Idea Lab

Journalists Need to Update Stories Online

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• June 26, 2008
• 3 comments

Related Content in 100 words: An Update

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• May 6, 2008
• No comments

Signal-to-Noise and Related Content

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• April 29, 2008
• 1 comment

Lies about Venezuela: If NYT.com ran Related Content

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• December 1, 2007
• 9 comments