Idea Lab

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

Life After Newspapers: One Reporter Takes on the Island of Alameda

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Bit of a busy couple weeks for those watching the newspaper business. The presses stopped at the Rocky and the P-I, Clay Shirky and Steven B. Johnson took turns penning big think pieces about the Future of News(papers), and -- good news -- the San Diego Union-Tribune looks like it will sell to a private equity firm. So what does life after newspapers look like, especially in major-metro-adjacent neighborhoods? I asked one reporter-turned-blogger about the local news site she started after leaving the Bay Area Newspaper Group, the chunk of Dean Singleton's MediaNews that includes the Oakland Tribune and a...

• March 18, 2009
• 11 comments

Spot.Us Has Success and Failure in the Same Week

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spot.Us has just had one of its most exciting weeks chalk full of successes and failures. The most interesting lesson is related to the Oscar Grant shooting in Oakland California. It is a tragic event that occurred where a Bart police officer shot and killed a young man. The entire event, caught on camera, has touched on deep seeded issues of class and racism in Oakland. Subsequent protests turned into civil unrest and the city of Oakland continues to deal with the emotional aftershocks. All this came just four days after we had successfully funded an investigation into the Oakland...

• January 28, 2009
• 3 comments

When is a Riot a Riot?

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now almost everyone knows that a group of demonstrators protesting against the killing of a young father by a transit officer splintered off and began a wave of destruction in downtown Oakland. Mainstream media outlets called it everything from a riot to a violent protest. Some bloggers referred to it as a civil unrest, rebellion or both a riot and civil unrest. Like is true with many issues, our perception of what happened is often shaped by our fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography. Perhaps because I live in Oakland and spent some years in Detroit,...

• January 12, 2009
• 10 comments

Unrest in Oakland: Who's On The Case?

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

My friend and fellow citizen-journalism thinker Amy Gahran once asked, "Was Zapruder a journalist?" Zapruder's home-movie camera captured the famous footage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, TX. If your answer to that question is yes, then there were an untold number of journalists on the Oakland BART train platform on New Year's Day, where they pointed increasingly ubiquitous pocket-size video cameras toward Oscar Grant and BART transit police officer Johannes Mehserle. The videos these onlookers took show the chilling final interaction between Grant and Mehserle, which left Grant dead, and Oakland in a...

• January 9, 2009
• 2 comments

Old Timers React to the 7th Street Video Game

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A big concern we had when we started our Remembering 7th Street video game project was how older people who lived and worked on Oakland's 7th Street in the 1940s and 1950s and frequented the jazz and blues clubs there would react to our virtual world rendition of it. Would it look like what they remembered? Or would it seem an alien world to them? Worse, would the game just trivialize a precious memory? On Oct. 8 we got a chance to test this when my journalism students and I went to the West Oakland Senior Center to interview people...

• October 13, 2007
• No comments

History and Heritage Through Video Games

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can new technologies be used to tell old stories about a local community? That's the question we're trying to answer with our "Remembering 7th Street" project that uses a video game to tell the story of Oakland, California's old jazz and blues club scene. During the 1940s and 1950s, Oakland's 7th Street was a vibrant community and a mecca for jazz and blues musicians from all over the country. But in the late 1950s and 1960s the area fell victim to a series of ill-fated redevelopment schemes, and barely a trace of the jazz and blues clubs remains today. We're...

• October 13, 2007
• No comments