Idea Lab

Why it Matters that Pierre Omidyar is Launching a News Startup

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is launching a for-profit news startup in Hawaii, where he and his family live. This is important news, and not just because he's involved. A few months ago Pierre and Randy Ching founded Peer News. Their first project was a Twitter-related experiment called Ginx, which didn't get critical mass and is being closed. Now they've announced Peer News' more important move -- a project aimed at creating the kind of local journalism that brings accountability and value to a community. Pierre, in a note on the company blog, says he and his team are launching...

• November 18, 2009
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Local Press Subsidies Are Not The Answer

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are a growing number of voices from within the media and politics in the UK who are suggesting the government should subsidise local newspapers. This is not, IMHO, a good idea. The government can set parameters - particularly fiscal parameters (i.e. tax) that incentivise people to collect and publish public interest news. But this is fundamentally different from providing a subsidy, however arm's length, that organisations can apply for.

• January 16, 2009
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Five Ways to Gather and Report News with Twitter

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I read Chris O'Brien's IdeaLab post about the latest Twitterquake and the 10 (so far) comments with a great deal of interest. After all, ReportingOn borrows a great deal from Twitter, and I've been writing about the exponentially growing micro-blogging service for around a year now. I can't help but notice that a commenter or two seem to think that anyone actually takes is seriously when Twitter asks its base question of "What are you doing?" This is what makes it easy for those who haven't sipped from the Tweetstream to write it off as crap for tweens. Actually, that's...

• August 3, 2008
• 3 comments

Making Maps Work with Geo-Filtering

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's finals week here at Carnegie Mellon, and now more than ever I don't want to spend unnecessary time digging around for information. I want my notes organized and easy to flip through, I don't want to have to look at 5 different course portals to find the study guides that my professors put online, and I definitely don't want to download and read half of an assigned paper only to realize that it doesn't matter for the test. In fact, these desires sound a lot like the desires of an information consumer in general - I would like my...

• December 13, 2007
• 2 comments

Figuring Out Beat Reporting with a Social Network

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Below is a lightly revised version of a letter that went out last week to a number of professional news organizations--some big and famous, some small and unsung--asking if they want to participate in the figuring out. My goal is to find 12 willing beat reporters at 12 newsrooms. I have about 7 to 8 of the 12 signed up now. Interested in participating? Email me or leave a comment This is a simple project testing a single idea: Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a "live" social network connected to the beat,...

• November 1, 2007
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Getting Started at EveryBlock

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

With my News Challenge grant, I'm starting a project called EveryBlock that aggregates local news for specific cities. We've been working on EveryBlock for a couple of months now, and things are starting to come together nicely. We've got a crack team of four working on the project: designer Wilson Miner, people person Dan O'Neil, developer Paul Smith and yours truly. We're based in Chicago and share office space in the Loop with a great local cartographer and Chicago historian. Our office windows overlook the El tracks -- as Elwood Blues would say, the trains go by "so often that...

• October 14, 2007
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