At Gotham Gazette, we're gathering our bearings and preparing work on a pretty great crowdsourcing project (though this business of talking something up before its even in beta testing does make the developer in me nervous) and I'm increasingly interested in really understanding what makes crowdsourcing work. It is everywhere these days, and it certainly is one way that we can be turning the Internet into a really effective reporting tool. Two new projects I'm watching? Adopt-a-Stimulus -- which I first caught wind of on Twitter -- asks individuals to pick one TARP project and track it. Steve Katz tried...
more »crowdsourcing
Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.
Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.
Learn more about the Knight News Challenge »
At Gotham Gazette, we're gathering our bearings and preparing work on a pretty great crowdsourcing project (though this business of talking something up before its even in beta testing does make the developer in me nervous) and I'm increasingly interested in really understanding what makes crowdsourcing work. It is everywhere these days, and it certainly is one way that we can be turning the Internet into a really effective reporting tool. Two new projects I'm watching? Adopt-a-Stimulus -- which I first caught wind of on Twitter -- asks individuals to pick one TARP project and track it. Steve Katz tried...
more »
Help Me Investigate: Paul Bradshaw on Crowdsourcing Investigative Reporting
On June 1, Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog and Birmingham City University in the U.K. announced that a project he's been working on for 18 months called Help Me Investigate won funding to build a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism. I spoke with Paul via Skype about the goals of the project, the nature of the funding, and what he calls "slow journalism." You can find Paul on Twitter or follow the project's progress at the Help Me Investigate blog if you have questions for him, or leave a comment here....
more »
Partnerships to Watch (and a Crowdsourcing Project I'm Envying)
A small local website from Brooklyn has partnered with NBC to build neighborhood pages for a handful of NBC markets. I haven't followed Outside.in for more than stoop sales (which is New Yorkerese for garage sales or yard sales since most New Yorkers have neither yards nor garages), but it looks like they've taken up EveryBlock's approach to local news aggregation as well, though they want posts explicitly geo-tagged for their maps. Speaking of EveryBlock, they recently announced that they're working with the New York Times to track Times reporting on political districts. Presumably they'll be taking advantage of the...
more »
The Includer
Episode 8
People Vs. Ideas
Open culture is the interplay of open people rather than open ideas. I proposed an idea, but actually, I proposed to bring it to life. I and my team didn’t win funding to build Includers. Instead, I won the chance to blog about them at the PBS Idealab website. But what is the point of blogging about a one-year-old idea? My challenge is to link together those who care and bring to life something new. The challenge I bring to the Knight Foundation is to call for knights - for champions - for includers, rather than for ideas like the Includer.
more »
ReelChanges Aims to 'Audience-Fund' Documentaries
ReelChanges.org, a nonprofit venture that promises to herald an era of viewer-funded documentaries, launched May 1. Since that time, the site has gained considerable traction, partly driven by the tenacity of its founder, Hal Plotkin (a former journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle), and partly because of the sheer power of the idea. Last week Hal wrote a post about the positive reception to the site in the documentary filmmaker community and the site's partnership with Spot.us, an even newer effort that aims for the audience to financially support community and investigative journalism. Spot.us founder David Cohn has written...
more »
People-Funded Journalism Budding
A week ago at this time a small group of journalists and new media stalwarts were at Adobe headquarters in San Francisco talking with two dozen social cause proponents (they run a marvelous little private philanthropy fund called the Full Circle Fund) about the new Spot.us initiative. David Cohn, who writes below about the interesting issue of whether audience-funded journalism would work better for beats or stories, explained the contours of his nascent project, while a consultant, journalists for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Fog City Journal, and yours truly pitched in with thoughts about where this whole citizen...
more »
Imagine a website that would show you, not just how many copies of some book are available for sale from Amazon, but which libraries near you carry the book. Oh wait, that already exists . Between WorldCat and Steven's thoughts on the Sacramento Bee salary database I'm thinking a lot about what really good data driven content looks like. How could we, as news reporters, use our readers as more than passive observers in meaningful ways. WNYC has been doing some interesting work with crowdsourcing and I'd like to see some ideas for introducing the concept to public salary databases...
more »
Crowdsourced Election Coverage
What with the nonstop drumbeat of presidential campaign news these days, it's easy to forget that we've actually got some other elections coming up. On Feb. 5, primary voters in Chicago will cast ballots for ward committee leaders, the county's chief prosecutor and a slew of other positions. From my point of view this is an interesting deal, because I've never run a news organization's election coverage before. I'm always the guy who comes in afterwards to do the big project on voter fraud. Which is a good thing, because I can't plan my way out of a paper bag....
more »
2007: The Year of Social Media
A few thoughts about the pivotal year in media just behind us, and a look at some of the trends that will extend into 2008 and well beyond. Social movements and cultural trends rarely fit into neat chronological packages, and that's true here as well. A year ago, you'll recall, Time named "You" as the Person of the Year, chronicling the rise of the personal media revolution best exemplified by the spectacular growth of YouTube. It's become a truism that we're all now part of the media, and more of us have grown comfortable in that role, as cell...
more »
When I first began thinking of launching a website that published the work of citizen journalists, one of the most alluring potential benefits was the idea of putting more eyes on the street. If we ran a typical local news operation that had a dozen reporters or so, we'd have a dozen people out and about who might see some news. But with grassroots journalism, the possibilities are vastly expanded. We got an illustration of how important that is on Friday, when citizen journalist Kimberly Michaels called to say that an acquaintance had witnessed an instance of apparent police brutality...
more »Featured Comment
It sounds like journalists today also have to be marketers. They have to know who they are trying to reach, and... to pitch their stories to a broader audience.
Topics
Monthly Archives
Get Idea Lab via E-mail
Creative Commons Attribution NC SA 3.0 License