Idea Lab

Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

When he's not toasting escapism, our tireless editor Mark Glaser has been asking why reporting costs so much. I can't tell you much about investigative reporting (a $400,000 product of which started the conversation), except to say that six figure salaries do add up. But I can tell you that when it comes to local reporting, improved access to information could make a big dent in the expense of getting a story written. If you want to take a look at distribution of discretionary funds by the New York City Council, you have to start with a 400-page PDF full...

• September 9, 2009
• 1 comment

Twittering Away the Jobs of Journalists

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jon Steward did a funny bit last night, referencing how the major news networks were forced to rely on the "hearsay" of Twitter and Facebook postings to understand the events unfolding in Iran. But with the State Department requesting that the good folks at Twitter delay their scheduled site maintenance to keep Tweets flowinng from Iran, you know we have turned a corner. So in all seriousness, in the era of twittering and crowdsourced journalism, are journalists themselves still relevant? Obviously I am not the first person to ask this - or to piss people off by asking it again....

• June 17, 2009
• 7 comments

ReportingOn: Phrased in the Form of a Question

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I last wrote here to report on ReportingOn's progress, I talked about the work I was doing with my development and design team to define the terms of the RO pitch. A dozen or so whiteboards later, the Lion Burger team is actively putting together mockups and the beginnings of the database for what we're calling "Phase 2" of the project. And it's a huge rethinking of what a "back channel for your beat" looks like. While it's been easy to tag the initial version of ReportingOn as simply "Twitter for journalists," journalists already have a Twitter. It's called...

• March 26, 2009
• 8 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

Reporting for Games

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Much of the discussion about online games focuses on the technical issues, and that's not surprising since the technical aspects make a game a game or a simulation and not a conventional story. But as Gotham Gazette continues its efforts to create interactive features to involve and educate New Yorkers on key policy issues, we have discovered that the reporting piece can be far more complicated than we originally imagined. Games, at least those that entail budget numbers, carbon emissions or other figures, require a level of precision most stories simply do not. This is not to say that reporters...

• November 17, 2008
• No comments

Are We Ready for Citizen Journateerism?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Thanks to massive adoption of blogging and other do-it-yourself Web 2.0 tools like Twitter we have seen an explosion in citizen journalism in recent years. That goes without saying on a blog like this. But there is a related trend emerging which is perhaps not so apparent. Lets (rather clumsily) call it Citizen Journateerism. Citizen Journateerism = Citizen Journalism + Volunteerism. Basically that means ordinary folks leveraging social media tools to help people in need. I'm not talking about political or community-relevant reporting and opinioning, which is certainly a kind of volunteer community service, but about the re-purposing of citizen...

• September 28, 2008
• 4 comments

Five Ways to Gather and Report News with Twitter

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I read Chris O'Brien's IdeaLab post about the latest Twitterquake and the 10 (so far) comments with a great deal of interest. After all, ReportingOn borrows a great deal from Twitter, and I've been writing about the exponentially growing micro-blogging service for around a year now. I can't help but notice that a commenter or two seem to think that anyone actually takes is seriously when Twitter asks its base question of "What are you doing?" This is what makes it easy for those who haven't sipped from the Tweetstream to write it off as crap for tweens. Actually, that's...

• August 3, 2008
• 3 comments

The Blogosphere Needs to Mature -- But How?

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm leaving Chicago, physically tired but mentally invigorated. 1. I was inspired by the loft and good natured vibe of Knight's mission. 2. Took time to rethink my personal blogging motivation and experience. 3. Worked more on pushing spot.us into existence. (latest design work here). But in this post I want to take a moment to examine the evolution of technology reporting, particularly from large/mainstream technology blogs (think TechCrunch). I am in part inspired by a blog post from Robert Scoble on how tech blogs have failed. The reason I'm interested in this space isn't just because I'm a huge...

• July 29, 2008
• 1 comment

An Introduction to ReportingOn

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been writing about ReportingOn, my Knight News Challenge project, in fits and starts for 11 months now, but it's time to backtrack for a moment and answer some simple questions about what I'm up to here. Q: So, what's ReportingOn? A: ReportingOn.com will be a simple way for journalists to update their peers on the stories they're working on right now. Tag your 140-character-or-less updates with the beat you're on, and find peers reporting on similar beats to make connections, introduce yourself to potential mentors, or discover an unsung hero. Q: When you say "journalists," who are you talking...

• July 14, 2008
• 1 comment

Figuring Out Beat Reporting with a Social Network

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Below is a lightly revised version of a letter that went out last week to a number of professional news organizations--some big and famous, some small and unsung--asking if they want to participate in the figuring out. My goal is to find 12 willing beat reporters at 12 newsrooms. I have about 7 to 8 of the 12 signed up now. Interested in participating? Email me or leave a comment This is a simple project testing a single idea: Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a "live" social network connected to the beat,...

• November 1, 2007
• No comments

Ready? Here's My Formula for Online News Success

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

• October 17, 2007
• 9 comments