Idea Lab

Gearing up Citizen Journalism in Grahamstown, South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Low literacy environments, and multi-lingual areas, like Grahamstown, South Africa, face particular challenges when it comes to encouraging citizen journalism. More than 80 percent of the population speaks English as a second language. While most people are able to speak and understand English, writing is not always a comfortable experience (and some are unable to read or write). That's partly why we've launched Izwi Labahlali (The Voice Of The Citizens), Grahamstown's first radio show with content that's largely produced and presented by citizen journalists and transmitted mainly in iziXhosa, the dominant local language. The show, which airs on Radio Grahamstown...

• November 16, 2009
• 3 comments

Hyper-Local a Hot Topic at All Russia Media Forum

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The SochiReporter team recently presented our project at the 14th All Russia Media Forum, held in Dagomys, Sochi, in late September. This annual forum for Russian print and online media is organized by the Russian Union of Journalists. Among the participants this year were more than 1,000 journalists from local and regional Russian newspapers, as well as European and U.S. editors. The gathering discussed many global issues, such as the decline of trust in the press, measures of responsibility in journalism, and the social weight of the printed word. There were discussion groups, creativity contests, meetings with politicians, celebrities, scholars,...

• October 30, 2009
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Printcasting Bridges the Digital Divide for Hyperlocal Coverage

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've had a busy few months with Printcasting, launching some significant new features and engaging in a number of partnership discussions. I'll get into the features and partners later in this post, but what I'm most excited about right now is that people are using the service to bring previously all-digital content into the physical communities that they serve. Andynoise: Citizen Sports Journalist The best example so far is a sports enthusiast named Paul Anderson in Bakersfield, California who goes by the online moniker "Andynoise." He's now one of 400 publishers who have collectively created 1,500 editions since we launched...

• October 23, 2009
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How Citizen Journalists Can Learn from Work of 'Citizen Scientists'

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I visited Carnegie Mellon University's website for the first time as an alumnus. The front page, often dedicated to highlighting faculty work, had a picture of an iPhone screen displaying brightly colored data visualizations. I didn't have to look past the first two words of the title -- "Citizen Scientists" -- before I knew that it would be worth my time to keep reading. The article described how Eric Paulos, an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, is equipping "everyday mobile devices" with sensors used to collect reliable scientific data. The point of all this effort is...

• August 27, 2009
• 5 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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Journalism Graduates: It's Time to Reinvent Journalism

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spring is upon us and with it comes commencement season at universities across the country (Harvard's 358th commencement is this Thursday, FYI). This is a tough time for graduates in almost every discipline, but especially so for journalism grads. At least that is the conventional wisdom. Which is why it is so refreshing to see a shift in perspective occurring (perhaps even, gasp, a paradigm shift?) at two of this country's preeminent journalism schools: the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In commencement speeches last month, Nicholas Lemann and Barbara Ehrenreich both exhorted...

• June 2, 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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Unrest in Oakland: Who's On The Case?

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My friend and fellow citizen-journalism thinker Amy Gahran once asked, "Was Zapruder a journalist?" Zapruder's home-movie camera captured the famous footage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, TX. If your answer to that question is yes, then there were an untold number of journalists on the Oakland BART train platform on New Year's Day, where they pointed increasingly ubiquitous pocket-size video cameras toward Oscar Grant and BART transit police officer Johannes Mehserle. The videos these onlookers took show the chilling final interaction between Grant and Mehserle, which left Grant dead, and Oakland in a...

• January 9, 2009
• 2 comments

Journalists, Citizens, and the Media Conversation

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my first post to this blog I said that the professional/citizen journalist debate was a "topic best left for another day." It seems that the time has finally come for me to put my two cents out there, and I'll be doing it by exploring what it means to be a journalist and a citizen in this digital world. Ultimately, though, I hope to convince everyone that although it may seem difficult, there doesn't have to be a tradeoff between quality and democracy: we can have it all.

• April 12, 2008
• 1 comment

MTV Taps 51 Citizen Journalists for Election

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MTV, as part of its Emmy-winning "Choose or Lose" campaign (www.ChooseorLose.com), unveiled "Street Team '08": a specially recruited group of 51 citizen journalists - one from every state and Washington, D.C. - who will cover the 2008 elections from a youth perspective and tailor their reports for mobile devices. The members will contribute weekly, multi-media reports (short form videos, blogs, animation, photos, podcasts) that will be distributed via a soon-to-launch WAP site, MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and to the more than 1,800 sites in the Associated Press Online Video Network.

• December 20, 2007
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