Constitutional Law

Using a Database to Track NY Politicians

Posted on April 17, 2008
A few weeks ago, I asked a question that I'm still chewing on: what good is all this data ? Sitting the programmers down with reporters is a great advance over abandoning them to some cold dark dungeon, but I think we've got a ways to go to come up with really smart uses of data and database driven content...

Ten Things Journalists Should Know About Surviving In a High-Tech Industry

Posted on April 17, 2008
Journalism is becoming a high tech industry, and that means that career norms for journalists are approaching those of high tech workers -- shorter job tenures, working for smaller companies, and much more. Here are ten things that can help journalists survive Web 2...

Journalism Will Survive the Death of Its Institutions

Posted on April 15, 2008
Massive layoffs with no end in sight. Wave after wave of acquisitions and mergers fueled by the excesses of artificially cheap capital. Widespread fear that an entire industry and its contributions will stall or simply stop. This describes the news industry today, but it also described the high tech industry in the late eighties and early nineties...

Testing News Game Concepts

Posted on April 14, 2008
Here is another report from our research assistant Fabio Berzaghi on the progress we are making on "Playing the News." Our struggle is to come up with embedded games that do not clash with the content of the topic or issue being addressed by the news organization...

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Google Earth, New York Times Team Up

Posted on April 13, 2008
In early March, the amazing Amy Gahran and I presented at Knight Digital Media Center seminar talking about new tools. I spoke about locative media, showed examples, learned a lot, and assured all the participants that they too could create multimedia editorial pieces using Google Earth's very simple toolkit...

News Is Code #1: Attack of the Podium Weasels

Posted on April 13, 2008
How can technology improve on even the best journalistic work and help journalists hold officials to account? In the first of the News Is Code series, we take a look at the recent Pulitzer won by Dana Priest and Anne Hull of the Washington Post for their series on conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center...

Journalists, Citizens, and the Media Conversation

Posted on April 12, 2008
In my first post to this blog I said that the professional/citizen journalist debate was a "topic best left for another day." It seems that the time has finally come for me to put my two cents out there, and I'll be doing it by exploring what it means to be a journalist and a citizen in this digital world...

Blogger Kathleen Seidel Fights Subpoena Seeking Information About Vaccine Litigation

Posted on April 11, 2008
We've been following the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel in the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Threats Database, but thought it was time to throw our support behind Seidel and post about this egregious attempt to chill online speech. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues...

Community News Companies Will Become Extinct

Posted on April 11, 2008
The internet has created the need for radical change in the community news business. Incremental changes such as Yahoo consortiums will not be sufficient to stem the loss of print revenue. Consumers do not want to be limited to browsing content provided by legacy top-down, control oriented news organizations...

Our City, Our Voices Graduates Second Round of Students

Posted on April 10, 2008
On Sunday April 13th, Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) and Juntos will graduate a second round of twelve students from an English Speaking video and web workshop. The graduation will take place at Songhai City Cultural Center at 3117 Master Street in Philadelphia at 3pm...

A Blogger Posse in Israel

Posted on April 09, 2008
I've been busy the past two weeks readying for a last-minute trip to Israel. I'm honored to be past of a blogger/citizen journalist delegation heading to the Holy Land. The trip was arranged and paid for by the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest, which covers California and the greater West, though we'll be paying for some items...

Early Adapters Don't Conform to Conventional Use

Posted on April 08, 2008
At a recent meeting, a representative from Verizon and a former BET executive were discussing the seeming contradiction between the fact that African American males were early adapters of mobile technology, yet have a very low rate of posting videos on internet sites such as BET...

Jumping Back on the Entrepreneurial Horse

Posted on April 08, 2008
The irony was deliberate when Steve Outing and Steve Kearsley soft-launched their new online comic strip, techGRL, a week ago today. It's a humor site, yes, but the goal -- "not just a comic strip, but also an online community" -- was no April Fools joke...

The Long Shelf Life for News Games

Posted on April 08, 2008
People who run news sites can be resistant to encouraging the developing games and other interactive feature. Perhaps it's that "game" sounds too playful, although given that most newspaper feature comics, crosswords and Sudoko, to say nothing of the latest celebrity photos and gossip, it's hard to see why...

Fire Eagle and the Future of Citizen Media

Posted on April 07, 2008
Buenos Aires Leads the Way Two months ago I was back in my old stomping grounds, Encinitas, California. It had been several years since I last coasted along Highway 101 as it sucks in its asphalt belly between San Elijo Lagoon and the near-perfect surf break, Cardiff Reef...

What Journalism Needs: A New Business Model or a New Product?

Posted on March 31, 2008
When journalists were asked in a recent survey to identify the most important aspect of their work, 91% said "make my publication successful by creating appealing content for its audiences." What a turn-around from the not too distant past when such sentiments would have been denounced in many newsrooms as pandering to the public and giving people what they want, not what they need...

Beyond display ads -- hyperlocal social/news sites can deliver

Posted on March 31, 2008
Mark Glazer, our host on Mediashift, asked: " ... is there something (hyper-local news sites) can offer the businesses beyond just a display ad or a place in an online directory? Is there a more creative partnership they might have, where reader/contributors could give the business honest feedback on the site -- positive and negative? Paulding...

"Navigating Life" is No Longer a Metaphor

Posted on March 31, 2008
Once upon a time, four travelers began a global quest... So says the video that launches, Urbanista Diaries, the second phase of the Nokia's advertising campaign for its N82 series phone. The first phase of the campaign followed four of Nokia's favorite bloggers on a trip around the world armed only with, "their wits, guile, and a Nokia N82 multimedia computer...

Finalists for the Knight News Challenge

Posted on March 31, 2008
The Knight Foundation today posted a list of the finalists for the next round of its News Challenge grant program. This list does not include the names of the 17 projects that were chosen for funding. Those winners will be announced on May 14, 2008, at the E&P Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas...

(Only) Two Visions for the Future of Blogging?

Posted on March 30, 2008
An interesting battle of the blogging titans was covered in the "Bits" section of today's New York Times. It's basically an exchange between popular technology bloggers (and blog owners) Michael Arrington and Rafat Ali. Their differing views are worth examining because they touch on a hot button issue in blogging and journalism: How are new for-profit business models impacting blogging and the journalistic integrity of bloggers? In their personal scrap Mr...

The Read and Write Library

Posted on March 28, 2008
From cataloguing books to training users how to blog At least six times a week, Gabriel Venegas, a dedicated and underpaid librarian in Medellin, Colombia, rises from bed while the world outside is still dark royal blue and heavy with the silence of early morning to in order to make the 45-minute bus ride that begins in the valley center and eventually climbs up the city's northern slope to the isolated community of San Javier La Loma...

All the Summaries Fit to Print

Posted on March 28, 2008
As so many people who blog here have observed, newspapers face a quandary as they struggle to attract and keep readers to their print editions as well as their Web sites. They want to win customers at the same time they are giving those customers less for their money...

Look to the old for the new business models for journalism

Posted on March 26, 2008
Beating the street looking for a job in journalism is not a pleasant thought these days. As the firing of editors at places like the LA Times over newsroom staff cuts demonstrates, out-of-work journalists are totally divorced from the decision making that affects their lives...

How Can Ads Support Community News?

Posted on March 26, 2008
I'm going to be posting weekly questions here on Idea Lab to spark discussion by the various authors, as well as our community of readers. This week I'd like to follow up on the recent theme of new business models for local news sites. Many small hyper-local community sites start up with Google AdSense ads and other automated, quick ways of bringing in a small revenue stream...

What Drives News Decisions (What Are They Thinking)?

Posted on March 25, 2008
Senator Barack Obama mischaracterized statements of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. To be charitable, there's only so many media narratives any one person or even campaign can try to change at one time. That's my question for today: how are these media narratives formed in the first place, and why? Easier question: Did you see the videos below? The seven and ten minute versions, not the seven and ten second versions? Obama, in his speech, chose to defend Wright as a person and a leader, but he denounced the statements as divisive and reflecting a static view of progress in history...

How Would You Engage People in Public Policy?

Posted on March 25, 2008
The one million figure is my number, but seriously, the UK government wants advice on how to engage lots of people online. Engage is the key word, the British Prime Minister already receives e-petitions online (nothing like that with the White House, Congress, or even one U...

Mini-Games As Bait?

Posted on March 24, 2008
As we work to create a news game that will engage readers, we are exploring what types of incentives we can use to meet the "gaming" expectations of hard-core players. We've decided to try embedding "mini-games" into the news game scenario. For example, a news game might create an environment where the reader is exploring the different aspects of the use of ethanol fuel...

Media's "New" Community Role

Posted on March 21, 2008
I just got back to the U.S. from my first visit to Rome. The whole trip was great, but my favorite part was The Roman Forum. This ancient gathering place represents, as far as I'm concerned, the epitome of community facilitation given the resources available at the time...

Know a Good Manager?

Posted on March 21, 2008
One of the biggest challenges of building ChiTownDailyNews.org has been running the business side of things -- fundraising, ad sales, etc -- while also trying to build a network of volunteer community journalists, edit their stories, manage our bloggers and beat reporters...

Life Inside the Non-Profit News Model

Posted on March 21, 2008
One of our group bloggers here, Geoff Dougherty, founder of the Chi-Town Daily News, is the focus of an extended profile that appears in Miller-McCune magazine. The profile was written by one of my former Mercury News colleagues, Ryan Blitstein, who uses Dougherty's story to explore some themes that have emerged on this blog: The possiblities of citizen journalism and the sustainability of the non-profit news model...

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