Idea Lab

What Are The New Obligations Of Readers?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago, I was reading an interesting story about the state of the Columbia Journalism School that appeared on the New York Magazine website. In short, the story tried to examine concerns about how well Columbia was making the transition to the digital journalism era. After reading the story, I dutifully tweeted a link to it to those following me through my Next Newsroom account: Columbia J-School struggles to adapt to the digital age: http://is.gd/mY0s "F--- new media," says one prof. A short time later, I received this reply from ajsundby: @nextnewsroom That @nymag post has many reporting...

• June 17, 2009
• 13 comments

New Resource Devoted to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Citizen Media Law Project, which I direct, today launched a new page that aggregates everything on our site relating to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("Section 230"), the important federal statute that protects operators of websites and other interactive computer services from liability for publishing the statements of third-parties. We've also added some detailed background on Section 230, links to our legal guide materials, and feeds showing recent legal threats from our database, blog posts, and news from other websites. The page also has a list of outside resources and will soon host a compendium of...

• April 30, 2009
• No comments

Cultivating a Community Garden, not a Public Toilet

by Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I recently attended the Integrated Media Association conference in Atlanta and sat in on a panel of web content providers addressing public radio folks about online content. Jesse Thorne moderated a great discussion about how to provide content your audience wants to hear, how to listen and how to foster online communities around your content. Online community building is of particular interest to our project as it is a key feature Radio Engage will provide. The Sound of Young America Merlin Mann made the following observation about how to handle community and conversations: Creating community is not as simple as...

• April 16, 2009
• 8 comments

Ease of Use Matters

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We spend a lot of time talking about why people don't comment more on Gotham Gazette stories. By "a lot of time," I actually mean about 20 minutes every three weeks, but nonetheless as a project with a mission to improve public discourse and engage New Yorkers in public policy conversations, we gauge our impact in part by how many people are reading and responding to our reporting. When popular blogs reference our reporting we see lively and contentious conversations. But rarely do we get much discussion on our own site. This week, though, I made an interesting discovery. After...

• March 11, 2009
• 8 comments

'News Mixer' Offers Better Engagement

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Crunchberry Project -- six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending the Medill School on Knight News Challenge scholarships -- set out this fall to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults. Here's what they came up with: News Mixer. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system. News Mixer is already getting some positive buzz thanks to some Twittering last week after Team Crunchberry presented...

• December 16, 2008
• 5 comments

Stack Overflow Sets an Example for News Commenting Systems

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a poorly-kept secret: I hang out with Web developers all day. And by their nature, Web developers tend to be Web savvy, and Web natives. Which means they are already using and hacking and rebuilding the next big thing online before most of us have ever laid our eyes on it. Like this one: Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a service where programmers can ask and answer questions. That's all. Not too complicated when you describe it that way. But hidden in that description is a valuable system of voting and rating, where users earn points (call it Karma...

• November 14, 2008
• 4 comments

The Five Biggest Barriers to Online Participation

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Team Crunchberry -- so-called because we're thinking about Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home of a large Quaker Oats cereal factory responsible for the nickname "City of the Five Smells" -- has emerged from its ideation process with a core idea and a target audience. The six-student team has created three personas representing 20-34-year-olds in eastern Iowa, and is brainstorming what the barriers are that keep them from participating in online conversations related to news and information. The brainstorming process, in turn, has begun to yield some very interesting ideas for improving online-news conversation systems. Like many online news sites, the sites...

• October 18, 2008
• 3 comments

A Call for Quality Comments

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few days ago I was snooping around Digg when I noticed a popular submission titled The Difference Between Digg and Reddit. I clicked, eager to learn, and was presented with an image juxtaposing two very distinct flavors of user-submitted comments surrounding the breaking news of Tony Snow's death. The first comments shown at Digg offered generic words of respect that you might expect to hear about a public figure that passed away. The top comment at Reddit, however, was a bit more candid to say the least. The discussion that followed ranged from folks saying "maybe I should join...

• July 18, 2008
• 4 comments

Reader Comments: Send Me Your Success Stories

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

• October 31, 2007
• 3 comments