Idea Lab

What Will 2009 Bring for Journalism?

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

...it is hard to imagine what America would look like without the small and shrinking number of people who engage in painstaking, firsthand research in order to separate the truth from the body of supposed facts, and who keep the rest of us honest. That's what David Samuels wrote about John Coster-Mullens, the author of a book-length work on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. You know what's surprising about this? The man who's being accorded this respect is not and never has been a journalist: he's a truck driver. 2009 looks to be a year...

• December 22, 2008
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Hiring for Change: How to Staff a New Media Project

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now, I had something all ready to post, but I loved Chris O'Brien's post on Mistakes I Made With The Next Newsroom Project that I'm going to do one of my own. I've been working on Placeblogger, a 2007 News Challenge Winner, with Tish Grier, over the past year and a half. Like a lot of technical projects, Placeblogger had a ski-jump-like curve of complexity and features; when you're making something new online, you often do a ton of work in the background before anyone sees anything at all. That's one of the things that makes our most recent release...

• December 11, 2008
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Student R&D Can Show the Way for Media

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Placeblogger, a Knight News Challenge winner from 2007, has launched a new design and announced that it is now indexing more than 3,000 "placeblogs" -- Web sites that deliver, as founder Lisa Williams puts it, "an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time ... about the lived experience of a place." The new design served to remind me -- yet again -- of how much has happened in online media in the past few years. About 4 1/2 years ago, I directed a team of Medill master's students who explored the potential of what they called "hyperlocal...

• November 17, 2008
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Placeblogger 2.0: Taking Local to the Next Level

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Placeblogger launched on January 1, 2007. Done on a shoestring budget using open source tools, Placeblogger let people find and see the large and growing number of placeblogs -- weblogs devoted to a particular geographic community. Placeblogger's origins can be traced back to a lunch in an Italian restaurant in San Francisco, in June of 2006. I was seated with Jay Rosen of Pressthink and Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media and director of the freshly-minted Center for Citizen Media. Jay asked me, "How many blogs like yours do you think there are?" And, just pulling a number out,...

• October 17, 2007
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