Idea Lab

"Programmer-Journalist" Scholarships Yield Finalists for Online Journalism Awards

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our Knight News Challenge scholarship program to educate "programmer-journalists" at the Medill School at Northwestern University just won some significant external validation. The Online News Association yesterday announced the finalists for this year's Online Journalism Awards, and two of the finalists resulted directly from the scholarship initiative. News Mixer, the "conversations around news" site created by a team of master's students including the first two programmer-journalists, is one of four finalists for a new prize: the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism. The site is in some pretty good company; the other finalists are...

• September 1, 2009
• 2 comments

News Mixer Options: Launch a Site, Use the Code or Be Inspired

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What's next for News Mixer? The demonstration Web site, launched in December by a team of Medill students, shows off some interesting new ideas for engaging people in online conversations around news. The site has attracted quite a bit of attention from people interested in the future of journalism, social media and new technology. More than just attention, in fact. There are now at least two separate organizations actively working with News Mixer's open-source code. One is the (Knight News Challenge-funded) Populous Project, which announced recently that it will incorporate News Mixer's functionality into the Populous open-source publishing platform for...

• February 2, 2009
• No comments

Populous Is Adopting News Mixer (And More)

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're chugging along over at Populous, and getting closer and closer to a public release of our CMS beta and demo. Right now we have an alpha of our CMS we're using to test and get selected feedback on, and we still have a bit more refinement to do to get things up and running for public consumption. I'm excited to discuss some of the other projects and features we're incorporating into Populous. We realized a long time ago that we weren't going to be able to make a viable platform for online publication unless we included a number of...

• January 12, 2009
• 5 comments

News Mixer Generates Widespread Interest

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since we announced the launch of News Mixer, a Web application developed by Medill master's students to demonstrate new ways of fostering conversations around news, the site has gotten a lot of positive feedback. News Mixer is the final project for six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending Medill on Knight News Challenge scholarships. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system. The class officially ended Dec. 12, but the students and I have...

• January 5, 2009
• 7 comments