Constitutional Law

How to Use Ushahidi for Non-Crisis Projects

Posted on April 23, 2010
Rebecca Wanjiku is a project assistant for Ushahidi in Kenya. She interfaces with many organizations and individuals who have inquiries about Ushahidi. In this post, she shares her perspective and experience. "How do we inspire active participation in a project that is non-political, and not related to a crisis?" ??This is a question asked by many organizations who are thinking of using Ushahidi, our Knight-funded project...

Programmer-Journalist? Hacker-Journalist? Our Identity Crisis

Posted on April 22, 2010
Jacqui Maher is the most recent addition to my Interactive News team at the New York Times, and although she started almost six months ago, I have yet to get her business cards -- an embarrassing fact she (rightly) points out at regular intervals. I'm not raising this to highlight my shortcomings as a manager, but rather as a plea for help...

A Real Watershed Moment for Citizen Journalism in South Africa

Posted on April 21, 2010
Ever heard of load shedding? It's one of the cleverest bits of Orwellian double speak the south African government (or in this case the government-owned electricity company ESKOM) has ever cooked up. It means, in plain English, power cuts -- as in cutting off electricity to whole areas...

Printcasting Plans Mobile Expansion With FeedBrewer

Posted on April 20, 2010
About two years ago, I wrote up an idea for how to leverage standardized web content to create locally-targeted publications with less time, money and software than ever before. The technology and content would be digital, but the output would be optimized for physical distribution as printable PDF magazines...

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Helium Baloons with Digital Cameras Create Grassroots Maps

Posted on April 20, 2010
I'm getting ready for day five of a two-week workshop for high schoolers at Beaver Country Day School in a suburb of Boston. The subject is my project, Grassroots Mapping, which helps teach people -- often young people -- around the world how to be activist cartographers and how to make their own maps...

Serving the Community of Programmer-Journalists: Help.HacksHackers.com

Posted on April 19, 2010
For many years now, the NICAR-L email list has been the online home for journalists doing data analysis -- the people doing "computer-assisted reporting" or "precision journalism." Though email lists are an old technology, this one continues to thrive -- just in the past week, there have been 277 posts to the list...

How Blocking Search Engines Can Increase Ad Click-Throughs

Posted on April 16, 2010
Search engines, RSS feeds and content aggregators make a reader's life easier by providing new ways to scan for articles and to discover news. One result of this is that readers may no longer feel the need to regularly visit their local paper's website in order to stay informed about the goings-on around town...

Designing a True Community Tool for the Online World

Posted on April 15, 2010
Last December I wrote about digital community and social media tools in a post titled, In Search of a Community That Takes 'Me' Out of Social Media. My ultimate argument was that although community tools exist, they are underpowered and unpopular compared to modern networking systems like Facebook and Twitter...

Spot.Us Expands to Seattle

Posted on April 14, 2010
We have been hinting at Seattle as the next Spot.Us city for some time and I'm very excited today, with the click of a few buttons, to make it a reality. It would be a crime to keep Spot.Us limited to the Bay Area and Los Angeles. It would turn us into a non-profit news organization when, as I've said many times, we are a platform...

The Namibian Turns Text Messages into Letters to the Editor

Posted on April 13, 2010
Many news organizations use SMS to send out news alerts, but the Namibian, a daily paper in Namibia, has set up pages in its print edition and on its website to publish text-message letters to the editor submitted by readers. The Namibian is an independent newspaper with newsstand sales of 27,000 a day (with an estimated 10-person pass-along rate), and a popular web edition...

Documents Pouring in as DocumentCloud Goes Beta

Posted on April 11, 2010
Eagle-eyed followers of the DocumentCloud Twitter feed have already picked up on the fact that we began adding users to our beta last month. We made a strategic decision to peg our beta to NICAR's March 2010 computer assisted reporting conference, where we knew we'd be able to gather a sizable group of just the sort of investigative reporters we hope to support with DocumentCloud, and get them excited about using our tools to do more with their documents...

Our Friends Become Curators of Twitter-Based News

Posted on April 02, 2010
I like to listen before I talk. Which means that during my morning routine I read before I write. But where to turn and what to read? One of the most oft-repeated statements I heard at conferences last year: "our problem isn't information overload, it's crappy filters...

What Kinds of Experimental Ads Are Local News Sites Using?

Posted on April 02, 2010
In the search for new business models for community news sites, many experimental advertising platforms have been used. MinnPost has its Real-Time ads widget. Printcasting is trying out MediaBids. And Spot.us is planning something called Community-Centered Ads, where people could view an ad or fill out an advertiser's survey in exchange for credits they can use to pay for original reporting...

A Plan for Spot.Us to Use Community-Centered Ads

Posted on April 01, 2010
Perhaps it's ironic for me to write about advertising. Fellow Knight News Challenge winner Dan Pacheco can quote me as once saying "f*&# advertising" and one of the initial inspirations for me to get into journalism was Adbusters Magazine. Below I want to describe a potential advertising model that Spot...

How Virtual Street Corners Fits with History of Art-Telecom Projects

Posted on March 08, 2010
Below is a guest post from George Fifield, director and founder of Boston Cyberarts Inc., an organization that is a fiscal sponsor of Virtual Street Corners. He and I are working closely together on the project, and here he helps contextualize Virtual Street Corners from a curator's perspective...

Agriculture and us

Posted on March 06, 2010
I attended an Ashoka conference in New Delhi yesterday on rural innovation and farming. There were so many new things I realized about agriculture's deep rooted connections with our culture and society and economy that I decided to immediately write about it before the memories weaken...

Clifford Stoll Was Wrong, But Internet is Far From Perfect

Posted on March 05, 2010
Poor Clifford Stoll. His 1995 Newsweek essay The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana resurfaced last month and, yes, is still so curmudgeony that it makes Dennis the Menace's Mr. Wilson sound like Pangloss: What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness...

Pew Report Shows Mobile News Use Spreading in U.S.

Posted on March 03, 2010
The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) released a important new report this week, Understanding the Participatory News Consumer. It presents many insights on how Americans stay informed, and highlights the fact that many of us are already accessing news on our mobile phones...

Councilpedia Uses Crowdsourcing to Link Money, Politics in NYC

Posted on March 02, 2010
As Gotham Gazette gears up to launch a pilot version of its Knight-funded Councilpedia project, we are confronting a number of interesting issues. To step back first, though, Councilpedia will provide information about New York's 51 City Council members and two citywide elected officials, including their campaign finance information, the bills they introduced, and the groups they gave "member items" -- the parlance here for pork or earmarks...

Can Citizen Journalists in South Africa Help Open up Government Data?

Posted on February 27, 2010
Communities need information, particularly information about what government is doing, and how people can access government services. In South Africa, this information doesn't flow so much as trickle -- and often a paper-based trickle at that! The fact that communication between government and us citizens is so poor is arguably part of the reason why we are reportedly second only to China in terms of the number of social protests per day (and they have 20 times our population)...

So You Want to Try Crowdsourcing?

Posted on February 26, 2010
It is no secret that I'm always on the hunt for great crowdsourcing projects. We're still learning a lot about what "the crowd" can tackle and what it can't, but turning to your readers (listeners, community, neighbors) is a great way to foster civic participation because it gives people a stake in the news...

How Mobile Voices Enables Day Laborers to Tell Their Stories

Posted on February 25, 2010
This is the second of two articles about Mobile Voices, a project based in Southern California. The first post can be found here. Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices, a Los Angeles-based citizen media project, a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (ASC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA)...

Faint Praise for Citizen Journalism Misses Point

Posted on February 24, 2010
John Darnton is a good novelist, and was a superb journalist in a long career at the New York Times. Now he's curator of the Polk Awards, one of only a couple of journalism prizes that means anything. (Journalists have a tedious tendency to give themselves prizes, more so than any other business I can name...

Spot.Us Adds Assignments, Widgets, Story Updates in Revamp

Posted on February 23, 2010
Since Spot.Us first launched in late 2008 as a simple wiki, I've wanted this to be a learning and growing endeavor both for myself and for  journalism as a whole. There are so many lessons in starting a non-profit news project, especially one that is unique in its scope and mission like Spot...

A New Model of Media Research

Posted on February 22, 2010
How to piss off the subjects of your research study Everyone who had the opportunity to do so pointed out that we were just a few blocks from one of Beirut's Hezbollah-controlled neighborhoods. But we were also just a couple blocks from a Starbucks, snuggled comfortably in a new shopping center with more security guards than window shoppers...

Don't Blame the Tools -- People Plagiarize Copy!

Posted on February 19, 2010
Two high-profile cases of plagiarism made recent headlines -- one at the New York Times, one at the Daily Beast. In each case, the plagiarist expressed confusion and surprise when confronted with the evidence, and in each case, he blamed the speed of Internet-era reporting and the cut-and-paste tools that make lifting someone else's words so easy...

New Tools for Mapping News

Posted on February 17, 2010
Want to illustrate a story by displaying data on a map? Don't have a team of whiz kids at your fingertips? One good option has long been IBM's Many Eyes. Their maps, however, stop at the state level. Not especially helpful if you cover local politics! I haven't struggled too much with maps lately, but a tweet from Sunlight Labs' Clay Johnson caught my eye this morning, nonetheless...

How Partnering with McDonald's Helped Boost SochiReporter

Posted on February 16, 2010
I'm excited about finding new ways to market and promote SochiReporter.ru that inspire the citizens of Sochi, Russia to contribute to the site. I believe that you can be a lot more creative when marketing a website. As opposed to a newspaper or radio station, a website can reach a larger, even global, audience...

The Future of Public Radio -- Today

Posted on February 15, 2010
Imagine you are public radio. You've spent the first sixty years or so of your existence focused on one output stream - audio. You've created all of your business processes and your staff has been trained around producing content for the airwaves. You produce quality content that has a great affection and trust...

'Anarconomy' and the News Industry

Posted on February 11, 2010
A good friend of mine forwarded me this essay (PDF) from the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies, which presents an important set of ideas. Although it belittles intellectual property using straw man arguments, it does a nice job of assembling the array of "knowledge as public good" arguments...

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