Idea Lab

Partnerships to Watch (and a Crowdsourcing Project I'm Envying)

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

• January 29, 2009
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Interactive Journalism

by Angela Powers
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism hosted an informational meeting with local elected public officials on Wednesday, November 19, to showcase VoxPop, an interactive tool for civic engagement, developed by journalism students through the Knight News Challenge grant. The school is collaborating with the Manhattan Mercury to launch and research VoxPop. The software innovation allows area citizens to contact elected officials regarding local issues in the news. The AQ Miller School of Journalism at Kansas State University was among a consortium of universities awarded a $235,000 grant by the Knight Foundation to develop new ways and technologies that can help...

• December 18, 2008
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Hyperlocal Media Meets Negative Campaigning

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If all politics are local, then hyperlocal media of sorts should be in tall cotton when it comes to local politics. No so and not now; rather hyperlocal media is at best a big thorn in the side of the key group that determines where the big buck political money goes. That key group is the political consultant. This group controls spending for most big-dollar local races such as state house, senate, commission chairman and sheriff in most mid-size to large counties in the nation. Today a serious candidate for commission chairman in Paulding County will spend upwards of $100,000...

• July 3, 2008
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Journalism Education and Social Networks

by Angela Powers
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Citizen journalism, the blogosphere, YouTube, Facebook and more...what do these social networks and new media forms have to do with journalism and mass communications? Often they refer to individuals, rather than traditional media organizations, playing an active role in collecting, reporting and disseminating news. * For example, students at Northern Illinois University took to the streets writing, shooting photos and blogging during the hours and days that followed the Valentines Day shooting. Kyle Yataes posted a video on UTube, providing more moving coverage of the events than the local news. Journalism as we know it today is becoming less confined...

• April 7, 2008
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