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Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.
Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.
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Liberian Bloggers Show Everyday Life in Monrovia
Liberia was afforded a rare glimpse of international media attention this week when United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the capital Monrovia and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Most of the coverage focused on basic facts about Liberia. To learn more about everyday life we must turn to the country's bloggers.
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News Ecosystem Demands Collaboration, Not Us vs. Them Mentality
One of the great tragedies that I see in the current debate about the future of journalism is the way the discussion continues to be framed around a series of binary choices. Newspapers or blogs. Print or online. Journalists or algorithms. In each case, there seems to be a simple-minded belief that the future will inevitably be one or the other. I consider this tragic because the result is a lot of dead-end debates that devolve into spitball fights about whether one will replace the other. My belief is that the better conversation is about how these things should complement...
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Life After Newspapers: One Reporter Takes on the Island of Alameda
Bit of a busy couple weeks for those watching the newspaper business. The presses stopped at the Rocky and the P-I, Clay Shirky and Steven B. Johnson took turns penning big think pieces about the Future of News(papers), and -- good news -- the San Diego Union-Tribune looks like it will sell to a private equity firm. So what does life after newspapers look like, especially in major-metro-adjacent neighborhoods? I asked one reporter-turned-blogger about the local news site she started after leaving the Bay Area Newspaper Group, the chunk of Dean Singleton's MediaNews that includes the Oakland Tribune and a...
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The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism hosted an informational meeting with local elected public officials on Wednesday, November 19, to showcase VoxPop, an interactive tool for civic engagement, developed by journalism students through the Knight News Challenge grant. The school is collaborating with the Manhattan Mercury to launch and research VoxPop. The software innovation allows area citizens to contact elected officials regarding local issues in the news. The AQ Miller School of Journalism at Kansas State University was among a consortium of universities awarded a $235,000 grant by the Knight Foundation to develop new ways and technologies that can help...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Politics to Poetry
Go to Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog and you don't know if you're going to find a post on politics, poetry, the NFL or the world of videogames. A journalist who has worked at Time Magazine and the Village Voice, Coates started his own blog after being laid off from Time Magazine. Then, back in August, the author of the recently released "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood," was added to the magazine's roster of bloggers at the Atlantic.com. There he continues to interweave culture and politics in posts that ruminate on topics ranging from...
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AP Takes on Drudge Retort Over Copyright Use
Last week, the Associated Press ("AP") sent a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Rogers Cadenhead, the founder of Drudge Retort, a liberal alternative to (and parody of) the well-known Drudge Report, demanding that he remove six user-submitted blog entries and one user comment on the site that contained quotations from AP articles. Today, the New York Times reported that AP was reconsidering its request while it creates a set of guidelines for bloggers and websites that excerpt AP material. The Drudge Retort is a community site similar to Digg and Reddit, allowing its users to...
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Sean Bell Illustrates Lines that Divide Us
Blaring red headlines on the Drudge Report announced to the world that the three New York City Police who shot Sean Bell 50 times, killing him, were found not guilty. Drudge, with his right wing reputation, it turns out was one of the only mainstream white blogs to prominently play the Bell verdict. In fairness, the Huffington Post did have a small headline about the verdict. Things were different in the black blogosphere. It wasn't just that the black interest sites carried the coverage, it was also that many included rich texture and context in which to look at the...
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Several News Challenge projects, including ours (the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker), feature blogs as a publishing tool. So consider this a friendly tip: If you or anyone who will be posting to your blog even occasionally uses net access of unknown or uncertain security (such as public wifi, or a hotel's network), make sure you use a secure login to your blog's back-end.
Why? Because it's pretty common for unscrupulous folks to monitor networks used by many people with the express purpose of "sniffing" userIDs and passwords. This can have obvious bad consequences if they get access to your web-based e-mail -- but it can also mess up your blog, too.
I learned my lesson last November...
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Why I Love Forums -- and Not Blogs
I have an admission to make. I really don't like blogs. They are not conversational and they don't build a community. I love forums because they are conversational and with a little nurturing, they can blossom into a full-blown on-line community. This is true whether the common interests are cars, collectibles or a geographic community. Another reason I love forums is that, unlike a blog, I could have stopped writing at the end of the last paragraph. On an active forum that assertion would have been enough to effectively start a conversation that possibly would be just as informative as...
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Reader Comments: Send Me Your Success Stories
I am working up a post on reader comments to news stories on media sites, comments on media-hosted blogs, or media hosted online forums. At the recent Online News Association conference there was definitely a sense of turmoil surrounding reader comments online. I'd hate to see interactivity switched off due to the lack of "here is how we make it work" knowledge sharing. Those in local media are in particular asked to send in some success stories. Please comment here or privately to me - clift@publicus.net - about your success stories. Add links to examples when possible. Some questions to...
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My 21st Century News Challenge
I am G. Patton Hughes and I publish a hyperlocal website in Paulding County Georgia. My 21st Century Knight News Challenge is to write about how I am going to make money out of this hyperlocal new media venture. My goal is to share with you observations of a lone entrepreneur who had a new media idea and is trying to make it work. I feel it important to set the stage for what will follow so bear with me while I present a little history. I'll use a "QnA" format. Q. The first question is how I came to...
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