Idea Lab

Ten Points on Funding Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week the Salzburg Global Seminar organized two back-to-back meetings which brought together passionate enthusiasts in the field of new media for three days, and then traditional funders of media development for another three days. Josh Goldstein of UNICEF Innovation and Erik Hersman of Ushahidi each blogged about the gathering. There has also been a flurry of blogging by Anne Nelson and Susan Moeller on the Strengthening Independent Media blog. During the first meeting I gave the following presentation about my experience funding citizen media projects over the past two and a half years. HiperBarrio began when a Colombian media...

• October 11, 2009
• 3 comments

The Power of Proximity: Possibilities for Hyperlocal Journalism in South Africa

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Whether it focuses on hyperlocal crime, hyperlocal pollution and health issues, local economies (market matching information) and information about the provision of local services, this approach provides an arguably essential missing link between what citizens might find useful to know, and ways that citizens might use the information and analysis to create pressure and increase participation in efforts to change things.

• September 1, 2009
• 1 comment

Maps for Social Change and Community Involvement

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

2008 was the year of aggregating data related to local communities and displaying that information on maps. Knight News Challenge grantee EveryBlock, for example, labored to convince city governments to make their data more open and accessible, and then created a beautiful map interface to display what is happening where in real time. Map of the 132 calls made to police on April 22nd in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. Other examples of projects which have set out to add geographic locations to information found on the internet, and to display that information on map interfaces, include outside.in, WikiMapia,...

• April 24, 2009
• 2 comments

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
• 1 comment

One Location Doesn't Cut It

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two months ago I made a post about the fun little news application on the Nintendo Wii. Dan Burd responded to the post with this comment criticizing some of Wii News' interface assumptions: "I think it's limiting to say that each news story only pertains to one location. Many news stories are overviews of the relations between two or more countries. I'm guessing the AP thing would place them at whatever city the reporter is reporting from. I think that's a bit misleading." If you ask me, he is spot on. Burd's comment refers to global news, but the...

• January 3, 2008
• 4 comments