Idea Lab

Virtual Street Corners Connects Neighborhoods and People in Boston

by John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Virtual Street Corners, our Knight-funded project, is scheduled to be installed in Boston between May 15 and June 15 of next year. We have formed an exciting collaboration with the Boston Cyberarts festival, which will be our fiscal sponsor. I thought I would use my first post on Idea Lab to describe the project and fill everyone in on the work and thinking that has already gone into the piece. For those not familiar with the project, I'll offer a quick description. Large glass storefronts in two Greater Boston area neighborhoods, Brookline and Roxbury, will be transformed into video screens,...

• October 16, 2009
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The Shocking Truth About Journalism, Activism, and the Healthcare Reform Debate

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago, I spotted a link to something called deathpanels.org getting passed around Twitter, and quickly traced its origin to Matt Thompson, Knight Foundation interim online community manager and general champion of contextual journalism. (Note: deathpanels.org is an independent project of Matt's, and not affiliated with the Knight Foundation.) Remembering a conversation that I had with Matt and others at a recent conference, I realized the idea had been brewing for some time. A few minutes after I looked at the site for the first time, I called up Matt to talk about the idea. Listen to...

• September 4, 2009
• 2 comments

Nika System Brings Reader SMS Messages into Newspaper's Workflow

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recent research support the idea that South Africans, 15 years after the heroic levels of participation that led to overthrow of apartheid, are becoming less engaged: Membership of religious groups, trade unions, political parties, and even of sporting associations are all decreasing, sometimes sharply, in the 21st century. Whether this is about a "growing dependence on the state to provide everything" or just people getting on with their lives -- getting involved takes a lot of time -- is not clear. Bowling Alone What has caused this South African equivalent of "bowling alone"? In Robert Putnam's 2000 book, "Bowling Alone:...

• July 14, 2009
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The A Word: Information and Activism

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the central shifts implicit in user-generated information is that in many cases the user will be closer to the subject than a reporter may have been. Journalists, like ethnographers or consultants, are separated from their subjects by factors like structures of reward (salary) and professional codes (organized skepticism, systematic disinterestedness). These factors are sometimes driven by ethical positions and sometimes are byproducts of revenue structures, but have been seen as important to the neutrality and objectivity that characterize recent ideas of journalism. Citizen-created content falls in a different space; as I have said elsewhere, it starts to look...

• June 5, 2009
• 6 comments

Community Organization with Digital Tools

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I took a digital-communication-oriented glance at the war on Scientology being led by the nontraditional online group called Anonymous. I'm not exactly writing a part 2, but I want to start a follow-up discussion on a few of the comments made and questions posed by Anonymous about how digital media affects the dynamics of community organization. That being said, if you haven't had the chance to browse the comments of that post it's probably worthwhile. I have mentioned in the past that I want to see digital media facilitate local impact; to do that well we need to...

• March 1, 2008
• 6 comments

Political Action in Egypt Using Mobile Devices

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Using cell phones to organize protests and share information during demonstrations is not a new idea...but it is one that is changing how news is made or "unmade" - instantly. Check out this interview with Noria Yunus, who agitates against violence against women...note: the first couple of minutes are images of Israel/Egypt leading up to the interview......

• October 15, 2007
• 1 comment