Amanda and I have just returned from Dar es Salaam. We were on the road with Freedom Fone.
Last Tuesday it was 9 degrees at 9am in orderly Johannesburg and 28 degrees with sweat inducing humidity at 7pm in chaotic Dar. After negotiating the jam-packed arrivals hall we smiled [...]
I'm at Day 2 of a remarkable two-day conference that is bringing nonprofits, citizen journalism and social media together in ways I've never seen before. [...]
Back in early 2008, as I headed off to a conference at Georgia Tech, I wrote a post for Idealab headlined "Computation + Technology = ?"
Two recent developments suggest that we're starting to find answers to that question -- and more importantly, that there's a growing number of' [...]
I'm glad to say that SochiReporter, my Knight-funded project, launched on October 27. This was a very important day for me, and for our team. We tested SochiReporter for about two months before the public launch, inviting both web experts and users to comment on various aspects of the' [...]
I 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. Lawyers [...]
Manya 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. She blogs occasionally at [manya-myvoice.blogspot.com].
Learn some more about [...]
Pierre 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 [...]
Low 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 [...]
Sergii 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' [...]
(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 [...]
I 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. The people on' [...]
How 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 [...]
A 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 [...]
Today 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 [...]
Networks 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.
Or ask any Twitter user.
But' [...]
We 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, [...]
Spend 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. But how do these [...]
The SochiReporter team recently presented our project at the 14th All Russia Media Forum, held in Dagomys, Sochi, in late September. This annual forum for Russian print and online media is organized by the Russian Union of Journalists. Among the participants this year were more than 1,000 journalists from local [...]
What 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 [...]
October 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 [...]
It 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' [...]
We'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' [...]
We 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. Having been proposed as a new data format and then [...]
First, a quick recap 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' [...]
Software 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 [...]
SochiReporter was presented by its creators at the 14th All Russia Media Forum, held in Dagomys, Sochi on September 24-30. This is an annual forum for Russian print and online media, organized by the Russian Union of Journalists. Among the participants this year were over 1000 journalists from local and [...]
From 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. She didn't think much [...]
Virtual 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 [...]
User-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' [...]
Last 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 [...]
In 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 [...]
Hi 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" [...]
Recently, 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 [...]
It'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. They were very engaged, [...]
Something 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 [...]
Media 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. An active and dynamic media ecosystem, the thinking goes, leads to [...]
As 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' [...]
Our 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 [...]
Arguments 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 [...]
Arguments 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 [...]
During 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 [...]
During 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 [...]
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. You can [...]
Most Africans don't have computers or access to the Internet. Cell phones 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 --' [...]
I 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 [...]
SochiReporter 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 [...]
Earlier 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 [...]
To extend the analogy further: transparency is the board itself.
Unfortunately, freelancing is [...]
Looks 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' [...]
This 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. ASU has a huge footprint in the Phoenix area because [...]
My 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 [...]
I 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 [...]
I 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' [...]
Times 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.
To build an effective alternative, [...]
When he's not toasting escapism, our tireless editor Mark Glaser has been asking why reporting costs so much. I can't tell you much about investigative reporting (a $400,000 product of which started the conversation), except to say that six figure salaries do add up. But I' [...]
A 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. (Note: deathpanels.org is an independent project of Matt's, and' [...]
The 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 [...]
Our 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.
Newspapers everywhere are being forced to rethink their role as simply 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 hyperlocal and also more detailed and granular, to use an increasingly popular word for [...]
Last 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 [...]
Last 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 [...]
Last 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' [...]
Rising 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 [...]
The 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., and at the Washington Post.
There had [...]
"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,' [...]
Back 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 [...]
I'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. Thirty-five journalism and' [...]
In 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 [...]
By 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.' [...]
There's no intrinsic reason why organized journalism education shouldn't lead -- rather than merely reflect -- what's happening in the world of communications. Yet this passive "mirror" status cries out for transformation.
Of course, not everyone sees J-schools as reflective entities. For years, editors worldwide have complained that the schools don't [...]
Liberia 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
During 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 [...]
Daily 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. all on a stop by stop basis.
Where are we today?It has [...]
Okay, 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' [...]
Radio 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 [...]
Gram 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 [...]
Ideas 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. (William Wallace comes to mind.) But, in war [...]
The 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' [...]
I'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' [...]
It'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. Local TV station KTVK-TV Channel 3 interviewed [...]
A 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' [...]
Is 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'" [...]
Government 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. If newspapers go [...]
I'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. Or at' [...]
With 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 [...]
The 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 [...]
The entire Beanstockd Team has been running on full throttle 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 [...]
First, 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.
First, the Global Green USA Annual [...]
One 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 [...]
We 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. In addition, 60% of every [...]
If 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' [...]
At 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. It is [...]
This 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 [...]
Those 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' [...]
Constructing 'scenarios' - stories about the future - are a big deal in South African political circles. 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 [...]
Recent 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.
Whether this [...]
The 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 [...]
Before I dive in, I'd like to give readers a brief overview of what exactly our project, Daily Phoenix, is. This past December, Phoenix debuted a new light rail system which has changed the physical and social landscape of the city. We will use print, web and mobile technology to' [...]
