Constitutional Law

News Mixer Options: Launch a Site, Use the Code or Be Inspired

Posted on February 02, 2009
What's next for News Mixer? The demonstration Web site, launched in December by a team of Medill students, shows off some interesting new ideas for engaging people in online conversations around news. The site has attracted quite a bit of attention from people interested in the future of journalism, social media and new technology...

Voces Bolivianas Makes "Web 2.0 for Everyone"

Posted on February 01, 2009
Despite Bolivia's low internet penetration (among the lowest in Latin America at 4.4% compared to neighboring Chile's 36.1%, according to El Deber), the citizen media project and Rising Voices grantee Bolivian Voices is determined to spread Web 2.0 well beyond Bolivia's connected elite...

Philadelphia's Community News Portals

Posted on January 30, 2009
As part of Our City Our Voices, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) in partnership with Juntos has launched a new drupal based participatory website. The Our City Our Voices portal is part of a network of community portals MMP has developed to create dynamic spaces for communities across the city to tell and share stories and get information...

Endow Newspapers? Wrong Question

Posted on January 30, 2009
There's a debate under way in the newspaper/journalism corner of the blogosphere and Twittersphere, spurred by an op-ed commentary in the New York Times earlier this week. The piece, by Yale's chief investment officer, David Swensen, and his colleague Michael Schmidt, a Yale financial analyst, starts with a questionable idea -- that newspapers should be endowed as nonprofits in order to save them -- and goes south from there...

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Partnerships to Watch (and a crowdsourcing project I'm envying)

Posted on January 29, 2009
A small local website from Brooklyn has partnered with NBC to build neighborhood pages for a handful of NBC markets. I haven't followed Outside.in for more than stoop sales (which is New Yorkerese for garage sales or yard sales since most New Yorkers have neither yards nor garages), but it looks like they've taken up EveryBlock's approach to local news aggregation as well, though they want posts explicitly geo-tagged for their maps...

Protests in Madagascar and the Importance of Citizen Journalism Training

Posted on January 28, 2009
As Juliana and I emphasized during a presentation at last year's MobileActive conference in South Africa, just because over three billion people are equipped with cell phones, which can be used as tools for reporting during emergencies, that doesn't mean the world has three billion citizen journalists ready and able to cover every natural disaster, political uprising, and news-worthy event they encounter...

Spot.Us Has Success and Failure in the Same Week

Posted on January 28, 2009
Spot.Us has just had one of its most exciting weeks chalk full of successes and failures. The most interesting lesson is related to the Oscar Grant shooting in Oakland California. It is a tragic event that occurred where a Bart police officer shot and killed a young man...

Bigger and Better Betas

Posted on January 28, 2009
2009 is already proving to be a big year for The Beanstockd Project. After a few rounds of successful internal beta tests and user feedback, the Beanstockd team is preparing for our first institution-level test of The Beanstockd Game at the United Nations International School in New York City...

Other fun stuff Beanstockd is up to..

Posted on January 28, 2009
Each week, we look forward to keeping you apprised of changes, developments, and progress happening with the Beanstockd Game. But, this week, I wanted to amend our weekly report card with some of the fun stuff happening on the media side of Beanstockd! This month, we were able to send several of our writers to the Presidential Inauguration, and even got a special invitation to attend the Green Inaugural Ball in Washington, DC...

Online-News@ reborn as News-Online@ - E-mail List Nostalgia or the Best Way to Interact?

Posted on January 27, 2009
As spaces for those interested in online news like WiredJournalists.com and Poynter's online groups go completely web-centric, my heart pangs for the simple e-mail list. Something I can easily read and post to in those rare idle moments in transit on my handheld or from the place I still spent the majority of my time online - conveniently from my desktop e-mail...

The Opportunity of Public Radio

Posted on January 27, 2009
Today I write about public radio, its potential and its promise. I am not an Internet or social media native. I am 40 years old and remember using our encyclopedia set for school papers and had a well-worn library card. I am an Internet and social media enthusiast...

Online-News@ reborn as News-Online@ -- E-mail List Nostalgia or the Best Way to Interact?

Posted on January 27, 2009
As spaces for those interested in online news like WiredJournalists.com and Poynter's online groups go completely web-centric, my heart pangs for the simple e-mail list. Something I can easily read and post to in those rare idle moments in transit on my handheld or from the place I still spent the majority of my time online - conveniently from my desktop e-mail...

Can "anyone" be a journalist, or does it take innate talent?

Posted on January 24, 2009
Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the "Community Video Unit" has lots of potential for great programming on arts and culture...

Building a Social Entrepreneurial Garage Startup in India

Posted on January 24, 2009
Moving from ideas to execution is an ultra cool feeling. Gram Vaani is finally on the go and we are all extremely excited to see our dreams taking shape. The garage startup mode I always used to wonder what a Silicon Valley garage startup would feel like...

Each Culture Should Communicate News Their Way

Posted on January 24, 2009
Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the "Community Video Unit" has lots of potential for great programming on arts and culture...

Printcasting.com Helps Spark a Global Movement

Posted on January 23, 2009
Ever since the Knight News Challenge was first announced in 2006, I've been fascinated and inspired by its open nature. While the primary goal of the contest is to fund great ideas for new local news and information projects, it has a larger mission. It also requires those projects to eventually be released under open source licenses...

"We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part Two)

Posted on January 23, 2009
You describe a range of projects in the book including those involving youths and senior citizens. What generational differences, if any, did you observe in the ways they thought about their roles and responsibilities as journalists? Young people are much more technologically adept in general...

Phase 2 of the Open-Media Project Begins This Week

Posted on January 23, 2009
Deproduction's KNC grant was designed in 4 distinct six-month phases. The first phase included an updated release of our Open-Source Drupal tools: the set of Drupal modules which enable Denver Open Media to function as a user-driven Public Access Community Media Center with no operating support from the city or cable provider in Denver...

"We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part One)

Posted on January 21, 2009
One of the pleasures of living and teaching at MIT for the past 20 years has been the chance to build ongoing relations with a fascinating cast of characters, many of whom have been regulars at the MIT Communication Forum events that are run by my colleague, David Thorburn...

Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part One)

Posted on January 21, 2009
One of the pleasures of living and teaching at MIT for the past 20 years has been the chance to build ongoing relations with a fascinating cast of characters, many of whom have been regulars at the MIT Communication Forum events that are run by my colleague, David Thorburn...

President Obama's Open Government Imperatives Must Trickle Down to Cities

Posted on January 21, 2009
Today President Obama issued two eloquent orders with the following subject lines: "Freedom of Information Act" and "Transparency and Open Government". Published on the first full day of his presidency, they constitute a sweeping manifesto about how he wants to govern at the Federal level...

Obama's Open Government Imperatives Must Trickle Down to Cities

Posted on January 21, 2009
Today President Obama issued two eloquent orders with the following subject lines: "Freedom of Information Act" and "Transparency and Open Government". Published on the first full day of his presidency, they constitute a sweeping manifesto about how he wants to govern at the Federal level...

Choosing a Domain Name: Getting to Know Cyber Squatters (Starbucks Scene 1)

Posted on January 19, 2009
It's not the case when you can remain unnamed. At this stage - when working out the site structure and drawing graphic schemes, you can't stop thinking about the domain name. Soon after the Knight Foundation announced that my proposal made it and I was selected one of the winners of the '08 Knight News Challenge, I registered several domain names which could alternatively be the site address...

Local Press Subsidies Are Not The Answer

Posted on January 16, 2009
Most people would now acknowledge that there are serious structural issues facing regional and local news in Britain just like in the US. The UK's main commercial broadcaster (ITV) says it's too expensive and it will stop providing it unless the government makes it worthwhile (see Michael Grade's piece in the Telegraph)...

Two Coders Head Off to 'Fix Journalism'

Posted on January 16, 2009
There are a lot of words I could use to describe Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, but perhaps the first one is: fearless. About 21 months ago, they heard (Ryan through a friend, Brian on Boing Boing) about a new scholarship program offering computer programmers a chance to earn a master's degree in journalism at the Medill School...

The Journalism Bubble

Posted on January 16, 2009
You've heard about the housing bubble. And the dot-com bubble. I'm here to tell you about The Journalism Bubble. Anybody who's paying attention to the state of journalism in the US is aware of the financial crisis facing the news industry. And there's wide agreement on the cause of the crisis: advertising revenue for print and broadcast is declining, and advertising revenue for internet offerings is not rising fast enough to make up the difference...

Rising Voices: 2008 in Review

Posted on January 15, 2009
In 2007 Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices aimed at bringing under-represented voices from the developing world to the social web, got its feet on the ground thanks to the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It was a year of building community, forging partnerships, and defining the needs of groups teaching citizen media tools and techniques in the developing world...

Gates Foundation Invests $2 Million in Chilean Social Web

Posted on January 13, 2009
Back in March last year I pointed to Contenidos Locales ("Local Content"), a program of Chile's national library network, as a model example of how public institutions like libraries can foster more civic participation by training their local users how to take advantage of new media tools: Examples include Buscando Mis Raices ("Looking for my Roots") by Rosa Tromilén, which offers a personal history of the Mapuche-majority community Juan Calfumán; Conjunto Folklórico Renacer de Cucao, a youth-group on Chiloé Island dedicated to preserving local folkloric traditions; and the website of the Asociación de Artistas Plásticos de Puerto Montt ("Association of Plastic Artists of Puerto Montt")...

Digital Community Builders Can Roll Their Own Economic Stimulus Package

Posted on January 13, 2009
I come from the "citizen" side of citizen media and work a lot with community building online. Everyday, I an privileged to live in a neighborhood with a vibrant online community far from the wretched shores media hosted mostly anonymous and frequently disturbing online reader comments...

Legal Guide to Covering the 2009 Presidential Inauguration

Posted on January 13, 2009
Heading to Washington, D.C., to attend the Presidential Inauguration? You're bringing your camera with you, right? Well it shouldn't come as any surprise that heightened security measures across the Washington area will affect where you can go, what you can bring with you, and what you can do to cover the inaugural events...

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