Constitutional Law

The People Formerly Known as the Audience Need a New Name

Posted on July 21, 2009
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...

Public Edition of The Beanstockd Game

Posted on July 18, 2009
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 and brainstorming new ways to GAMEify the process...

Beanstockd UNC Case Study

Posted on July 18, 2009
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 any questions they have during the course of the semester...

Focus!

Posted on July 18, 2009
The 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!!)...

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Beanstockd Class Field Trip to LA

Posted on July 18, 2009
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...

News Ecosystem Demands Collaboration, Not Us vs. Them Mentality

Posted on July 16, 2009
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 belief that the future will inevitably be one or the other...

Inzwa: Listen up!

Posted on July 15, 2009
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 +263 913 444 321-8 and ...

Printcasting Launches Paid Ads, Revenue Sharing

Posted on July 15, 2009
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...

Ideas for Professional Journalists to Prove Their Value

Posted on July 15, 2009
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 reliable, to name a few...

Crowdsourcing Keeps Coming

Posted on July 15, 2009
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...

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, 2009
Constructing '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, 2009
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 "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, 2009
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...

Getting the Daily Phoenix Off the Ground

Posted on July 13, 2009
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 Arizona...

Bump: Getting on the Ballot in NYC

Posted on July 08, 2009
Gotham 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
When 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, 2009
ReportingOn 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, 2009
Last 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, 2009
Today'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, 2009
I 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
I'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, 2009
Internet 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, 2009
Spare 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, 2009
I'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, 2009
Here'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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Jon Steward did a funny bit last night, referencing how the major news networks were forced to rely on the "hearsay" of Twitter and Facebook postings to understand the events unfolding in Iran. But with the State Department requesting that the good folks at Twitter delay their scheduled site maintenance to keep Tweets flowinng from Iran, you know we have turned a corner...

Spot.Us Maps Out Three-Month Plan for Growth

Posted on June 17, 2009
If 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...

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