With our Knight News Challenge grant we (the Media Standards Trust and Web Science Research Initiative) are exploring and developing ways in which to help the public find and assess news on the web (for which we have also received a MacArthur Foundation grant). Part of this initiative includes developing tools for making online news more transparent. What does that mean? It means enabling journalists, and people creating journalism, to embed basic information to their online news articles which helps the public establish an article's authorship and provenance (the same methodology applies to photos and video but I'll stick with...
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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.
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There is a great selection of new media information channels already to go even before Gustav has touched down in the U.S. These include: A Gustav Information Center on the social networking site Ning: A government Gustav Twitter feed A Gustav Wiki with centralized information: And a whole slew of live video feeds and news broadcasts on LiveNewsCameras.com Please help spread the word to those who can benefit from the resources now in place, many put together by volunteers....
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We had a brainstorming session and an idea of a board game came up. Then a card game followed and it seemed interesting enough to be explored in detail because of the low cost prototype that we could make. The idea is that the player would gather cards by talking to the stakeholders that are involved in whatever issue the game is about. The end of the game would be a player vs computer card game. Every card can have 5 parameters, each parameter can affect positively or negatively or be neutral to a certain facet of the issue. Yet...
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Will 3G iPhone Help Push Geo-Based News?
Apple's announcement yesterday of a GPS-enabled iPhone is further fanning the flames of excitement around location based services and mobile social networking. Being able to connect with friends (and strangers), and to interact with your immediate environment via your smartphone is the new new thing. But we still have a ways to go with all of this mobile-enabled location activity... The economic opportunity is a big one, which is precisely why so many services are coming on line, and why so much attention is being paid to open mobile platforms (i.e., Android and LiMo) that will fertilize the space. In...
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We Need a PowerPoint to Make Games
"Playing the News" Update - Distil Interactive I just returned from Ottawa where Nicole Rinerand I went to collaborate with Distil Interactive. We spent two days in their office and it was a positive learning experience. I should make a premise that Distil is trying to build a system that will allow non tech-savvy users, with little knowledge of coding, to create a game or game-like environment in a simple way and in a short time. The system is based off XML, flash and C. Right now the XML code is what controls what is being displayed on screen and...
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Tell Me You Hear the Writing on the Wall?
Microsoft's Tell Me subsidiary announced the launch of a new audio service for the BlackBerry which allows the user to conduct local business search, get directions or traffic information, etc. using voice commands. Apparently, by uttering a singe word like "coffee" your GPS enabled Blackberry will do an automatic search (in this case via Microsoft Live Search) and provide you with the nearest cafe links, directions, phone numbers, etc. That's a cool feature to have, especially as our "smart" phones get smaller and their screens way too damn small to read. Of course voice activated software has been around for...
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The State of the News Media Is Troubled
On Monday the Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report. It's worthwhile reading for anyone who's interested in the major trends affecting not just the news industry but the culture of information dissemination in this country. I've been reading the report since last night and find myself agreeing with just about all its major observations. Here are some especially noteworthy snippets. From the Introduction: The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago. And the problems, increasingly, appear to be different than many experts have...
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Thanks to Chris O'Brien's challenge, serious talk of business models for journalism have come to the IdeaLab blog. Let's pause a moment for an overarching view. Turn off the bright lights and stare into the empty studio. Markets - selling and buying at prices set by supply and demand - don't work for news and information. Valuable news is a public good. All right, if you care about journalism, you already believed that. But news is also a public good in the sense economists use the term: once one person comes into possession of it, everybody can have it. Expensive...
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National Awareness Days are a Cry for Help
Today, March first, is National Self-Injury Awareness Day. You may not know much about this issue. A Google news search turned up one article, in the independent Charleston Gazette. I am meaningfully aware that people self-injure only through a friend's yearly blog post to mark self-injury awareness day: "We are male and female. We are artists, athletes, students, and business owners. We have depression, DID, PTSD, eating disorders, borderline personalities, bipolar disorder, or maybe no formal diagnosis at all. Some of us were abused, some were not. We are straight, bi, and gay. We come from all walks of life...
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Lies about Venezuela: If NYT.com ran Related Content
Lara, Venezuela, lacks widespread internet access, cutting off Agaric Design Collective from our sysadmin. If you want to tell us Hugo Chávez's administration in Venezuela is doing a bad job developing the country, we have reason to listen, with prejudice. But the accusations slipping unchallenged into news articles that Venezuela is anti-democratic, that Chávez is unpopular, and that the proposed constitutional reforms up for approval tomorrow are unlikely to pass - these are lies with consequences. These unsourced and poorly sourced claims, dripping like acid rain showers on the informed public's understanding of Venezuela - are lies where the truth matters....
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Geotagged News and Drupal: Why Wait?
A week or so ago Dan Schultz posted here about the potential for geotagging. Technically, the basics of geotagging is coming along: the Drupal shop Development Seed announced today "We Will Geocode Anything," using a news-tagging service and a Python script to add locations to news stories. (This is part of their larger project Managing News.) Dan, however, outlined a list of things he needed for geotagging news to be exciting. A commenter on his blog reiterated that the ability to geographically tag things by region or a shape drawn on the map (and defined by multiple pairs of coordinates)...
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What's Not News? Unflattering Trivialities, Opinions on Planet's Shape, and Fake Press Conferences
We can make some easy progress defining news by instead listing what's not news. Paul Krugman interviewed by Rory O'Connor: several major parts of the news media that are for all practical purposes part of "movement conservatism" -- Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Times -- and [...] other news organizations are intimidated, at least to some extent. I sometimes talk about what I call "asymmetrical intimidation." If you say a true but unflattering thing about Bush or in fact about any other prominent conservative, oh, boy! People are going to go after you. I mean, I've got...
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Some interesting work being done interactive games for use by the news media. For example, ImpactGames (makers of Peacemaker), is working on expanding its business strategy to encompass a model of interactive participation in current events. ImpactGames is in talks with some of the major news sources about creating portals that would allow viewers to "Play the News". Hear more about this latest work and how it relates to current events and the concept of interactive news...
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Jay Rosen beat me to the punch but I'm still going to jot down seven goals that I think the perfect news system would address. I used this list as a foundation when thinking about how to utilize digital media and it is what I feel any type of aggregation system should include. Afterwards you'll find a quick summary of the idea that got me into this big mess in the first place.
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What is Your Definition of News?
In the spirit of Web 2.0 - getting y'all to do the work - I request you to do it over at RootTruth.org, a site I put up for this and playing with the Drupal module I will make. Sign up and post an element of how you define news....
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Ready? Here's My Formula for Online News Success
I am at the Online News Association annual meeting in Toronto. Listening to some of the speakers at the J-Lab's workshop, puzzling through the success of some sites and the failure of others, and putting together what I have learned from four years of doing PressThink, the emerging model I see would combine... √ High quality aggregation within a strong editorial focus. (Like the Huffington Post nationally, or Twin Cities Daily Planet locally.) √ Blogging platform with the best posts filtered to the front page. (Like Daily Kos) √ Original reporting with hybrid strength: amateurs with pro support (training, production...
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What is the Knight News Challenge About?
Hello World! Seems fitting to open this new space with this traditional greeting, used by humans upon first interaction with a new computing environment. My name is Lisa Williams, and along with 23 others writing on this blog, I am one of the winners of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge. I pause here, because if there is one thing that blogging has taught me, it is to distinguish what I know from what I just think I know. When I don't, well, that's what my friend and fellow blogger Shimon Rura calls "self-teaching through shame" kicks in in the...
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What is News? What's Important? And Who Decides?
What is news? If we define news as what's important, and we were to ask regular folks what they considered important enough to be in the news each day, I wager we'd get a much more serviceable media than we have now. Serviceable, in the sense that we would have an idea of what's happening in our world and, equally important, an understanding of how to affect the conditions that shape our lives.. In blogging about Related Content, the little Drupal module which will try to show that news plus ideas can equal action (that will be the next day's...
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Playing the News Project Moving Forward
We haven't posted much until now because we've been busy getting the "beta" version of our game engine off the drawing board. We now have an initial build that Nora will demo at the ONA conference in a few days. After some serious brainstorming sessions with game designers, news professionals and people who actually play games, we have a good idea about the type of game environment we will be prototyping. We have some questions and comments for the others in the group who are also working on games and news applications and I'm sure we will have much more...
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One of the funny things about citizen journalism is the notion that most people are walking around with a thousand story ideas in their head that they would gladly write if given the opportunity. It's not true. As we build our network of citizen journalists, we're finding that some folks have a good feel for what's newsworthy in their neighborhoods. But most don't, and so we need to help them. But how? We can't know what's going on in every neighborhood in Chicago, a city of three million people with a southern boundary that's more than 10 miles away from...
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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.
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