Idea Lab

Future of News & Civic Media: The Motion Picture

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last June we held our Future of News & Future Civic Media conference, here at MIT, with many recipients of the Knight News Challenge meeting, speaking, and demoing their work. We chose to use the "barcamp" un-conference technique for most of the sessions, where all participants to the conference were able to host a session. This flat, democratic style turned out to be perfect for a group of citizen journalists, social software hackers, information activists, and researchers. Here is a brief video (by film makers Paula Aguilera and Jonathan Williams) that gives a sense of the flavor of FNFCM09....

• August 31, 2009
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Knight Rewards On-the-Spot Competitors at MIT Meetup

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last Thursday, I returned to Moscow from the Future of News and Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass. Organized by the MIT Center of Future Civic Media and the Knight Foundation, this is the annual meeting where all the Knight News Challenge Winners discuss the future of civic media and talk about the digital tools to build local communities. This year, nine new exciting projects joined this community of innovators, raising the total of Knight News Challenge projects to 45. The conference was also a good chance for the past Knight News Challenge winners to talk about their progress on...

• July 1, 2009
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Messages From Hot Places

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I got to go to the MIT Media Lab to sit in on a gathering of researchers and graduate students involved with the Center for Future Civic Media. It's hard not to get all fangirl when going to the Media Lab. I mean, I used to read about this place in issues of Wired back before they adopted rational typography! We all got brief presentations on three projects at different stages of development. One, Virtual Gaza, took eyewitness testimonies from people living in Gaza and overlaid them on a Google Virtual Earth layer. Another, called Between the Bars, was...

• February 27, 2009
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Convergence and Disturbance: New Media, Networked Publics, and Pakistan

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The above video is one of a large number posted via YouTube by students in Pakistan to share what was happening in their country during the 2007-2008 political emergency. During a time when the government was tightening its control over traditional media, citizen journalists took on vital functions in fostering public debate, insuring the spread of important information, monitoring elections, and helping the outside world understand what was happening. Huma Yusuf, a recently graduate Comparative Media Studies student, has shared an important analysis of the role which grassroots media played during the crisis through the Center for Future Civic...

• February 4, 2009
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The Sites in their Sights

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

So which are the regular websites visited by the big names at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media conference? I asked people like Jay Rosen, JD Lasica, Amy Gahran, Paul Grabowicz, Henry Jenkins and others to share their favorites. Surveying ten or so folks shows that top of the list is Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine. It's followed closely by Amy Gahran's E-Media Tidbits and Jay Rosen's Pressthink. Dan Gilmor, Romanesko and Mark Glaser's MediaShift are also popular online destinations. Also mentioned were: Paidcontent.org ReadWriteWeb Dave Winer's Scripting News Doc Searles Steve Outing JD Lasica's Social Media Online Journalism Review Cyberjournalist.net...

• June 13, 2008
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What Does Popular Culture Have to Do With Civic Media?

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Center for Future Civic Media is collaborating with the MIT Communications Forum to host an ongoing series of conversations about media and civic engagement. This past term, we hosted two such exchanges --- "Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," an exchange between University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein (Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge) and Harvard University law professor Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) and "Youth and Civic Engagement" with University of Washington political science professor Lance Bennett, actvist Alan Khazei (Be the Change), and our own Ingeborg Endter (formerly with the Computer...

• May 23, 2008
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ManyEyes: Data-Rich Features on the Cheap

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The web offers news organizations whole new ways to present complex stories to readers, but even the emergence of free tools hasn't made online databases or Google Maps mashups a daily commonplace in your average news organization's website. Often, that's because the effort involved in building a rich, complex visualization is just too high for it to become an everyday occurrence. But what if those days are coming to a close? Enter ManyEyes, a free service created by one of IBM's research labs that allows near-instant interactive visualizations of a data set. Your Excel spreadsheet of public job salaries and...

• April 23, 2008
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