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MediaShift Idea Lab 
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Post Frequency: 2.2/day Last Entry: November 20, 2009 at 14:20:47 Recent Entries: 609
By Knight News Challenge winners
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SochiReporter Launches with Time Machine, Wiki Guidebook
Posted on November 20, 2009I'm proud to say that SochiReporter, my Knight-funded project, launched on October 27. This was a very important day for me, and for our team. In the days before the launch, I didn't sleep a wink. But this is natural. The less you sleep, the less you want...
Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Assistance Network for Online Journalists
Posted on November 19, 2009I am delighted to announce the public launch of the Berkman Center's Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help...
Citizen Media Law Project Gives Free Legal Help to Online Publishers
Posted on November 19, 2009I am delighted to announce the public launch of the Berkman Center's Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help...
4th Programmer-Journalist Scholarship Winner Learns to 'Think Like a Journalist'
Posted on November 18, 2009Manya Gupta, a software engineer for telecommunications companies in her native India, is the fourth winner of a Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarship. She's now in her second quarter studying journalism at the Medill School at Northwestern University...
Why it Matters that Pierre Omidyar is Launching a News Startup
Posted on November 18, 2009Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is launching a for-profit news startup in Hawaii, where he and his family live. This is important news, and not just because he's involved. A few months ago Pierre and Randy Ching founded Peer News. Their first project was a Twitter-related experiment called Ginx, which didn't get critical mass and is being closed...
Gearing up Citizen Journalism in Grahamstown, South Africa for the 2010 World Cup
Posted on November 16, 2009Low literacy environments, and multi-lingual areas, like Grahamstown, South Africa, face particular challenges when it comes to encouraging citizen journalism. More than 80 percent of the population speaks English as a second language. While most people are able to speak and understand English, writing is not always a comfortable experience (and some are unable to read or write)...
Gearing up Citizen Journalism in Grahamstown, South Africa
Posted on November 16, 2009Low literacy environments, and multi-lingual areas, like Grahamstown, South Africa, face particular challenges when it comes to encouraging citizen journalism. More than 80 percent of the population speaks English as a second language. While most people are able to speak and understand English, writing is not always a comfortable experience (and some are unable to read or write)...
Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years
Posted on November 14, 2009Sergii Danylenko and Anna Prymakova asked me to speak about "changes in media over the past five years" at MediaCamp Kyiv last week. It's a pretty standard topic of discussion for me, but I felt that it would be more interesting and more useful to look at changes in media over the past 550 years...
Reporting with Mobile Phones: The Experience of Voices of Africa
Posted on November 13, 2009(This story was written by Anne-Ryan Heatwole of MobileActive.org.) Mobile phones are the tool of choice for a new group of young reporters in Africa. Voices of Africa Media Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit, trains young journalists in Africa to create news videos for the web using mobiles...
TED India -- the experience of a technology non-profit
Posted on November 12, 2009I just returned from TED India, where I was one of the 100 TED Fellows they had invited to attend, and my head is spinning with all the new ideas and my pockets heavy with all the business cards. This was undoubtedly the best networking event I've been to, and the people on stage were only marginally more spectacular than the people you turned to for chit-chat on the police escorted-buses from Bangalore to Mysore, where the conference was being held at the Infosys campus...
Video Volunteers Talks Technology and Non-Profits at TED India
Posted on November 12, 2009I just returned from TED India, where I was one of the 100 TED Fellows invited to attend the event. My head is spinning with all the new ideas and my pockets are heavy with business cards. This was undoubtedly the best networking event I've been to...
How Do We Categorize All Journalistic Errors?
Posted on November 11, 2009How many different kinds of errors is it possible for journalists to make? And how would you classify them or organize them into useful categories? These questions are not my attempt to concoct a tactful paraphrase for "How many different ways is it possible to screw journalism up?" Rather, they represent one of the interesting issues we face as we move work on MediaBugs from the project-organizing phase to the "let's build something" stage...
Staffing Up DocumentCloud
Posted on November 11, 2009A few months ago (three, to be precise), I quietly announced that I'd be leaving Gotham Gazette for parts unknown. I wasn't making that up about "parts unknown," but my announcement did get a few conversations started. The most interesting one turned out to be with Eric, Aron and Scott, who persuaded me to join DocumentCloud as their program director...
How the Spot.Us Garbage Patch Story Got to the NY Times
Posted on November 10, 2009Today in the New York Times science section you'll find a piece written by Lindsey Hoshaw about the Pacific garbage patch and an accompanying photo slide show. This piece would not have been possible if Spot.Us and a community of over 100 people hadn't come together to fund her trip...
Using Mobile Phones to Map the Slums of Brazil
Posted on November 09, 2009In the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, unnamed streets meander through the hillsides. There are hospitals, coffee shops and restaurants, none of which appear on a map. Mail carriers struggle to deliver letters to homes without addresses...
I Wouldn't Want to Belong to Any Twitter List That Would Have Me as a Member
Posted on November 06, 2009Networks are funny. As soon as they get big enough to have a lot of value, it gets harder to separate the signal from the noise. That's obvious enough -- just ask anyone using AT&T in an area densely populated with bandwidth-hogging iPhone users like me...
Kicking Off the Grant Process With Monitoring and Evaluation
Posted on November 05, 2009We at the Jefferson Institute began our experience as a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner with one of the more exciting and misunderstood elements of the grant cycle: monitoring and evaluation (M&E). When done properly, M&E begins with the grantee setting out clearly the objectives of the grant, the activities necessary to achieve the objectives, and the resources applied to make these activities happen...
The New Era of Media Development, Part III
Posted on October 31, 2009Spend your money wisely: this is the mandate given to program officers of philanthropic, government, and multilateral donor organizations. Each year they are given a certain budget, and they are expected to use that money as effectively as possible to further the objectives of their program...
Hyper-Local a Hot Topic at All Russia Media Forum
Posted on October 30, 2009The 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...
DocumentCloud Going Open Source Every Step of the Way
Posted on October 29, 2009What does it mean to work on a project where open-source principles are written into the founding contract? A little over a month after receiving a 2009 Knight News Challenge grant, DocumentCloud released its first open-source component. The system, called CloudCrowd, performs the distributed computing that helps process the vast quantities of documents that will eventually be stored in DocumentCloud...
How to Win a Knight News Challenge Grant
Posted on October 28, 2009October 12 was a day of high emotion; it was finally time to thrive under pressure. I got home from work, rushed to my friend's house, and cracked open my laptop. The goal was to brainstorm like crazy, write up some solid project descriptions, and submit as many Knight News Challenge grant applications as possible over the three days I had left...
The New Era of Media Development, Part II
Posted on October 25, 2009It is a telling sign that Wikipedia has no entry on media development. Rather, the search results suggest that perhaps you are looking for "ICT for development". Indeed, what is the future of media development when we're still unsure about the future of media in general? And, for that matter, where should funders invest their money to ensure that the same social benefits associated with traditional media (a sense of community, good governance, an informed citizenry) remain while journalism increasingly moves beyond broadcast, and beyond financial sustainability...
Printcasting Bridges the Digital Divide for Hyperlocal Coverage
Posted on October 23, 2009We've had a busy few months with Printcasting, launching some significant new features and engaging in a number of partnership discussions. I'll get into the features and partners later in this post, but what I'm most excited about right now is that people are using the service to bring previously all-digital content into the physical communities that they serve...
hNews Microformat for News Adopted by AOL and TownNews
Posted on October 22, 2009We are on the cusp of something exciting. Thousands of news articles marked up with with hNews, a microformat for news content funded by the Knight Foundation, will soon start populating the Internet. Last week, hNews became an official draft microformat...
Viva CityCircles! Light Rail Publication for Phoenix in Alpha
Posted on October 21, 2009Recap of our project: CityCircles is a multi-platform portal (using web and mobile) which delivers stop by stop information for Phoenix's light rail system. Information includes businesses and services, news, events, and promotions around each stop. We encourage collaboration and will feature a social networking aspect to the site...
Machine-Generated News a Threat to Journalists? I Think Not
Posted on October 19, 2009Software that writes baseball game stories from box scores and play-by-play information now has a name: StatsMonkey. And it's making some journalists nervous -- needlessly. The software, the first version of which was developed this spring by a team of computer science and journalism students at Northwestern University, has evolved significantly since then...
Meet Danielle Belton, the Woman Behind the Black Snob
Posted on October 17, 2009From pop culture and politics to the personal, Danielle Belton's The Black Snob covers a lot of ground. During a recent week, Belton weighed in on everything from Mormons comparing themselves to Southern blacks during the civil rights movement, to the Michelle Obama Action figures...
Virtual Street Corners Connects Neighborhoods and People Using Technology and News
Posted on October 16, 2009Virtual Street Corners, our Knight-funded project, is scheduled to be installed in Boston between May 15 and June 15 of next year. We have formed an exciting collaboration with the Boston Cyberarts festival, which will be our fiscal sponsor. I thought I would use my first post on Idea Lab to describe the project and fill everyone in on the work and thinking that has already gone into the piece...
Virtual Street Corners Connects Neighborhoods and People in Boston
Posted on October 16, 2009Virtual Street Corners, our Knight-funded project, is scheduled to be installed in Boston between May 15 and June 15 of next year. We have formed an exciting collaboration with the Boston Cyberarts festival, which will be our fiscal sponsor. I thought I would use my first post on Idea Lab to describe the project and fill everyone in on the work and thinking that has already gone into the piece...
Mobile Phones Give Africans a Voice, Make Governments Nervous
Posted on October 13, 2009User-generated comments, and text messages in particular, are causing umbrage in Namibian government circles. Their unhappiness highlights the historic shift of media away from unidirectional, univocal information. This case underlines the politics entailed when the media becomes a platform for broader communication, which is exactly what's happening with mobile phones in some African countries...
Good, Fast and Cheap: Startups Can Only Pick Two of These
Posted on October 12, 2009Whenever people ask me about the process of building a website, here's how I explain their choices: "There is good, fast and cheap -- you get to pick two." Spot.Us has quietly started development again. I'll be putting up sketches of a much needed re-design on the Spot...
Ten Points on Funding Citizen Media
Posted on October 11, 2009Last week the Salzburg Global Seminar organized two back-to-back meetings which brought together passionate enthusiasts in the field of new media for three days, and then traditional funders of media development for another three days. Josh Goldstein of UNICEF Innovation and Erik Hersman of Ushahidi each blogged about the gathering...
New Partnerships and Game Possibilities
Posted on October 09, 2009In September, we were approached by a major national magazine to help produce content for a new monthly green column in their print magazine, which has a subscriber-ship of 900,000 and a readership of over 6 MILLION. As they are entertainment-news oriented, but have been trying to implement a green column, their editorial team had trouble creating environmental content that was relevant for their target audience...
Fashion Week 2009!
Posted on October 09, 2009Hi everyone, So just to stray for a moment from the topic of the Game, I wanted to forward on an update from our fabulous fashion editor, Sarah Jacobson, on Fashion Week 2009: "Fashion week was drama filled but oh so fabulous. in the months leading up to september, i spent time contacting designers and PR folk and asking for invites to the shows...
Best Week Ever!
Posted on October 09, 2009Recently, the Beanstockd team experienced (and, of course, celebrated!) our Best Week Ever! In August, we finally surpassed the 100,000 weekly hit mark (specifically 110,566 visits) and on Friday, August 14th we threw a long overdue regional Beanstockd get-together, with staffer from NYC, MA, PA, and DC coming in to join the festivities...
Beanstockd Class Field Trip to NC
Posted on October 09, 2009It's the start of the fall semester at UNC and Beanstockd has just taken a trip down to visit the class, present on Beanstockd, and answer all their questions. Prior to our arrival, the 20 students in the class had already done their preliminary research on us...
Non-Profit News Becomes the Flavor of the Month
Posted on October 09, 2009Something that's been lurking just below the surface of the San Francisco Bay Area news scene for several months finally bubbled up to the top last month. Financier Warren Hellman announced the creation of a new, non-profit news organization. This news organization will partner with KQED, the the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and most likely the New York Times...
The New Era of Media Development, Part 1
Posted on October 07, 2009Media development as a field within international development has existed for at least 30 years. Broadly speaking, media development organizations provide financial support, training, and resources to groups in developing countries that want build and sustain media organizations...
MediaBugs Aims to Fix Errors, Rebuild Public Trust in Media
Posted on October 02, 2009As a student journalist working for my high school and college newspapers, I learned basic reporting from a strict rulebook. I can still recall my truculent resentment at one particular rule: why did we have to include the middle initial whenever we mentioned somebody's name? What a pain to have to ask for it each time! What an invitation to introduce a trivial error! On one level, of course, the middle-initial rule was, even then, a pretentious holdover from a bygone era of compulsivity, and today those lonesome capital letters are less and less commonly seen in print and on the web...
Introducing Switch, A News Game About New York City's Energy Gap
Posted on September 30, 2009Our latest (and last, for now) news game, Switch, is live. It is no Energyville but we think it is pretty awesome. Not only is it live, the source code and installation instructions are already available. With gadgets guzzling evermore energy, New York City faces a looming energy gap...
What Both Sides Are Missing in the Pay Wall Debate
Posted on September 25, 2009Arguments about paywalls around news content are becoming increasingly dogmatic and ideological. As a result, lots of sensible ideas about how to make money from new models of journalism are being obscured. Not least, how to add value to existing content so it becomes more identifiable, more searchable, and helps lead people "back home" (that's where the Hansel and Gretel theory comes in)...
Citizen Journalism newroom and NIKA CMS launched in Grahamstown
Posted on September 24, 2009During the massive Highway Africa conference, two Knight Foundation funded projects, the Iindaba Ziyafika ('the news is coming') Citizen Journalism newsroom, and the NIKA Content Management System were launched. The CJ newsroom has 10 computers, the ability to download photos and content from any cellphone (both wireless and through the most amazing collection of cables!) allowing anyone to walk in, write a story, download a photo and get it published on the Grocott's website, or in the twice weekly print edition of Grocott's Mail...
New Citizen Journalism Newsroom Launched in South Africa
Posted on September 24, 2009During the massive Highway Africa conference, two Knight Foundation funded projects, the Iindaba Ziyafika ('the news is coming') Citizen Journalism newsroom and the Nika content management system, were launched. The Iindaba Ziyafika newsroom has 10 computers and the ability to download photos and content from any cellphone (both wirelessly and through the most amazing collection of cables!)...
Spot.Us Expands to L.A. with USC Annenberg
Posted on September 22, 2009First: The big news. Spot.Us is expanding to Los Angeles and we are doing so with USC's Annenberg School of Journalism. Needless to say, we are very excited about the opportunities and possibilities. The main Spot.Us homepage will aggregate pitches from both the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles regions...
Journalism teachers get mobil-ised
Posted on September 21, 2009Online computers, Africans do not have. Cellphones are a different story. So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places - even in media dense environments...
AP News Registry aims at most flagrant infringers
Posted on September 21, 2009I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry. The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components: ? All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc...
Overcoming Drupal Challenges as SochiReporter Nears Launch
Posted on September 18, 2009SochiReporter is getting ready to launch on the web and for mobile users. We spent the last three weeks fixing linguistic, technical and design bugs, all with the goal of maximizing ease of use. So far we have drawn a fabulous group of people from both local and virtual communities: garage tech geeks and web schizophrenics, coffee-shop amateurs, and folks who want to use the site and offer feedback...
New Tools For Journalists From TechCrunch 50
Posted on September 17, 2009Earlier this week, I spent two days at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. The conference organizers pick 50 web companies who officially launch at the conference. The overall group was pretty mixed, but a few start-ups offer interesting services or ideas that might be of interest to folks thinking about the future of news and information...
Digital Space - Environmentalism
Posted on September 15, 2009Looks like digital is the official media platform for all things hip and green. Besides its obvious environmental benefits - digital provides an open space for all breeds of environmentalism to share their message. Below you'll find Beanstockd's compilation and summary of our favorite new green sites - taking a new approach to using digital as a mode to drive awareness and action...
For News Organizations, Transparency is the New Objectivity
Posted on September 15, 2009Back in the spring, I made an analogy about journalism being a game of chess. On the chess board of journalism, content is King (the most important piece) but collaboration is Queen (the most powerful piece). To extend the analogy further: transparency is the board itself...
Mobile Projects Shouldn't Overlook 'Dumbphones'
Posted on September 14, 2009This week, CityCircles (formerly Daily Phoenix) attended a lunch event at Arizona State University that allowed us to have one-on-one conversations with college seniors who were interested in our project. (The event is summarized here.) This was a crucial event...
Look Beyond Data When Considering New Models for News
Posted on September 10, 2009My post last month -- Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content -- generated some thoughtful discussion and comments. But there was one thread that I want to highlight in order to elaborate on an important concept for news innovators. Before I dive into the details of the conversation, let me summarize my overall point...
Report from Gov 2.0: A Nerd, Suit, Spook, and Database Smoothie
Posted on September 10, 2009I had not planned on attending O'Reilly's Gov2.0 conference, which is an exposition and dialog about new forms of government and information technology. But at last week's Foo Camp (another O'Reilly event) I met a number of people in the field, and I became pretty excited with what I heard...
Community Media's Path Out of Obscurity
Posted on September 09, 2009Times of great change represent an opportunity to shift power, and the power shift many of us are working towards here is the democratization of the media. We seek to establish truly effective alternatives to the commercial media system, alternatives that are not relegated to obscurity...
Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper
Posted on September 09, 2009When 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...
The Shocking Truth About Journalism, Activism, and the Healthcare Reform Debate
Posted on September 04, 2009A few weeks ago, I spotted a link to something called deathpanels.org getting passed around Twitter, and quickly traced its origin to Matt Thompson, Knight Foundation interim online community manager and general champion of contextual journalism. Remembering a conversation that I had with Matt and others at a recent conference, I realized the idea had been brewing for some time...
How Talking into a Mobile Phone Can Help Change Lives
Posted on September 03, 2009The pre-cursors to mobile phones were two-way radios, also called Walkie-Talkies, that transmitted voice signals. The first generation of mobile phone networks were similar in that they also only supported voice communications. Second generation networks, and a happy accident, gave us SMS, and third generation networks provide even more advanced mobile data services...
"Programmer-Journalist" Scholarships Yield Finalists for Online Journalism Awards
Posted on September 02, 2009Our 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...
The Power of Proximity -- the possibilities of hyperlocal journalism in South Africa
Posted on September 01, 2009The Power of Proximity Newspapers everywhere are being forced to rethink their role as mere providers of the 'news of the day'. There is (and always has been) an appetite for immediate information and 'news you can use' that is not just 'hyper-local' but also more detailed and granular, to use an increasingly popular word for the kind of gritty features implied...
Future of News & Civic Media: The Motion Picture
Posted on August 31, 2009Last June we held our Future of News & Future Civic Media conference, here at MIT, with many recipients of the Knight News Challenge meeting, speaking, and demoing their work. We chose to use the "barcamp" un-conference technique for most of the sessions, where all participants to the conference were able to host a session...
How Citizen Journalists Can Learn from Work of 'Citizen Scientists'
Posted on August 27, 2009Last week I visited Carnegie Mellon University's website for the first time as an alumnus. The front page, often dedicated to highlighting faculty work, had a picture of an iPhone screen displaying brightly colored data visualizations. I didn't have to look past the first two words of the title -- "Citizen Scientists" -- before I knew that it would be worth my time to keep reading...
Blogging Positively Guide Encourages Open Conversations About HIV/AIDS
Posted on August 25, 2009Rising Voices is pleased to announce the release of "Blogging Positively," a collection of case studies, interviews, and best practices about citizen media related to HIV/AIDS. You will be introduced to some of the leaders and veterans of the HIV-positive blogging community, and also to citizen media projects which aim to spread more awareness about the pandemic...
Adrian Holovaty Talks about EveryBlock Sale to MSNBC.com
Posted on August 25, 2009The big news last week was that Knight-funded startup EveryBlock was bought by MSNBC.com for an undisclosed sum. EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty is one of the Idea Lab bloggers, and has been a pioneering programmer/journalist at the Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan...
Video Volunteers Creates a New Kind of Sustainability Using Community Video
Posted on August 21, 2009"You mean to say that sending the email is free?! I don't have to pay for it?" Laxmi was amazed that there is no equivalent on the Internet to paying for a postage stamp to send a letter. The first twenty minutes of this workshop on digi-activism being held in Goa, India were over her head, but when she saw her own language, Telugu, appear on the Google...
HuffPost Social News Helps Close the 'Awareness Gap'
Posted on August 21, 2009Back in December, as a team of Medill students (including the first two Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalists") was developing the News Mixer project, I wrote an IdeaLab post called "The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here." It captured my thoughts based on my experience of working with the students on the News Mixer project, which offered new approaches to news commenting driven by the capabilities of the Facebook Connect service...
Students Get Blogging Seminar, Digital Cameras for SochiReporter
Posted on August 20, 2009I've just returned from helping deliver the first seminar about blogging and citizen journalism ever held in Sochi, Russia. Just weeks away from launching my Knight News Challenge project, SochiReporter.ru, I organized a seminar for third, fourth and fifth year students from the five leading Sochi-based universities...
When FM Radio Meets the Mobile Phone in Pakistan
Posted on August 19, 2009In the United States, high-end smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry don't have built-in radios. But in Pakistan, even the cheapest cell phones, which don't have cameras or other features, come with the ability to listen to FM radio. Every day, and especially during cricket matches, people walk the streets with their phones pressed to their ears, tuned into their local stations, according to Huma Yusuf, a journalist based in Pakistan...
EveryBlock, MSNBC.com and the General Public License
Posted on August 18, 2009By now everyone has heard the news: EveryBlock is now part of MSNBC.com. And anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight's open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license -- it is one of the terms of funding...
Coming soon: a chance to transform journalism education.
Posted on August 15, 2009There's no intrinsic reason why organised journalism education should lead, rather than merely reflect - as it does, what's happening in the world of communications. Yet this passive "mirror" status cries out transformation. Oc course, not everyone sees j-schools as reflective entities...
Liberian Bloggers Show Everyday Life in Monrovia
Posted on August 14, 2009Liberia was afforded a rare glimpse of international media attention this week when United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the capital Monrovia and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Photo of Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson and Hillary Clinton by Glenna Gordon Glenna Gordon, a Monrovia-based American journalist who was involved in a training workshop for Liberian bloggers, notes in an article for Time Magazine that the United States government has given Liberia over $2 billion since 2003, "the highest number of aid dollars spent per capita anywhere in the world...
Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content
Posted on August 13, 2009During an otherwise mundane story about Microsoft's recent decision to offer a free, web-based version of its Office suite of products, I was struck by this sentence in an Associated Press story: With Office 2010, Microsoft must decide how much software it can give away online without undermining its lucrative desktop software business...
Making Progress Toward Launch of Phoenix Light Rail Pub
Posted on August 11, 2009Daily Phoenix is a website and mobile app for Phoenix metro residents who use or live around the light rail. We are providing news and information per stop. Information includes business and services, events, promotions, gossip, networking opportunities, etc...
Source Code for Balance
Posted on August 10, 2009Okay, so you haven't been waiting for this with baited breath the way everyone was waiting for the EveryBlock code. Nonetheless, after a few months of wrangling on and off with Git Hub I finally sat down and worked through a bunch of nagging authentication issues and managed to post the code for Balance! our game about balancing city budgets...
Using GRINS to Improve Technology and Processes at Community Radio Stations
Posted on August 07, 2009Radio Bundelkhand, one of the early community radio stations in India, started live transmission in October 2008. We visited the station in February 2009 as a part of Community Radio India Forum annual body meeting. During this visit we initiated talks of piloting the radio automation system being developed by us...
GRINS piloted at Radio Bundelkhand
Posted on August 07, 2009Gram Vaani successfully launched its first pilot a few days back with Radio Bundelkhand! Radio Bundelkhand is a community radio station operating in the small town of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh (India), and was the first community driven CR station to start broadcasting after the new policy...
The Leadership Vacuum in Journalism
Posted on August 05, 2009Ideas are cheap; execution is everything. There are several factors that come into play to make the difference between a successful and a failed execution. One of those factors is leadership. There are different kinds of leaders. Some lead from the front...
IOC to Include Citizen Contributions with Virtual Olympic Congress
Posted on August 04, 2009The Olympics is a special brand that boasts a bottomless marketing potential. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) admits that it has to be careful in positioning the Games' name online. Even so, it's clear that, because of its social nature and enormous global outreach, the Olympics have terrific potential to develop on the web...
How Fear, Brand Addiction and Paranoia Block Innovation
Posted on August 03, 2009I've been thinking a lot lately about organizational behavior and innovation, and how the former can hinder the latter. It comes to mind not because I like to dwell on the negative, but rather out of hope that understanding the root cause of problems can help us all avoid the mistakes of the past...
Help Us Rename the Daily Phoenix Light-Rail Publication
Posted on July 31, 2009It's been 42 days and counting since the Knight Foundation announced that Daily Phoenix, our hybrid platform to deliver news and information to urban audiences by light-rail stop, won startup funding. Back here in the scorching confines of Phoenix, the interest was immediate...
Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media
Posted on July 29, 2009A fierce and fascinating debate has broken out over the cover photo on Time magazine's April 27 print edition. Time paid a pittance for the picture -- at least a pittance next to what big magazines normally pay for cover art -- and that's made a lot of professional photographers furious...
Saving (or Destroying) Public Radio on a Mobile Phone
Posted on July 27, 2009Is the iPhone app Public Radio Player the good guy or the bad? The critics aren't so sure. Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on ReadWriteWeb, "How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio" took the super-hero stance, but Rafat Ali opted for the villain with "Public Radio Dangerously Close To Making Public Radio Obsolete" on PaidContent...
No Newspaper Bailouts without Civic Representation
Posted on July 23, 2009Government money to bail out newspapers is a rather "un-American" suggestion. It has been put forward by various commentators who feel that emergency circumstances call for drastic measures. After all, it's not just jobs at stake, but the survival of a key pillar of democracy...
The People Formerly Known as the Audience Need a New Name
Posted on July 21, 2009I'm not one for semantic arguments. There's little-to-no practical value in deciding the names of things. ("User-generated content," anyone?) But if you spend your days and side projects talking to journalists about interacting with their readers, you tend to look for the right words to get your message across...
Public Edition of The Beanstockd Game
Posted on July 18, 2009With the help of some new summer meat (haha... MBA interns... gotta love them) we have begun storyboarding the public edition of The Beanstockd Game. Our beta edition has received amazing reviews in our beta tests, but for our big launch we are taking the core functionalities of the game and brainstorming new ways to GAMEify the process...
Beanstockd UNC Case Study
Posted on July 18, 2009The University of North Carolina's marketing strategy course has elected to use The Beanstockd Game as the case study for their fall 2009 course! The Beanstockd Team will be traveling down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to meet the students, present all the ins and outs of Beanstockd, and answer any questions they have during the course of the semester...
Focus!
Posted on July 18, 2009The entire Beanstockd Team has been running on full throttled with producing the public edition of the Game, rolling out new/better/frequent video content, preparations for serving as the University of North Carolina's marketing course's fall 2009 case study, implementing advertising and other business model/administrative initiatives, and increasing our traffic across the board (which has been off the charts lately!!)...
Beanstockd Class Field Trip to LA
Posted on July 18, 2009First, lots going on at Beanstockd in past weeks. This Spring, we signed our new video host Chet Cannon, from MTV's Real World Brooklyn! Chet and several members of The Beanstockd Team (minus myself and Sandra, sadly...) trekked out to Los Angeles for 2 major events...
News Ecosystem Demands Collaboration, Not Us vs. Them Mentality
Posted on July 16, 2009One of the great tragedies that I see in the current debate about the future of journalism is the way the discussion continues to be framed around a series of binary choices. Newspapers or blogs. Print or online. Journalists or algorithms. In each case, there seems to be a simple-minded belief that the future will inevitably be one or the other...
Inzwa: Listen up!
Posted on July 15, 2009This week, Kubatana launched Inzwa, Zimbabwe's experiment with Freedom Fone, providing audio information via mobile phones. We'll be updating our information every Tuesday, and we are interested in any feedback to help us improve the service. How does it work? Tune into Inzwa by phoning +263 913 444 321-8 and ...
Printcasting Launches Paid Ads, Revenue Sharing
Posted on July 15, 2009We just reached another big milestone on Printcasting with a feature that we think will redefine how publishers perceive and use the service. Starting now, all ads placed with the Printcasting self-serve advertising tool cost $10, an amount that publishers can mark up per publication...
Ideas for Professional Journalists to Prove Their Value
Posted on July 15, 2009If you were a professional journalist and I asked you, "what does mainstream media provide that the crowd can't?" I have some guesses about what I might hear in your answer: It's more credible, more comprehensive, fact-checked, less biased, professionally composed, more knowledgeable, presented in the larger context, and more reliable, to name a few...
Crowdsourcing Keeps Coming
Posted on July 15, 2009At Gotham Gazette, we're gathering our bearings and preparing work on a pretty great crowdsourcing project (though this business of talking something up before its even in beta testing does make the developer in me nervous) and I'm increasingly interested in really understanding what makes crowdsourcing work...
Getting South Africans to 'bowl together' (or how community papers can help shape a sense of what the 'common interest' is)
Posted on July 14, 2009Constructing 'scenarios' - stories about the future - are a big deal in South Africa. By creating a few plausible 'alternative futures', carefully worked out and well researched, citizens and planners can use these narratives to 'see' more vividly what could happen, and can thus plan to achieve the best possible outcome...
Lessons Learned in Rollout of ReportingOn 2.0
Posted on July 14, 2009Those of you who have been keeping score surely noticed that I've saddled the iteration of ReportingOn that launched late on July 1 with a "2.0" label when I talk about it. Many of you might remember what the backchannel for beat reporters looked like before the clock struck "late" on July 1: That's what it looked like, and it did some interesting things, but not as much as I would have liked...
Nika System Brings Reader SMS Messages into Newspaper's Workflow
Posted on July 14, 2009Recent research support the idea that South Africans, 15 years after the heroic levels of participation that led to overthrow of apartheid, are becoming less engaged: Membership of religious groups, trade unions, political parties, and even of sporting associations are all decreasing, sometimes sharply, in the 21st century...
Getting the Daily Phoenix Off the Ground
Posted on July 13, 2009The conference in Boston was a significant milestone for us. It allowed us to finally confirm funding, which provided us with legitimacy. Not to mention opened the door for some publicity. After the conference we received a few phone calls about interviews for local news sources such as Good Morning Arizona...
Bump: Getting on the Ballot in NYC
Posted on July 08, 2009Gotham Gazette released our fourth game in our Knight-funded game series this week. Bump, which revisits the maze theme from our Budget Maze sends players through a whole new labyrinth: ballot access. If you can't imagine how ballot access is even remotely interesting, I suggest playing the game! Seriously: we knew we wanted to do two things: to build a game that would stay relevant through the New York City campaign season and to find a topic that would fit nicely into the existing code base for one of our earlier games...
Discussing Spot.Us Business Model with Mother Jones' Steve Katz
Posted on July 08, 2009I met Steve Katz of Mother Jones in 2007 at a Personal Democracy Forum conference and he has been a fantastic resource for brain-picking. Recently Katz and I have been having an interesting conversation about the funding model for Spot.Us, the future of non-profit journalism, and other related topics via our blogs...
How Law Enforcement Overreached in Lori Drew Case
Posted on July 07, 2009When public officials start talking about "protecting the children," watch out. Those are often code words for whacking civil liberties -- and in the Internet age, they go directly to core liberties such as free speech. A breaking-news example is the ugly case of Lori Drew, in which a federal judge is in the process of rescuing us from a prosecutor whose legal theories would have created criminals of just about everyone who ever signed up for just about anything online...
ReportingOn 2.0 Launches Next Generation of Backchannel for Your Beat
Posted on July 02, 2009ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions. And answers. It's still the backchannel for your beat, but it's an absolute re-imagining of the network. For those of you who haven't been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it's a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source...
Knight Rewards On-the-Spot Competitors at MIT Meetup
Posted on July 01, 2009Last Thursday, I returned to Moscow from the Future of News and Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass. Organized by the MIT Center of Future Civic Media and the Knight Foundation, this is the annual meeting where all the Knight News Challenge Winners discuss the future of civic media and talk about the digital tools to build local communities...
EveryBlock Source Code Released
Posted on July 01, 2009Today's a big day for us at EveryBlock. We're making our source code available. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "micro-local" news, and to release the source code...
Another Budget Game
Posted on June 29, 2009I like to think that Gotham Gazette's Balance! inspired the folks over at the Washington Post to create an even better budget game of their own but I am open to the possibility that they came up with it all on their own. Take a look at both if you haven't already...
Reflections on a Facebook Birthday
Posted on June 29, 2009This year for my birthday I got three calls. Two people sent cards. And I don't think I ever received so much attention in my life. I have to say, it was fabulous turning 51 years old on Facebook. The well wishes started pouring in on the night before my birthday and they kept coming the day after, too...
Printcasting Goes National, Partners With MediaNews Group
Posted on June 28, 2009I'm very excited to announce that Printcasting.com, my 2008 Knight News Challenge project that democratizes print magazine publishing, is expanding to more U.S. cities. And I'm equally excited about the first partner: Denver-based MediaNews Group. Here's a link to the full press release about our arrangement with MediaNews...
VLink Offers Robust, Low-Cost Internet Service for Rural Areas
Posted on June 26, 2009Internet penetration in rural areas, especially in developing countries such as India, is generally poor. Telecom companies do not find it economically viable to deploy wired broadband such as DSL; satellite connectivity is expensive and often slow; dial-up (if available) is always flaky; and cellular data services such as GPRS or EDGE are quite costly to use...
Reports of Journalism's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
Posted on June 25, 2009Spare a thought for journalists these days, the folk feeling particularly unappreciated as they face a barrage of public scorn on the one hand and panic-stricken managements pushing for cuts in salaries, rises in productivity, and even retrenchments, on the other...
'Alive in Tehran' Lets Iranian Citizens Report Through Voicemail
Posted on June 24, 2009I've been following Brian Conley's work at Alive in Baghdad since October 2007, when I met him at the Networked Journalism summit at CUNY. Conley -- somewhat more commonly known as Baghdad Brian -- is one of the few supporters of citizen journalism with several trips to wartime Iraq under his belt...
An Update on ReportingOn 2.0 Development
Posted on June 19, 2009Here's an eight-minute tour of ReportingOn 2.0, as it stood on our development server on Tuesday June 17, 2009. I'm extremely psyched to report that we're on track for a July 1 launch of the second phase of this Knight News Challenge funded project...
What Are The New Obligations Of Readers?
Posted on June 18, 2009A few weeks ago, I was reading an interesting story about the state of the Columbia Journalism School that appeared on the New York magazine Web site. In short, the story tried to examine concerns about how well Columbia was making the transition to the digital journalism era...
Twittering Away the Jobs of Journalists
Posted on June 17, 2009Jon 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...
Spot.Us Maps Out Three-Month Plan for Growth
Posted on June 17, 2009If you want to cut to the chase - the most important link is this simple Google Form where we are collecting feedback on our progress. Spot.Us recently had its second community advisory board meeting at Tech Liminal. We experimented with making the meeting more open by inviting new interns, volunteers and people in the community, so that we could have an open discussion about setting goals...
Think Community? Think Maps! (Going to MIT. Part One)
Posted on June 17, 2009I'm looking into the Delta airplane illuminator at the white snow valley with scattered grayish mountain peaks of Greenland, which just recently became independent of Denmark, and comparing the view with the satellite map right behind me on the horizontal Kindle-size screen...
Knocking Down Barriers for Newspapers to Try New Technologies
Posted on June 16, 2009During my time at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I had a chance to learn about some of the harsh realities that come with taking on yet another technology. The general idea was that even if it's "free," there is unfortunate baggage that comes with adding tools to the newsroom -- baggage like increased overhead, learning curves, and brand new risks that have to be mitigated...
How My 6-Year-Old Became a Citizen Journalist
Posted on June 15, 2009I've been involved in the social media revolution for years now, having started "citizen media" brands like Bakotopia that depend completely on social networking and user-contributed content, and various community tools in the late 1990s at AOL that opened media participation up to the average Joe...
Stuck in a Maze
Posted on June 12, 2009Last week, we were honored with an Honorable Mention in the first Knight News Game Award competition, for our (pretty excellent) budget maze. The honor was made sweeter with the knowledge that our little maze -- we estimate the budget at $65,000 -- was up against a massively multi-player multi-issue networked news game project with a budget just over tenfold ours...
First Release of the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System is now here!
Posted on June 11, 2009After working countless weekends and days and nights, we are very happy to announce that Gram Vaani's platform for community radio stations is now available for download. We call it GRINS, standing for the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System. GRINS is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations...
Saving Journalism, One Idea at a Time
Posted on June 11, 2009True/Slant's hybrid model (reporters find their own advertising sponsors) will save journalism! Or not. The Huffington Post is creating tomorrow's business model for journalism! Or not... Northwestern University's "computer nerds" will save journalism! Really? Ultra-cheap netbooks could save the media industry! Umm...
Citizen Journalism Networks Stepping Up Editorial Standards
Posted on June 10, 2009I tend to avoid the "professional vs. amateur journalism" debate, saying "I have constructive criticisms for both sides." As we've hit a flash point for traditional news organizations, the evolution of citizen journalism networks like NowPublic, AllVoices and others may shed light on how the media space will resolve...
The Need for New Economic Models in the Public Media
Posted on June 10, 2009For most of us, it's clear that there are a few social costs that we can't rely on the market to cover. Most of us, for example, want to ensure that a child born into poverty has access to a good education, even though that child and his/her family could not afford to pay for it...
Student Journalists, Technologists Collaborate on News Innovations
Posted on June 08, 2009Eight computer science students and 11 journalism master's students -- including the third "programmer-journalist" scholarship winner, whose Medill journalism education was paid through a Knight News Challenge grant -- are putting the finishing touches on five innovative new products that combine journalism and technology...
To Save Journalism We Need More than New Software Programs
Posted on June 08, 2009In the recent edition of Times Magazine Matt Vilano looks at the role computer nerds can play in saving journalism. The piece details the forward looking work of the Knight Foundation and allied journalism schools like Northwestern's Medill, which have created specialized degrees in journalism for software programmers, in order to find solutions to the crisis in journalism...
Impacts of Community Video, Written by Community Producers
Posted on June 07, 2009How do you teach creativity and critical thinking to people from very disadvantaged communities, with little formal education? Doing this is a major goal of Video Volunteers' work in training community producers. If organizations don't develop these training tools, the world could find itself in a situation where technology allows the poor to produce content, but the vast expressive potential this could release is still left untapped...
The A Word: Information and Activism
Posted on June 05, 2009One of the central shifts implicit in user-generated information is that in many cases the user will be closer to the subject than a reporter may have been. Journalists, like ethnographers or consultants, are separated from their subjects by factors like structures of reward (salary) and professional codes (organized skepticism, systematic disinterestedness)...
Cell Phone Video Makes the Difference in Oscar Grant case
Posted on June 05, 2009In the end, it may be the cell phone that makes the difference in Oscar Grant's death. Without it, it's likely that 22-year old father would have been just another anonymous black man who ended up dead after a run in with law enforcement. Instead, as Grant lay face down on the platform of a Bay Area Rapid Transit station, a handful of passengers pulled out their cell phones and hit record, capturing the moment that a BART officer shot him in the back, killing him...
Help Me Investigate: Paul Bradshaw on Crowdsourcing Investigative Reporting
Posted on June 03, 2009On June 1, Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog and Birmingham City University in the U.K. announced that a project he's been working on for 18 months called Help Me Investigate won funding to build a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism...
Making Uruguay's 300,000 Laptops Count - Part I
Posted on June 03, 2009Engineering a single laptop to serve the educational needs of young students throughout the developing world is no easy feat. Designers at MIT's Media Lab needed to keep the cost of the machine well below $200, and yet it required many of the same features that owners of traditional laptops have come to expect: a wireless internet connection, USB ports, a color display, a built-in webcam, and a processor powerful enough to record and render video files...
Journalism Graduates: It's Time to Reinvent Journalism
Posted on June 02, 2009Spring is upon us and with it comes commencement season at universities across the country (Harvard's 358th commencement is this Thursday, FYI). This is a tough time for graduates in almost every discipline, but especially so for journalism grads. At least that is the conventional wisdom...
Moving Beyond Text for Cell Phone Citizen Media
Posted on June 02, 2009Cell phones are great for making calls, listening and speaking. So when it comes to media convergence, and the ability to do more and more on our cell phones, why is our media still so writing-centric? Even in the Iindaba Ziyafika project, our Knight funded expansion of the public sphere in Grahamstown City, we're focused on getting citizen journalism in via text (in particular in through SMS) and getting it back out via text...
Digital Divide and Conquer
Posted on June 02, 2009A number of journalism educators and administrators traveled to Mexico City this past spring to assess the state of journalism in our bordering nation. Unfortunately, more journalists there are being killed than in any other country in the world as they report on drug cartels...
Community Journalism in Times of Economic Crisis
Posted on May 28, 2009Media Mobilizing Project recently started a new initiative: Community Journalism in Times of Economic Crisis. The initiative is a response to both the economic crisis, which is hitting Philadelphians hard, and the growing problems with the for-profit journalism model, which is making it difficult for local newspapers to cover stories about the struggles of everyday people during the economic downturn...
YouTube Orchestra Brings Together Musicians Around the World
Posted on May 28, 2009Well, it's Susan Boyle again singing "Now you say you're lonely," being not at all lonely with her 61 million YouTube viewers. That number makes the appealing British singer about 61 million times more popular than the YouTube Symphony Orchestra Global Mash-up musicians with their 1...
Singing the Praises of 'Strategic Journalism'
Posted on May 26, 2009With all the talk of how newspapers can retain readers, it's still worth remembering some useful advice to newspapers from more than ten years ago. It comes from Mike Smith, at that time the assistant director of the Newspaper Management Center at Northwestern University...
Open Media Project Sprints to Half-Way Point
Posted on May 15, 2009With two months remaining in the first half of our Knight-funded Open Media Project, we've got a busy few weeks ahead. Last month, we brought many of Drupal's top video and media developers together with the staff from the 7 OMP Beta-Test sites for the Open Media Camp in Denver...
State of the Spot - Half a Year Since Launch
Posted on May 12, 2009It has been a year since Spot.Us was officially announced as a project and six months since our website launched. So it is time to reflect back on what we have accomplished, where we have succeeded and failed. It is amazing what can happen in six months! It is far easier to look at one's own project, their baby, and gleefully point out where it has surpassed expectations...
'Hacker-Journalist' Finds Job, Seeks More Coders for Journalism
Posted on May 11, 2009For Brian Boyer, the circle is complete. Almost exactly two years ago, Boyer saw a posting on BoingBoing about scholarships for computer programmers interested in studying journalism. He was one of the first to apply for the "programmer-journalist" scholarships, and enrolled in the master's program at the Medill School in January 2008...
Introducing hyperlocal reporting to schools in Grahamstown South Africa
Posted on May 08, 2009Is hyperlocal journalism interesting enough to engage its own audience? And is the prospect of being more 'in the know', and more connected and more involved in one's community, attractive enough to inspire people to take the time out to do Citizen Journalism? The old adage that "all news is local" does hold a great deal of truth...
Bringing Hyper-Local, Citizen-Driven News to South Africa
Posted on May 08, 2009Is hyper-local journalism interesting enough to engage its own audience? And is the prospect of being more "in the know," and more connected and more involved in one's community, attractive enough to inspire people to take the time out to do citizen journalism? The old adage that "all news is local" does hold a great deal of truth...
Journalism's 3.0 Business Model(s)
Posted on May 06, 2009(Note: This posting is from Jeremy Pennycook, a graduate student at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. He wrote this originally for our class website.) By Jeremy PennycookThe Internet killed journalism...
The ReportingOn Roadshow: Feedback and Notes from San Jose and Philadelphia
Posted on May 06, 2009It's been a busy few weeks for ReportingOn, with development of Phase 2 continuing behind the scenes, and a lot of public conversation about the network's start and continuation as I've traveled to San Jose and Philadelphia in recent days. In San Jose, I gave a short talk on ReportingOn as part of my requirements at San José State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communications, where I've now finished up a graduate degree...
Rethinking Community Information Needs
Posted on May 05, 2009Following up on the Knight Commission's work and musings on "community information needs in a democracy", Mark glaser poses a much more targeted question which has yet to be fully addressed: "What is missing in terms of local community needs"? Most of the discussion in this area focuses on what you and might want in our own communities - things like crime reporting, new local ordinances, and hyper local happenings and events on your block...
News from the RIF - The Russian Internet Forum
Posted on May 02, 2009I am entering the large movie theatre hall where the conference dedicated to the social networking is just about to start. A prominent web expert is commenting on the Russian President's decision to launch a Livejournal profile and the first post on the Internet development in Russia...
A Related Epidemic: Swine Flu brings New Lows in Context to Chatter Ratio
Posted on April 30, 2009One pig, if only in the news topic logo*, usually gets a cameo in television coverage of swine flu. The lonely pig is out of context, though- separated from the three-quarters of a million caged, crammed, and fattened pigs slaughtered annually at the massively polluting pig factory in the town with the first human case of the virus...
New Resource Devoted to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
Posted on April 30, 2009The Citizen Media Law Project, which I direct, today launched a new page that aggregates everything on our site relating to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("Section 230"), the important federal statute that protects operators of websites and other interactive computer services from liability for publishing the statements of third-parties...
Pulitzer Validates Journalism-Technology Collaborations
Posted on April 28, 2009If the survival of journalism depends on technology innovation, one or more of three things will have to happen: Journalists will learn technology development; Technology developers will learn journalism; Journalists and technology professionals will learn to collaborate...
Maps for Social Change and Community Involvement
Posted on April 24, 20092008 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...
Technological Design Decisions Behind Gram Vaani's Radio Platform
Posted on April 22, 2009This is a post more for the technology minded, but even others should find it interesting to get an inside view of what goes into designing appropriate technological systems in rural contexts that we are addressing. We've made many design decisions along the way, based on our prior experiences, foresight into expected problems, and observations made while visiting and learning about community radio stations in India...
How Can We Improve Information Needs of Local Communities?
Posted on April 21, 2009With some fanfare, the Knight Foundation and Aspen Institute announced a new Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy a couple years ago, with the idea of finding out just what needs were being served -- and what was lacking...
Waiting for the bill
Posted on April 20, 2009It has been an exciting few weeks for Freedom Fone. We finally got back a version of our prototpye software which works with SIM cards, so we can use it here in Zimbabwe. We've been having focus group discussions with a range of people to help inform our first local deployment...
Pounding the Pavement and Planning Ahead for Printcasting
Posted on April 20, 2009It's been about a month since Printcasting launched in Bakersfield, and our local grassroots outreach is well under way. Every week our marketing evangelist meets with several new groups and individuals. Many of them see immediate uses for Printcasts, and we're starting to see a stream of new activity...
MTV Iggy and Community Video Coming Together
Posted on April 17, 2009Video Volunteers has partnered with MTV Iggy to produce videos in Kashmir about life in the refugee camps of Jammu. Here's a link to one of the videos, about a boy who watched his entire family be slaughtered: <embed src="http://media.mtvnservices...
Cultivating a Community Garden, not a Public Toilet
Posted on April 16, 2009I recently attended the Integrated Media Association conference in Atlanta and sat in on a panel of web content providers addressing public radio folks about online content. Jesse Thorne moderated a great discussion about how to provide content your audience wants to hear, how to listen and how to foster online communities around your content...
Does the input medium matter in cell phone journalism?
Posted on April 14, 2009Although newspapers have gone through 150 years of evolution away from popular contributions and towards fully professional writing, technology is rapidly re-empowering non-professionals. Anyone who has rudimentary access to technology can blog or twitter, take cell phone photos and video of dramatic moments, and quickly get them 'out there'...
Progress Made: So What About the Hyphen? (Car Plant Scene 1)
Posted on April 06, 2009According to the Council for Research Excellence, created by the Nielsen Company, an adult is exposed to screens - TVs, cellphones, even G.P.S. devices - for about 8.5 hours a day, the NYT reports. It seems like those last five weeks I have spent twice more time in front of my Mac and iPhone screens moving the Sochi Olympics Project forward...
Making a Map Mash-Up with the G1 Phone and Flickr
Posted on April 06, 2009Combining mobility, time and location is becoming one of the most valuable techniques of media creation. Last week, some students and I did a small experiment that demonstrates how easy this is to do, and suggests all kinds of possibilities for journalistic follow-ups...
News From the Front: Reflections of an Intern
Posted on April 03, 2009It’s been a long six months, but I’m finally dusting off my keyboard and re-starting my blog here. First things first, a disclaimer: I don’t graduate until May, so it’s safe to say that I still don’t know what I’m talking about...
Freedom Fone at W3C - Maputo
Posted on April 02, 2009Freedom Fone's Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, is currently at the W3C workshop in Maputo: Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development. The workshop has organised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), particularly the Mobile Web Initiative, and its Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group...
Technological Advances Can Reveal Failure to Reflect Community
Posted on April 01, 2009In a few weeks the American Society of Newspaper Editors will release its annual census. The census, created to capture an accurate picture of the industry's diversity, will also tell us how many jobs were lost in this year of lay offs, buy-outs and shuttered newspapers...
Social Networking and Political Movements
Posted on April 01, 2009An upcoming event caught my attention as something I thought other Ideas Lab bloggers and readers might be interested in: Using Social Networking to Marshal the Youth Vote: Online discussion with Rock the Vote director Heather Smith - Tuesday April 7 Very significant elections are coming up in South Africa on April 22, and for the first time in the country's history, there is relatively strong opposition to the governing party...
Where Citizens Gather: An Interview with The Future of Public Media Project's Jessica Clark (Part Two)
Posted on March 31, 2009Today, we continue our discussion with Jessica Clark, co-author of Public Media 2.0, an important white paper recently issued by American University's Center for Social Media. What does your research suggest about the relative roles of professional media producers and Pro-Am media makers in the new ecology of public media? Professionally produced content is central to public media 2...
Where Citizens Gather: An Interview with The Future of Public Media Project's Jessica Clark (Part One)
Posted on March 31, 2009Amidst all of the dire talk these days about the fate of the American newspaper, the Center for Social Media at American University has issued an important white paper exploring the future of public media more generally. When most of us think about "public media" these days, we are most likely to be talking about Public Broadcasting, where the Public refers as much to Public Funding as it refers to any conception of the Public Sphere...
Collaboration is Queen - Spot.Us Moving Forward
Posted on March 30, 2009There are more updates to spot.us than I can really fit into a MediaShift IdeaLab post. For the list-y version of recent milestones - scroll down to the bottom. But first, I want to highlight a very specific example of forward momentum both for Spot...
How Many Homegrown News Stories Are in Your Daily Paper?
Posted on March 27, 2009Let's try a simple count of locally produced news stories in your daily newspaper. Yes, the print edition. The whole news system feeds off the flow of newspaper content, right? Lots of people asking, what's going to replace newspapers if they can't make it? Expecting amateurs to step in is dumb, and it won't happen...
ReportingOn: Phrased in the Form of a Question
Posted on March 26, 2009When 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...
Redesigning Journalism At Stanford's Design School
Posted on March 26, 2009I had the great privilege to be invited to sit on a panel earlier this month at the Institute of Design at Stanford to provide feedback on an effort called, "Redesigning Journalism." I've been wanting to visit the "D School" for some time now. So I jumped at the chance to participate...
School Media clubs and the question of context and incentives for citizen journalism
Posted on March 26, 2009Getting your photo published by CNN, or having the BBC follow up on a story lead you've emailed or sent in by short message text (or Twitter) is often its own reward. Whatever your motivation might have been - civic duty, anger, impressing your friends, ambition - it's a kick for many just to see their name in pixels...
Peace Blogging Along the Colombia-Venezuela Border
Posted on March 26, 2009View Larger Map Map of El Nula, a small village in the Venzuelan state of Apure along the Colombian border. One of the world's lesser-known conflicts has endured for over a decade along the Colombia-Venezuela border. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants' latest report: Colombian guerrillas and paramilitaries, together with the Fuerzas Bolivarianas de Liberación (FBL), a Venezuelan irregular armed group, exercised de facto control over the border states of Táchira, Apure, and Zulia, where most Colombian asylum seekers arrived...
School Media Clubs and the Question of Incentives for Citizen Journalism
Posted on March 26, 2009Getting your photo published by CNN, or having the BBC follow up on a story lead you've emailed or sent in by short message text (or Twitter) is often its own reward. Whatever your motivation might have been - civic duty, anger, impressing your friends, ambition - it's a kick for many just to see their name in pixels...
Citizen Media Law Project Leads Amicus Effort Promoting Rights of Anonymous Speakers in Illinois
Posted on March 25, 2009In a case involving important First Amendment rights, the Citizen Media Law Project joined a number of media and advocacy organizations, including Gannett Co., Inc., Hearst Corporation, Illinois Press Association, Online News Association, Public Citizen, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Tribune Company, in asking an Illinois appellate court to protect the rights of anonymous speakers online by imposing procedural safeguards before requiring that their identities be disclosed...
Second Implementation of the Open Media Project Complete
Posted on March 24, 2009Ten members of the Deproduction team traveled to Austin this month to implement the Open Media tools at the second of 6 Beta sites, ChannelAustin. We traveled down in two RV's and scheduled the visit to coincide with SXSW, where we hosted a core conversation as part of the interactive festival...
Introducing the 3rd "Programmer-Journalist"
Posted on March 23, 2009Nick Allen, a computer science student who got intrigued by journalism as a college senior, is the third "programmer-journalist" enrolled at the Medill School through the Knight News Challenge scholarship program. The first two (Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark) graduated in December...
Good News as a Business Model?
Posted on March 22, 2009In his "Are We Home Alone?" OpEd today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says "I've never talked to more people in one week who told me, "You know, I listen to the news, and I get really depressed." I feel the same way. It's something I've wondered about for years...
Life After Newspapers: One Reporter Takes on the Island of Alameda
Posted on March 19, 2009Bit 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...
The Intelligence is in the Network, Social Media and Local Public Life Gathering in Boston Thursday
Posted on March 18, 2009Join me this Thursday evening at Harvard's Berkman Center for a discussion of Social Media and Local Public Life. It should be an interesting conversation, particularly if you bring examples with you. On a related note, I am getting ready to speak on Saturday at the Newout...
Choosy transparency practiced by the NY Attorney General
Posted on March 17, 2009Today New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo made headlines by coming down hard on American International Group (AIG), the company that has paid out millions of dollars in bonuses to some of the people thought responsible for the billions of dollars in losses that preceded government bailout money that continues to flow to the insurance giant...
Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield
Posted on March 17, 2009This week we publicly launched Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. While our focus is on outreach to the 330,000 people who live there, anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine. I invite you all to give it a try at http://www...
NY Attorney General Should Practice Transparency He Preaches
Posted on March 17, 2009Today New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo made news headlines by coming down hard on American International Group (AIG), the company that has paid out millions of dollars in bonuses to some of the people thought responsible for the billions of dollars in losses that preceded government bailout money that continues to flow to the insurance giant...
Where the journalists aren't
Posted on March 16, 2009Where the journalists aren't: the Marketplaces/Drilling Down on Local conference, a gathering of industry execs and venture investors. The "how do we make money on local" question that is generally the conversation ender at journalism confabs is the conversation beginner at this gathering, where the first panels are stocked with venture investors talking about what they will -- and will not fund, and what they expect to get back, and why...
Media Cloud and Calais
Posted on March 12, 2009The Berkman Center launched a project called Media Cloud this week, a toolkit that facilitates analysis of trends in the news. The sample visualization on the site now shows world maps that illustrate the number of mentions each country got in Talking Points Memo, the New York Times and the BBC, respectively...
Ease of Use Matters
Posted on March 11, 2009We spend a lot of time talking about why people don't comment more on Gotham Gazette stories. By "a lot of time," I actually mean about 20 minutes every three weeks, but nonetheless as a project with a mission to improve public discourse and engage New Yorkers in public policy conversations, we gauge our impact in part by how many people are reading and responding to our reporting...
The community radio movement in India
Posted on March 10, 2009India has been quite a latecomer to this promising channel of people empowerment through community media. Until late 2006, only educational institutions were allowed to set up campus radio stations having a transmission range of 10-15km. The scope was only recently expanded to also include non-profit agencies, agricultural research institutes, and schools, to set up community radio stations that would involve local communities in the content production process...
New Citizen Media Projects Foster Rising Voices in Ivory Coast, Liberia, China, Mongolia, and Yemen
Posted on March 09, 2009In January we received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGO's all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities - long ignored by both traditional and new media - to the conversational web. It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects...
Printcasting in BusinessWeek Story about Newspaper Innovation
Posted on March 09, 2009Printcasting is mentioned in a BusinessWeek story about "online experiments that could help newspapers". The story leads with Bakotopia.com, the social networking site I started for The Bakersfield Californian back in 2005. This is fitting, as Bakotopia's later success with a printed magazine helped inspired the Printcasting concept...
Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Four of Four)
Posted on March 09, 2009Henry Jenkins: I do think that the concept of networked publics has a great deal to offer us in terms of identifying a way of addressing some of the concerns you raise here, but I also think you need to go into that realm with your eyes wide open. So much has been written about the democratic potential of an era of social networks and collective intelligence, yet the challenge you pose here is one which might push our current understanding of this potential to the breaking point...
5 New Rising Voices Grantees in Ivory Coast, Liberia, China, Mongolia, and Yemen
Posted on March 09, 2009In January we received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGO's all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities - long ignored by both traditional and new media - to the conversational web. It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects...
community news as a livelihood for the world's poorest
Posted on March 07, 2009Can a Community Producer like Samata, from a slum in Mumbai, ever become fully competitive in a mainstream market? In thinking about Video Volunteers' future work, I'm realizing we need to develop new models of community video that are scalable and allow for video to be a livelihood for thousands of the world's poor...
Change Tracker
Posted on March 06, 2009This one is for the "wish I'd thought of that" files. Brian Boyer at ProPublica got the bright idea to write a wee widget that uses Versionista to track changes to a handful of White House websites including whitehouse.gov. Since I heard about Change Tracker on Twitter I've been following it on Twitter...
Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Three of Four)
Posted on March 06, 2009(Part 1.) (Part 2.) Dayna Cunningham: Thank you for reminding me that we are talking about institutions and cultures and politics and that media are nothing more than tools within these contexts. We need social organizations, not just technology. Drat...
Mobile Voices and the Ethical Responsibilities of Citizen Journalism Training
Posted on March 05, 2009Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Two of Four)
Posted on March 04, 2009Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part One of Four)
Posted on March 03, 2009Digital Newsroom Wireframes Available
Posted on February 26, 2009I'm happy to announce the availability of annotated wireframes for the Digital Newsroom portion of the Populous Project. The functionality, as eloquently described by Gary Kebbel at the Center for Future Civic Media Conference, is being able to "edit from the beach...
CELL PHONE JOURNALISM AND BETTER DEMOCRATIC DECISION MAKING - WHAT DO WE MEASURE?
Posted on February 25, 2009How do you build a culture of participation? What does it mean to empower people to participate in projects and politics that might improve their own lives? How do you seed participation in a way that promotes sustainability after the initial impetus? 15 years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, following decades of political mobilization by anti-apartheid movements and organisations, these questions are still burning brightly in South Africa...
House Exploded? Try Software for Community Collective Action.
Posted on February 25, 2009I've written before about the extrACT suite of software tools we have been developing at MIT: information and communication technologies that promote community collective action. We have started to introduce the first of these tools, Landman Report Card, to communities in Texas and Ohio that are being confronted by the impacts of natural gas extraction...
Social Networks for Doing Good
Posted on February 25, 2009At Rising Voices we are getting ready to announce the newest grantee projects. We received over 270 proposals from non-profits, NGO's, and activists from around the world who want to use citizen media tools to bring new and under-represented voices to the conversational web...
Cell Phone Journalism and Better Democratic Decision-Making: What Do We Measure?
Posted on February 25, 2009How do you build a culture of participation? What does it mean to empower people to participate in projects and politics that might improve their own lives? How do you seed participation in a way that promotes sustainability after the initial impetus? 15 years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, following decades of political mobilization by anti-apartheid movements and organisations, these questions are still burning brightly in South Africa...
More thoughts on Times Open
Posted on February 23, 2009I spent last Friday admiring the views of the Hudson from the 15th floor of the NY Times building, alongside Lisa Williams. Thought it was billed as a "hack day" there wasn't much actual hacking going on that I could find. There was a steady stream of presenters, most of them funny, all of them plenty worth listening to...
More Thoughts on TimesOpen
Posted on February 23, 2009I spent last Friday admiring the views of the Hudson from the 15th floor of the NY Times building, alongside Lisa Williams. Thought it was billed as a "hack day" there wasn't much actual hacking going on that I could find. There was a steady stream of presenters, most of them funny, all of them plenty worth listening to...
Army of Geeks
Posted on February 23, 2009As communications change and the demand grows for local networks, our mission becomes clear: we are being called upon to organize an army of geeks to accomplish the tasks that lie ahead. The Background Joaquin Alvarado presented the plan for National Public Lightpath to public broadcasters at the Integrated Media Association conference last week in Atlanta...
How can Disadvantaged Citizens Learn to be Journalists?
Posted on February 22, 2009How do I even have the gall to write here? I do not have any special knowledge of the media to impart. I am not a journalist with a degree or newspaper experience. I am just an everyday person who has realized... I have to be a journalist. This might be a strange dilemma, but it is one that has become increasingly common...
Games that Create Value
Posted on February 22, 2009Online, multiplayer games open the door to a new form of group collaboration that can create value. Take, for example, the Google Image Labeler, originally the brainchild of MacArthur Grant-winner Luis von Ahn. The game pits two players against each other in an image-labeling challenge, as images are displayed on the screen in succession (for example a naval orange, or a pregnant MIA) players enter the name of the image, "naval orange", and every time both players enter the same word they are both awarded points...
Getting ready for testing
Posted on February 22, 2009Finally after a lot of project and design changes we are approaching the starting line of testing. Right now one prototype is ready to go. We just have to set up the server and upload the content. We decided that on-site testing was the best choice for our purposes...
Using new technology in the fight against cholera in Zimbabwe
Posted on February 21, 2009This week we gave our first targeted demonstrations of Freedom Fone, aimed at encouraging local health organisations to use Freedom Fone as one of the communications tools in the response to Zimbabwe's cholera crisis. We believe that given the rapid spread of the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe, greater use should be made of the country's most ubiquitous communication tool - the mobile phone - to share information that can help address the suffering and limit the number of deaths...
Playing the News ready for testing
Posted on February 21, 2009After a lot of fits and starts, we are ready to deploy two different versions of the "Playing the News" prototype games. One uses a simulated environment that allows the user to visit various locations to interview stakeholders on the topic of the use of ethanol as fuel...
Using Technology in the Fight Against Cholera in Zimbabwe
Posted on February 21, 2009This week we gave our first targeted demonstrations of Freedom Fone, aimed at encouraging local health organisations to use Freedom Fone as one of the communications tools in the response to Zimbabwe's cholera crisis. We believe that given the rapid spread of the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe, greater use should be made of the country's most ubiquitous communication tool - the mobile phone - to share information that can help address the suffering and limit the number of deaths...
Turning Print Upside Down and Inside Out
Posted on February 20, 2009Scripps executive and media consultant Jay Small has a shout-out to Printcasting in his Small Initiatives blog. Here's what he says about Printcasting in a post about decapitalizing printing. "Watch Dan Pacheco's Printcasting developments closely. My read: This project attempts to cut cost, waste and inflexibility out of producing printed periodicals, while adding customization and speed to market for publishers of most any scale...
Janet Robinson's Remarks at TimesOPEN
Posted on February 20, 2009Today, the New York Times is hosting TimesOPEN, their first developer conference. We're now listening to tech book publisher Tim O'Reilly, but just a few minutes ago Janet Robinson, President and CEO of the New York Times Company, concluded her remarks...
Digital migration - for a smalltown paper
Posted on February 19, 2009No, this article is not about broadcasters shifting to digital transmission. But it's about something that's also a huge change - uprooting from known territory and heading for the unknown complexities of digital country. Switchover in the sense of convergence is the challenge facing South African community paper Grocott's Mail...
Digital Migration For a Small-Town Paper in South Africa
Posted on February 19, 2009No, this article is not about broadcasters shifting to digital transmission. But it's about something that's also a huge change -- uprooting from known territory and heading for the unknown complexities of digital country. Switch-over in the sense of convergence is the challenge facing South African community paper Grocott's Mail...
It's "Bring a Professor Night" for a Conversation About Journalism Education
Posted on February 18, 2009This Sunday, February 22, at 8 p.m. EST, it's "Bring a Professor Night" at CollegeJourn, a weekly live online chat about student media and journalism education. I spoke with Suzanne Yada today about the chat, why it's so important to bring the faculty to the table, and what she thinks they can learn from their students...
Pink Chaddi (Underwear) Campaign in India
Posted on February 17, 2009I am posting here a blog written by Ruchika Muchhala, the online manager of Video Volunteers' website "Channel 19", ch19.org, where we post the videos made by the community producers. This is a blog she wrote for Rising Voices, where she has also recently started blogging -- courtesy of connections made in the Knight News Challenge community...
Spot.Us Deals with the Good and Bad of Limitations
Posted on February 16, 2009Long-time readers of Spot.Us updates will know I am a big believer in staying agile and iterative. Take small bites, chew well, rinse and repeat. With that in mind - I am in route to visit my developers to do another "dev blitz" to try and get Spot.Us as close to a 2...
BarCamp NewsInnovation Chicago: Join the Conversation
Posted on February 15, 2009If you've been following my posts to this blog, you know that I'm always interested in exploring ways to connect journalists and technology professionals. The Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarships are one approach. So is the idea of a "computational journalism" conference like the one held last year at Georgia Tech...
ReportingOn is Back in the Lab, Defining the Terms of the Pitch
Posted on February 14, 2009[I'm going back to the proverbial drawing board for ReportingOn, working with the development and design team at Lion Burger to build the next iteration of the backchannel for your beat from scratch, more or less. Here's some of what we're talking about in front of the whiteboard...
?thulhu, Polar Bear, Futurama's Dr. Zoidberg, M.D. and the Teacher of English to symbolize the Olympics.
Posted on February 13, 2009On the web, choosing the symbol of the Sochi Olympics was probably the most discussed topic around the Games. What is great with the Olympics is that being a global, international affair, each time it presents the local quintessence of the hosting city...
?thulhu, Dr. Zoidberg & the Teacher of English to Symbolize the Olympics
Posted on February 13, 2009On the web, choosing the mascot of the Sochi Olympics was probably the most discussed topic around the 2014 Winter Games. What is great with the Olympics is that being a global, international affair, each time it presents the local quintessence of the hosting city...
Balance the Budget: Gotham Gazette Game 3
Posted on February 12, 2009After a series of false starts on an energy consumption game we decided to skip ahead to a timely game of balancing the budget . The game is actually a reprise of a popular budget balancing game we created in 2003 -- we're regularly asked for the source code for that game, and while we do have it, it is a bear of a maze of a mess that no self-respecting programmer would want to try to wade through in search of numbers and texts to change...
Putting Our Plane on the Runway
Posted on February 12, 2009Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing, entered closed beta last week. An open beta just around the corner, and we're doing everything we can to officially launch in Bakersfield in early March. To make that happen, two camps -- development and marketing -- are busy getting everything into place for a successful launch...
Journalism Education's Broader, Deeper Mission
Posted on February 07, 2009Accepting an award from Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably "the best general education that an American citizen can get" today...
Strategizing Media Software Development: Some Lessons Learned
Posted on February 05, 2009Here's a story showing the extent of complications in getting a system going, so I'll tell it simply. It's my non-geek experience of work for a community newspaper that aims to produce world-class code for community papers that is singing-dancing, super-portable and open-source...
The Sins of Princes...
Posted on February 05, 2009I've been following the story of Prince's copyright battles for over a year, and found the latest development noteworthy enough to call attention to. My interest began with Prince and Universal targeting YouTube, Fansites, and housewives for a number of debatable copyright infringements in 2007...
Convergence and Disturbance: New Media, Networked Publics, and Pakistan
Posted on February 04, 2009The above video is one of a large number posted via Youtube by students in Pakistan to share what was happening in their country during the 2007-2008 political emergency. During a time when the government was tightening its control over traditional media, citizen journalists took on vital functions in fostering public debate, insuring the spread of important information, monitoring elections, and helping the outside world understand what was happening...
Options for News Mixer: Launch a Site, Use the Code or Just Be Inspired
Posted on February 02, 2009What'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...
First Beta Site in the Open Media Project is a Success!
Posted on February 02, 2009Urbana Public Television, the first of six Public Access TV and Community Technology Centers to implement the model and modules developed for Deproduction's Knight News Challenge project, has launched their new Drupal website with our help. Lead Developer for Deproduction/Civic Pixel, Kevin Reynen explains the process of setting up this revolutionary new system with Kate Gorman of UPTV, "Launching a basic Drupal site can be a lot for someone to take in...
News Mixer Options: Launch a Site, Use the Code or Be Inspired
Posted on February 02, 2009What'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...
Voces Bolivianas Makes "Web 2.0 for Everyone"
Posted on February 01, 2009Despite Bolivia's low internet penetration (among the lowest in Latin America at 4.4% compared to neighboring Chile's 36.1%, according to El Deber), the citizen media project and Rising Voices grantee Bolivian Voices is determined to spread Web 2.0 well beyond Bolivia's connected elite...
Philadelphia's Community News Portals
Posted on January 30, 2009As part of Our City Our Voices, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) in partnership with Juntos has launched a new drupal based participatory website. The Our City Our Voices portal is part of a network of community portals MMP has developed to create dynamic spaces for communities across the city to tell and share stories and get information...
Endow Newspapers? Wrong Question
Posted on January 30, 2009There's a debate under way in the newspaper/journalism corner of the blogosphere and Twittersphere, spurred by an op-ed commentary in the New York Times earlier this week. The piece, by Yale's chief investment officer, David Swensen, and his colleague Michael Schmidt, a Yale financial analyst, starts with a questionable idea -- that newspapers should be endowed as nonprofits in order to save them -- and goes south from there...
Partnerships to Watch (and a crowdsourcing project I'm envying)
Posted on January 29, 2009A small local website from Brooklyn has partnered with NBC to build neighborhood pages for a handful of NBC markets. I haven't followed Outside.in for more than stoop sales (which is New Yorkerese for garage sales or yard sales since most New Yorkers have neither yards nor garages), but it looks like they've taken up EveryBlock's approach to local news aggregation as well, though they want posts explicitly geo-tagged for their maps...
Protests in Madagascar and the Importance of Citizen Journalism Training
Posted on January 28, 2009As Juliana and I emphasized during a presentation at last year's MobileActive conference in South Africa, just because over three billion people are equipped with cell phones, which can be used as tools for reporting during emergencies, that doesn't mean the world has three billion citizen journalists ready and able to cover every natural disaster, political uprising, and news-worthy event they encounter...
Spot.Us Has Success and Failure in the Same Week
Posted on January 28, 2009Spot.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...
Bigger and Better Betas
Posted on January 28, 20092009 is already proving to be a big year for The Beanstockd Project. After a few rounds of successful internal beta tests and user feedback, the Beanstockd team is preparing for our first institution-level test of The Beanstockd Game at the United Nations International School in New York City...
Other fun stuff Beanstockd is up to..
Posted on January 28, 2009Each week, we look forward to keeping you apprised of changes, developments, and progress happening with the Beanstockd Game. But, this week, I wanted to amend our weekly report card with some of the fun stuff happening on the media side of Beanstockd! This month, we were able to send several of our writers to the Presidential Inauguration, and even got a special invitation to attend the Green Inaugural Ball in Washington, DC...
Online-News@ reborn as News-Online@ - E-mail List Nostalgia or the Best Way to Interact?
Posted on January 27, 2009As spaces for those interested in online news like WiredJournalists.com and Poynter's online groups go completely web-centric, my heart pangs for the simple e-mail list. Something I can easily read and post to in those rare idle moments in transit on my handheld or from the place I still spent the majority of my time online - conveniently from my desktop e-mail...
The Opportunity of Public Radio
Posted on January 27, 2009Today I write about public radio, its potential and its promise. I am not an Internet or social media native. I am 40 years old and remember using our encyclopedia set for school papers and had a well-worn library card. I am an Internet and social media enthusiast...
Online-News@ reborn as News-Online@ -- E-mail List Nostalgia or the Best Way to Interact?
Posted on January 27, 2009As spaces for those interested in online news like WiredJournalists.com and Poynter's online groups go completely web-centric, my heart pangs for the simple e-mail list. Something I can easily read and post to in those rare idle moments in transit on my handheld or from the place I still spent the majority of my time online - conveniently from my desktop e-mail...
Can "anyone" be a journalist, or does it take innate talent?
Posted on January 24, 2009Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the "Community Video Unit" has lots of potential for great programming on arts and culture...
Building a Social Entrepreneurial Garage Startup in India
Posted on January 24, 2009Moving from ideas to execution is an ultra cool feeling. Gram Vaani is finally on the go and we are all extremely excited to see our dreams taking shape. The garage startup mode I always used to wonder what a Silicon Valley garage startup would feel like...
Each Culture Should Communicate News Their Way
Posted on January 24, 2009Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the "Community Video Unit" has lots of potential for great programming on arts and culture...
Printcasting.com Helps Spark a Global Movement
Posted on January 23, 2009Ever since the Knight News Challenge was first announced in 2006, I've been fascinated and inspired by its open nature. While the primary goal of the contest is to fund great ideas for new local news and information projects, it has a larger mission. It also requires those projects to eventually be released under open source licenses...
"We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part Two)
Posted on January 23, 2009You describe a range of projects in the book including those involving youths and senior citizens. What generational differences, if any, did you observe in the ways they thought about their roles and responsibilities as journalists? Young people are much more technologically adept in general...
Phase 2 of the Open-Media Project Begins This Week
Posted on January 23, 2009Deproduction's KNC grant was designed in 4 distinct six-month phases. The first phase included an updated release of our Open-Source Drupal tools: the set of Drupal modules which enable Denver Open Media to function as a user-driven Public Access Community Media Center with no operating support from the city or cable provider in Denver...
"We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part One)
Posted on January 21, 2009One of the pleasures of living and teaching at MIT for the past 20 years has been the chance to build ongoing relations with a fascinating cast of characters, many of whom have been regulars at the MIT Communication Forum events that are run by my colleague, David Thorburn...
Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part One)
Posted on January 21, 2009One of the pleasures of living and teaching at MIT for the past 20 years has been the chance to build ongoing relations with a fascinating cast of characters, many of whom have been regulars at the MIT Communication Forum events that are run by my colleague, David Thorburn...
President Obama's Open Government Imperatives Must Trickle Down to Cities
Posted on January 21, 2009Today President Obama issued two eloquent orders with the following subject lines: "Freedom of Information Act" and "Transparency and Open Government". Published on the first full day of his presidency, they constitute a sweeping manifesto about how he wants to govern at the Federal level...
Obama's Open Government Imperatives Must Trickle Down to Cities
Posted on January 21, 2009Today President Obama issued two eloquent orders with the following subject lines: "Freedom of Information Act" and "Transparency and Open Government". Published on the first full day of his presidency, they constitute a sweeping manifesto about how he wants to govern at the Federal level...
Choosing a Domain Name: Getting to Know Cyber Squatters (Starbucks Scene 1)
Posted on January 19, 2009It's not the case when you can remain unnamed. At this stage - when working out the site structure and drawing graphic schemes, you can't stop thinking about the domain name. Soon after the Knight Foundation announced that my proposal made it and I was selected one of the winners of the '08 Knight News Challenge, I registered several domain names which could alternatively be the site address...
Local Press Subsidies Are Not The Answer
Posted on January 16, 2009Most people would now acknowledge that there are serious structural issues facing regional and local news in Britain just like in the US. The UK's main commercial broadcaster (ITV) says it's too expensive and it will stop providing it unless the government makes it worthwhile (see Michael Grade's piece in the Telegraph)...
Two Coders Head Off to 'Fix Journalism'
Posted on January 16, 2009There are a lot of words I could use to describe Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, but perhaps the first one is: fearless. About 21 months ago, they heard (Ryan through a friend, Brian on Boing Boing) about a new scholarship program offering computer programmers a chance to earn a master's degree in journalism at the Medill School...
The Journalism Bubble
Posted on January 16, 2009You've heard about the housing bubble. And the dot-com bubble. I'm here to tell you about The Journalism Bubble. Anybody who's paying attention to the state of journalism in the US is aware of the financial crisis facing the news industry. And there's wide agreement on the cause of the crisis: advertising revenue for print and broadcast is declining, and advertising revenue for internet offerings is not rising fast enough to make up the difference...
Rising Voices: 2008 in Review
Posted on January 15, 2009In 2007 Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices aimed at bringing under-represented voices from the developing world to the social web, got its feet on the ground thanks to the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It was a year of building community, forging partnerships, and defining the needs of groups teaching citizen media tools and techniques in the developing world...
Gates Foundation Invests $2 Million in Chilean Social Web
Posted on January 13, 2009Back in March last year I pointed to Contenidos Locales ("Local Content"), a program of Chile's national library network, as a model example of how public institutions like libraries can foster more civic participation by training their local users how to take advantage of new media tools: Examples include Buscando Mis Raices ("Looking for my Roots") by Rosa Tromilén, which offers a personal history of the Mapuche-majority community Juan Calfumán; Conjunto Folklórico Renacer de Cucao, a youth-group on Chiloé Island dedicated to preserving local folkloric traditions; and the website of the Asociación de Artistas Plásticos de Puerto Montt ("Association of Plastic Artists of Puerto Montt")...
Digital Community Builders Can Roll Their Own Economic Stimulus Package
Posted on January 13, 2009I come from the "citizen" side of citizen media and work a lot with community building online. Everyday, I an privileged to live in a neighborhood with a vibrant online community far from the wretched shores media hosted mostly anonymous and frequently disturbing online reader comments...
Legal Guide to Covering the 2009 Presidential Inauguration
Posted on January 13, 2009Heading to Washington, D.C., to attend the Presidential Inauguration? You're bringing your camera with you, right? Well it shouldn't come as any surprise that heightened security measures across the Washington area will affect where you can go, what you can bring with you, and what you can do to cover the inaugural events...
When is a Riot a Riot?
Posted on January 12, 2009By 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...
Beanstockd Players Give Feedback on Beta Test
Posted on January 12, 2009Happy 2009! Here at Beanstockd we're kicking off the new year with a bigger and better Beanstockd Game. 2008 ended with a cliffhanger: We'd just wrapped up our first beta test and were preparing to survey players on their gaming experience.This week the results are in, and we've got answers to questions that will determine the updates we make for version 2...
Populous Is Adopting News Mixer (And More)
Posted on January 12, 2009We'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...
Inaccessible Pothole Data in Chicago
Posted on January 12, 2009Recently in Chicago, as the weather warmed inordinately from a deep freeze, with a 70-degree swing in temperature, the attention of the media and the municipal workers turned to potholes. The two daily newspapers sent writers to a press conference at the city's "Pothole Command Center," where Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), Tom Byrne, and his top spokesman, Brian Steele held forth on the problem of holes in the street...
Unrest in Oakland: Who's On The Case?
Posted on January 09, 2009My 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...
News Mixer Generates Widespread Interest
Posted on January 05, 2009Since 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...
Preview the Printcasting Local Ad Tool
Posted on December 31, 2008Tonight is literally the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, so first I want to say Happy New Year to all of you. We've learned a lot since winning a Knight News Challenge grant 9 months ago, and are extremely grateful to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for making it possible for us and so many others to continue to experiment at a time when so many companies are eliminating into their research & development budgets...
A Holiday Gift
Posted on December 24, 2008Written English Version: During this holiday season, many people take the time to reconnect with their family. This is true with deaf people, too. Yet for a large number of deaf people, their families are hearing. The majority of interaction is likely to be spoken, and the deaf individual is unavoidably left out of them...
Community-Owned Media: What Does It Mean?
Posted on December 24, 2008Many people today who work in social change are convinced that the typical 'top down' approach to development, where bureaucrats and international agencies design large-scale social programs and then impose them on millions of poor people, isn't working...
Rising Voices Seeks Micro-grant Proposals for Citizen Media Outreach
Posted on December 23, 2008Application Deadline: January 18, 2009 Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own...
End of the Year Radical Transparency for Spot.Us
Posted on December 22, 2008It is the end of the year and I received some questions from the TIdes Center who are doing due-diligence reports for the Knight Foundation. I've been meaning to do a public "where is Spot.Us" post for some time and since I'm answering all these related questions I thought - why not just go crazy and blog the questions and my answers...
What Will 2009 Bring for Journalism?
Posted on December 22, 2008...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...
Ethnic Hyperlocal News Network Launched in L.A.
Posted on December 22, 2008A project billed as the "first-ever online network of ethnic citizen journalists" was launched last week in Los Angeles. Called LA Beez, the effort is a project of New America Media with support from the Ford Foundation. It brings together six L.A.-area ethnic media outlets with the goal of providing a more diverse representation of views...
Language as a Bridge to Inclusion
Posted on December 21, 2008Deaf people can participate in citizen journalism through written language tools. Given this, why do I believe that using American Sign Language videos are an essential tool to provide them access to journalism? For those who are confronted by the 'digital divide' there are often seemingly hidden elements that cause their lack of access...
Online Filmmakers Offer New Glimpses of Iran
Posted on December 19, 2008The last time we checked in with Iran Inside Out, project leader Shaghayegh Azimi had just finished a trailer video to whet our appetite for what was to come. As she details in a two-part project evaluation, Azimi intended for Iran Inside Out to become a full-time venture to spread awareness about and raise the profile of young Iranian filmmakers by introducing their works to an international audience...
Interactive Journalism
Posted on December 18, 2008The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism hosted an informational meeting with local elected public officials on Wednesday, November 19, to showcase VoxPop, an interactive tool for civic engagement, developed by journalism students through the Knight News Challenge grant...
News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age
Posted on December 18, 2008After a year of study, countless meetings, and at least two conferences, a team of researchers at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society have released a series of papers exploring the potential and challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment (note: I played a small role in this work)...
Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture
Posted on December 18, 2008Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect...
Freedom Fone Interviewed on the BBC
Posted on December 17, 2008Freedom Fone's technical director, Brenda Burrell, was recently interviewed by Digital Planet, the BBC's weekly world technology update. Listen to Brenda speak about Freedom Fone, and the potential of mobile phones as a vehicle for voice based information services here
Introducing News Mixer: A 'Game-Changing' Approach to News Engagement
Posted on December 16, 2008The Crunchberry Project -- six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending the Medill School on Knight News Challenge scholarships -- set out this fall to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults...
Study on Digital Inclusion and Civic Engagement
Posted on December 16, 2008Hey folks, I wanted to tell you all about a study I am wrapping up with Peter Funke, Dan Berger and a few other folks in Philadelphia. We received a grant from the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC) "Necessary Knowledge for Public Sphere" initiative to study the Media Mobilizing Project(MMP) and their use of new media and digital inclusion to promote civic engagement in disenfranchised communities across Philadelphia To offer some background, MMP was launched in 2005 as a strategic initiative to partner with local organizations, facilitating grassroots media production to advance socio-economic justice through the (self) empowerment of disenfranchised communities...
The Day Print Didn't Stand Still
Posted on December 16, 2008Last week, after 6 months of planning and hard work, we officially launched Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project, in alpha. We're still busy finishing up the remaining functionality while responding to the excellent feedback and ideas we're getting from alpha testers...
Beanstockd Internal Beta Test
Posted on December 15, 2008Last week, members of the Beanstockd Team participated in the inaugural Beanstockd internal beta test of the Beanstockd Game. Members of the Beanstockd Team spent one week taking environmental actions and getting credit for it through the Beanstockd interface in order to brainstorm ways to make it better, find any bugs, and compete for a team prize: organic sweets from Manhattan's finest green bakery...
ReportingOn: Changing Horses Mid-stream is Easy When You're the Horse
Posted on December 12, 2008DIY development, design, community management, and marketing isn't for me (this year). This is an update about what's going on with ReportingOn, which is to say, there's not much going on with ReportingOn. For now. My Knight News Challenge-funded project to connect journalists on the same topical beat with their peers launched on October 1...
Why Spot.Us Should have used Drupal (and why it doesn't matter)
Posted on December 12, 2008It's the one that got away. With many Knight News Challenge projects using Drupal, the dedicated Knight Drupal Initiative (reopening after DrupalCon in March), and Drupal sites for the Knight Foundation's own community, David Cohn must just be deficient in groupthink to have chosen to develop Spot...
Making News More Transparent
Posted on December 11, 2008With our Knight News Challenge grant we (the Media Standards Trust and Web Science Research Initiative) are exploring and developing ways in which to help the public find and assess news on the web (for which we have also received a MacArthur Foundation grant)...
Mistakes I made with the Next Newsroom Project
Posted on December 11, 2008Now that I've officially completed the work on our Knight Foundation News Challenge grant that funded the Next Newsroom project, I wanted to share some of the horrendous, grotesque mistakes I made over the past 18 months. I'm doing it not because I'm feeling particularly masochistic...
Hiring for Change: How to Staff a New Media Project
Posted on December 11, 2008Now, 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...
Updating the Pulitzer Prizes for the Internet Age
Posted on December 11, 2008The people who run the Pulitzer Prizes, undoubtedly America's premier journalism awards, have taken some useful steps into the 21st Century with new rules that welcome online-only entries. From the official rules (PDF): Entries for journalism awards must be based on material coming from a text-based United States newspaper or news organization that publishes--in print or online--at least weekly during the calendar year; that is primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories; and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles...
Iindaba Ziyafika: The News Is Coming
Posted on December 11, 2008The news has started to flow. It's a trial-trickle from township teenagers, through to other social groupings in Grahamstown. With the kick-off of phase one during 2008, citizen youth content has crossed the chasm of age difference to reach the older readers of the Grocott's Mail newspaper...
Inspiration: The Secret Sauce for Printcasting
Posted on December 09, 2008We're underway with alpha testing for Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge-funded project at The Bakersfield Californian. It's great to see everything coming together! The alpha period will give us feedback on how well we've done in presenting the basic functionality of the product...
Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Politics to Poetry
Posted on December 08, 2008Go to Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog and you don't know if you're going to find a post on politics, poetry, the NFL or the world of videogames. A journalist who has worked at Time Magazine and the Village Voice, Coates started his own blog after being laid off from Time Magazine...
Beanstockd Application Internal Beta test
Posted on December 08, 2008This week we're running a private beta test of the Beanstockd application internally; members of the Beanstockd editorial, business development and tech teams will be competing against each other as they take the game for a test drive. The beta test will give us quick, snapshot results on user engagement with the app, which will prepare us for results gathered from upcoming full-scale beta tests...
Extract: Civic Defense 2.0
Posted on December 07, 2008This week our development team announced the release of the LandmanReportCard (LRC), the first of our experiments in designing tools for community understanding and self-defense. We've chosen one of the most difficult community contexts imaginable: neighborhoods, mostly rural, that stand in the path of some of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world...
Answering the Information Needs of Non-Geographic Communities
Posted on December 07, 2008There has been much said about the idea of empowering local communities through citizen journalism. But when I view this within the context of minority communities, focusing solely on geographic communities is a mistake. Lets focus on the Deaf community as an example of this situation...
When a Cell Phone Is Bigger Than a Yacht
Posted on December 07, 2008Despite the global warming reports snow covered the Moscow roads and rooftops just on time this year, preluding to the urban installation of the New Year trees all around the city, bringing romanticism into the hearts of the Muscovites, and inspiring citizens to upload new Christmas-related videos (along with those featuring car crashes) at the http://mreporter...
RadioEngage on the Move
Posted on December 07, 2008The news is old now, we won a grant, eh? Over the course of the last six months we have embarked upon a journey traveling down the road of journalism, technology and community building. We were awarded this grant as technologists to build a tool for public radio...
The IncluderEpisode 13Do-Gooders
Posted on December 05, 2008The Includer, if it ever exists, will write when and where it wants to. Just like the laptop that I bought in March 2007 at Office Depot in Hyde Park, Chicago for David Ellison-Bey of Episode 3. He was making good use of a Time Dollar Tutoring computer, which has provided thousands of refurbished computers to children and adults on the South Side...
The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here
Posted on December 02, 2008Social software -- technology that enables interactions among multiple people -- has existed for almost a half century now. (Clay Shirky, in a widely linked essay on this topic, traces the roots of social software to the PLATO system, built at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s...
Freedom Fone goes on the road
Posted on December 01, 2008Freedom Fone had its first public debut at the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) 2008 Forum in Cape Town, 14-17 November. The event was a great opportunity to deploy Freedom Fone - even in its software prototype state. We prepared different content for each of the four days of the conference, and ran four "channels," or options which users could access when they phoned in: Highlighted sessions, Interviews with presenters, Culture and inspiration, and the Feminist Tech Hunt, which was run in association with Take Back the Tech...
Tough economic times put a new spin on the Beanstockd Game
Posted on November 30, 2008It's official: the US economy is in recession. The reality of our current economic crisis has hit corporations hard and is now starting to affect the American consumer. Reports on this year's Black Friday show that the annual post-Thanksgiving shopper has a new attitude, one that is cautious about what and how much is bought...
The IncluderEpisode 12Wisdom In Characters
Posted on November 28, 2008I read Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. On my Sony PRS-505 Reader, thanks to Ricardo. On my three-hour rides through the mountains between Sarajevo and Tuzla, thanks to the American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Also in bed, when I unwind, before I'd fall asleep, in my room in Grbavica, without Internet, thanks to God, who lets me wake up offline in every way, on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, so that I might devote my best intensity to my life's quest...
Happy Thanksgiving! Love, Beanstockd
Posted on November 26, 2008As Thanksgiving approaches, we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the past few months and offer a few words of thanks. This past August, after winning the MTV-Knight Foundation Young Creators Award, appearing in Entrepreneur Magazine, and participating in the summer-long DreamIT Ventures incubator program, Beanstockd relocated to New York City...
Two Weeks, Two Stories, Too Early For A Victory Dance
Posted on November 24, 2008It has been two weeks since the "official" launch of Spot.Us. I'm happy with its progress, but I remain unsatisfied. The new media hype has been great. I'm truly honored at how much attention Spot.Us has received, the optimistic and hopeful remarks, the young journalists with questions, etc...
Populous Code Released
Posted on November 24, 2008I have an exciting, albeit brief, announcement to make about our progress on the Populous project (formerly known as the Community News Network). Today we publicly released all of our code, in alpha, on the social coding site GitHub. The entirely of our progress so far is there, which at this point is an extremely powerful and flexible content management system...
Market Research for The Beanstockd Game
Posted on November 23, 2008We're doing a bit of market research to understand how different communities perceive and can benefit from The Beanstockd Game. Because the competition is so community-centric, tailoring the nuances of the game (prizes, length of game cycle, competitors, etc...
The IncluderEpisode 11$100 Solar Project
Posted on November 21, 2008Do you ever have an extra day? or a day's wage? A denarius, as in Roman days? A Sunday or twelve hours of sun spread out over a year? The Includer is a human-sized device, the product of a human-sized economy, the sum of working one day at a time. Jackton Arija was the spark for the day in question...
Two Different Media/Game Approaches to Delivering Content
Posted on November 21, 2008There are a couple of new things happening in our research group. Just a quick reminder first: we had an outside contractor for our mini-games idea that we decided to part with, and then we were also working with Distill Interactive for a game-like environment...
The Next Newsroom Proposal is complete
Posted on November 20, 2008It is with great pleasure that I'd like to announce that we have completed work on our newsroom proposal for The Chronicle, the independent, student-run newspaper at Duke University. The Chronicle’s board has adopted our proposal for a new home...
The Pitch: Bringing Together Seattle's Best Media Minds
Posted on November 20, 2008So here's The Pitch: Put together some of the smartest, most engaged, passionate thinkers about the changing media landscape in a room, buy them a few drinks, and let the conversation flow. That's the premise behind a series of meet-ups in Seattle, put together by Jason Preston, a social media consultant with the Parnassus Group...
Reporting for Games
Posted on November 17, 2008Much 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...
Student R&D Can Show the Way for Media
Posted on November 17, 2008Placeblogger, 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 ...
Toward a National Journalism Foundation
Posted on November 17, 2008Amid so much talk of federal bailouts for the banking and auto industries, what would a national bailout plan for journalism look like? If you were given $700 billion to save journalism, how would you use it? How would you fix the system? The End of Commercial Media Several months ago I watched Roger Alton, the new editor of the Britain daily, The Independent, get absolutely skewered by Stephen Sackur on the BBC evening talk show, Hard Talk...
Beanstockd is a We Media Game Changers Award finalist
Posted on November 14, 2008We are happy to announce that Beanstockd has been named one of 35 finalists for the We Media Game Changers Award, which recognizes people, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media. We're honored to share the finalist list with major digital influencers such as Twitter, Digg, Huffington Post and of course the James L...
Stack Overflow Sets an Example for News Commenting Systems
Posted on November 14, 2008Here's a poorly-kept secret: I hang out with Web developers all day. And by their nature, Web developers tend to be Web savvy, and Web natives. Which means they are already using and hacking and rebuilding the next big thing online before most of us have ever laid our eyes on it...
The IncluderEpisode 10Our Good Idea
Posted on November 14, 2008The Includer grows wings. An idea can't fly on a single wing or even two or three. An idea soars when inspired from every angle. Just as a gangster's heart can't shut out love from all directions. Who among us can take credit for a miracle? It's the logic of the Glory of a greater Inspirer...
Bloggers Demonstrate the Difference Diversity Makes
Posted on November 13, 2008Two days after the election both UNITY and the National Association of Black Journalists sent out open letters urging the media to redouble their efforts to diversify staffs in the aftermath of the historic election of Barak Obama. At the same time, others privately wondered if there some people who would argue that the election of the first African-American president signaled the country has moved past the need to be concerned about racial equity...
Whither Online Social Networks?
Posted on November 10, 2008My "innovation project" team of master's students at the Medill School is tackling two interesting challenges: (1) improving the tools available for online interaction around news (for instance, better ways of commenting) and (2) engaging young adults in local news...
Spot.Us: Launching a Site and Being Iterative
Posted on November 10, 2008Anybody that's been following my posts on IdeaLab should notice a pattern. Growing a Community and the Importance of Being Iterative Eliminating the Fear of Being Open and the Importance of Being Iterative Starting Small and the Importance of Being Iterative I'm always trying to chop Spot...
Job Openings at Social Entrepreneurial Startup
Posted on November 09, 2008Company background: Gram Vaani is a social entrepreneurial startup focused on building innovative models of media delivery for rural areas of India. Media is an important agency to bring social change and responsible politics, but novel technological and business methods are required to successfully and scalably enable services in the challenging rural environments...
Twittering the Minnesota U.S. Senate Recount
Posted on November 06, 2008Politicos and media-types are crowd sourcing the continuous change in the unofficial count between Al Franken and incumbent Senator Norm Coleman. By coalescing around the tag #mnrecount on Twitter, a dynamic conversation and exchange is developing. You can see the national reaction with simple searches of franken and coleman as well...
UCLA students get news from YouTube
Posted on November 05, 2008An exit poll conducted Nov. 4 by the Daily Bruin suggests, unsurprisingly, that UCLA students received a substantial amount of information about the election from the Internet and social media sites. Eight hundred sixteen students were polled at five locations on and around campus, and we ended up with a margin of error of 3%...
The IncluderEpisode 9Africans Want to Chat With You
Posted on November 05, 2008Imagine living on $1 a day and spending $1 an hour to chat with you! Fred Kayiwa: Hi Andrius I'm multitasking as I'm blogging this. Listening to John McCain's gracious concession and reading Kennedy Owino's and Francis Opiyo Opiyo's rejoicing from Kenya in Barack Obama's victory, and preparing sample test problems for my algebra students here in Bosnia...
enviroVOTE: Side Project for Two Programmer-Journalists
Posted on November 05, 2008Some more evidence that interesting things can happen when computer programmers spend some time learning (and thinking about) journalism: enviroVOTE. The site, built by "hacker journalists" Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, aggregates election results from around the country (contests for president, governor, U...
a challenge: creating internet platforms for the world's poorest
Posted on November 03, 2008This week, I've given a lot of thought to how poor communities on the other side of the digital divide are able to connect. The Internet is now only accessible by a tiny portion of humanity; Probably less than 20% of humanity has regular internet access, and in rural India, where 700 million people live, it must be a far, far smaller number...
Plans for Beanstockd Mobile
Posted on November 03, 2008Recently we've been getting a lot of emails from people seeking advice on applying for the Knight News Challenge. We're excited to see so many of our friends and fans of Beanstockd applying to the contest! Good luck, and for some advice writing the full proposal, be sure to check out this article by Amy Gahran...
What Bloggers Are Saying About the U.S. Election
Posted on November 03, 2008Tomorrow's American election stands out for many reasons; among them that a large percentage of the world's 6.5 billion people will have something to say about who wins. Never before have so many individuals shared so many opinions about any other single topic in the history of humanity...
The IncluderEpisode 8People Vs. Ideas
Posted on November 01, 2008The Includer stays alive, as an idea, thanks to last year's Knight News Challenge. At the Las Vegas awards ceremony, I told one of the judges, maybe I got lucky? He assured me that I won because my idea was original. A billion people live within walking distance to the Internet, but there is no device for them, no Includer, so that they might read and write emails at home onto a USB flash drive, and then upload and download them once a week at an Internet cafe...
Not all colleges are hip on social media
Posted on October 31, 2008Right now I'm attending a national conference in Kansas City (Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers) for student news organizations, and I must say I've been underwhelmed. There was a keynote yesterday afternoon from Rich Beckman, a professor at the University of Miami School of Communication...
Media R&D: How Philanthropy, Journalism Education and Industry Can Partner
Posted on October 31, 2008The Crunchberry Project is now officially past the halfway point, and I'm getting a clearer picture of what our student team can accomplish in the remainder of the fall quarter at the Medill School. The students' vision is coalescing around a Web site that enables young adults to interact with news and information via different types of "comment structures," which we're defining as forms of user interaction...
Apply for a Knight News Challenge Grant by Nov. 1
Posted on October 30, 2008Here at MediaShift Idea Lab, you get to hear directly from all the innovators who received grants from the Knight Foundation in the News Challenge. Now, you have the chance to join them by coming up with an idea that will help connect communities with technology and the Internet and help create the next generation of community news...
The Role of Citizen Media in Ensuring Fair Elections
Posted on October 30, 2008Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times describing the fears some voters in Duval County, Florida have that their early votes will be lost and never counted. I found the article deeply disturbing. It wasn't because it surprised me that people fear their votes won't be counted (that fear has some precedent in Duval County, where 26,000 ballots were discarded in the 2000 election), but because it brought into focus for me the apprehensive feelings I've been having about the upcoming election...
The IncluderEpisode 7Vote For Losers!
Posted on October 29, 2008The Includer is the voting machine for ones dreams.(There are no apostrophes on this Bosnian keyboard.) I am blogging thanks to last years Knight News Challenge. November 1 is the last day to apply this year. What I really like about this contest is that everybody can see your entry...
Agile Programming: a Good Model for Journalism-Technology Collaborations?
Posted on October 28, 2008In my experience in media companies and academia, developing or implementing new software is almost always a painful process. The people who are going to use the software can't communicate what they want, and the developers don't understand the end users' needs...
The IncluderEpisode 6Help Room
Posted on October 26, 2008The Includer gives way to the Help Room. The more intensely we work offline, the more intensely we engage each other online. I share my proposal to the Knight News Challenge. The deadline is November 1. I ask for $180,000 for this three-year project...
Who's Watching the Elections?
Posted on October 24, 2008Every election, Gotham Gazette publishes a last minute voters guide. We almost always include every local race along with a round up of our coverage of the issues in that district and the race itself. From Surrogate Court and judicial convention delegates to NYC congressional races; and sometimes we're the only publication in town that can tell you whether there's a race in your precinct...
MobileActive in South Africa
Posted on October 22, 2008Brenda Burrell, technical director of Kubatana.net has attended the two previous MobileActive conferences and has found them very useful. It was at the 2005 MobileActive Conference in Toronto that Brenda first discussed the idea of Freedom Fone and where she was able to meet developers to help her make her idea a reality...
Is Barack Obama the newsroom of the future?
Posted on October 20, 2008This thought occurred to me over the weekend when I heard that Barack Obama's campaign had purchased advertising space in video games. According this Associated Press Article: "Nine video games from Electronic Arts Inc., ranging from the extremely popular 'Madden 09' football game to the street racing 'Burnout: Paradise,' feature in-game ads from the Obama campaign...
Scaling the Beanstockd Game
Posted on October 20, 2008When we developed the Beanstockd concept we created it with a specific target demographic in mind: college students and young professionals with a taste for trends, technology, and some passing knowledge of the green movement. These were our friends on campus and fresh out of school- intelligent young adults who were aware of the environmental crisis, but were busy! As such, they did not have enough incentive or structure to enable them to "go green" in their everyday lives...
The IncluderEpisode 5Hardship Letter
Posted on October 18, 2008The Includer is a device for listening to a person's deepest thoughts. This may take twelve years, which is how long I have known David Ellison-Bey. In July, his house was foreclosed. He then asked for my help to review his many bills. They reflect the American economy, which weighs on his shoulders...
The Five Biggest Barriers to Online Participation -- and What to Do About Them
Posted on October 18, 2008Team Crunchberry -- so-called because we're thinking about Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home of a large Quaker Oats cereal factory responsible for the nickname "City of the Five Smells" -- has emerged from its ideation process with a core idea and a target audience...
Microblogging Tools for your Newsroom
Posted on October 16, 2008I thought about ReportingOn for more than a year before the public beta launched on October 1; I turned the idea over in my head, scrawled back-of-a-napkin sketches, and built several HTML prototypes before I ever got close to building something with dynamic code...
Student innovation team explores needs of young adults
Posted on October 13, 2008The Crunchberry Project -- the innovation class that includes the first two Knight News Challenge programmer-journalists -- is moving forward rapidly. The six journalism master's students involved in the project started out exploring "conversations around news...
A Key Game Design Debate in The Beanstockd Game
Posted on October 13, 2008Last week, we spoke at length with 42 Entertainment founder Elan Lee, who managed to break down in 10 minutes concepts that we had derived over the course of many months of debate. Over a year ago as we pieced together our game conceptually, much of our time was spent scrutinizing the specifics of the game: the interface, the rules, and the rewards...
Interactive Literacy
Posted on October 13, 2008What does it mean to be truly literate with new media? Certainly, it means more than the ability to send email and browse websites. Recent commentaries on new media literacy have emphasized the importance of the ability to analyze media critically and the ability to participate actively in online communities...
The IncluderEpisode 4Phone + USB = Brilliant
Posted on October 12, 2008Ricardo submitted a brilliant idea for Google's 10 to the 100th competition. The idea is to get mobile phone manufacturers to add a USB Host Interface to fairly cheap GPRS mobile phones, so they can control peripherals, such as cheap PC Keyboards, flash drives, etc, and more expensive devices like printers, where the cost is shared among many people in a village, business, school, medical centre, etc...
Can the Internet have a heart?
Posted on October 11, 2008I attended a conference on "Online Giving Marketplaces" at Stanford University this past week, which was a great gathering of online donation, volunteer, and social matchmaking sites like Kiva.org and GlobalGiving. The kind of organizations that are doing in the social service sector what sites like Prosper...
Printcasting Prototype Video
Posted on October 10, 2008As I mentioned in my last post, Printcasting is finally beginning to take shape. We're very excited to have a working prototype that performs the very basic tasks: pulling in RSS feeds, flowing feeds into print templates, and placing targeted self-serve ads...
Finding Political Sleazemongers
Posted on October 09, 2008I have invited researchers at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media to participate in an effort to blow the whistle on groups who are falsely presenting themselves as "ordinary bloggers," but instead are paid to spread false information about candidates during the 2008 campaign in viral internet campaigns to influence voters...
One Week of ReportingOn, International Style
Posted on October 08, 2008One week after launching ReportingOn in a public beta that's helping me prioritize features and fix bugs in my programming, there is one big surprise: The large international turnout. The Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking media blogosphere appears to be truly excited about the idea of Twitter para periodistas, even as I try to differentiate from Twitter as fast as I can...
A Talk with the Creator of Drupal
Posted on October 08, 2008Here at the IdeaLab, we've been hearing a lot over the past year about Drupal, the open source content management system that is now powering tens of thousands of websites, including Ourmedia, The Onion, Sony Music artists (I really like myplay...
If you're too old for Oregon Trail, why would you play an educational computer game? (Gaming Incentives)
Posted on October 08, 2008Yesterday during my bi-weekly "sarah palin" "snl" google search, I stumbled upon The Political Machine Express, a downloadable version of the popular PC game The Political Machine 2008 in which, "players take on the role of campaign manager for a US Presidential candidate...
The IncluderEpisode 3The Chain of Angels
Posted on October 07, 2008The Includer is a tool for a solitary thinker. When we center our world on the solitary thinker, then we'll all be one, in life and death, in our evergrowth - our choice to grow forever, to live forever. Let's connect the scattered dots. David Ellison-Bey and I are still up...
Medill student innovators -- including "programmer-journalists" -- focus on conversations around news
Posted on October 05, 2008It's been almost a year and a half since a grant from the Knight Foundation allowed the Medill School to offer journalism master's program scholarships to experienced programmer-developers. Since then, on this Web site, I've been documenting the experience of the first two "programmer-journalists...
Denver Open Media Close to Selecting Beta Sites
Posted on October 05, 2008In just over a month, the 6 organizations who will participate in the first round of the Open Media Beta process will be selected, cooperating with Denver Open Media to implement and develop the set of Drupal Modules that will help automate workflows, engage users in more control of the station, increase your online presence, and take the next step in cooperating as a true network of locally-focused, user-driven community media centers...
The IncluderEpisode 2Year 2
Posted on October 03, 2008Ricardo and I spoke by phone for ninety minutes about our laboratory's strategy for the Includer and making the most of limited Internet access in Africa. Thank you to our African participants - Samwel Kongere, Kennedy Owino, Fred Kayiwa, Peter Ongele, Kofi Thompson, James Njunge, William Wambura, Wendi Losha Bernadette, Joseph Runnel Lule, Betty Kyewa, Josephat Ndibalema and many more! - for giving our Minciu Sodas laboratory such great vitality around the world...
Why ReportingOn Launched on Django
Posted on October 03, 2008First things first: ReportingOn is live, it's a public beta, and it's built in Django. Whoo-hoo! I have a long list of things to polish, add, tweak, revise, and rethink, but it was time to open the site up to users and let them help me figure it out...
Beanstockd in 500 words or less
Posted on September 30, 2008If you haven't already read our mid-summer update (found here) I'll give you the abridged version. My name is Angela Antony, and my cofounder's name is Sandra Ekong. We were roommates at Harvard. Like most things hip and cutting edge, Beanstockd was born in Paris...
South African Seniors Speak: Age Demands Action
Posted on September 29, 2008Originally published on Rising Voices. Which group is most affected by today's digital divide? The poor? Those who live in rural communities? The so-called Global South? Women? To a greater or lesser degree, they have all tended to benefit less from the advantages and opportunities afforded by the internet than, say, young men living in urban North America, Western Europe, and East Asia...
The IncluderEpisode 1Sisterhood
Posted on September 28, 2008The Includer can't work simply as a device. We can write, but whose heart will leap to respond? We learn from Wendi Losha Bernadette of Actwid Kongadzem, a women's organization in Cameroon: We all wish to thank Janet for her wonderful contribution written out on our behalf which first read exactly as if she was writing from our minds eyes...
Framing the Candidates (Part Three): The Daily Show Parodies
Posted on September 28, 2008Over the past two posts, I've suggested ways educators could use the campaign bio videos produced for the two national conventions as a way of encouraging civic literacy. I've suggested that they are powerful examples of the different ways that the parties "frame" their candidates and platforms...
Are We Ready for Citizen Journateerism?
Posted on September 28, 2008Thanks 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...
Framing the Candidates: The Vice Presidential Videos
Posted on September 26, 2008Last time, I introduced George Lakoff's argument that the two major American political parties adopt different frames, based on images of parenthood and the family, for understanding the political process: the Strict Father paradigm associated with Republicans and the Nurturing Parent paradigm associated with the Democrats...
Innovations in Storytelling: Using Comics for Journalism
Posted on September 25, 2008Over the summer, I saw an incredibly exciting piece of visual journalism over at USA TODAY. The production involved a mash-up of sorts between one of USA TODAY's most popular bloggers (Pop Candy), Twitter, some comic book artists, and a nifty bit of flash animation...
The IncluderEpisode 0Our Hero
Posted on September 25, 2008My story is real, except for the Includer, which may yet some day be real as well. The Includer is a device for Africans or anybody to read and write emails and other texts stored on their USB flash drives. Once a week they might walk the three miles or so to their Internet cafe to upload their emails and download more...
U.S. Government Should Publish All Mortgages It Buys
Posted on September 24, 2008It appears that the United States government is going to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad mortgages in an effort to prevent the collapse of the world's financial system. If they do, I'd like them to publish a list of all of the mortgages they purchase -- the loan number, the address of the property, the lender, the amount of the loan, the status of the loan, the plaintiffs and defendants in any associated foreclosure cases, and so on...
Wiki Our Next Segment
Posted on September 24, 2008I was pretty sad when Radio Open Source went off the air, because I thought they were tugging at the loose threads of something interesting, and they never got to properly unravel it. Breaking news and reporters getting leads from the short message service Twitter are interesting phenomena but I don't think they can create the kind of community that you need to bring an audience into reporting...
Framing the Candidates: A Closer Look at Biography Videos
Posted on September 24, 2008George Lakoff's book, Don't Think About an Elephant, has been one of the most influential arguments about the nature of American politics to emerge in recent years. Lakoff, a linguist, turned his attention to the "framing" of political discourse. If you want to look more closely at his argument, "A Man of His Words" is an online excerpt which pulls out most of the ideas that are going to interest us here...
Unconventional: How Mobile Reporting "Stuck it to the Man."
Posted on September 23, 2008It's been a few weeks since our whirlwind of reporting from the political conventions, which has given me a bit of a chance to reflect on how it all went down. From celebrity-studded parties, to the tear gassing of protesters, to lots and lots of young voters, mobile reporting using new technologies was instrumental to our coverage...
New Liability Insurance Program for Bloggers
Posted on September 23, 2008Here is a simple, but often ignored, truth: if you publish online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video, or even a user comment, you open yourself up to potential legal liability. It doesn't matter whether you are a professional journalist, hockey-mom, or an obscure blogger, if you post it, you'll need to be prepared for the legal consequences...
Open Invitation to the Alliance for Community Media Conference
Posted on September 20, 2008Denver Open Media is hosting the Western Regional Alliance for Community Media Conference, Oct 23-25, 2008 in Denver, CO. We will be showcasing the Drupal Modules being developed to empower user-generated media in our communities through Public Access TV stations and Community Technology Centers...
Meet The Printcasting Team
Posted on September 16, 2008One of the most exciting times in the development of any new product is when concepts begin to give way to reality. That's the phase we're entering now with Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing and make print advertising affordable for local businesses...
iamnews: A Global DIY Newsroom
Posted on September 15, 2008As one of the very early members of the Online News Association, I've attended my share of ONA conferences over the years. This year, I wasn't able to attend the annual gathering that ended in Washington, DC, over the weekend. Instead, I spent most of last weekend at TechCrunch50, a technology conference in San Francisco now in its second year put on by TechCrunch, one of those upstart startups that may put the San Jose Mercury News out of business some day...
Can the Political Press Self-Correct? Spinewatch Hopes it Can
Posted on September 15, 2008Fellow IdeaLabber Jay Rosen, an NYU journalism professor and PressThinker, mounted a campaign this weekend to encourage the political press to grow a spine. Rosen and others are calling for journalists of all stripes (professionals, amateurs, citizens, bloggers, etc...
Start with the Low Hanging Fruit with Software Development
Posted on September 15, 2008A key component of Freedom Fone is the software development we will undertake over the next two years. Last weekend Brenda and I met with a handful of people who have experience with open source development projects like those we'll be undertaking. We got to share our ideas and experiences to date developing the Freedom Fone prototype, and we benefited from their contributions and suggestions...
Are the Info Needs of Local Communities Being Served?
Posted on September 15, 2008Last week, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy arrived in Silicon Valley to hold the first of its three planned community forums. I was asked to speak on a panel that day about "technology and innovation" but hung around for most of the day to listen to the other two panels and the wide-ranging discussion...
The Travails of Taking a CPU Tower from Zimbabwe to France
Posted on September 15, 2008Brenda and I went to Paris recently for a development launch and brainstorming meeting for Freedom Fone. In addition to picking the brains of a small handful of experts in the field, we thought it would be a good opportunity to have some of our equipment assessed...
Challenges for the Collegiate Press, Part 2
Posted on September 12, 2008Yesterday I wrote about the financial troubles impacting some of the nation's collegiate newspapers -- the public struggles of the Daily Cal and the Daily Orange, and the less public struggles of many of the papers that are quietly looking to the future and worrying...
Eliminating the Fear of Being Open
Posted on September 12, 2008Spot.Us is about to hit the ground running. We hope to have something to show in mid-to-late October (assuming everything stays on schedule). We've gotten here through a couple of stages. The Cliffs Note version of that is as follows. Stage one: Narratives After realizing Spot...
Challenges for the Collegiate Press, Part 1
Posted on September 11, 2008This is the first half of a two-part series on the financial challenges facing college newspapers, and what they can do to embrace the future. There was an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today about the financial state of student newspapers...
Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File
Posted on September 10, 2008During the 2004 presidential election season, I ran a column in Technology Review Online which described the way that average citizens were exploiting their expanded capacity to manipulate and circulate images to create the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons...
Public Information Done Right
Posted on September 10, 2008I spent Tuesday in Washington DC at Websites Without Walls. A nine hour trip for a four hour meeting always makes me nervous, but we're passionately interested in seeing New York City match Washington DC's astounding wealth of open public data. Never knew that the District publishes an astounding wealth of usable public information? Me neither...
Youth, New Media Literacies, and Civic Engagement
Posted on September 07, 2008This fall, I am going to be teaching a course on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement, which is designed to help facilitate conversations across two of the projects we run through the Comparative Media Studies program: the Center for Future Civic Media, funded by the Knight Foundation as a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, and Project NML (New Media Literacies), which is funded by the MacArthur Foundation...
Listen and Learn: Recording in Harare's Cafes
Posted on September 03, 2008Even though we're still a few months, and a telephony server with a PCI slot, short of our first deployment, the Freedom Fone creative team has been hitting Harare's arts scene. In an effort to train our ears and give our digital audio editing fingers a work out, we've been recording some audio at a few public events...
Street Team Exclusive: Palin Liked Romney, Paul In Primaries
Posted on September 02, 2008Back in February, on Super Tuesday, MTV News/Knight Foundation Street Teamer Dani Carlson did a Flixwagon mobile phone interview with Alaska Governor -- and now presumptive Republican vice-presidential candidate -- Sarah Palin, who had some interesting things to say about energy policy and the "party machinery...
Takeaways from the Conference
Posted on June 14, 2008Some takeaways from the Future of Civic Media conference, showcasing Knight News Challenge winners, that ended yesterday at the MIT Media Lab in Boston: ? All in all, it was a fascinating gathering of some of the real thought leaders who will be driving new media forward in the coming years...
Initial Milestones from Denver
Posted on June 13, 2008Goal 1: Staffing. Our first goal for the Deproduction / Denver Open Media project was to establish the development team. In June, we hired long-time contractor Brian Hiatt, as well as his partner/designer Sharee Dierringer, merging their Drupal development shop, Civic Pixel, into the Deproduction Family...
The Sites in their Sights
Posted on June 13, 2008So which are the regular websites visited by the big names at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media conference? I asked people like Jay Rosen, JD Lasica, Amy Gahran, Paul Grabowicz, Henry Jenkins and others to share their favorites. Surveying ten or so folks shows that top of the list is Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine...
Trying to Solve the Civic Media Participation Gap
Posted on June 13, 2008Knight News Challenge winners are meeting at MIT to discuss the future of civic media. The focus has been on PARTICIPATORY culture and the skills that the youth and others need. Problems that have been identified include the following: Transparency problem: people are swimming in media Participation gap: resources growing in the life of young vs...
1st day at Knight News Challenge Winners Conference
Posted on June 12, 2008I am in Boston at the Center of Future of Civic Media which hosts the Knight News Challenge Conference. Yesterday after registering I assisted to the welcome speech by Alberto Ibarguen. He believes that what Knight is doing is the next big thing happening...
Live-Blogging Future of Civic Media Gathering
Posted on June 12, 2008CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- I am in the swanky Stata Center at MIT for the conference on "The Future of Civic Media," put on by the new Center for Future Civic Media. Nearly all the Idea Lab bloggers are here in attendance as the Knight Foundation is using this gathering to help all News Challenge winners get to know each other and collaborate more...
Election Day Could Be Our Own Pangia Day
Posted on June 11, 2008When the filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED), her wish was to create one day where people across the world gathered at the same time to watch films produced by international filmmakers. Best known for her film Control Room(film), Noujaim believed the power of the films could help the audience see beyond our differences to the humanity that binds us together...
AFRICAN CELLPHONE MEDIA: HOSTAGE TO POLICY DELAYS
Posted on June 11, 2008There are a couple of delays in implementing our Iindaba Ziyafika - the news is coming project around cellphone journalism, supported by the Knight Foundation - but the tardy policy context in South Africa is also a constraint. At present in South Africa, at least six out of ten adults have access to cellphones, but their main use is for interpersonal conversation...
Civic Media Innovation Camps
Posted on June 11, 2008I've just arrived at MIT in Boston, where the Future of Civic Media conference is being held over the next three days. Attendees are gathering to compare notes, soak up new ideas (including some smart technologies devised by students here) and tease out ways to maximize the impact of civic media in our lives...
Twittering from the Future of Civic Media Meeting
Posted on June 11, 2008Opening panel at the conference is talking from local media (as civic media), ranging to macro political level. Tweeting the debates.
Voces Bolivianas Featured in Vamos Magazine
Posted on June 10, 2008Rising Voices aims not just to get new communities actively participating in the conversational web, but also to introduce their voices to mainstream media outlets so that, for once, under-represented communities are portrayed by their own residents. While the majority of the ten current Rising Voices outreach projects have been covered by mainstream media organization, Voces Bolivianas takes the prize when it comes to attracting national and international media attention...
Will 3G iPhone Help Push Geo-Based News?
Posted on June 10, 2008Apple's announcement yesterday of a GPS-enabled iPhone is further fanning the flames of excitement around location based services and mobile social networking. Being able to connect with friends (and strangers), and to interact with your immediate environment via your smartphone is the new new thing...
A Participatory News Agenda
Posted on June 08, 2008We all know that the "audience" analogy no longer represents the way journalism should work. We know that the people reading the news have opinions, perspectives, and facts that are relevant to the conversation. Some of them just have observations, but others are reporters at heart or maybe they have the wordsmithing abilities of a columnist...
Smart Mobs for News Participation
Posted on June 08, 2008Following is part 3 of my 3-part series on open APIs and crowdsourcing community news. Part 1, Part 2.At the NetSquared conference for nonprofits in San Jose on May 27-28, one of the most intriguing projects I heard about was Social Actions, a project to tie together disparate cause movements through an open API that would aggregate information about dozens of different campaigns and allow users to take action to further a cause...
we need a PowerPoint to make games
Posted on June 07, 2008I just returned from Ottawa where Nicole and I went to collaborate with Distill. We spent two days in their office and it was a positive learning experience. I should make a premise that distil is trying to build a system that will allow non tech-savvy users, with little knowledge of coding, to create a game or game-like environment in a simple way and in a short time...
Laptops in the most disadvantaged areas of Uruguay
Posted on June 07, 2008The following is a translation of a post by Rising Voices grantee and Plan Ceibal coordinator Pablo Flores, who details some of the upcoming challenges and opportunities as the OLPC project in Uruguay spreads to the capital city, Montevideo. If we look at how the next phases of expansion of Plan Ceibal (OLPC in Uruguay), it is apparent that we are about to face some new challenges...
On Organizing Media and Organizing a Conference
Posted on June 07, 2008At Journalism That Matters "The New Pamphleteers," held earlier this week in Minneapolis, every session meant horizontal communication: no one on a stage, a circle of chairs with the facilitator at the same level as anyone else. John Nichols is most certainly one of my favorite organizers of the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), going on now in Minneapolis...
Prison Diaries Show the Reality of Life Behind Bars in Jamaica
Posted on June 05, 2008When thinking of Kingston, Jamaica, blogging and podcasting are far from the first words to come to mind. "Murder capital of the world", sure. Bob Marley and reggae music, of course. But a cutting edge prison rehabilitation program, which teaches prisoners at a maximum security correctional institute how to blog, podcast, and even participate in Second Life? Photo of Tower Street Correctional Facility by Christina Xu That is precisely what Students Expressing Truth (S...
Killing Trees and the Future of News Online
Posted on June 04, 2008Seth Godin on the news buiness versus the paper business: Jason wrote in to ask why I thought that the newspaper industry was in a Dip. In my book, I point out that with classified ads disappearing and the web thriving, the days of newspapers as we know them are clearly over...
The first EveryBlock 'special report'
Posted on June 03, 2008(Cross-posted to the EveryBlock Blog.) We've launched our first EveryBlock "special report" -- an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation "Operation Crooked Code." As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block...
Google News Layered in Google Earth
Posted on June 02, 2008At the Where 2.0 conference in May, Google announced Google News would be now be accessible and located in Google Earth. As Brandon Badger, Product Manager noted in his Lat Long Blog entry The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser...
Give the Public Access to Public Records
Posted on May 29, 2008I'm on an open API kick here at IdeaLab, so here's the second of three entries on the potential of application programming interface for news organizations. (I'll post a final video interview on Monday.) This is a way to give the public true access to public records...
Open-source Software
Posted on May 28, 2008Western Kentucky University if one of seven academic programs working on a joint Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge grant (Ithaca College, Kansas State, Michigan State, Saint Michael's College, the Univeristy of Kansas, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas)...
NY Times to Test Crowdsourcing Its Data
Posted on May 27, 2008News about a potentially big deal in the newspaper industry broke just before the holiday weekend. No, not another story about a chain swallowing another chain, or news about the formation of yet another online advertising platform that's doomed to underperform...
Still seeking coders interested in journalism
Posted on May 26, 2008It's now been almost exactly a year since we announced (thanks to a Knight News Challenge grant) that programmer-developers could earn full scholarships to study journalism in the master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. We've got plenty of scholarship money still available -- but we have not been overwhelmed with applications...
From GeoGraffiti to GeoJournalism
Posted on May 25, 2008I recently began playing around with a new service called GeoGraffiti, which allows you to post or access voice notes or "markers" while at a specific physical location using any cell phone. I like the idea of localized, user generated information which GeoGraffiti is a platform for...
Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations
Posted on May 24, 2008Before 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...
COLLABORATION WITH DISTILL
Posted on May 24, 2008Finally I am able to post independetly, and after the semester is over I will have a chance to work more on the news project. As a matter of fact I already started working on it. I have an internship for the summer at the Johnson Simulation Center and I worked 3 days of this weeks on the news game...
Rising Voices at the Global Voices Summit 2008
Posted on May 23, 2008What is the state of the global blogosphere? Where is participatory media growing the fastest? And where, for that matter, are new voices being restricted by state censorship? Is social media actually changing the electoral landscape in emerging democracies like Armenia, Kenya, and Venezuela? Has the promise of an international, barrier-free, multilingual conversation finally become reality? Most importantly, where do we go from here? How do we encourage dialog in times of heated international debate? How do we bring new voices from new communities into the universe of web 2...
What Does Popular Culture Have to Do With Civic Media?
Posted on May 23, 2008The Center for Future Civic Media is collaborating with the MIT Communications Forum to host an ongoing series of conversations about media and civic engagement. This past term, we hosted two such exchanges --- "Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," an exchange between University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein (Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge) and Harvard University law professor Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) and "Youth and Civic Engagement" with University of Washington political science professor Lance Bennett, actvist Alan Khazei (Be the Change), and our own Ingeborg Endter (formerly with the Computer Clubhouse project, now a key player at the Center for Future Civic Media...
YouTube Lauches New Citizen News Channel
Posted on May 22, 2008This week YouTube announced it's very own citizen news channel, and assigned a news manager named Olivia Ma, to run it. You can apparently reach her at citizennews@youtube.com Just for fun, here is our own Dan Gillmor, talking on YouTube about how web censorship is affecting citizen journalism, posted prior to the launch of the YouTube Citizen news channel...
Any There at Where 2.0?
Posted on May 19, 2008Where 2.0 happened May 12-14 at the San Francisco Airport Marriot just south of the city. This annual event, now in its 4th year, is a strange mix of grassroots geo-enthusiasts and entrepreneurial geo-hackers. Where 2.0 is primarily a developer's conference, so the majority of time and certainly the focus was on tools and how they function and less on how these tools are being used...
Into the Budget Dungeon
Posted on May 19, 2008Today, Gotham Gazette unveils the second of its news games: The Budget Maze. With challenges and a dash of humor, the game presents an entertaining way to educate New Yorkers about one of the eternal mysteries of policy and politics in the city: How the budget is determined...
Tandem to be powered by local communities
Posted on May 16, 2008We are charging ahead with the Tandem Project, developed by a team of students this past year as part of the Innovation Incubator Project. Partnering with The Detroit News on the project, we hope for a launch in summer if we can get software issues handled...
Ceibal Jam! Developing Applications for the XO Laptop
Posted on May 14, 2008An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the '$100 laptop') to recreate the student computer's user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux...
Knight Announces News Challenge Winners
Posted on May 14, 2008Hello from sunny Las Vegas! I am here for the E&P Interactive Media Conference at the Rio Hotel, but also to welcome the next round of winners in the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge. These folks will soon be blogging here on Idea Lab, and it's quite a group of winners...
Can the classifieds be saved?
Posted on May 12, 2008Steve Outing -- who's been trying to prod the newspaper industry to embrace its digital multidirectional future for the past decade -- asked me what the future holds for newspaper classifieds. He's behind the site ReinventingClassifieds.com, an initiative aimed at bringing experts together to revive newspaper classifieds by finding a new business model that's relevant in the Internet age...
Medill Grad Students Study Locative Journalism
Posted on May 12, 2008At least once a day I ask myself how locative media can be used to more fully engage and connect folks to their communities. The question for this blog is a bit more focused: how can locative media and geo-localized content find form in the art and craft of journalism...
Sean Bell Illustrates Lines that Divide Us
Posted on May 12, 2008Blaring red headlines on the Drudge Report announced to the world that the three New York City Police who shot Sean Bell 50 times, killing him, were found not guilty. Drudge, with his right wing reputation, it turns out was one of the only mainstream white blogs to prominently play the Bell verdict...
It's Not Just a Newspaper Problem; It's a Media Problem
Posted on May 12, 2008This past week, the National Association of Music Retailers landed in San Francisco to hold their 50th annual convention. Never heard of them? Neither had I, until I responded to a random email pitch and decided to attend for a few hours. Essentially, NARM is a trade group that includes every piece of the music ecosystem, from artists and songwriters to retailers to record labels...
Connecting People, Content, and Community
Posted on May 11, 2008One of the main goals of online information design is to present content in a way that allows users/readers to find what they want. Tagging, the digital extension of newspaper sections, is one technique used on just about every modern news website as a way to help users browse or search, but that isn't the only way it can be useful...
Adopt a competitive mindset and avoid marketing myopia
Posted on May 11, 2008Adopting a Competitive mindset I've attended a few conferences and it appears to me that most folks in journalism hate advertising. Maybe that comes from seeing the last eight inches of their story end up on the composing room floor to make room for another two column by four-inch ad or just distrust of business...
Copyright and the Demise of Newspapers
Posted on May 08, 2008Neil Netanel, a highly regarded legal scholar, has an interesting post on Balkinization entitled "The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech." Netanel, who has written extensively on copyright issues, posits that part of the reason for the decline in newspapers stems from Internet competitors that build on the content and value that newspapers create...
Driving Forward, Toyota Style
Posted on May 08, 2008When Toyota first began to rise to prominence in this country, the company's cars were known as cheap, plasticky, not-to-be trusted imports. Now Toyota is on pace to unseat GM as the world's auto sales leader, and is regarded as one of the most innovative companies around...
Web developer: "Journalism is hard"
Posted on May 06, 2008Today I'm publishing a guest post from Ryan Mark, one of the first two journalist-programmers attending the Medill School of Journalism on a Knight News Challenge scholarship. Ryan is a 2004 graduate of Augustana College, where he earned a BA in computer science...
Looking for the Mouse in Media: Clay Shirky on the Cognitive Surplus
Posted on May 06, 2008Ever wondered: where's the time going to come from for all these nifty open source ventures people are planning? Clay Shirky says we got plenty. He just gave an extremely useful and imaginative speech to Web heads about where we are in media time. Shirky, who teaches in a different program at NYU, has a new book out: Here Comes Everybody ("The Power of Organizing Without Organizations...
Related Content in 100 words: an update
Posted on May 06, 2008Related Content will provide an easy way for people visiting a Drupal-powered newspaper site to connect articles to past reports, opinion pieces, letters to the editor, or feature stories- to relate any piece of content on the web site to any other piece...
A Collage of Business Models from NewsTools2008
Posted on May 05, 2008Some of the most interesting discussions and demonstrations at last week's NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley centered around making the changing news landscape sustainable. Here are some of the ideas I heard, along with a few of my own: 1) News Consultancies: Leveraging local information channels & relationships to connect average people with local influencers and experts...
Insights into News Games through Eyetracking / Usability
Posted on May 05, 2008I've been terrible about blogging...it's just not in my daily routine...so I've been letting others on our Knight grant team take up the slack. But now I really do have something to share that I hope spurs some comments and feedback (it will be very helpful as we grapple with these challenges...
Newspapers Struggling Online, Not Just in Print
Posted on May 04, 2008As disturbing as the recent numbers on declining print circulation and plunging advertising revenue at newspapers have been, less attention has been paid to ominous signs of a slow-down on the online side as well: - Most newspaper chains reported online revenue growth in single or low double digits this quarter, compared with growth rates of 15-20% or more a year ago...
Coming Home Online
Posted on May 02, 2008I've been thinking a lot about just how "local" most people want to be online. The greatest myth about the Internet is that people only want to go to world online. That they only care about creating social networks with friends or people like themselves with similar interests from thousands of miles away...
Open Government Data and the EveryBlock Project
Posted on May 01, 2008At EveryBlock, where my main role is to work with municipal governments to uncover new data sets, we're experimenting with a new form of journalism where we treat freshly updated public records as block-level news. It's a big job to acquire ongoing feeds of government data, and we have a broader goal of spreading the gospel of open data...
Stealth Reprints
Posted on May 01, 2008In an ideal world, I suppose, all information would be free and widely accessible. Maybe not credit records, health stats or income information -- but certainly journalism would be. Alas, though, we're not in an ideal world. On-line publications need readers (hits) to survive...
Thirteen Ways of Talking to a Programmer
Posted on April 30, 2008[With apologies to Wallace Stevens.] If you decide to venture beyond talking about how your news organization's site should work into actually changing how it does work, there's one essential skill you'll have to learn: how to talk to a programmer. Most nonprogrammers have no idea how to communicate their idea for a new feature or a whole new website in a way that's going to be useful to the person who's actually building that site...
Rising Voices Seeks Micro-Grant Proposals
Posted on April 30, 2008Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, in collaboration with the Open Society Institute Public Health Program's Health Media Initiative, is now accepting project proposals for the third round of microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects focused especially on public health issues involving marginalized populations...
Signal-to-Noise and Related Content
Posted on April 29, 2008Related Content: If you're in California's bay area, don't miss Drupal Day on Friday May 3, a special open session of NewsTools2008's mixing up journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs. Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio. Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools...
Finding a Good Domain Name
Posted on April 28, 2008Are all the good Internet domain names already owned by someone? No -- only the obvious ones are taken. Every new enterprise, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, needs a domain name -- the identifier that shows up in a brower's address field. For example, the MediaShift Idea Lab blog lives inside the Public Broadcasting Service's pbs...
Tying it All Together
Posted on April 27, 2008The IdeaLab bloggers have spent four months talking about technologies, roles, and rules surrounding journalism and digital media. Now it's time to take some of the insights from those posts and design a system that will allow citizens and journalists alike to inform the media conversation, connect with their communities, and democratically drive the social agenda...
Locative Media in the Newsroom
Posted on April 27, 2008Here's a short sampling of some of the ways that mainstream media in integrating locative (location-based) technology tools - some of which already been discussed on this blog. The folks at LoJoConnect are also conducting a survey of how newsrooms are using locative media...
Making Location the Centerpiece of the Story
Posted on April 27, 2008Seero, a new startup, is a "live on location," geo-broadcasting online app that mixes gps and video streaming by broadcasting and mapping in real-time. With the service, you broadcast live video, geo-tagging the content in real-time as you go. If folks are logged on to the site, they can follow in you in real-time; or if they aren't online at the moment, the content, including the geo-tag is archived and accessible...
Open Source Flash Games
Posted on April 25, 2008Here is another update from our research assistant on the "Playing the News" project. The team has been exploring "mini-games" that would provide a challenge as players move through the information from the news stories. Fabio has discovered some open source flash sites that might help...
The Legacy Press Room
Posted on April 25, 2008One of the most telling juxtapositions at this week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is taking place on the third floor of the Moscone Center, where the traditional press lounge and the bloggers lounge (dubbed Blogtropolus, above) were set up side by side...
A coder practices multimedia journalism - with open-source tools
Posted on April 24, 2008Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, the first two programmer-journalists whose Medill education is being financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships, have begun their second academic quarter (of four). They are reporting in Medill's Chicago newsroom and taking our introductory new media class, Interactive Techniques...
Tell Me You Hear the Writing on the Wall?
Posted on April 24, 2008Microsoft's Tell Me subsidiary announced the launch of a new audio service for the BlackBerry which allows the user to conduct local business search, get directions or traffic information, etc. using voice commands. Apparently, by uttering a singe word like "coffee" your GPS enabled Blackberry will do an automatic search (in this case via Microsoft Live Search) and provide you with the nearest cafe links, directions, phone numbers, etc...
ManyEyes: Data-Rich Features on the Cheap
Posted on April 23, 2008The web offers news organizations whole new ways to present complex stories to readers, but even the emergence of free tools hasn't made online databases or Google Maps mashups a daily commonplace in your average news organization's website. Often, that's because the effort involved in building a rich, complex visualization is just too high for it to become an everyday occurrence...
Judge Quashes Subpoena to Blogger Kathleen Seidel
Posted on April 23, 2008A federal magistrate judge in New Hampshire has quashed the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues. In February 2008, she wrote about a lawsuit against various vaccine manufacturers, Sykes v...
MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 - Leaning Local
Posted on April 22, 2008The premise of our MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 is that the path to civic participation and becoming a voter is different for everyone, particularly among today's youth. Frequently, young people disconnect the issues that concern them most, from the act of voting - on the premise that their individual vote won't make a difference, or that the news media nor the political candidates NEVER speak about the issues THEY care about most...
Participants Balk at Controversial Topics
Posted on April 22, 2008It might seem a good starting point for building virtual community when people already know each other in the real one. But for Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker, we've been surprised to find that doesn't seem so true. For many potential users of our online group blog and forums, the risks of speaking about a controversial topic so openly in an online public forum appear just too great...
Press Can Survive Newspaper's Demise, But Must Benefit Public
Posted on April 21, 2008Two weeks ago I participated in a forum on newspapers and the net put on by Britannica Blog. The tone was: are newspapers doomed and does anyone care? My part includes this: At many a conference I have attended on new media and journalism, some old pro whose subsidy is fast disappearing will (mentally) place hands on hips and say about the Internet as a whole, "Well, that's all very nice, very Web 2...
A Year of Rising Voices
Posted on April 21, 2008With this week's introduction to Iran Inside Out, a video-blogging project led by Shaghayegh Azimi, all ten Rising Voices grantees have now been introduced. Some of the earliest projects, like Nari Jibon in Bangladesh, have been active for nearly a year now...
Old and Young Playing a Video Game
Posted on April 20, 2008Can a virtual world bring together young and old people to explore a community's history in a shared video game experience? This is a question we're pondering in the wake of some user testing of our Remembering 7th Street video game. We previously showed a video version of our game world to people who remembered Oakland's 7th Street blues and jazz club scene from the 1940s and 1950s, and were surprised by their generally positive reaction to the virtual re-creation of what they had actually lived...
Our Hidden Biases Reflected in Our Work
Posted on April 19, 2008In a recent post Lauren Williams editor of the black interest blog Stereohyped, wrote about the case of a black man accused of killing a white police officer in New Hampshire. In defense of the accused, Mahzarin Banaji, the creator of Implicit Association Test, a web-based test that measures an individual's inherent biases, testified that it would be virtually impossible for a black defendant to get a fair trail by an all white jury...
Iran Inside Out
Posted on April 19, 2008Shaghayegh Azimi is the epitome of what is often referred to on Global Voices as a "bridge-blogger"; that is, someone who uses his or her weblog to bridge two or more cultures. There is only one catch - Azimi isn't really a blogger. As a former film producer in Iran, video has always been her preferred medium of expression...
'Digital New Deal' Needs Real Life Counterpart
Posted on April 18, 2008An interesting piece appeared in the Friday, April 11 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, calling for a New Deal-like investment by America in youth and technology. The basic argument is that a new generation of technology savvy youth could be put to work leveraging their digital skills to create socially useful tools and engage in 21st Century public service...
Tools the Power Geeks Use
Posted on April 18, 2008We just wound up our Innovation Israel tour of Israel's tech community, and I'm in awe of the Silicon Valley alpha geeks I traveled with during the week. (Here's our group blog: Travelinggeeks.com.) Anyone in the media, publishing or tech business should be interested in the software applications and Web 2...
Using a Database to Track NY Politicians
Posted on April 17, 2008A few weeks ago, I asked a question that I'm still chewing on: what good is all this data ? Sitting the programmers down with reporters is a great advance over abandoning them to some cold dark dungeon, but I think we've got a ways to go to come up with really smart uses of data and database driven content...
Ten Things Journalists Should Know About Surviving In a High-Tech Industry
Posted on April 17, 2008Journalism is becoming a high tech industry, and that means that career norms for journalists are approaching those of high tech workers -- shorter job tenures, working for smaller companies, and much more. Here are ten things that can help journalists survive Web 2...
Journalism Will Survive the Death of Its Institutions
Posted on April 15, 2008Massive layoffs with no end in sight. Wave after wave of acquisitions and mergers fueled by the excesses of artificially cheap capital. Widespread fear that an entire industry and its contributions will stall or simply stop. This describes the news industry today, but it also described the high tech industry in the late eighties and early nineties...
Testing News Game Concepts
Posted on April 14, 2008Here is another report from our research assistant Fabio Berzaghi on the progress we are making on "Playing the News." Our struggle is to come up with embedded games that do not clash with the content of the topic or issue being addressed by the news organization...
Google Earth, New York Times Team Up
Posted on April 13, 2008In early March, the amazing Amy Gahran and I presented at Knight Digital Media Center seminar talking about new tools. I spoke about locative media, showed examples, learned a lot, and assured all the participants that they too could create multimedia editorial pieces using Google Earth's very simple toolkit...
News Is Code #1: Attack of the Podium Weasels
Posted on April 13, 2008How can technology improve on even the best journalistic work and help journalists hold officials to account? In the first of the News Is Code series, we take a look at the recent Pulitzer won by Dana Priest and Anne Hull of the Washington Post for their series on conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center...
Journalists, Citizens, and the Media Conversation
Posted on April 12, 2008In my first post to this blog I said that the professional/citizen journalist debate was a "topic best left for another day." It seems that the time has finally come for me to put my two cents out there, and I'll be doing it by exploring what it means to be a journalist and a citizen in this digital world...
Blogger Kathleen Seidel Fights Subpoena Seeking Information About Vaccine Litigation
Posted on April 11, 2008We've been following the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel in the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Threats Database, but thought it was time to throw our support behind Seidel and post about this egregious attempt to chill online speech. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues...
Community News Companies Will Become Extinct
Posted on April 11, 2008The internet has created the need for radical change in the community news business. Incremental changes such as Yahoo consortiums will not be sufficient to stem the loss of print revenue. Consumers do not want to be limited to browsing content provided by legacy top-down, control oriented news organizations...
Our City, Our Voices Graduates Second Round of Students
Posted on April 10, 2008On Sunday April 13th, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) and Juntos will graduate a second round of twelve students from an English Speaking video and web workshop. The graduation will take place at Songhai City Cultural Center at 3117 Master Street in Philadelphia at 3pm...
A Blogger Posse in Israel
Posted on April 09, 2008I've been busy the past two weeks readying for a last-minute trip to Israel. I'm honored to be past of a blogger/citizen journalist delegation heading to the Holy Land. The trip was arranged and paid for by the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest, which covers California and the greater West, though we'll be paying for some items...
Early Adapters Don't Conform to Conventional Use
Posted on April 08, 2008At a recent meeting, a representative from Verizon and a former BET executive were discussing the seeming contradiction between the fact that African American males were early adapters of mobile technology, yet have a very low rate of posting videos on internet sites such as BET...
Jumping Back on the Entrepreneurial Horse
Posted on April 08, 2008The irony was deliberate when Steve Outing and Steve Kearsley soft-launched their new online comic strip, techGRL, a week ago today. It's a humor site, yes, but the goal -- "not just a comic strip, but also an online community" -- was no April Fools joke...
The Long Shelf Life for News Games
Posted on April 08, 2008People who run news sites can be resistant to encouraging the developing games and other interactive feature. Perhaps it's that "game" sounds too playful, although given that most newspaper feature comics, crosswords and Sudoko, to say nothing of the latest celebrity photos and gossip, it's hard to see why...
Fire Eagle and the Future of Citizen Media
Posted on April 07, 2008Buenos Aires Leads the Way Two months ago I was back in my old stomping grounds, Encinitas, California. It had been several years since I last coasted along Highway 101 as it sucks in its asphalt belly between San Elijo Lagoon and the near-perfect surf break, Cardiff Reef...
What Journalism Needs: A New Business Model or a New Product?
Posted on March 31, 2008When journalists were asked in a recent survey to identify the most important aspect of their work, 91% said "make my publication successful by creating appealing content for its audiences." What a turn-around from the not too distant past when such sentiments would have been denounced in many newsrooms as pandering to the public and giving people what they want, not what they need...
Beyond display ads -- hyperlocal social/news sites can deliver
Posted on March 31, 2008Mark Glazer, our host on Mediashift, asked: " ... is there something (hyper-local news sites) can offer the businesses beyond just a display ad or a place in an online directory? Is there a more creative partnership they might have, where reader/contributors could give the business honest feedback on the site -- positive and negative? Paulding...
"Navigating Life" is No Longer a Metaphor
Posted on March 31, 2008Once upon a time, four travelers began a global quest... So says the video that launches, Urbanista Diaries, the second phase of the Nokia's advertising campaign for its N82 series phone. The first phase of the campaign followed four of Nokia's favorite bloggers on a trip around the world armed only with, "their wits, guile, and a Nokia N82 multimedia computer...
Finalists for the Knight News Challenge
Posted on March 31, 2008The Knight Foundation today posted a list of the finalists for the next round of its News Challenge grant program. This list does not include the names of the 17 projects that were chosen for funding. Those winners will be announced on May 14, 2008, at the E&P Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas...
(Only) Two Visions for the Future of Blogging?
Posted on March 30, 2008An interesting battle of the blogging titans was covered in the "Bits" section of today's New York Times. It's basically an exchange between popular technology bloggers (and blog owners) Michael Arrington and Rafat Ali. Their differing views are worth examining because they touch on a hot button issue in blogging and journalism: How are new for-profit business models impacting blogging and the journalistic integrity of bloggers? In their personal scrap Mr...
The Read and Write Library
Posted on March 28, 2008From cataloguing books to training users how to blog At least six times a week, Gabriel Venegas, a dedicated and underpaid librarian in Medellin, Colombia, rises from bed while the world outside is still dark royal blue and heavy with the silence of early morning to in order to make the 45-minute bus ride that begins in the valley center and eventually climbs up the city's northern slope to the isolated community of San Javier La Loma...
All the Summaries Fit to Print
Posted on March 28, 2008As so many people who blog here have observed, newspapers face a quandary as they struggle to attract and keep readers to their print editions as well as their Web sites. They want to win customers at the same time they are giving those customers less for their money...
Look to the old for the new business models for journalism
Posted on March 26, 2008Beating the street looking for a job in journalism is not a pleasant thought these days. As the firing of editors at places like the LA Times over newsroom staff cuts demonstrates, out-of-work journalists are totally divorced from the decision making that affects their lives...
How Can Ads Support Community News?
Posted on March 26, 2008I'm going to be posting weekly questions here on Idea Lab to spark discussion by the various authors, as well as our community of readers. This week I'd like to follow up on the recent theme of new business models for local news sites. Many small hyper-local community sites start up with Google AdSense ads and other automated, quick ways of bringing in a small revenue stream...
What Drives News Decisions (What Are They Thinking)?
Posted on March 25, 2008Senator Barack Obama mischaracterized statements of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. To be charitable, there's only so many media narratives any one person or even campaign can try to change at one time. That's my question for today: how are these media narratives formed in the first place, and why? Easier question: Did you see the videos below? The seven and ten minute versions, not the seven and ten second versions? Obama, in his speech, chose to defend Wright as a person and a leader, but he denounced the statements as divisive and reflecting a static view of progress in history...
How Would You Engage People in Public Policy?
Posted on March 25, 2008The one million figure is my number, but seriously, the UK government wants advice on how to engage lots of people online. Engage is the key word, the British Prime Minister already receives e-petitions online (nothing like that with the White House, Congress, or even one U...
Mini-Games As Bait?
Posted on March 24, 2008As we work to create a news game that will engage readers, we are exploring what types of incentives we can use to meet the "gaming" expectations of hard-core players. We've decided to try embedding "mini-games" into the news game scenario. For example, a news game might create an environment where the reader is exploring the different aspects of the use of ethanol fuel...
Media's "New" Community Role
Posted on March 21, 2008I just got back to the U.S. from my first visit to Rome. The whole trip was great, but my favorite part was The Roman Forum. This ancient gathering place represents, as far as I'm concerned, the epitome of community facilitation given the resources available at the time...
Know a Good Manager?
Posted on March 21, 2008One of the biggest challenges of building ChiTownDailyNews.org has been running the business side of things -- fundraising, ad sales, etc -- while also trying to build a network of volunteer community journalists, edit their stories, manage our bloggers and beat reporters...
Life Inside the Non-Profit News Model
Posted on March 21, 2008One of our group bloggers here, Geoff Dougherty, founder of the Chi-Town Daily News, is the focus of an extended profile that appears in Miller-McCune magazine. The profile was written by one of my former Mercury News colleagues, Ryan Blitstein, who uses Dougherty's story to explore some themes that have emerged on this blog: The possiblities of citizen journalism and the sustainability of the non-profit news model...
Court Dismisses Libel Lawsuit Against iBrattleboro
Posted on March 20, 2008In a case we've been following closely at the Citizen Media Law Project, a Vermont judge has dismissed the libel lawsuit filed against Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, a widely acclaimed community journalism site based in Brattleboro, Vermont, ruling that Grotke and LePage are immune from liability under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("CDA 230")...
Nuestra ciudad, nuestras voces
Posted on March 20, 2008Versión en español más abajo. Greetings all, for some time now we have been deeply involved in developing our project and carrying out the audiovisual production workshops with the immigrant population in Philadelphia. The workshops have had a good turnout, and as you may know already from my colleague Todd Wolfson, the first 20 participants finished the course successfully and are now in the process of making their videos...
How About an Annual Chris O'Brien New Media Business Model Award!
Posted on March 20, 2008Returning to Chris O'Brien's Business Model Challenge, here are some suggested approaches and models from the perspective of an entrepreneur and strategic consultant. For a more rigorous approach I would absolutely check out Chris's recommended NewspaperNext report...
Virtually and Really Watching the Trees (grow)
Posted on March 20, 2008The city of Shanghai is geo-tagging over 1500 registered ancient tress with the plan to use gps devices to monitor and protect the trees in ways they couldn't before. Not unlike many cities, modernization poses enormous risks (and has exacted quite a toll) to nature and the natural...
It's Sunshine Week!
Posted on March 20, 2008(Written by Tuna Chatterjee, CMLP Staff Attorney.) It's March and it's Sunshine Week. This year, from March 16 - 22, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is holding its annual initiative to raise public consciousness on the need for open government...
What Good is All This Data?
Posted on March 19, 2008Imagine a website that would show you, not just how many copies of some book are available for sale from Amazon, but which libraries near you carry the book. Oh wait, that already exists . Between WorldCat and Steven's thoughts on the Sacramento Bee salary database I'm thinking a lot about what really good data driven content looks like...
No returning to the all-elites era
Posted on March 19, 2008In response to this week's Newsweek article Revenge of the Experts suggesting the expert is back and user-created content is on the wane, columnist Tom Regan offers this in today's Christian Science Monitor: Credible Web? It's where we click most. Expertise is essential online, but the Internet's real 'killer app' is choice...
Is Citizen Media Skipping Small Town America?
Posted on March 19, 2008I am on a hunt. While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic "user-generated" content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America...
Markets Fail News
Posted on March 18, 2008Thanks to Chris O'Brien's challenge, serious talk of business models for journalism have come to the IdeaLab blog. Let's pause a moment for an overarching view. Turn off the bright lights and stare into the empty studio. Markets - selling and buying at prices set by supply and demand - don't work for news and information...
Is posting public employee salaries online a good thing?
Posted on March 18, 2008Government Technology reported on public employee protests to seeing their names and salaries online via a database on the Sacramento Bee. What about public employee salaries - should all be publicly posted online? Should only management level and above be listed specifically with others displaying the salary range per pay scales for various classifications? I have a hard time imagining a democracy where any and all legally public government information is not on the Internet for all to see in a decade or so...
The State of the News Media Is Troubled
Posted on March 18, 2008On Monday the Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report. It's worthwhile reading for anyone who's interested in the major trends affecting not just the news industry but the culture of information dissemination in this country...
Playing the News
Posted on March 17, 2008For those of us working on creating "serious games," the experience we've had with the "Playing the News" project might be instructive. We are working with the Johnson Simulation Center at Pine Technical College in Pine City, MN to develop a tool that will allow journalists (read, non-techies) create engaging games built from news coverage of ongoing coverage in a community...
Fragmentation of Media is Democratization of Media: Retaining Reach
Posted on March 17, 2008Oso uses a German pilot's statement that he would not have shot down the author of the Little Prince, had he known, to ask: Will Global Voices' coverage of Iranian bloggers have any influence one way or the other on a potential US invasion? It is comforting to think that it could, but realistically, I doubt it...
Gaming, seriously.
Posted on March 14, 2008I crossed paths with "serious gaming," in a serious way twice in one week. First at the Knight Digital Media Center's Editorial Writers seminar in Los Angeles last week. Later in the week, I attended a gaming session at the Computer Using Educator's conference in Palm Springs...
Is that my corpse they're talking about?
Posted on March 13, 2008I've been following closely a theme that has developed here in recent days. It began last week with David Sasaki's post about the legacy of the Knight family, continued with Dan Gillmor's call for more entrepreneurial thinking in journalism, and was amplified by J...
A News Mashup
Posted on March 13, 2008The good folks at Netsquared in San Francisco are sponsoring a Mashup Challenge, designed to encourage civil society and social benefit organizations to submit innovative new ideas for Mashups(web_application_hybrid) supporting social change. Of the 50 or so entries submitted so far, a number of them have a news angle that may be of interest to journalists and the larger media community...
Boulder's ClimateSmart Lacks Online Community
Posted on March 12, 2008When I,Reporter launched Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker last summer, we knew from meetings with Boulder city officials that they were planning their own web site to promote the city's unique greenhouse gas reduction initiative. Not only didn't that stop us, it encouraged us...
The San Jose Mercury News and Gary Webb
Posted on March 11, 2008The San Jose Mercury News' location in Silicon Valley is not the first reason it should have become the newspaper of record in the Internet age. Reading about this year's round of layoffs and cutbacks, I think about the journalist the Mercury News cut off twelve years ago during boom times...
CMLP Legal Guide: Newsgathering and Privacy
Posted on March 10, 2008This is the fourth in a series of posts I've written that call attention to some of the topics covered in the Citizen Media Legal Guide the Citizen Media Law Project began publishing in January. This past month we rolled out the sections on Newsgathering and Privacy, which address the legal and practical issues both professional and non-professional journalists may encounter as they gather documents, take photographs or video, and collect other information...
Newspapers: The Innovation Challenge
Posted on March 09, 2008On Friday Dan Gillmor wrote here about bringing an entrepreneurial mindset to today's journalism. On Friday, Dan's former employer, the San Jose Mercury News, laid off 15 newsroom staffers and lost five other editors through buyouts, shaving the editorial staff by about 10 percent, on top of a larger set of layoffs a few months ago...
Bringing Entrepreneurial Thinking to Journalism
Posted on March 07, 2008(Note: I wrote this initially for PR Week magazine. What follows is slightly updated.) A cliche of business holds that good ideas are a dime a dozen; it's hard work and investment capital that turn them into businesses. As with most cliches, this one has a solid foundation of truth...
Knight Ridder and the Knight Foundation: Two Legacies, Two Paths
Posted on March 05, 2008This is a story about who foots my paycheck. It is a story about who funds this very blog, along with all of the projects that we write about here. It is the story of the transformation of media and the efforts to make that transformation sustainable...
Hyperlocal media's threat to personal privacy minuscule compared to big media
Posted on March 04, 2008Hyperlocal media's threat to personal privacy minuscule compared to big media Chances are you'll be getting a notice regarding changes in privacy policies from the various web sites from hgtv.com (Home and Garden) to myspace and other publishers and advertising related businesses associated with the Internet Advertising Bureau...
Citizen Media Law Project Publishes Newsgathering Legal Guide
Posted on March 03, 2008Back in January, I announced the launch of the first two major sections of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online and Dealing with Online Legal Risks. This past month we began rolling out the section on Newsgathering and Privacy, which addresses the legal and practical issues you may encounter as you gather documents, take photographs or video, and collect other information...
Is It a Game Without Moving Parts?
Posted on March 03, 2008We're knee deep in our second game and I realized that I never came through with my promised recap of our last minute technical decisions on the Garbage Game. For one thing, as I mentioned, we jumped ship from OpenLaszlo in the interest of expedience...
Is Old Media Really Dead?
Posted on March 02, 2008According to this new report released by We Media/Zogby, two thirds of Americans think traditional journalism is out of touch with what they want from their news and nearly half now get their news online. The report suggests that 29% of Americans get their primary news information fromTelevision, 11% from radio and only 10% from newspapers...
National Awareness Days are a Cry for Help
Posted on March 01, 2008Today, March first, is National Self-Injury Awareness Day. You may not know much about this issue. A Google news search turned up one article, in the independent Charleston Gazette. I am meaningfully aware that people self-injure only through a friend's yearly blog post to mark self-injury awareness day: "We are male and female...
Community Organization with Digital Tools
Posted on March 01, 2008Last week I took a digital-communication-oriented glance at the war on Scientology being led by the nontraditional online group called Anonymous. I'm not exactly writing a part 2, but I want to start a follow-up discussion on a few of the comments made and questions posed by Anonymous about how digital media affects the dynamics of community organization...
The Catch Is the "Challenge" Part
Posted on February 29, 2008Earlier this week I was at WeMedia 08 in Miami, where I was on a panel about the Knight News Challenge. (Last year, Adam Glenn and I won a Knight News Challenge grant to fund our community journalism project, the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker.) Also on the panel were Gary Kebbel, director of the News Challenge progam for the John S...
Media Organizations Back Wikileaks in Court
Posted on February 27, 2008Yesterday, a coalition of organizations dedicated to preserving free speech rights on the Internet, including the Citizen Media Law Project, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Los Angeles Times, Hearst Corp., Gannett Co., Associated Press, and Society of Professional Journalists, filed a "friend of the court" brief in the Wikileaks case...
It's Got to be About More Than Just Getting from Point A to Point B
Posted on February 26, 2008Phones use one of two methods to figure out where they are (and if you happen to be carrying it, where you are). The first is built-in gps. Nokia is leading the way with these smart phones, having announced four new phones earlier this month at the Mobile World Congress 2008, where 50,000 people (including keynote Robert Redford) gathered in Barcelona to talk all things mobile (but mostly about devices and less-than-innovative uses of these devices)...
How Do You Know When to Take Mobile Seriously?
Posted on February 25, 2008How does mainstream media know when to take mobile seriously as a distribution platform? 1) When the New York Times unveils a mobile-to-PC application? The NYT's new ShiftD application you to move its content from one device to the other, insead of having to save and move them separately...
Journalists and technologists: an uneasy courtship
Posted on February 25, 2008The first Computation + Journalism Symposium, held Friday and Saturday at Georgia Tech, is over. It's been widely covered in the blogosphere -- you'll find some of the most thoughtful reflections here and here and here and here. As I said before the panel I moderated (on "Advances in Newsgathering"), the event was truly remarkable...
Computation + Journalism Confab: Exciting, Disappointing and Confusing
Posted on February 25, 2008Last week's Symposium on Computation & Journalism left me excited, disappointed and confused. It was hard not to be excited listening to all the technologists talking about the latest advances that will allow us to get news to once isolated people in Africa and India using mobile phones and other technology...
What did you call me?
Posted on February 22, 2008Marketing guru Seth Godin urges companies to start calling "potential customers" and "targets" instead citizens. He means this term to be inclusive of those who have a relationship with the marketer and those who do not and to bring about a mental shift toward respect and humility...
The Washington Post vs. washingtonpost.com
Posted on February 21, 2008The Washington City Paper published an extensive profile of the online strategy used by The Washington Post. Called, "One Mission, Two Newsrooms," the piece details how the Post has built an entirely separate newsroom for the online staff across the river in Arlington, Va...
Crashing the E-Politics and E-Democracy Gates
Posted on February 21, 2008My focus tends to be the "citizen" in citizen media. Over the last few years I've increasing found myself at conferences like Public Media and the Online News Association. I always feel a bit out of place, because despite the adoption of online interactivity in online news and media, I am still pretty much viewed as a "consumer...
Every Nonprofit Tries to Give People Information, Which is Power
Posted on February 20, 2008At this year's SalesForce.com Foundation gathering, "Innovation for Nonprofit Success," the recurring theme was less the SalesForce software than the broader topic of the social web. This is to SalesForce's credit; Suzanne DiBianca, cofounder and director of the Foundation, set the tone when she introduced Holly Ross, Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, as the keynote speaker...
Right to Anonymity Under Attack
Posted on February 18, 2008Anonymous communication online is becoming quite a theme here on Idea Lab. The web site WikiLeaks.org (if you're in the United States, right now you'll have to access it through their IP address) reports that it has been censored by U.S. court injunction (it is also banned in China)...
Is Your Blog Login Secure?
Posted on February 18, 2008Several News Challenge projects, including ours (the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker), feature blogs as a publishing tool. So consider this a friendly tip: If you or anyone who will be posting to your blog even occasionally uses net access of unknown or uncertain security (such as public wifi, or a hotel's network), make sure you use a secure login for posting to your blog...
Databases as Entry Points to Investigative Stories
Posted on February 18, 2008If you want to know what the future of investigative reporting might look like online, check out what the Las Vegas Sun has done with its special section on Flight Delays . It's an interactive map and database on plane delays at McCarran Airport. You can check a particular flight, look at patterns in delays to other airports and find out how long it takes to go through security checkpoints at different gates at different times of the day...
Computation + Journalism = ?
Posted on February 17, 2008When the Knight News Challenge awarded me (and the Medill School of Journalism) a grant to offer journalism scholarships to computer programmers, I thought teaching journalism to technologists was a pretty novel idea. But it turns out some faculty at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing were thinking along similar lines...
CMLP Legal Guide: Deciding Whether and How to be Anonymous
Posted on February 17, 2008In light of Dan Schultz's excellent post entitled Anonymous vs. Scientology: A Case Study of Digital Media, I've decided to focus my post this week on the legal and practical issues you should consider if you wish to engage in anonymous speech online...
BarCamps Without Borders: The Unconference Spreads Globally
Posted on February 17, 2008OK, So you've got your own blog. You've started taking pictures and posting them online. But what's more, you've also trained some of your friends, family, and neighbors how to publish online. And, via the blogosphere, you've been able to get to know others in your city who you otherwise never would have met...
Super Tuesday Wrapup: the MTV/Knight Choose or Lose Street Team '08 & the live mobile to web experiment
Posted on February 17, 2008"When I say that we all ought to collectively stand, bend over, and moon the rest of the media world, I really mean it. And it's too bad a few people had crappy times, but that's entirely the failure of this country to build the kind of communications infrastructure that Europeans and Koreans can't laugh at...
Wearing Your Media on Your Sleeve
Posted on February 17, 2008Some really interesting experimentation is being done with "wearable media" these days. Wearable media is simply clothing or other accessories that allow for the transmission or display of digital information. Some examples... Wearable Resistance a dress adorned with LED that can be programmed to depict images or text...
Anonymous vs. Scientology: A Case Study of Digital Media
Posted on February 15, 2008So far I have avoided bringing up specific events and breaking stories here even when they might illustrate relevant uses of digital media. The reason for this is that I'm not really a reporter, but I've been watching something play out over the Internet and it is just too interesting to pass up...
Will There Be a Newsroom in the Future?
Posted on February 14, 2008The nature of our project at Duke University, the Next Newsroom Project, is to try to design the "newsroom of the future." But the other day on our project site, Leonard Witt of Kennesaw State University, started a discussion around the first, most obvious question we confronted: "Does the newsroom of the future really need to be a brick and mortar newsroom?" You can view the various responses, and some relevant links that got posted there...
Open Media Publishing: One New Option
Posted on February 14, 2008EngageMedia, an Australia-based open media organization that promotes social justice and environmental issues, has just released a major open source software package called Plumi. Based on the Plone content-management system, it's designed to let citizen publishers create their own video-sharing communities out of the box...
Public Notices 4.0: Time to Upgrade Public Meetings
Posted on February 13, 2008Over the years my work has brought me to Rome a few times. The Roman Forum as well as the Athenian Agora have always intrigued me as a model for envisioning online public spaces. Surrounding a public space you have major public and religious institutions, a commercial market in one corner, a place for public speeches, and in Roman Forums the "Albus" or a white notice board with public announcements written in black...
XO Laptop Turns Kids into Media Creators in Uruguay
Posted on February 12, 2008"On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo. It's an amazing thing to watch--at least, to a city slicker like me who doesn't get to witness the miracle of birth every day...
NewsTools2008 to Bring Geeks and Journalists Together
Posted on February 11, 2008One truism that has remained constant over the years is that journalists and technologists rarely cohabit the same physical plane. Even when they cross each other's path, they rarely speak each other's language. And yet, any great leap forward in the new media space requires great technology...
Place-Based Video Games Could Transform Education
Posted on February 11, 2008After reading Paul Grabowicz's post Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games, I thought I'd chime in and riff off of that statement and ask: What is the value of video games in education, formal and informal, and in the delivery of information. Paul makes great point about who determines perspective...
Toward a Community Media Toolset
Posted on February 11, 2008In the past three years, since I co-founded Ourmedia.org, a lot of would-be community publishers have asked me the same question, which more or less is this: How can I get a site up and running without investing a lot of time or resources into building a content management system and technology infrastructure from scratch? There's good news and bad news, I tell them...
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Can collection agency call me for my mother debt that she never had?
Get an Attorney - quickly. Do not talk to the collection people. Do not tell the...
can you patent the idea of letting, for a proper price, adults direct a porn scene for there own possesion over the internet or in person? A scene witch will be a one of a kind and owned by them without the ability for r
Probably not, as it's already been done....
Is it posible to succeed in sueing someone (or company) for giving you the idea to use illegal drugs in order to enhance physical or mental ability (then of course suffering imperable damages to health without any of the
I am not sure, but I think it depends if you have proof, or not. :)...
What is the procedure to register a religious association in USA? What forms do I need, where do I present them, etc. The association is working in another country already so the idea is opening a branch in USA. Thank y
One of the marvelous things about the USA is that you don't need to register wit...
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