Idea Lab

Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Before I went home this summer I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Twedt, a reporter at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who teaches one of the few journalism classes at Carnegie Mellon. I told him about the Idealab and the user driven system I've been writing about here. The first big question he asked deserves a well thought out response: "What if the users don't contribute?" Steve is right; a developer can't rely on user contribution unless he/she is sure users will contribute. Since one can never actually be sure about that, we are left with three simple tasks: hedge...

• May 24, 2008
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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

Some Goals and An Idea

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jay Rosen beat me to the punch but I'm still going to jot down seven goals that I think the perfect news system would address. I used this list as a foundation when thinking about how to utilize digital media and it is what I feel any type of aggregation system should include. Afterwards you'll find a quick summary of the idea that got me into this big mess in the first place.

• October 22, 2007
• 4 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