps of Oakland and San Francisco, which give geographical context to the world of crime. This week they are taking on a world-sized challenge as they host a conference...

• February 9, 2011
• comments

Knight, Mozilla Partner to Boost Tech-Journalism Collaboration

by Nathaniel James

I'm excited to announce the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, a Mozilla Drumbeat project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Journalism Program. For the next three years, we will have the opportunity to engage a huge community, bring people together for trainings and in-person events, and ultimately build software and thought leadership to address the challenges that news organizations are facing today. We'll be working with some amazing news partners: BBC, Boston.com, The Guardian, and Zeit Online, who are launching the partnership with us, and many more who we will invite to join the initiative. If you're...

• February 8, 2011
• comments

Lawyers Voice Concerns About Live-Streaming Court Cases

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the first things First Justice Mark Coven told us when we went down to the Quincy District Court to start talking about our project, Order in the Court 2.0, was that we had to hold an all-court meeting to introduce the project to everyone to get their input. This seemed like an excellent thing to do before waltzing into the complex world of the court with our video camera and high-speed Internet in hand. On the day of the meeting in December, the First Session of the courthouse was standing room only, and included the entire court staff,...

• February 4, 2011
• comments

Why Huffington Post's 'Predict the News' Game Is No Galaga

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Fellow Knight News Challenge winner Chris O'Brien recently posted on this site about "gamifying" the news. The idea behind the  movement O'Brien is speaking of, which Brad Flora touched on in another recent Idea Lab post, involves adding incentives -- pop-up achievements for tasks completed, progress bars to fill, badges to display, online leaderboards for score comparison, and virtual goods -- to activities. The idea is to reward repeat patronage and reframe participation as if it's like a playing a game. A Brief History of Videogame Scoring Videogames have long used scores to track player performance. In 1976, Sea Wolf...

• February 2, 2011
• comments

Turning the iPad into an Open, Offline Mapping Platform

by Justin Miller
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've talked here before about TileMill, an open source tool for creating your own custom map tiles (the individual pieces that make up a full map of a city, country, and so on). But what sorts of things can you do with these map tiles? One area we wanted to explore was using them on Apple's latest touch-based device, the iPad. Providing a touch interface for maps is a serious usability win and the long battery life, huge available storage, and opportunistic network connectivity combine to make a really attractive mobile mapping platform. The result? The MapBox iPad app. This...

• January 21, 2011
• comments

Dotspotting Expands to Track Homicides, Food Vendors, Road Trips

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since my last post, we've been busily working on extending the functionality of Dotspotting, the first project in our larger Citytracking project aimed at helping people tell stories about cities. It's still, as my colleague Aaron puts it, very much in a "super alpha-beta-disco-ball" state -- which mainly just means we don't want anyone to put data in there that they expect to keep -- but it's getting there. A few things have happened that I want to update you about: Import has been expanded from only accepting .csv files to include .gpx, .json, .kml, .rss and .xls files. Various...

• January 20, 2011
• comments

How Can We 'Gamify' the News Experience?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the biggest emerging conversations over the past year in Silicon Valley is around "gamification." Simply put, this is the idea of applying game mechanics, particularly those found in videogames, to all sorts of non-game experiences. After following this conversation for many months, I've come to believe that over the next decade gamification will profoundly reshape the way we experience the web, to the same degree that social media and networks redefined the web last decade. To that end, I've been thinking in the broadest terms what that could and should mean for how we can reinvent digital news....

• January 19, 2011
• comments

LocalWiki: Laying the Groundwork

by Philip Neustrom

A few of you have been wondering what we've been up to since our Kickstarter pledge drive ended, so we want to give you a quick update on our Knight-funded project, LocalWiki. For those of you who are more technically inclined, we hope to also provide an insight into these early stages of our process. To follow our updates in the future, please sign up with your email address at http://localwiki.org, follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/localwiki, or follow our blog directly. Or if you're a huge geek, join us on IRC in Freenode's #localwiki. Right now, we are ramping...

• January 6, 2011
• comments

NPR's Project Argo Creates National Content at the Local Level

by Joel Sucherman

Jason and the Argonauts were the mythological Greek heroes who set off on a quest for the Golden Fleece. Like its namesake, NPR's Project Argo is off on another noble quest -- to strengthen local journalism, particularly on digital platforms. Project Argo is a partnership between NPR and member stations, funded by the Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Its focus is building and launching niche, topic-focused websites for NPR member stations that can be models for the rest of the system. We're proving the notion that a news organization can quickly build authority, engagement and traffic...

• December 20, 2010
• comments

Introducing Sourcerer: A Context Management System

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you want to follow the news, the web has a lot to offer: a wide variety of information sources, powerful search tools, and no shortage of sites where people can voice their opinions. At the same time, though, the web can be overwhelming. Hundreds of links turn up in a Google search. Relevant information can be scattered across dozens of sites. Online conversations often generate more heat than light. And if you have a question about a news topic, it's hard to find the answer. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a website that made it easier to...

• December 15, 2010
• comments

How OpenStreetMap Helps to Curb Haiti's Cholera Epidemic

by Robert Soden
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In order to respond to the current cholera epidemic in Haiti, it's essential that citizens, aid groups and others are aware of the locations of functioning health and sanitation facilities. The challenge is that maps showing this information don't currently exist -- at least not in a comprehensive and up-to-date way. Guensmork Alcin is attempting to change this. He is working with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to expand OpenStreetMap, a free and open source map of the world that has one of the most detailed GIS data sets in existence on Haiti. Guensmork, known as Guens, is training...

• December 13, 2010
• comments

Altering Docs? Now There's a Tool for That in DocumentCloud

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we embarked on the DocumentCloud project, tools for altering documents were the furthest thing from our minds. After all, a responsible journalist doesn't tweak source documents! But one of the first papers to embed material using DocumentCloud needed to do just that. The Chicago Tribune accompanied their coverage of a troubled foster home with a collection of letters and court orders. Though the documents offered an excellent illustration of the state child services agency's lax oversight and slipped follow-ups, they were predictably full of personal information about children in the foster care system, individual agency staff names and other...

• December 9, 2010
• comments

CNN Fails to Correct Mistaken Identity for New Zealand PM

by Mark Follman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

CNN's broadcasts are packed with cheerleading for the network's viewer participation opportunities. You're encouraged to "share your story" at CNN iReport or "join a live chat" at Anderson Cooper's blog or check out CNN Heroes on Facebook or follow one of the network's nearly three dozen Twitter feeds. Welcome to the brave new world of interactive news! But what if you notice an error in a CNN broadcast and want to tell the network about it? Welcome to the jungle. Email Black Hole Back on October 28, a MediaBugs user filed a bug pointing out that a CNN broadcast had...

• December 6, 2010
• comments

Medill Students: Audience Research Should Drive Hyperlocal Revenue Strategy

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the Block By Block "community news summit" in September, operators of locally focused websites came together to share what they knew and learn from their peers. Almost all of them were looking for advice on how to support their sites financially. Here's a start: "Sustaining Hyperlocal News: An Approach to Studying Local Business Markets," a new report from a team of master's students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The report is the first output -- with more to come -- from this term's "innovation project" class. "To become financially sustainable, hyperlocal publishers need to make...

• December 1, 2010
• comments

MIT Unveils Civic Tools for Communities Affected by Natural Gas

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last Friday, MIT Center for Future Civic Media's director Chris Csikszentmihalyi formally released extrAct, a suite of Internet-based databasing, mapping and communications technologies for use by communities impacted by natural gas development. extrAct is targeted not only at communities and landowners but also at the journalists who cover local development and environment issues. It is a novel platform for community education and civic action. While outlets such as 60 Minutes have picked up on both the unprecedented opportunities and health risks of American natural gas extraction, which is touted as the country's path to energy independence, Csikszentmihályi and his team...

• November 26, 2010
• comments

Innovation Strategy #1: Don't Take 'No' for an Answer

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past week, Tom Grasty and I were invited to the Paley Center as part of "The Next Big Thing: The New News Entrepreneurs." We were asked to present Stroome before an extraordinary audience stuffed with CEOs, COOs and presidents of some of the world's most important media companies. During one presentation, Google's entertaining president of global sales operations and business development, Nikesh Arora, claimed the company culture regarding innovation at Google is about saying "let's try to find a way to say yes." It was one of the most inspiring leadership principles laid out during the two-and-a-half day conference...

• November 24, 2010
• comments

How the FCC is Creating Better Open Data

by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the context of our TileMill project, we’ve been talking about our goal to help make open data from governments more actionable by making it easier to turn GIS data into custom maps. We’re focused on building better tools so people can turn data into custom maps to tell better stories online, but another important part of this process is getting good access to quality data in the first place. What does it look like to open up data effectively, so that it’s not just available but useful to the public? FCC Setting a Good Example The Federal Communications Commission...

• November 23, 2010
• comments

Scholarship winner wants to help media "explore new digital revenue models"

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When a Knight News Challenge grant made it possible to award journalism scholarships to people with backgrounds in computer science, no one -- not even the first scholarship applicants -- knew what career opportunities would be available to "programmer-journalists." Five Knight scholars will graduate from Medill in December. Here's the second of a series of posts describing them and their career goals and plans. Other profiles: Geoffrey Hing. Jesse Young has worked for two Internet startups in the Bay Area, but he came to Medill in part because of his love for magazines -- the printed kind. He's particularly interested...

• November 23, 2010
• comments

Graduating Programmer-Journalist Wants to Help Underserved Communities

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When a Knight News Challenge grant made it possible to award journalism scholarships to people with backgrounds in computer science, no one -- not even the first scholarship applicants -- knew what career opportunities would be available to "programmer-journalists." One of the first two Knight scholars wrote a guest post for Idea Lab suggesting eight different career paths for people who, as I like to put it, are bilingual in journalism and technology. Five Knight scholars will graduate from Medill in December.  Here's the first of a series of posts describing them and their career goals and plans. Geoffrey Hing's...

• November 22, 2010
• comments

Building a Successful Technology Venture for the Bottom of the Pyramid

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a long overdue update from our end! We were awarded a grant in the 2008 News Challenge for developing low-cost technologies for community radio stations in India. We have come a long way since then. Our systems are now in use in 9 stations in India, and growing steadily. But we have also realized that there is a lot more that needs to be done to push the community radio movement in India. Thankfully the Knight Foundation has given us considerable flexibility to tackle various problems as and when they arise. Let me first give you a context,...

• November 17, 2010
• comments

Remix Radio Re-Imagines Public Radio as Interactive Collage

by Jake Shapiro

While we continue to delve into code-level collaboration with Spot.Us to get our Story Exchange crowdfunding project launched later this year, I'll take the opportunity in my next couple posts to give updates on other emerging PRX services that are helping reshape public radio, and that ultimately will amplify the results of Story Exchange. First up is Remix Radio, an entirely new sound for public radio. Remix Radio The basic idea of Remix is to create a story-driven radio format that aggregates and curates remarkable audio -- short-form documentaries, features, podcasts, interviews, archives, "found sound" -- and rotates it through...

• November 12, 2010
• comments

Overcoming the Challenges of Using Ushahidi in Low Bandwidth Areas

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the increased adoption of Ushahidi around the world, we are finding that one problem (which we anticipated in the very beginning of the initiative) is that of low bandwidth regions. In the early days of testing the platform in Kenya, we found that the map would take ages to load, and so the development team worked very hard to change this. This was of course before the installation of fiber optic links in Kenya, which make connection speeds much better after September 2009. Our current solution for integrating SMS in areas with low bandwidth (but good wireless service coverage)...

• November 9, 2010
• comments

A Six-Step Process for Managing Web Projects

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

After years of intensive work in the IT industry, I've put together a practical guide to project development that my company uses for 99 percent of our projects. So far we've done amazingly well with this approach. Once you know it, it feels so simple and natural that you don't even know you know it. In the interest of helping other folks with their development projects -- and to encourage you to offer your tips and suggestions in the comments -- I offer our process. Step One: Consultations This is where you start brainstorming about the core idea, as well...

• November 4, 2010
• comments

Citytracking Presents Data on Cities for Maps, Visualizations

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Citytracking, one of this year's Knight News Challenge winners, will present digital data about cities that journalists and the public can easily grasp and use, and provide tools to let them distribute their own conclusions. We will build a series of tools to map and visualize data that is truly Internet-native and useful. The project will be: Simple enough that a fairly technical reporter who understands Google Maps and basic HTML can embed something good in their article/report/blog posts. Beautiful enough that an interested amateur citizen will find it useful and interesting. Complex enough to catch the attention of developers...

• November 3, 2010
• comments

Blimee Brings Local News, Engagement and Instant Offers to Digital Signage

by CJ Cornell
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

New ideas, new ventures, new visions: They never turn out quite the way the entrepreneur expects, and often the path to success comes from walking backwards into a great idea. That's what happened with an innovative digital media journalism venture that emerged from the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The founder wasn't even a journalism student. He was a film student with an idea for a better way to get people interested in watching movies. In fact, his idea was nearly a product with a customer and investor lined...

• October 30, 2010
• comments

Mapnik: The Coolest Mapping Software You've Never Heard Of

by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

On the MapBox website we describe TileMill — the project we’re working on with our 2010 Knight News Challenge grant — as “a toolkit for rendering map tiles”. To be more specific, it’s essentially a “glue layer.” TileMill is built on top of a cocktail of other open source mapping software projects, and its biggest value is streamlining other more complex tools into a clean and easier workflow. For users to take advantage of TileMill, it can be useful to understand some of the underlying parts. Perhaps the most important part of that cocktail is a lesser known open source...

• October 29, 2010
• comments

DocumentCloud Users Make Ballot Design An Election Issue

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we make lists of the kinds of source documents users can upload to DocumentCloud, they can get pretty long. DocumentCloud is court filings, hearing transcripts, testimony, legislation, lab reports, memos, meeting minutes, correspondence. I can say with absolute confidence that in all of our planning, "ballots" never once came up as the sort of document a news organization might want to annotate for readers. Our relentlessly creative users have shown us otherwise. This summer, the Memphis Commercial Appeal rounded out its guide to August's primary elections with a sample ballot. Their digital content editor told us that many readers...

• October 27, 2010
• comments

Journalists Should Play and Discuss Newsgames Like 1378(km)

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Evangelizing newsgames is not just about convincing journalists that they should create and use games to express ideas and inform the public. It's also about getting journalists to recognize newsgames that are created outside of professional institutions as works in dialogue with their field. Even if a person cannot produce a game on his own, newsgames can still be shared and discussed. Expending a modest amount of effort in this capacity would go a long way toward the adoption of newsgames as a form. 1378(km) Last week we wrote on our project blog about the media's reception of a German...

• October 21, 2010
• comments

Basetrack Pushes Off to Follow Marines in Afghanistan

by Teru Kuwayama
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Safi Airways flight 4Q-52. Sept 28, 2010 at 20:00 GMT-Zulu -- I'm airborne and en route to link up with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment (a.k.a. "one-eight," the subject of our Knight News Challenge grant), in southern Afghanistan. We're at cruising altitude, somewhere between Hungary and Turkey, on a civilian flight into Kabul. The first leg of our trip, on Singapore Air between New York and Frankfurt, was fully packed. Frankfurt to Kabul is almost empty. Go figure. Apparently Afghanistan has yet to re-establish itself as a vacation destination for European tourists. Battling Red Tape Plan A was to travel...

• October 19, 2010
• comments

BookBrewer Makes Major Self-Publishing Deal with Borders

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This has been one of the most amazing, rewarding and surreal weeks of my life. Borders has chosen BookBrewer -- the first product of my startup, FeedBrewer, which grew out of a News Challenge grant -- to power the engine for its e-book self-publishing service. You can read about our partnership in the official press release, or in media coverage from a variety of sources including Fast Company, Publishers Weekly and PC Magazine. We made the announcement at BlogWorld Expo, one of the largest confabs of bloggers and new media enthusiasts in the world. The response at our booth was...

• October 18, 2010
• comments

577 U.S. News Sites Now Using hNews

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865. It is the only daily broadsheet newspaper in San Francisco -- and is published online at SFgate.com. In the 1960s Paul Avery was a police reporter at the Chronicle when he started investigating the so-called "Zodiac Killer." Earlier this year Mark Fiore won a Pulitzer Prize for his animated online cartoons for the paper. (It's well worth watching his cartoon that has Snuggly the security bear demonstrating how to make the Internet "wire tap friendly.") I'm focused on the Chronicle these days because it is also one of 577 U.S. news sites...

• October 13, 2010
• comments

Student Team -- Including Five "Programmer-Journalists" -- Seeks Hyperlocal Solutions

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In December 2008, a class of Northwestern University journalism master's students -- including two Knight "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners -- unveiled a prototype news Web site called News Mixer. The site, one of the first to integrate Facebook Connect as a system for identity management, got a fair amount of attention for its novel approaches to user interaction around local news. Almost two years later, another team of students from Northwestern's Medill School is hard at work in another "innovation project" class. Once again, the class focus is on local news and information. And once again the class includes Knight scholars...

• October 13, 2010
• comments

LocalWiki to Create Collaborative, Community-Owned Local Media

by Philip Neustrom

So much of the unique knowledge and experiences we acquire through years of living in a community gets spread only by word of mouth, or worse it just stays "locked up" in our heads. But this is great stuff, valuable expert knowledge that can benefit everyone. After all, when it comes to the communities where we live, we are all experts! What if everyone could share and collaborate on what they know about their local community? What would local media look like if everyone in the community was creating it? The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned,...

• October 5, 2010
• comments

'Sourcing Through Texting' Brings Public into Radio Investigations

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

If a large truck illegally barrels through a neighborhood and no reporters are around to see it, does it make the news? It does if local residents with mobile phones can text truck sightings to a local public radio station. This is the premise behind a new pilot project called Sourcing Through Texting from a team at "The Takeaway" radio program. Sourcing Through Texting provides a way to connect citizens with journalists via mobile phones. The Takeaway is a co-production of Public Radio International and public radio station WNYC in collaboration with the BBC World Service, the New York Times,...

• September 23, 2010
• comments

How to Build a Website: One Piece at a Time

by Tom Grasty
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The likelihood that an online video editing site, a 21st century technological innovation if ever there were one, would draw inspiration from a 34-year-old Johnny Cash song about a broken-down, piece of junk Cadillac is, admittedly, a tad anachronistic. But as my partner, Nonny de la Peña, and I roll up our sleeves, crawl back under the hood and start fine-tuning Stroome, one of this year's Knight News Challenge winners, it seems we've found our muse in the most unlikely of places. "One Piece at a Time" Released in 1976, the Johnny Cash song "One Piece at a Time" tells...

• September 22, 2010
• comments

An Anaylsis of Six Journalism Startups

by David Cohn

In the last few weeks there has been some interesting and exciting news in the journalism startup world. I wanted to take some time to highlight new players and provide my own personal analysis. Collaborative Storytelling: Three New Startups Kommons.com Kommons was founded by the young Cody Brown who busted into the conversation with some epic blog posts last fall. Brown and his co-founder taught themselves how to code (this is a bootstrapped operation) and iterated like mad. For that, my hat is off. Disclaimer: I've had the chance to chat with Brown a few times and find him to...

• September 21, 2010
• comments

SeedSpeak To Sprout Community Improvement Projects in Phoenix

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The excitement continues to build in the Phoenix community over a new mobile and web platform that will help people sow positive change in the community. Since the June Knight News Challenge funding announcement, my development partner Cody Shotwell and I have fielded dozens of calls and emails from local people. They can't wait to help us put together the project that will allow users to plant the seed of an idea for a community improvement project, allow others to add on or grow that idea toward maturity and, finally, join neighbors and local officials together to harvest the idea...

• September 20, 2010
• comments

PRX Story Exchange, Spot.us Bring Crowdfunding to Public Radio

by Jake Shapiro

Story Exchange (formerly Story Market) is a way for local public radio stations, producers, and listeners to pitch, find and fund documentaries and stories on important local issues. We're also one of this year's winners of a Knight News Challenge grant. Here's how we envision it working: Let's say that in Kentucky the issue of mountaintop mining needs a deeper investigative look. On Story Exchange, the Louisville public radio WFPL station can invite producers to bid on reporting the story, ask listeners to contribute funds as well as ideas, and see the story through to completion for broadcast and digital...

• September 15, 2010
• comments

The Cartoonist Aims to Bring Newsgames to the Masses

by Ian Bogost
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Cartoonist, our winning entry in the 2010 Knight News Challenge, emerged from two research programs. For the past two years, my research group at the Georgia Institute of Technology has been cataloging and analyzing the burgeoning genre of "newsgames" -- videogames about current and past real-world events. That research produced a book, Newsgames, which will be published next month by MIT Press. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, professor Michael Mateas and his Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz have been working on the problem of game generation by creating artificial intelligence tools to create a...

• September 2, 2010
• comment

SeenReport Helps Citizens Report on Floods in Pakistan

by Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The devastating floods in Pakistan have been covered by trained reporters and mainstream media outlets around the world. Citizens, often on the front lines of the flood, have also been contributing thousands of reports though mobile phones, in part enabled by the citizen journalism service SeenReport.com. SeenReport (a name derived from "see 'n report") is a citizen journalism service through which users can submit photos, videos, and text accounts of news as it is happening via SMS, MMS, or email. SeenReport won a 2010 mBillionth award, a first-ever contest which recognizes mobile content in South Asia. (This YouTube video...

• August 30, 2010
• comments

New Media Tools Play Pivotal Role in Kenya's Constitution-Making

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Kenya is moving towards greater democracy and more transparent governance thanks to the recent constitutional referendum that received 70 percent "yes" votes. The new constitution, which is scheduled to be signed into law on Friday, replaces the one drafted during Kenya's colonial era. It includes a Bill of Rights, which states that all Kenyans should have access to clean water, decent housing, basic sanitation and quality food. The new constitution aims to decentralize political power, increase government accountability, create more robust checks and balances against corruption, and foster a move towards fairer distribution of wealth. President Mwai Kibaki said, "The...

• August 25, 2010
• comment

Helping D.C. Drinkers and Bikers with Custom Maps

by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my last post about [TileMill](http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2010/08/tilemill-custom-maps-to-help-with-data-dumps-hyper-local215.html), I outlined some of our general plans and the background for why we're working on this project to help make it easier for people to design very custom maps online. One question that we get a lot from people who are new to the GIS space is, "When would I need this? How could I hope to improve on what [fill in the blank:Google/Bing/etc.] make available?" The answer is that it's all about the details of the specific communications goal you want to accomplish.

• August 24, 2010
• comments

One-Eight, Afghanistan: Social Media + U.S. Marine Corps

by Teru Kuwayama
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

As the saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for." In my case, I won a Knight News Challenge grant to launch an online, social media reporting network that follows a battalion of U.S. Marines throughout their deployment to southern Afghanistan. (Congratulations! You've won a year in Helmand Province, roadside bomb capital of the world...) Although recently upgraded from "forgotten war" to "central front," the Afghanistan conflict exists on the periphery of the American consciousness. We're nearly a decade into the longest war in U.S. history, but most Americans still have a pretty fuzzy idea of what we're actually doing...

• August 23, 2010
• comments

NowSpots: Working to Make Local Web Ads That Work

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

NowSpots are beautiful online ads that feature the latest social media updates from advertisers, and make it easy for a reader to follow and share their content across the web. For the last year at WindyCitizen.com, a social network for Chicago news aficionados and urban explorers, we've been selling a simple version of NowSpots ads to small businesses and local colleges -- and we recently won a Knight News Challenge Award to spin the format off into its own company that provides these ads to other publishers. In a world where thousands of small businesses are signing up for sites...

• August 12, 2010
• comments

Programmer-Journalists Apply Talents to News21 Multimedia Project

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Manya Gupta and Andrew Paley are the first Knight "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners to participate in the News21 multimedia reporting project, an initiative in its fifth year that engages some of the nation's top journalism master's students. The Northwestern University team that Manya and Andrew are part of is focusing on young urban Hispanics and "how they are transforming American politics, media and education now and will continue to do so over the coming decades" said Steve Duke, director of Northwestern's project and associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism. Gupta, Paley and their teammate Kennedy Elliott are developing the...

• August 11, 2010
• comments

Front Porch Forum: Connecting Strangers in the Neighborhood

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mention the Internet, and most people think of the World Wide Web, of reaching out across the globe for news, long-lost friends, or low-price bargains. But in dozens of Vermont towns, residents are using the web to connect with their back-fence neighbors. In an era where national and global information is broadly available online, it seems that few of us know our neighbors and what's going on down the street. My name is Michael Wood-Lewis, and my wife, Valerie, and I saw an opportunity four years ago and created Front Porch Forum (FPF) to serve our home region in northwest...

• August 6, 2010
• comments

TileMill: Custom Maps to Help with Data Dumps, Hyper-Local

by Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

TileMill is an open source toolkit that helps you create beautiful custom maps in the cloud, built by Development Seed. We recently won a Knight News Challenge award (a.k.a. “Tilemapping”) to help us release a new version of TileMill that will make it even easier for people to design highly custom maps — using their own data or freely available public data — that they can then use anywhere online. Over the coming year, our team will be blogging on Idea Lab to share different pieces of our work and talk about our progress. In this post we want to...

• August 5, 2010
• comments

DocumentCloud Helps Arizona Paper with Annotated Immigration Law

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We opened the DocumentCloud floodgates less than six months ago and we're still working hard to make DocumentCloud a better tool. We're rolling out improvements at a healthy clip including SSL support, better documentation, and support for cross-newsroom collaboration. We continue to listen to feedback from our really incredible crop of beta testers (who now number close to 500!). There are nearly 100 newsrooms participating in the DocumentCloud beta and requests are still pouring in. We've been doing a fair amount of outreach and more is in the works, but it turns out that our users are our best advocates:...

• August 3, 2010
• comments

Creating a Participatory, Open Source Map of an Entire Country

by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the past few weeks I've been working from Tbilisi, Georgia -- the other Georgia -- with a fascinating organization called OpenMapsCaucasus (OMC for short), which has been hard at work creating the first participatory, public domain road map of an entire country. Created by JumpStart International, and building on previous mapping work in the West Bank and Gaza, OMC employs dozens of GPS-wielding mappers who work in teams across Georgia to collect, process and publish map data. The OMC office in Tbilisi is abuzz with tech-savvy students, GIS wizards, and a fun-loving and coffee-fueled atmosphere. The sheer amount...

• July 30, 2010
• comments

Councilpedia In Private Pilot, Overcoming Tech Challenges

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the last several months, Gotham Gazette has made major strides on its Councilpedia project, which will help New Yorkers keep tabs on their local officials and share their knowledge with others. Over the last year, the project has evolved and -- we think -- improved from our original plan. Currently we have a pilot for the site with the design, the structure and information for three office holders. We are not ready to release this to the world, but if you would like a sneak preview please email me at grobinson at gothamgazette.com. Councilpedia Brings City and Candidate Information...

• July 16, 2010
• comments

Ushahidi Racking up Downloads, Available in New Languages

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Ushahidi platform's growing use has been astounding to say the least. The platform has been download almost 4,000 times. On top of that, our mobile applications (including the Android Oil Spill reporter by Henry Addo) have been downloaded more than 3,700 times. As an organization that is barely two years old, it is encouraging to see adoption of the platform in various countries and for diverse uses. Be it election monitoring in Burundi, Snowmaggedon in D.C., or preventing forest forest fires in Italy, it is very encouraging to the development team to see people around the world using the...

• July 12, 2010
• comments

Highlights and Pitfalls of Virtual Street Corners Project

by John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're just winding down my Knight News Challenge project, Virtual Street Corners, and haven't had time to sort through all the recorded materials and debrief the participants, but I wanted to share some initial thoughts and reactions. The most encouraging takeaway from the project was the enthusiastic response it received. It seems to have struck a nerve and could be well worthy of further investigation. The piece is widely accessible without being overly simplistic, with the potential for opening up complex social interactions. On the other hand, there were also various aspects that fell short of my expectations. The project...

• July 7, 2010
• comment

Four More "Programmer-Journalists" Reach Halfway Point

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ever since the first Knight "programmer-journalist" scholars enrolled in the journalism master's program at the Medill School, I have checked in with them around the midway point -- and taken the opportunity to introduce them to the Idealab audience. As we mark the end of Medill's spring quarter, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our largest cohort of Knight scholars ever: Geoffrey Hing, Steven Melendez, Shane Shifflett and Jesse Young. Including Manya Gupta and Andrew Paley, who enrolled before these four, we now have six programmer-journalist scholarship winners here at the same time. All six are accompanying me this...

• June 16, 2010
• comments

Fifth "Programmer-Journalist" Helps Develop Visualization Tool for Census Data

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There is probably no government data used more by journalists -- and non-journalists -- than the trove of population and demographic information collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. But while the bureau has kept improving its tools for online data access, it's still a challenge for someone not well-versed in the workings of the census to find the most useful information -- let alone identify ideas for a journalistic story. So when my colleagues and I at the Medill School of Journalism were thinking about interesting data sets that we might make more useful for journalists, the Census was an...

• June 15, 2010
• comments

Teaching Ushahidi 101 in Kenya

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post is written by Melissa Tully and Rebecca Wanjiku. Melissa Tully is a PhD student at UW-Madison who is researching the use of social/new media in social justice work in Kenya. She has been volunteering with Ushahidi for the past two-and-a-half years. Rebecca Wanjiku is a project assistant for Ushahidi in Kenya. She interfaces with many organizations and individuals who have inquiries about Ushahidi. This month and last month saw the first ever "Ushahidi 101" events held at the iHub in Nairobi. The first Ushahidi 101 gathering took place on May 12 and attracted 16 people from different organizations...

• June 15, 2010
• comments

The Civic Media World Turns its Eyes This Week to MIT

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, all past and present Knight News Challenge winners descend here upon the MIT campus as Knight Foundation and the MIT Center for Future Civic Media co-host the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media conference. There has been an interesting evolution in the conference's -- and the News Challenge's -- focus: the question is less and less "How do we save, finance, or repurpose the functions of newspapers?" and more and more "How do we blow apart what we once thought media was 'merely' capable of?" News Challenge winners are showing that investigative journalism doesn't always need an...

• June 14, 2010
• comments

Social Media and Corporates -- the #Promise Conference

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few days ago Vince Stehle from the Knight Foundation invited me to the Think Social's The #Promise conference in New York, and so I organized babysitting for my new son and came for the day. The conference was about how companies are using social media to advance their goals, and many people (mostly very attractive people, I would add too!) from NGOs, design firms, the corporate world and others turned out to hear the likes of Pepsi, Nokia, MTV, GE and others present their beautiful glossy social media campaigns. It felt like the "place to be" in New...

• June 11, 2010
• comments

Pondering Online Communities and Fluid Social Groups

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A friend once told me that if I were a superhero I would be called "The Includer." She was right, I'm usually the one trying to get more people involved in whatever is about to happen. Superhero or not, my crowd-mongering has taught me one thing: Groups are complicated. I'm sure you know what I mean. Sometimes people only feel like hanging out with the "core." Or maybe someone has decided that they like the group, but can't stand a few of its members which causes a rift. The dynamics of even a small group can drastically shift with a...

• June 9, 2010
• comment

Community Centered Ads Boost Engagement, Funding at Spot.Us

by David Cohn

The beauty of starting something from scratch is the iterative and agile process I've talked about since before Spot.Us began. In this post I'm going to discuss two new developments at Spot.Us. One is an exciting feature and revenue stream. The other is in relation to our expansion into new regions. For almost two years now, Spot.Us has been growing and evolving. I'm very happy to say that the last month has possibly been the most exciting since our launch. We grew almost 30 percent in terms of users. Even more exciting is that the technology behind Spot.Us is starting...

• June 8, 2010
• comment

Freedom Fone Adopted by Bulawayo's Pioneering Voices

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had visions of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe being a sleepy little hollow, and perhaps in some ways it is. But last week, after arriving at Radio Dialogue offices in Pioneer House in Bulawayo's central business district, I was very pleasantly surprised. We were in the City of Skies to run a practical two-day workshop with six local organizations on using Freedom Fone. Pioneer House seemed to me to be pioneering the way! Radio Dialogue is a community radio station that opened nine years ago and resides on the ninth floor of Pioneer House. Like all community radio stations in Zimbabwe, it...

• June 7, 2010
• comments

How a Test Suite Can Help Your Open Source Project Grow

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

At CityCircles, we've been fortunate to work with a local developer who is passionate about our project's goal of developing hyper-local communication tools for mass audiences. Our first implementation of that is a platform for light rail passengers in Phoenix, Arizona. That said, one person can't carry the entire load, especially as the project inevitably evolves from its humble beginnings and wire frames. One solution that's worth considering is sinking some funds into a test suite -- a closed environment where other developers who share a vision for the project can develop new features with the approval of the "master"...

• June 4, 2010
• comments

The Future of News: Not So Bleak, Not So Rosy

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

What's the future of news? I'm tempted to say "not very much" since no one really knows too much about the future of news right now. You know this is true because senior news folk have given up on the doom and gloom stuff and are starting to talk about "the golden age of journalism" and how it's a "bright dawn" and that sort of thing. This would make sense if there had been any structural change in the economics of news, but there hasn't; so their optimism has the hollow twang of hope over reason. Still, the optimists have...

• June 3, 2010
• comments

New Media Should Dig into Issues Around Cyber-Security

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I was honored to be invited by the EastWest Institute to attend in Dallas a Cyber Security Summit, which gathered a fascinating collection of tech elites including Michael Dell, Esther Dyson, Ross Perot Jr., and Randall L. Stephenson; current and retired military and intelligence like James L. Jones, Tom Ridge, and T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley; and financial titans like George Russell and Francis Finlay. The mantra of the event was that cyber-security will be the new big obsession of our various security services for the next century -- an obsession on par with the human and material resources that went...

• June 2, 2010
• comments

Hacks and Hackers: The Time Was Right

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"Hacks and Hackers," our young organization focused on bringing journalism and technology closer together, seems to have struck a chord. Over the weekend of May 21-23, 80 journalists and technologists in San Francisco participated in the group's first "Hacks/Hackers Unite" gathering, where they developed 12 iPad applications. Meanwhile, our "question-and-answer" site, Help.Hackshackers.com, launched less than two months ago, is becoming a thriving online community for people interested in computer programming for journalism and media applications. Here's the latest sign that Hacks and Hackers is meeting a need: the RSVP list for our first New York City event tomorrow night...

• June 1, 2010
• comments

SochiReporter Helps Transform Sochi in Preparation for Olympics

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently spoke with a friend of mine here in Sochi, Russia. She is a specialist in modernizing the technological infrastructure of sanatoriums, which were the places where lucky Soviet working class heroes would be sent to rest and relax. (Think of them as health spas.) It's a challenge to transform the Soviet-era sanatoriums. For example, her job entails computerizing the files and data and modernizing the registration of new clients. But she said it's exciting work. For her, the most enjoyable part of the job is organizing courses for the staff (doctors, waiters, janitors) who at first seem dazed...

• May 27, 2010
• comments

The (Unrealized) Potential of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had the pleasure of attending the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile earlier this month. The summit brought together bloggers, activists, and thinkers working to advance citizen media all around the world. While the discussions that took place were informative, most presentations and panels fell short in recognizing the role mobile phones have played and exploring the potential mobile phones can play in citizen media. I'd like to highlight some of the potential for mobiles in citizen media that were not adequately discussed.The Potential of Mobiles in Citizen MediaMobile phones have already played a significant role in advancing citizen...

• May 21, 2010
• comments

Balloon Mapping the Oil Spill Proves Responsive, Open Source

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent Idea Lab post from the Center for Future Civic Media, Jeff Warren wrote about using inexpensive balloons and cheap cameras to make pseudo-satellite imagery of a given area. He had been using it to help people in poor areas establish title to their land (Google Maps satellites don't map poor areas as fast as these areas actually grow). But then the Gulf oil spill happened... Phone calls and emails started coming in from suddenly out-of-work fishermen who were frustrated with British Petroleum, and also flummoxed by the lack of imagery explaining how and where the oil slick...

• May 19, 2010
• comment

DIY Mappers Offer Remarkable Images of Gulf Coast Oil Spill

by Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, as the mainstream press reported on the worsening environmental and economic crisis that is the British Petroleum spill in the Gulf Coast, I and a small group of DIY mappers flew down to New Orleans to coordinate a grassroots, citizen effort to map the spill. Instead of helicopters and satellites, we deployed a new generation of low-cost tools, including weather balloons and kites with cameras attached. Since arriving, we've managed to mobilize small teams of Gulf Coast residents. Thanks to the fishermen and charter boat captains whose livelihood is at stake, we've been able to get teams...

• May 12, 2010
• comments

Freedom Fone Answers Questions on Zimbabwe Constitution

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two weeks ago the latest version of Freedom Fone, affectionately known to his handlers as "Fred," was set loose. Inspired by the cockney rhyming slang "dog and bone" (meaning phone), the Freedom Fone dog logo and quirky character of Fred was born a few years ago. Fred is still young, but after a few years of software development (and dog training!), and thanks to Knight News Challenge funds, he's now ready to go out into the world on his own. This is a report on his recent adventures since the launch of Freedom Fone version 1.5. To learn more about...

• May 4, 2010
• comments

Programming Language for Kids Banned from Apple App Store

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The MIT News Office recently interviewed one of our colleagues at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, Mitch Resnick. Resnick is a long-time Media Lab professor best known for helping develop and deploy Scratch, a programming language for kids. But this month Apple rejected an app that would allow kids to view Scratch programs on iPhones and iPads. Resnick is his ever-reasonable self in the interview, saying that Apple doesn't allow applications that interpret or execute code and thus the Scratch app in question (which was developed by a third party) violates that policy. But it's an indication of...

• May 3, 2010
• comments

In Need of a DocumentCloud for Video, Data

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brainstorming the next brilliant News Challenge project? I've got two for you, and you've got until fall to noodle over them. As the program director for DocumentCloud I spend a lot of time talking to journalists, writers and researchers about what DocumentCloud is and, often, what it isn't. DocumentCloud is great for documents. It is a repository of primary source texts and a great set of semantic analysis tools for text. Whether you want to use our annotation tools for reporting jujitsu, as ProPublica did when the subject of an extensive report offered only "no comment" on nearly every question...

• April 30, 2010
• comment

Programmer-Journalist? Hacker-Journalist? Our Identity Crisis

by Aron Pilhofer
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jacqui Maher is the most recent addition to my Interactive News team at the New York Times, and although she started almost six months ago, I have yet to get her business cards -- an embarrassing fact she (rightly) points out at regular intervals. I'm not raising this to highlight my shortcomings as a manager, but rather as a plea for help. The biggest reason Jacqui doesn't have business cards? I just can't come up with a title that...fits. This is a problem of no small significance, because as the career paths of journalists and developers converge, the labels we...

• April 22, 2010
• comments

A Real Watershed Moment for Citizen Journalism in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ever heard of load shedding? It's one of the cleverest bits of Orwellian double speak the south African government (or in this case the government-owned electricity company ESKOM) has ever cooked up. It means, in plain English, power cuts -- as in cutting off electricity to whole areas. Not because there is any extra "load" (i.e. a surplus) of electricity that needs to be "shed," but rather because there is too little electricity to go around. So different chunks of the country have to take turns having no electricity. In 2008, we dealt with the grim reality of load shedding,...

• April 21, 2010
• comments

Printcasting Plans Mobile Expansion With FeedBrewer

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

About two years ago, I wrote up an idea for how to leverage standardized web content to create locally-targeted publications with less time, money and software than ever before. The technology and content would be digital, but the output would be optimized for physical distribution as printable PDF magazines. That concept became Printcasting and it earned us a Knight News Challenge grant. We're still extremely busy with Printcasting and are working on multiple tracks over the next six weeks before our grant ends. We're finishing up version 2.0 of the Printcasting system on Drupal 6 and preparing to open-source everything,...

• April 20, 2010
• comments

Serving the Community of Programmer-Journalists: Help.HacksHackers.com

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For many years now, the NICAR-L email list has been the online home for journalists doing data analysis -- the people doing "computer-assisted reporting" or "precision journalism." Though email lists are an old technology, this one continues to thrive -- just in the past week, there have been 277 posts to the list. Beyond the numbers, I can personally testify to the importance of NICAR-L as a place to get practical problem-solving advice and to meet and interact with professional peers. When Aron Pilhofer and I proposed a "Hacks and Hackers" community -- for people doing software development relevant to...

• April 19, 2010
• comment

Documents Pouring in as DocumentCloud Goes Beta

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eagle-eyed followers of the DocumentCloud Twitter feed have already picked up on the fact that we began adding users to our beta last month. We made a strategic decision to peg our beta to NICAR's March 2010 computer assisted reporting conference, where we knew we'd be able to gather a sizable group of just the sort of investigative reporters we hope to support with DocumentCloud, and get them excited about using our tools to do more with their documents. Nothing beats hands-on support when you're using a new tool. Plus, we identified dozens of quick fixes we could make after...

• April 11, 2010
• comments

Our Friends Become Curators of Twitter-Based News

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I like to listen before I talk. Which means that during my morning routine I read before I write. But where to turn and what to read? One of the most oft-repeated statements I heard at conferences last year: "our problem isn't information overload, it's crappy filters." In other words, we shouldn't complain about all that amazing, free information out there. We just need to get better at finding what we care about and ignoring the rest. The podium speakers suggested that this would happen in two ways. First, through a variety of crowd recommendation sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit,...

• April 2, 2010
• comments

Sourcemap Makes Data Visualizations Transparent

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday colleagues of mine at MIT were brainstorming plenaries for an upcoming media conference. Data visualization came up, but each of us grumbled. "Overdone," one of us said, to nodding heads. We'd done a session on that at every one of our conferences and forums, as had others at theirs. Data visualization had become tragically hip, as if we were in charge of a music festival and one of us had just proffered Coldplay. But as we teased out our reservations, we realized that it wasn't visualization that we had an issue with; yes, we agreed, it's an overdone topic,...

• March 31, 2010
• comment

Contrasting Boston Neighborhoods for Virtual Street Corners

by John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Things have started to kick into gear for Virtual Street Corners, my project that will connect the Boston towns of Brookline and Roxbury by live 24-hour video connection. At this point the most time-consuming task is community organizing as we create excitement for the project and identify groups who will use the installation to generate dialogue between the two neighborhoods. The project requires us to draw on the resources of each community as we solicit merchants for space, identify community groups who use the portal, introduce technology and plan the aesthetics of the installation itself. Dudley Square is a commercial...

• March 30, 2010
• comment

Competition in Internet, Mobile Services Boosts Democracy

by Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) such as the Internet and mobile phones are often recognized for their role in helping connect people and communities, and spread knowledge and information. People may be unaware, however, that they're also a powerful force for international development -- provided that they are not suffocated by regulation and censorship. The ICT Development and Initiative Dossier from June 2002 [PDF file] stated that, "since the beginning of the 1980s almost all national telecom and information technology markets worldwide have been transformed by technological innovation, product diversification (especially the introduction of mobile/cellular telephony and Internet) and market...

• March 29, 2010
• comments

A New Battle Cry: Release the Raw Data for Better Visualization

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The most elegant, user-friendly data visualization program is useless without data to visualize; and, historically, those who possess data are reluctant to share it. Massive data has been dominated by a thin layer of elites, and sophisticated data-visualization tools -- such as heat maps, motion charts, time maps, and tag maps -- generally have remained within the domain of those elites. This monopoly has allowed very few to decide which data were important to visualize. They've created some dazzling digital narratives, but it was a one-way street -- very high-tech, but also very news 1.0/web 1.0. Data Visualization For All...

• March 26, 2010
• comments

Resurrecting Unstructured Data to Help Small Newspapers

by Joe Boydston
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Unstructured data is typically said to account for up to 80 percent of information stored on business computer systems. While this is a widely accepted notion, I'm inclined to agree with Seth Grimes that this 80 percent rule is inflated, depending on the type of business. Still, If we could structure even a fraction of that data, it would create significant value for small newspapers. The type of data that has my attention is free-form text. Small newspapers in particular have computers full of text files containing information about their communities. Often, these files lie dormant, left on the hard...

• March 19, 2010
• comments

In Search of a Wiki with Track Changes

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Most of us have become so used to being able to do so much online that is comes as a surprise when we want to do something and can't find the tools to do it. That's the situation confronting the Gotham Gazette staff as we move forward with our Councilpedia project that will use crowdsourcing to probe the links between money and politics. I'm hoping you can help. (For more on Councilpedia see my earlier post.) Monitoring Revisions The project will enable registered users to contribute information on campaign donors and the politicians they help. Like Wikipedia, Councilpedia needs to...

• March 18, 2010
• comments

How to Break Through the Difficult 'Phase 2' of Any Project

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you want to know what it's like pitching a new media project, just go to the experts: This South Park clip, a classic in its own right, is a favorite around the MIT Center for Future Civic Media because every single new media project -- ours and those from our Knight News Challenge colleagues -- inevitably hits a wall at "Phase 2." For South Park's Underpants Gnomes, "Phase 1: Collect underpants" is like every great idea we've all had: It doesn't quite make sense to everyone else yet, but we know it's gold. We also know it totally will...

• March 18, 2010
• comments

Crowdsourcing Crime Information In Kenya

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hatari.co.ke is is a website that allows anyone in Nairobi, Kenya, to submit reports about crime and corruption in the city. ("Hatari" means "danger" in Swahili.) It will provide the growing city and its inhabitants with a repository of public information about incidents such as carjacking, corruption, police harassment and others. This initiative builds on other crime maps such as SpotCrime and MapATL. The idea of crime mapping is not new (see EveryBlock, an Idea Lab success story), but it's unlikely that law enforcement officials and the general public in Kenya previously had a tool to visualize crime information. This...

• March 17, 2010
• comments

10 Reasons Why News Organizations Should Use 'Linked Data'

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On a news organization's list of priorities, publishing articles as "linked data" probably comes slightly above remembering to turn the computer monitors off in the evening, and slightly below getting a new coffee machine. It shouldn't, and I'll share 10 reasons why. Before I do, I should briefly explain what I mean by "linked data." Linked data is a way of publishing information so that it can easily -- and automatically -- be linked to other, similar data on the web. For example, if I refer to "Paris" in a news article, it's not immediately apparent to search engines whether...

• March 16, 2010
• comments

How Mark Luckie Created 'The Digital Journalist's Handbook'

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's an increasingly common story in the news business: Young journalist roars out of graduate school at Berkeley, gets a great job at a magazine in New York, works like mad, gets laid off when the economy tanks, turns to his blog and Twitter to brand himself a rock star in his field, publishes a book packed with the tips, tricks, and tutorials he's been blogging about, then gets a great gig with a non-profit news startup back in California. Okay, so maybe it's not all that common a career path, but it's the way things have unfolded for Mark...

• March 15, 2010
• comments

Hacks and Hackers: A New Community for Technojournalists, Journotechnologists

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last June, at the annual Center for Future Civic Media Conference, I got to talking with Aron Pilhofer (an old friend, leader of the New York Times news applications team and a Knight News Challenge winner for the DocumentCloud project) about the growing number of people who are now doing computer programming to serve news organizations or the larger goals of journalism, such as informing the public about what government is doing. The conference featured a small grant competition to reward new forms of collaboration. Aron and I put together a winning proposal to create a a new organization and...

• March 10, 2010
• comments

Printcasting Adds Partners in Philadelphia, Puerto Rico and Perú

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Do niche print magazines still have a role to play in the digital age? Media outlets in five different cities around the world are using the Printcasting publishing network to try and answer this question.We've added three partners in two weeks. They are:La República, one of the leading newspapers in Lima, Perú.El Nuevo Día, the dominant newspaper in Puerto Rico.Philadelphia Neighborhoods, a hyperlocal news site run through the Temple University Urban Publishing Lab. And in a purely technical sphere, we're also working with HP on a Printer app.These new local tests will accomplish several goals, not the least of which...

• March 9, 2010
• comments

Agriculture and Us

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I attended an Ashoka conference in New Delhi yesterday on rural innovation and farming. There were so many new things I realized about agriculture's deep rooted connections with culture, society and the economy that I decided to immediately write about it before the memories fade. Plus. I watched Avatar later in the evening, which was perfect icing on the cake! Agriculture and Women Agriculture can be looked upon from many perspectives. Food can be seen as a commodity, where farmers are considered akin to factory workers and we talk about increasing their productivity though machines, technology, etc. Or agriculture can...

• March 6, 2010
• comments

Clifford Stoll Was Wrong, But Internet is Far From Perfect

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Poor Clifford Stoll. His 1995 Newsweek essay The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana resurfaced last month and, yes, is still so curmudgeony that it makes Dennis the Menace's Mr. Wilson sound like Pangloss: What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the...

• March 5, 2010
• comments

Spot.Us Adds Assignments, Widgets, Story Updates in Revamp

by David Cohn

Since Spot.Us first launched in late 2008 as a simple wiki, I've wanted this to be a learning and growing endeavor both for myself and for  journalism as a whole. There are so many lessons in starting a non-profit news project, especially one that is unique in its scope and mission like Spot.Us. I hope to share some insight below, but first the news. Today Spot.Us takes a huge step forward with a new design and new features. This was made possible by lead designer Lauren Rabaino and the excellent development team of Erik Sundelof and Dan Newman. Please join...

• February 23, 2010
• comments

New Tools for Mapping News

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Want to illustrate a story by displaying data on a map? Don't have a team of whiz kids at your fingertips? One good option has long been IBM's Many Eyes. Their maps, however, stop at the state level. Not especially helpful if you cover local politics! I haven't struggled too much with maps lately, but a tweet from Sunlight Labs' Clay Johnson caught my eye this morning, nonetheless. I think that what got my attention was that Clay directed his nudge to Nathan Yau, a bottomless well of great data visualization insights and tutorials if ever there was one. He...

• February 17, 2010
• comment

The Future of Public Radio -- Today

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine you are public radio. You've spent the first sixty years or so of your existence focused on one output stream - audio. You've created all of your business processes and your staff has been trained around producing content for the airwaves. You produce quality content that has a great affection and trust. Your listeners pay for the privilege of supporting your efforts to produce this content. Around 1995 or so, you're hearing more and more about new media and this whole Internet thing. You purchased your station's domain name and put up a website that lets the world know...

• February 15, 2010
• comments

'Anarconomy' and the News Industry

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A good friend of mine forwarded me this essay (PDF) from the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies, which presents an important set of ideas. Although it belittles intellectual property using straw man arguments, it does a nice job of assembling the array of "knowledge as public good" arguments. An even more utopian future, which featured a backdrop of Eastern philosophy, was set out by James Burke and summarized nicely in his "the day the universe changed" series. In essence, it is a vision that holds the transcendental equilibrium of the individual in and with the collectivity of everything -- in...

• February 11, 2010
• comments

What's Wrong with the Stringer System in Rural Areas?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

One area that has recently started occupying our attention at VV is the business of newspaper stringers in rural areas in the developing world. Another one is the way that news stories get out, and the difference between a journalism system where stories get "pushed out" and one where they need to be "pulled out." It seems to me that only when stories get pushed out - ie, when someone attracts media attention to some local event the news media wouldn't know about otherwise - is journalism increasing the quantity of events that are known. Below are some interesting things...

• February 11, 2010
• comments

Using Text Messages to Combat Identity Theft in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Information access is on the move in Africa. Let me paint you a picture. The person is fictitious, but the process isn't. Patience Ndlovu, a 24-year-old woman living in Soweto, South Africa, sends an SMS to a cell phone number she has scribbled on a scrap of paper. Her text reads "L," followed by her ID number, and the destination number for the message is 32551. She got these details from a friend who in turn learned about it from a discarded newspaper that she picked up on a bus the week before. The phone beeps. Ndlovu clicks a...

• February 10, 2010
• comment

How the iPad Can Save the News Industry

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Do you remember the disappointing iPad media event of 2010? You know, the one where Apple announced their magical, revolutionary device that can't run more than one application at the same time, won't have built-in videoconferencing, doesn't support Flash, and whose name sounds the same as the iPod's when spoken in Boston. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't crushed; I've never been an Apple fan-boy. My iPod Touch is gathering dust right now because I refused to cave into Apple's $10 milk-the-early-adopter patches (yes, even the one that enabled Apps). Starting today, however, things will be different. I'm joining the...

• February 9, 2010
• comments

Moving on After the Knight News Challenge

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2008, the Open Media Foundation (then Deproduction) received a $380,000 Knight News Challenge award, and it was a major turning-point for our organization. We added staff, formed new partnerships, and maintained a level of growth that had us approximately double in size each year over our first five years after forming in 2004. The Open Media Project grant is for a four-part effort that began with a re-building of the software we developed to automate an unprecedented approach to user-generated and community-powered TV in Denver. The second phase saw our team implement this re-built Drupal software and business model...

• February 5, 2010
• comments

Printcasting 1.5 Boosts Design for On-Demand Publishing

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A funny thing happens when you win a contest like the Knight News Challenge. Suddenly, what was once just a wacky idea that you threw into a web form becomes a long list of things you have to do. And those of you who are lucky enough to be filling out a full Knight News Challenge proposal this week for the second phase of the competition should take note: If you win, you have to do all of it. If you haven't seen the list of features we originally promised to build into Printcasting, let's just say it was pretty...

• February 1, 2010
• comments

Truly Serving the Public -- With Web Tools

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We journalists are fond of saying that journalism is constitutionally protected because of our critical role in providing information that people need to be citizens in a democracy. Which makes it all the more shameful that most newspapers -- in print and online -- have historically done such a lousy job of helping people navigate the core functionality of democracy: elections. The Chicago Tribune's Election Center, developed by the team that includes the first two programmer-journalists (whose journalism educations were financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships), is a great example of what's possible. The site provides an essential guide to...

• February 1, 2010
• comment

Video Volunteers Gets some Boost from Bollywood

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers had a great moment a couple weeks ago - we got our first celebrity ambassador for the organization, a very popular Indian film actor named Abhay Deol, who has acted in some of the best "art" films of the last few years. We organized a screening in one of the bastis (slums) in Mumbai where two of our Community Video Units in our Knight-funded project have been working for the last few years. Slum residents from all over the area turned up, as well as all the major Bombay TV stations and of course our community producers. They...

• February 1, 2010
• comments

Steady Driving for Community Radio

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It has been quite a while since we wrote updates, but a lot has been going on. For one, we were winners in the Indian national Manthan Awards for 2009 for technological innovation for development! Then we did a second release of our broadcast system for community radio integrated with telephony, and deployed it at our pilot location. We are set for two more pilots in the next two weeks, and we will start professional deployments very soon! The community radio movement in India has also been picking up pace steadily, there are now almost fifty community radio stations, and...

• January 31, 2010
• comment

Creating Community Video Entrepreneurs in Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Late last year, Stalin K., my partner in the Knight-funded project Video Volunteers, and I were seated in the video laboratory of VCU.br in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We were joined by nine of VV's new Brazilian Video Fellows. We were there to conduct a workshop about entrepreneurship in the creative field of video. The purpose of our recently-launched program in Sao Paulo is to create "video entrepreneurs," and this post is a snapshot of one of the exercises we did while we were there. The nine young people were all from favela/periphery areas of Sao Paulo, and on that day...

• January 29, 2010
• comments

How Mobile Voices Developed a Citizen Media Platform

by Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

For the last eighteen months, three programmers have been working on Mobile Voices. I talked to Sasha Constanza-Chock, one of the developers of the project, about the process that went into building the Mobile Voices platform. I asked why Mobile Voices built a custom platform for the project, why they chose to use multimedia messaging for content delivery, and the lessons they have learned about using MMS.

• January 26, 2010
• comments

How Could News Organizations Manage Documents Better?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

How are you handling primary source material on your website? OaklandLocal is summarizing a new report on a shootout in March that left five people dead. They use Scribd to embed reports directly on their site, but can't provide annotations. California Watch is looking at what campaign season generosity bought for agribusiness in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. They put together a great Flash widget that highlights noteworthy portions of the documents they reviewed, but they had to sit down with a highlighter, circle relevant passages, and then scan each document for the site. ProPublica, the Los Angeles Times, ABC...

• January 21, 2010
• comments

Centralizing a People Finder for Haiti, Plus an SMS 911

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The information activist community has been rushing to respond to the Haitian earthquake. What I find remarkable is the capacity that has been built up in the last few years; from software standards, like the pfif standard generated after Katrina, to early systems like the Ushahidi engine designed during the Kenyan election violence, to larger organizations and resources like the Crisis Commons wiki and the Crisis Camps. First on the scene were a variety of technologists who were addressing the problem of people finding -- how to bring separated people back together, both for peace of mind and for social...

• January 17, 2010
• comments

Free Kiswahili Synthetic Voice for Freedom Fone a Possibility

by Brenda Lynne Burrell
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking with Etienne Barnard at Meraka Institute in Pretoria, South Africa. To my delight he indicated that work already done in Kenya on text-to-speech for Kiswahili by a team led by Dr Mucemi Gakuru at the University of Nairobi some years ago, might be updated and made available in time for our July release of Freedom Fone version 2.

• January 15, 2010
• comments

Q&A 2.0: There's More Than One Way to Answer a Question

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since ReportingOn launched with a new Question & Answer format in July 2009, a few new entries in what I'll call the Q&A 2.0 space have popped up and grown their base of users. Here's a look at three Q&A 2.0 applications with wide appeal. Aardvark Aardvark allows users to ask questions via instant message, the website, Twitter, and an iPhone app, among other ways. I've used IM for the most part, answering questions about Twitter, iPhone apps, and journalism from time to time, while fending off questions about SEO, and using my favorite Aardvark feature to refer questions to...

• January 14, 2010
• comments

Molo and Kubatana's Partnership Helps Get Information to Zimbabweans

by Brenda Lynne Burrell
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The value of Molo’s support cannot be measured in dollar terms – it goes well beyond that. Our expedited productivity gave birth to an innovation called ‘Inzwa’ which means ‘to listen’ in the vernacular. For the first time in many years in Zimbabwe, the general public were able to call-in, at their convenience, and access non-state controlled audio information via their phones.

• January 14, 2010
• comments

How Gotham Gazette Redesigned a Decade-Old Website

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette, our website about New York City policy and politics, unveiled its redesign recently. (Please take a look and let me know what you think by emailing grobinson at gothamgazette.com). For our readers, we hope the redesign will create a more useful publication by making it easier for visitors to find information about New York City issues. For our advertisers -- who we hope will increase in number -- it offers more space and more options. And for the GG staff, it reflects our evolution -- and to some extent, the web's evolution -- over the past decade. When...

• January 12, 2010
• comment

The Fascinating Innovators of Brazil Community Media

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

During our month in Brazil working on our new project VCU.br, my partner Stalin and I met with more than a dozen different community media groups. Every meeting was too short, with us starting off by explaining why we had called them and explaining our work, and then them explaining theirs, and then a brief -- too brief -- discussion about what we could do together. All the while we typed away at our laptop, eager to capture all the innovations and unique stories of the Brazilian community/alternative media innovators. Below are our meeting notes, which we hope give a...

• January 4, 2010
• comment

LocalLabs - Connecting Geeks Building Tools for Local Government Transparency

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Who the heck are the people building these local "apps" for the NYC Big Apps competition Amanda Hickman alerted us to in her recent post? I don't know, but they are invited to join LocalLabs to connect with other developers working to build the plumbing for far more transparent and participatory local government and communities. Over the last year, in part based on the 2008 e-election, the national work of the Sunlight Foundation and now the Obama Administration stirring the pot with the Open Government Directive, I've noticed a huge upswing in interest among software developers in open government. My...

• December 29, 2009
• comments

GRINS v0.2 is released

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are very pleased to announce the second release of GRINS, Gram Vaani's Knight-funded project to create low-cost systems for community radio stations in rural areas. This builds upon the v0.1 release we did in June by adding support for telephony, backup, and log-shipping, plus smoothing out many user interface issues. Having a single console to schedule broadcast, make and receive phone calls, archive live speech and manage content sets GRINS apart from any other commercial or open-source radio broadcast software available so far. Here's a look at some of the features: Telephony: The current support for live telephony allows...

• December 18, 2009
• comments

Video Volunteers Launches in Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How can the disadvantaged earn a living from their creativity? Why are nearly all the "base of the pyramid" micro-businesses supported by microcredit agencies based on manual labor, or super-local activities like driving a rickshaw or running a small shop? Since much of the music we love today, or design that we see in stores, has its roots in folk traditions, why don't the rural and urban poor today earn much of a living through their creativity? This is the question Video Volunteers is asking with a new program we've launched in Brazil, called VCU.br. We're exploring how video can...

• December 16, 2009
• comments

DocumentCloud Releases More Code, Continues to Attract Developer Interest

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A public beta of DocumentCloud, one that journalists can kick the wheels on and upload documents to, won't be ready for a few more months, but work is continuing apace in our corner of the cloud. We've released a handful of code that comprises some of the components of our big picture, and it is great to see how well received our work has been by the Ruby and JavaScript communities. Last week we hit a little milestone: more than 1,000 developers are watching DocumentCloud projects on Git Hub, which is pretty cool. The advantage for us is that many...

• December 10, 2009
• comment

Democratizing the Geography of Information

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As little as a year ago Google Maps had no geographic information about San Javier La Loma, a small working class neighborhood on the outskirts of Medellín where the ConVerGentes group of the HiperBarrio citizen journalism project is based. Some progress has been made, but as you can see from the satellite imagery, most of the streets are still not mapped, much less the parks, buildings and footpaths. Now, compare that to the map of San Javier La Loma created by HiperBarrio and freely available with nearly unrestricted use on Open Street Maps: There is clearly an aspect of amateurism...

• December 5, 2009
• comments

2008 Knight News Challenge Winner Launches Open Media Foundation

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deproduction, a Denver-based nonprofit media and technology organization and Knight News Challenge winner, has reorganized as the Open Media Foundation. The nonprofit media and technology organization was founded in 2003, offering media and technology training and services to nonprofits and individuals in the Denver area. In recent years, the organization spawned Denver Open Media, the Open Media Project, and a number of web-based initiatives through the Civic Pixel web & design department launched in 2008. The new name and website were officially announced November 19 at a fundraising breakfast hosted by Ashara Ekundayo and featuring presentations from Amy Goodman, host...

• December 1, 2009
• comments

Freedom Fone Comes to Dar es Salaam

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amanda and I have just returned from Dar es Salaam. We were on the road with Freedom Fone. Last Tuesday it was 9 degrees at 9am in orderly Johannesburg and 28 degrees with sweat inducing humidity at 7pm in chaotic Dar. After negotiating the jam-packed arrivals hall we smiled in relief when we discovered John holding up a torn piece of cardboard with Freedom Fone scribbled on it. We couldn't speak Swahili and he couldn't speak English but we made our greetings and jumped into his car for the ride of our life to a lodge off the Old Bagamoyo...

• November 26, 2009
• comments

The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The New Journalist in the Age of Social MediaView more documents from JD Lasica. I'm at Day 2 of a remarkable two-day conference that is bringing nonprofits, citizen journalism and social media together in ways I've never seen before. I'm jazzed, hopeful and intrigued by the challenges ahead. The passion in the room is palpable. The 40 people who convened at the Visioning Summit yesterday in San Francisco, and the 30 participants who are steering the program today, consist of some of the most talented and forward-thinking innovators — nonprofit execs, strategists, journalists — that I've come across in recent...

• November 24, 2009
• comments

Journalism, Technology Starting to Add Up

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in early 2008, as I headed off to a conference at Georgia Tech, I wrote a post for Idealab headlined "Computation + Technology = ?" Two recent developments suggest that we're starting to find answers to that question -- and more importantly, that there's a growing number of people trying to find these answers. Duke University has released an interesting report, and a group of journalists and technologists has begun meeting in Silicon Valley to address challenges that journalists and technologists might tackle together. The February 2008 conference at Georgia Tech, entitled "Journalism 3G: The Future of Technology in...

• November 24, 2009
• comment

4th Programmer-Journalist Scholarship Winner Learns to 'Think Like a Journalist'

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Manya Gupta, a software engineer for telecommunications companies in her native India, is the fourth winner of a Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarship. She's now in her second quarter studying journalism at the Medill School at Northwestern University. She blogs occasionally at http://manya-myvoice.blogspot.com/. Learn some more about Manya from the following edited Q&A. Tell us about your background. I am from India. I received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from JSS Academy of Technical Education in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.. While working on projects I realized my passion for programming and decided to make it a career. So, I moved...

• November 18, 2009
• comments

Gearing up Citizen Journalism in Grahamstown, South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Low literacy environments, and multi-lingual areas, like Grahamstown, South Africa, face particular challenges when it comes to encouraging citizen journalism. More than 80 percent of the population speaks English as a second language. While most people are able to speak and understand English, writing is not always a comfortable experience (and some are unable to read or write). That's partly why we've launched Izwi Labahlali (The Voice Of The Citizens), Grahamstown's first radio show with content that's largely produced and presented by citizen journalists and transmitted mainly in iziXhosa, the dominant local language. The show, which airs on Radio Grahamstown...

• November 16, 2009
• comments

Video Volunteers Talks Technology and Non-Profits at TED India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I just returned from TED India, where I was one of the 100 TED Fellows invited to attend the event. My head is spinning with all the new ideas and my pockets are heavy with business cards. This was undoubtedly the best networking event I've been to. The people on stage were only marginally more spectacular than the people I turned to for chit-chat on the police-escorted buses from Bangalore to Mysore, where the conference was being. The chap sitting next to me, for instance, told me as an aside that he had invented a needle that can only physically...

• November 12, 2009
• comment

How Do We Categorize All Journalistic Errors?

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

How many different kinds of errors is it possible for journalists to make? And how would you classify them or organize them into useful categories? These questions are not my attempt to concoct a tactful paraphrase for "How many different ways is it possible to screw journalism up?" Rather, they represent one of the interesting issues we face as we move work on MediaBugs from the project-organizing phase to the "let's build something" stage. There's a wealth of established practice in the software field for the kinds of data you can associate with a bug that a user finds in...

• November 11, 2009
• comments

Staffing Up DocumentCloud

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few months ago (three, to be precise), I quietly announced that I'd be leaving Gotham Gazette for parts unknown. I wasn't making that up about "parts unknown," but my announcement did get a few conversations started. The most interesting one turned out to be with Eric, Aron and Scott, who persuaded me to join DocumentCloud as their program director. I'm pretty thrilled to be joining them: I care a lot about software freedom, improving access to information, and making great software accessible to small organizations. DocumentCloud gives me a great opportunity to approach access to information from a different...

• November 11, 2009
• comments

Using Mobile Phones to Map the Slums of Brazil

by Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, unnamed streets meander through the hillsides. There are hospitals, coffee shops and restaurants, none of which appear on a map. Mail carriers struggle to deliver letters to homes without addresses.A new project by Rede Jovem, a Brazilian non-profit that loosely translates to "Youth Net," seeks to change that. With the help of five young "wiki-reporters" and GPS-equipped mobile phones, the non-profit is building a map of five Brazilian favelas: Complexo do Alemão, Cidade de Deus, Morro do Pavão-Pavãozinho, Morro Santa Marta and Complexo da Maré.  Mapping the Unmapped By uploading...

• November 9, 2009
• comments

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
• comment

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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• comment

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

by David Cohn

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
• comment

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

by Amanda Hickman
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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• comments

Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper

by Amanda Hickman
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
• 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
• 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
• comments

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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• comment

Source Code for Balance

by Amanda Hickman
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
• 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
• 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
• comment

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
• 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
• comments

Crowdsourcing Keeps Coming

by Amanda Hickman
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
• 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
• 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
• comments

Bump: Getting on the Ballot in NYC

by Amanda Hickman
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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• comment

Stuck in a Maze

by Amanda Hickman
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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• comments

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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• comments

Media Cloud and Calais

by Amanda Hickman
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
• comments

Ease of Use Matters

by Amanda Hickman
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
• 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
• 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
• comments

Change Tracker

by Amanda Hickman
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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• comments

More Thoughts on TimesOpen

by Amanda Hickman
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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• comment

Spot.Us Deals with the Good and Bad of Limitations

by David Cohn

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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• comment

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

by Amanda Hickman
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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• comments