Idea Lab

SochiReporter Launches with Time Machine, Wiki Guidebook

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm glad to say that SochiReporter, my Knight-funded project, launched on October 27. This was a very important day for me, and for our team. We tested SochiReporter for about two months before the public launch, inviting both web experts and users to comment on various aspects of the site. In the days before the launch, I didn't sleep a wink. But this is natural. I was very excited about the launch, and did my best to convey how cool and innovative SochiReporter is to the journalists and students that gathered on launch day in the hall of one of...

• November 20, 2009
• 3 comments

Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week we publicly launched Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. While our focus is on outreach to the 330,000 people who live there, anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine. I invite you all to give it a try at http://www.printcasting.com and let us know what you think. The more early usage we have the better. One easy way to get started is to browse through a list of recently updated Printcasts and subscribe to a few. For those of you who haven't followed the progress of our Knight News Challenge funded project, the...

• March 17, 2009
• 16 comments

The Includer
Episode 2
Year 2

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ricardo and I agreed on four priorities, in the order below, for our work on the Includer and marginal Internet access: What would you like to share online? What is our business value? What are new technical solutions? What technical skills might we encourage?

• October 3, 2008
• 3 comments

Ideal Printcasting Publishers

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the roughly 14 years that I've been in the online industry, I've learned that it's really easy to focus so much on what you're going to build that you can easily forget about why you're building it and who's going to use it. The key questions to constantly remind yourself of are: Who's going to use what you build? How will it help them solve problems in their daily lives? How will they find out about your product, and what will keep them coming back? This is especially easy to do with a project like Printcasting, which is simultaneously...

• August 15, 2008
• 1 comment

Still Seeking Coders Interested in Journalism

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's now been almost exactly a year since we announced (thanks to a Knight News Challenge grant) that programmer-developers could earn full scholarships to study journalism in the master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. We've got plenty of scholarship money still available -- but we have not been overwhelmed with applications. Here's where we stand: Two scholarship winners are now almost midway through their Medill studies. A third candidate will enroll next month. And we still have the equivalent of six full scholarships yet to award. From the beginning, I've felt that this project's biggest challenge would...

• May 26, 2008
• 13 comments

Newspapers Suffer from Marketing Myopia Online

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've attended a few conferences and it appears to me that most folks in journalism hate advertising. Maybe that comes from seeing the last eight inches of their story end up on the composing room floor to make room for another two column by four-inch ad or just distrust of business. I wouldn't hazard a guess. Regardless, it would seem some journalistic purists are using the current situation to seek wholly different business forms to fund journalism in general. While the national practice of the craft has been benefited by foundations, the idea that anything approaching hyperlocal can be funded...

• May 11, 2008
• No comments