Constitutional Law

Think Community? Think Maps! (Going to MIT. Part One)

Posted on June 17, 2009
I'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, 2009
During 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, 2009
I'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, 2009
Last 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...

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First Release of the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System is now here!

Posted on June 11, 2009
After 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, 2009
True/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, 2009
I 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, 2009
For 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, 2009
Eight 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
How 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, 2009
One 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
On 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, 2009
Engineering 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, 2009
Spring 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, 2009
Cell 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Media 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, 2009
Well, 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, 2009
With 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, 2009
With 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, 2009
It 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, 2009
For 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, 2009
Is 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, 2009
Is 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, 2009
It'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, 2009
Following 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, 2009
I 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...

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