Idea Lab

Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A fierce and fascinating debate has broken out over the cover photo on Time magazine's April 27 print edition. Time paid a pittance for the picture -- at least a pittance next to what big magazines normally pay for cover art -- and that's made a lot of professional photographers furious. They should get over it. But they and their gifted-amateur and part-timer peers -- especially the ones capturing breaking news events -- should start agitating for some better marketplaces than the ones available today. More on that below, but first some background: The marketplace for photography in the...

• July 29, 2009
• 2 comments

Citizen Journalism Networks Stepping Up Editorial Standards

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I tend to avoid the "professional vs. amateur journalism" debate, saying "I have constructive criticisms for both sides." As we've hit a flash point for traditional news organizations, the evolution of citizen journalism networks like NowPublic, AllVoices and others may shed light on how the media space will resolve. Perhaps the two "opposites" will meet somewhere in the middle or, as I suspect, find out that they are more alike than they ever thought. Recent news in the space has included Orato and Ground Report making shifts to require higher editorial standards in the submissions they accept and publish. Alfred...

• June 10, 2009
• 7 comments

Moving Beyond Text for Cell Phone Citizen Media

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Cell phones are great for making calls, listening and speaking. So when it comes to media convergence, and the ability to do more and more on our cell phones, why is our media still so writing-centric? Even in the Iindaba Ziyafika project, our Knight funded expansion of the public sphere in Grahamstown City, we're focused on getting citizen journalism in via text (in particular in through SMS) and getting it back out via text. Text content for smartphones and mobile sites are huge and growing niches. But why not use voice more for citizen journalism, public debate, and just getting...

• June 2, 2009
• 5 comments

Bringing Hyper-Local, Citizen-Driven News to South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Is hyper-local journalism interesting enough to engage its own audience? And is the prospect of being more "in the know," and more connected and more involved in one's community, attractive enough to inspire people to take the time out to do citizen journalism? The old adage that "all news is local" does hold a great deal of truth. News can be locally generated or outside news can be made local. The implications of any big news story - like H1N1 virus, a.k.a. swine flu - can almost always be localized to create stories about how this impacts on you, where...

• May 8, 2009
• 8 comments

Iindaba Ziyafika: The News Is Coming

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The news has started to flow. It's a trial-trickle from township teenagers, through to other social groupings in Grahamstown. With the kick-off of phase one during 2008, citizen youth content has crossed the chasm of age difference to reach the older readers of the Grocott's Mail newspaper. This is an early manifestation of the Knight Challenge project titled Iindaba Ziyafika, which aims to use cellphone technology to deepen a local public sphere in which Grocott's Mail is the primary place for a meeting of minds and formulation of public opinion. It's not just age differences being spanned, but a legacy...

• December 11, 2008
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MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 - Leaning Local

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The premise of our MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 is that the path to civic participation and becoming a voter is different for everyone, particularly among today's youth. Frequently, young people disconnect the issues that concern them most, from the act of voting - on the premise that their individual vote won't make a difference, or that the news media nor the political candidates NEVER speak about the issues THEY care about most. The job of each Street Team '08 member is to determine what is important to youth in their states, and get young people engaged in...

• April 22, 2008
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Super Tuesday Wrapup: the MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 & the live mobile to web experiment

by Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Super Tuesday was an historic day with incredible youth turnout at the polls (doubling, tripling and even quadrupling turnout from 2000 & 2004!) and so we were making our own history at MTV covering the youth vote in a whole new way - in this case, capitalizing on a new achievement in mobile technology, delivering real-time high-quality Internet-ready audio and video reporting from the campaign trail.

• February 17, 2008
• No comments