Idea Lab

"We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part Two)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

You describe a range of projects in the book including those involving youths and senior citizens. What generational differences, if any, did you observe in the ways they thought about their roles and responsibilities as journalists? Young people are much more technologically adept in general. Older citizen journalists often get tangled up in the technology. They approach issues differently. The youth have strongly held opinions and aren't afraid to express themselves, be they nationally or international in scope. The older generation tends to shy away from letting fly with their political opinions especially. They have sort of a been-there, done-that...

• January 23, 2009
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Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part One)

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the pleasures of living and teaching at MIT for the past 20 years has been the chance to build ongoing relations with a fascinating cast of characters, many of whom have been regulars at the MIT Communication Forum events that are run by my colleague, David Thorburn. These events have attracted people from across the campus, from neighboring universities, and from the greater Cambridge area, many of whom have been coming regularly for a decade or more to listen to smart, citizenly discussions about democracy, new media, and public life. The Center for Future Civic Media partners regularly...

• January 21, 2009
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Open Media Publishing: One New Option

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

EngageMedia, an Australia-based open media organization that promotes social justice and environmental issues, has just released a major open source software package called Plumi. Based on the Plone content-management system, it's designed to let citizen publishers create their own video-sharing communities out of the box. Given that websites like YouTube and Yahoo Video retain extensive rights to your video while keeping their own distribution platforms under lock and key,  Plumi is one of the important new forces pushing toward democratic, independent and open media. For the announcement and technical details, head here. To download Plumi, head here. A demo...

• February 14, 2008
• 4 comments

Toward a Community Media Toolset

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the past three years, since I co-founded Ourmedia.org, a lot of would-be community publishers have asked me the same question, which more or less is this: How can I get a site up and running without investing a lot of time or resources into building a content management system and technology infrastructure from scratch? There's good news and bad news, I tell them. The good news is that there are now hundreds of free, open source content management systems to run your publication or social network on. Some of the more popular ones include Drupal, Plone/Zope, Joomla, Ruby...

• February 11, 2008
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