Idea Lab

iamnews: A Global DIY Newsroom

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• September 15, 2008
• 2 comments

Over Time, Students Recognize Value of Incubators

by Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been more than a month since the students and faculty in the Innovation Incubator project presented their projects to an audience of reporters and editors at the Online News Association in Toronto. Before that event, we surveyed the students about their expectations, their impressions, and their conclusions about the process. It was, without a doubt, a lot more difficult and time-consuming than they'd expected -- in fact, probably more than any of us had expected. I was probably as surprised as they were. I came into this project with a set of operating assumptions about what this carefully selected...

• December 2, 2007
• No comments

Text in Video Games: How Much is Too Much?

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a session on video games at the Online News Association conference last month, the panelists discussed how much text can be included in a game - a topic my students and I have been grappling with in our Remembering 7th Street video game project. A couple of the speakers on the Using Serious Games to Engage Readers panel cautioned against including long textual entries in games because they tend to turn off game players. "You can't provide reams of text, because they won't read it," said Duane Dunfield of Red Hot Learning, a video game company based in Canada...

• November 12, 2007
• 1 comment

Educate: Journalism and Teaching Technologies

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many who spoke at the Online News Association conference in Toronto defined education (of the public) as an important part of journalists' work. Most of us clearly do not feel the need to fulfill Toronto-raised Mary Harris "Mother" Jones' injunction to educate, agitate, organize (and not doing so is a disservice news organizations do to themselves and to society, I will argue later), but what would taking seriously the responsibility to educate, by itself, mean for news? The related content to which this connects is an online video recommended at the conference by Jeff Young (of the Chronicle for Higher...

• October 23, 2007
• 2 comments

Lost Connection Opportunities...

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Once again, another conference that didn't fully leverage technology tools to help people connect, make new friends, and collaborate instantly and on the fly....I am speaking of this week's Online News Asscociation Conference in Toronto. Here's how it might have been different: • Conference attendees provide some basic profile information and tag key interests using one of many web based tools like Confabb.com or intronetworks.com. • Rather than having to go around the room and make introductions or describe projects, those introductions/project descriptions could have been available on the Web or on your mobile device as a session was in...

• October 19, 2007
• 3 comments

If You Aren't Thinking Mobile...You Don't Get It!

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am surpised how little of the discussion at the Online News Association conference going on today is around mobile media like cell phones and other handheld devices. The fact that we are approaching 3 Billion mobile users (compared to 1 Billion computer users), and that mobile use globally is growing rapidly while PC usage is flattening, should be on media minds everywhere. Just this month in India, for example, it was reported that the total number of fixed line Internet connections dropped to 9.22 million between April and June from 9.27 million the previous quarter. It may be that...

• October 18, 2007
• 2 comments

Ready? Here's My Formula for Online News Success

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am at the Online News Association annual meeting in Toronto. Listening to some of the speakers at the J-Lab's workshop, puzzling through the success of some sites and the failure of others, and putting together what I have learned from four years of doing PressThink, the emerging model I see would combine... √ High quality aggregation within a strong editorial focus. (Like the Huffington Post nationally, or Twin Cities Daily Planet locally.) √ Blogging platform with the best posts filtered to the front page. (Like Daily Kos) √ Original reporting with hybrid strength: amateurs with pro support (training, production...

• October 17, 2007
• 9 comments

Innovation Incubator Heads to Toronto for the Online News Association Conference

by Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been an extraordinarily challenging five months, and the students who have been working on the Innovation Incubator project are about to find out whether it's been worth it. About thirty-five students and faculty from seven journalism schools around the country are headed to Toronto tomorrow to present their projects at the ONA's annual conference. They've been working on them since June, when the group first gathered in Ithaca to talk about creation netting, the process we adopted to develop some new and original thinking about -- and approaches to - -community news. We figured there was nobody better positioned...

• October 14, 2007
• No comments

New Media Reality Check

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight News Challenge folks will be heading off to the Online News Association conference in Toronto on Tuesday (Oct. 16) for a few days' worth of new media reality checks. As a member of this merry troupe of experimenters, I'll be moderating a panel on Becoming a Community Evangelist, which is perhaps the term du jour for citizen journalist, with Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, and Rob Curley of the Washington Post. But mostly, I'll be listening and comparing notes with old friends and new colleagues. Every year seems to be a pivotal one for the news industry, but 2007...

• October 13, 2007
• No comments