Constitutional Law

Moving on After the Knight News Challenge

Posted on February 05, 2010
In 2008, the Open Media Foundation (then Deproduction) received a $380,000 Knight News Challenge award, and it was a major turning-point for our organization. We added staff, formed new partnerships, and maintained a level of growth that had us approximately double in size each year over our first five years after forming in 2004...

What Are the Universal Principles that Guide Journalism?

Posted on February 02, 2010
Defining principles of journalism is difficult. Rewarding, but difficult. Back in 2005 it took the Los Angeles Times a year of internal discussions to settle on its ethical guidelines for journalists. The Committee for Concerned Journalists took four years, did oodles of research and held 20 public forums, in order to come up with a Statement of Shared Purpose with nine principles (which was subsequently fleshed out in the excellent "The Elements of Journalism" by Kovach and Rosenstiel)...

Printcasting 1.5 Boosts Design for On-Demand Publishing

Posted on February 01, 2010
A funny thing happens when you win a contest like the Knight News Challenge. Suddenly, what was once just a wacky idea that you threw into a web form becomes a long list of things you have to do. And those of you who are lucky enough to be filling out a full Knight News Challenge proposal this week for the second phase of the competition should take note: If you win, you have to do all of it...

Truly Serving the Public -- With Web Tools

Posted on February 01, 2010
We journalists are fond of saying that journalism is constitutionally protected because of our critical role in providing information that people need to be citizens in a democracy. Which makes it all the more shameful that most newspapers -- in print and online -- have historically done such a lousy job of helping people navigate the core functionality of democracy: elections...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Video Volunteers Gets some Boost from Bollywood

Posted on February 01, 2010
Video Volunteers had a great moment a couple weeks ago - we got our first celebrity ambassador for the organization, a very popular Indian film actor named Abhay Deol, who has acted in some of the best "art" films of the last few years. We organized a screening in one of the bastis (slums) in Mumbai where two of our Community Video Units in our Knight-funded project have been working for the last few years...

Steady Driving for Community Radio

Posted on January 31, 2010
It has been quite a while since we wrote updates, but a lot has been going on. For one, we were winners in the Indian national Manthan Awards for 2009 for technological innovation for development! Then we did a second release of our broadcast system for community radio integrated with telephony, and deployed it at our pilot location...

Creating Community Video Entrepreneurs in Brazil

Posted on January 29, 2010
Late last year, Stalin K., my partner in the Knight-funded project Video Volunteers, and I were seated in the video laboratory of VCU.br in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We were joined by nine of VV's new Brazilian Video Fellows. We were there to conduct a workshop about entrepreneurship in the creative field of video...

An Overview of Community Media in Brazil

Posted on January 27, 2010
Almost undoubtedly, Brazil is the country with the largest public investment in community arts and culture. There are dozens of groups teaching video, hip-hop, graffiti, circus arts, carnival-related arts and digital media to youth from the favelas. In Rio alone, we visited five groups doing community arts, and between them we calculated there were roughly 500 kids from favelas this year alone learning video up to a semi-professional level...

How Mobile Voices Developed a Citizen Media Platform

Posted on January 26, 2010
This is the first of two articles about Mobile Voices, a project based in Southern California. Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices, a Los Angeles-based citizen media project, is a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California...

The Great News Business Model Hunt is a Wild Goose Chase

Posted on January 25, 2010
It may be impolitic to admit this, but I'm weary of the Great News Business Model Hunt. For those journalists who have just woken up to the changes in their industry, I know that this issue couldn't be more fascinating and pertinent. But if you worked in the news business on the web from the start, as I did at Salon...

Trying to Create the Stickiness Factor for CityCircles

Posted on January 22, 2010
CityCircles is a website and mobile app providing hyper-local news, events, promotions, fix-it projects, and other information for stops along Phoenix's light rail system. As we progress towards launching our full site (we're currently in beta), we face the challenge of making sure our site has the "stickiness factor...

How Could News Organizations Manage Documents Better?

Posted on January 21, 2010
How are you handling primary source material on your website? OaklandLocal is summarizing a new report on a shootout in March that left five people dead. They use Scribd to embed reports directly on their site, but can't provide annotations. California Watch is looking at what campaign season generosity bought for agribusiness in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta...

The Search for a New Revenue Model in Journalism

Posted on January 19, 2010
My writing on PBS Idea Lab was introduced to me as a way to publicly discuss the growth of Spot.Us, my Knight News Challenge project. I've received kudos for being honest in my blog posts. I'm comfortable talking about where Spot.Us is falling short, and where we are exceeding expectations...

Announcing the Technology for Transparency Network

Posted on January 19, 2010
Internet technologies give governments an unprecedented ability to monitor our communication, internet activity, and even the microphones on our cell phones. The Internet, however, also empowers citizens with new tools and tactics to hold their elected officials accountable, increase transparency in government, and promote broader and more diverse civic engagement...

Centralizing a People Finder for Haiti, Plus an SMS 911

Posted on January 17, 2010
The information activist community has been rushing to respond to the Haitian earthquake. What I find remarkable is the capacity that has been built up in the last few years; from software standards, like the pfif standard generated after Katrina, to early systems like the Ushahidi engine designed during the Kenyan election violence, to larger organizations and resources like the Crisis Commons wiki and the Crisis Camps...

Hip-Hop as Cosmopolitan Citizen Media

Posted on December 29, 2009
Seeking greater social inclusion through new communication technologies is a strategy with a long and accomplished history that has persisted through waves of new inventions including the telegraph, radio, television, satellite, and of course, the Internet...

LocalLabs - Connecting Geeks Building Tools for Local Government Transparency

Posted on December 29, 2009
Who the heck are the people building these local "apps" for the NYC Big Apps competition Amanda Hickman alerted us to in her recent post? I don't know, but they are invited to join LocalLabs to connect with other developers working to build the plumbing for far more transparent and participatory local government and communities...

GRINS v0.2 is released

Posted on December 18, 2009
We are very pleased to announce the second release of GRINS, Gram Vaani's Knight funded project of low-cost systems for community radio stations in rural areas. This builds upon the v0.1 release we did in June by adding support for telephony, backup, and log-shipping, plus smoothing out many user interface issues...

Big Apps Are Here

Posted on December 18, 2009
I've already voiced my own suspicion that New York City's Big Apps competition is a deft end-run on an actual open data bill in New York City. Nonetheless, some 85 applications built on the city's currently public data sets are available now to explore and vote on through early January...

Complying with the FTC Disclosure Requirements for Product Endorsements

Posted on December 17, 2009
Back in October, the Federal Trade Commission published a set of "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  The FTC Guidelines call for bloggers, Tweeters, Facebook users, and certain other online publishers to disclose any "material connections" they have with companies whose products or services they endorse...

The Post's Public Enemy Gaffe: Why Circle-The-Wagons is a Joke

Posted on December 17, 2009
A lot of virtual ink has already been spilled, by me and others, on the now-infamous Washington Post Public Enemy correction. (If you missed it, the Post ran a correction explaining that a story had "incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke...

Looking Back at a Year of Training Citizen Journalists in South Africa

Posted on December 17, 2009
If you want to see citizen journalism in action -- not to mention provoking action -- take a look at this collection of stories by citizen journalists who have completed a six-week course in the Grocott's Mail Citizen Journalism Newsroom. That page features 12 stories about a critical but little-covered topic that goes to the heart of the divergent experiences of living in Grahamstown, South Africa...

Video Volunteers Launches in Brazil

Posted on December 16, 2009
How can the disadvantaged earn a living from their creativity? Why are nearly all the "base of the pyramid" micro-businesses supported by microcredit agencies based on manual labor, or super-local activities like driving a rickshaw or running a small shop? Since much of the music we love today, or design that we see in stores, has its roots in folk traditions, why don't the rural and urban poor today earn much of a living through their creativity? This is the question Video Volunteers is asking with a new program we've launched in Brazil, called VCU...

How the Olympics Can Thrive in the Digital Age

Posted on December 16, 2009
I'm honored to share that an essay I wrote was selected by the International Olympic Committee for inclusion in the official book that was distributed at the Olympic Congress held in Copenhagen from October 3 to 5. This was a great opportunity, especially given our work on SochiReporter...

In Search of a Community That Takes 'Me' Out of Social Media

Posted on December 15, 2009
As someone who aspires to be a new media expert, I don't actually use many popular social media services. I dislike Facebook, I rarely tweet, and before winning the News Challenge I had never written a blog post. It would seem like I'm downright un-hip; yet I'm a young technologist who has been communicating online for more than half of my life...

Lessons Learned From Launch of CityCircles Beta Site

Posted on December 14, 2009
In the journey to launch our CityCircles beta site, we encountered many bumps in the road that turned out to be valuable lessons, and important opportunities. Below is some of what we've learned. And for those not familiar with our project, here's a description of what we're building: CityCircles is a collaborative platform where users and journalists work together to create and share information around each light-rail stop in the Phoenix metro area...

DocumentCloud Releases More Code, Continues to Attract Developer Interest

Posted on December 10, 2009
A public beta of DocumentCloud, one that journalists can kick the wheels on and upload documents to, won't be ready for a few more months, but work is continuing apace in our corner of the cloud. We've released a handful of code that comprises some of the components of our big picture, and it is great to see how well received our work has been by the Ruby and JavaScript communities...

Guide to Live-Blogging and Tweeting from Court

Posted on December 10, 2009
As part of the Citizen Media Law Project's legal guide series on documenting public proceedings and events, today we published a guide to Live-Blogging and Tweeting from Court.  Over the past year, we've published guides addressing how to stay out of legal trouble while documenting activities at polling places and covering the Presidential Inauguration, as well as a series of videos on newsgathering and privacy...

Reviewing "The Big Thaw" - Where is Media Going?

Posted on December 10, 2009
In July 2009, The Media Consortium published Tony Deifell's ""The Big Thaw: Charting a New Future for Journalism":http://mobileactive.org/research/big-thaw-charting-new-future-journalism." The comprehensive review not only examines the current state of journalism, but also maps out potential ways the media can adapt for the future...

'Climategate' and the Perils of the Media's Short Attention Span

Posted on December 10, 2009
There is a moment with which all stand-up comics are familiar. It comes when they release their big punchline, sometimes known as the "drop." For the drop, timing is everything. A successful drop means a joke takes off. An unsuccessful drop leaves it flat on its face...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.