Idea Lab

Hyper-Local a Hot Topic at All Russia Media Forum

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The SochiReporter team recently presented our project at the 14th All Russia Media Forum, held in Dagomys, Sochi, in late September. This annual forum for Russian print and online media is organized by the Russian Union of Journalists. Among the participants this year were more than 1,000 journalists from local and regional Russian newspapers, as well as European and U.S. editors. The gathering discussed many global issues, such as the decline of trust in the press, measures of responsibility in journalism, and the social weight of the printed word. There were discussion groups, creativity contests, meetings with politicians, celebrities, scholars,...

• October 30, 2009
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Ideal Printcasting Publishers

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the roughly 14 years that I've been in the online industry, I've learned that it's really easy to focus so much on what you're going to build that you can easily forget about why you're building it and who's going to use it. The key questions to constantly remind yourself of are: Who's going to use what you build? How will it help them solve problems in their daily lives? How will they find out about your product, and what will keep them coming back? This is especially easy to do with a project like Printcasting, which is simultaneously...

• August 15, 2008
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Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Before I went home this summer I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Twedt, a reporter at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who teaches one of the few journalism classes at Carnegie Mellon. I told him about the Idealab and the user driven system I've been writing about here. The first big question he asked deserves a well thought out response: "What if the users don't contribute?" Steve is right; a developer can't rely on user contribution unless he/she is sure users will contribute. Since one can never actually be sure about that, we are left with three simple tasks: hedge...

• May 24, 2008
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