Constitutional Law

Report from Gov 2.0: A Nerd, Suit, Spook, and Database Smoothie

Posted on September 10, 2009
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 what I heard...

Community Media's Path Out of Obscurity

Posted on September 09, 2009
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...

Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper

Posted on September 09, 2009
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...

The Shocking Truth About Journalism, Activism, and the Healthcare Reform Debate

Posted on September 04, 2009
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. Remembering a conversation that I had with Matt and others at a recent conference, I realized the idea had been brewing for some time...

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How Talking into a Mobile Phone Can Help Change Lives

Posted on September 03, 2009
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 more advanced mobile data services...

"Programmer-Journalist" Scholarships Yield Finalists for Online Journalism Awards

Posted on September 02, 2009
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...

The Power of Proximity -- the possibilities of hyperlocal journalism in South Africa

Posted on September 01, 2009
The 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, 2009
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 able to host a session...

How Citizen Journalists Can Learn from Work of 'Citizen Scientists'

Posted on August 27, 2009
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 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, 2009
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 which aim to spread more awareness about the pandemic...

Adrian Holovaty Talks about EveryBlock Sale to MSNBC.com

Posted on August 25, 2009
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...

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, 2009
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 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, 2009
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...

When FM Radio Meets the Mobile Phone in Pakistan

Posted on August 19, 2009
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 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, 2009
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...

Coming soon: a chance to transform journalism education.

Posted on August 15, 2009
There'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, 2009
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 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, 2009
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 lucrative desktop software business...

Making Progress Toward Launch of Phoenix Light Rail Pub

Posted on August 11, 2009
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...

Source Code for Balance

Posted on August 10, 2009
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 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, 2009
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 us...

GRINS piloted at Radio Bundelkhand

Posted on August 07, 2009
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 new policy...

The Leadership Vacuum in Journalism

Posted on August 05, 2009
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...

IOC to Include Citizen Contributions with Virtual Olympic Congress

Posted on August 04, 2009
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 develop on the web...

How Fear, Brand Addiction and Paranoia Block Innovation

Posted on August 03, 2009
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 mistakes of the past...

Help Us Rename the Daily Phoenix Light-Rail Publication

Posted on July 31, 2009
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...

Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media

Posted on July 29, 2009
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 that's made a lot of professional photographers furious...

Saving (or Destroying) Public Radio on a Mobile Phone

Posted on July 27, 2009
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 To Making Public Radio Obsolete" on PaidContent...

No Newspaper Bailouts without Civic Representation

Posted on July 23, 2009
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...

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