Constitutional Law

Reporting for Games

Posted on November 17, 2008
Much of the discussion about online games focuses on the technical issues, and that's not surprising since the technical aspects make a game a game or a simulation and not a conventional story. But as Gotham Gazette continues its efforts to create interactive features to involve and educate New Yorkers on key policy issues, we have discovered that the reporting piece can be far more complicated than we originally imagined...

Student R&D Can Show the Way for Media

Posted on November 17, 2008
Placeblogger, a Knight News Challenge winner from 2007, has launched a new design and announced that it is now indexing more than 3,000 "placeblogs" -- Web sites that deliver, as founder Lisa Williams puts it, "an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time ...

Toward a National Journalism Foundation

Posted on November 17, 2008
Amid so much talk of federal bailouts for the banking and auto industries, what would a national bailout plan for journalism look like? If you were given $700 billion to save journalism, how would you use it? How would you fix the system? The End of Commercial Media Several months ago I watched Roger Alton, the new editor of the Britain daily, The Independent, get absolutely skewered by Stephen Sackur on the BBC evening talk show, Hard Talk...

Beanstockd is a We Media Game Changers Award finalist

Posted on November 14, 2008
We are happy to announce that Beanstockd has been named one of 35 finalists for the We Media Game Changers Award, which recognizes people, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media. We're honored to share the finalist list with major digital influencers such as Twitter, Digg, Huffington Post and of course the James L...

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Stack Overflow Sets an Example for News Commenting Systems

Posted on November 14, 2008
Here's a poorly-kept secret: I hang out with Web developers all day. And by their nature, Web developers tend to be Web savvy, and Web natives. Which means they are already using and hacking and rebuilding the next big thing online before most of us have ever laid our eyes on it...

The IncluderEpisode 10Our Good Idea

Posted on November 14, 2008
The Includer grows wings.  An idea can't fly on a single wing or even two or three.  An idea soars when inspired from every angle.  Just as a gangster's heart can't shut out love from all directions.  Who among us can take credit for a miracle?  It's the logic of the Glory of a greater Inspirer...

Bloggers Demonstrate the Difference Diversity Makes

Posted on November 13, 2008
Two days after the election both UNITY and the National Association of Black Journalists sent out open letters urging the media to redouble their efforts to diversify staffs in the aftermath of the historic election of Barak Obama. At the same time, others privately wondered if there some people who would argue that the election of the first African-American president signaled the country has moved past the need to be concerned about racial equity...

Whither Online Social Networks?

Posted on November 10, 2008
My "innovation project" team of master's students at the Medill School is tackling two interesting challenges: (1) improving the tools available for online interaction around news (for instance, better ways of commenting) and (2) engaging young adults in local news...

Spot.Us: Launching a Site and Being Iterative

Posted on November 10, 2008
Anybody that's been following my posts on IdeaLab should notice a pattern. Growing a Community and the Importance of Being Iterative Eliminating the Fear of Being Open and the Importance of Being Iterative Starting Small and the Importance of Being Iterative I'm always trying to chop Spot...

Job Openings at Social Entrepreneurial Startup

Posted on November 09, 2008
Company background: Gram Vaani is a social entrepreneurial startup focused on building innovative models of media delivery for rural areas of India. Media is an important agency to bring social change and responsible politics, but novel technological and business methods are required to successfully and scalably enable services in the challenging rural environments...

Twittering the Minnesota U.S. Senate Recount

Posted on November 06, 2008
Politicos and media-types are crowd sourcing the continuous change in the unofficial count between Al Franken and incumbent Senator Norm Coleman. By coalescing around the tag #mnrecount on Twitter, a dynamic conversation and exchange is developing. You can see the national reaction with simple searches of franken and coleman as well...

UCLA students get news from YouTube

Posted on November 05, 2008
An exit poll conducted Nov. 4 by the Daily Bruin suggests, unsurprisingly, that UCLA students received a substantial amount of information about the election from the Internet and social media sites. Eight hundred sixteen students were polled at five locations on and around campus, and we ended up with a margin of error of 3%...

The IncluderEpisode 9Africans Want to Chat With You

Posted on November 05, 2008
Imagine living on $1 a day and spending $1 an hour to chat with you! Fred Kayiwa: Hi Andrius I'm multitasking as I'm blogging this.  Listening to John McCain's gracious concession and reading Kennedy Owino's and Francis Opiyo Opiyo's rejoicing from Kenya in Barack Obama's victory, and preparing sample test problems for my algebra students here in Bosnia...

enviroVOTE: Side Project for Two Programmer-Journalists

Posted on November 05, 2008
Some more evidence that interesting things can happen when computer programmers spend some time learning (and thinking about) journalism: enviroVOTE. The site, built by "hacker journalists" Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, aggregates election results from around the country (contests for president, governor, U...

a challenge: creating internet platforms for the world's poorest

Posted on November 03, 2008
This week, I've given a lot of thought to how poor communities on the other side of the digital divide are able to connect. The Internet is now only accessible by a tiny portion of humanity; Probably less than 20% of humanity has regular internet access, and in rural India, where 700 million people live, it must be a far, far smaller number...

Plans for Beanstockd Mobile

Posted on November 03, 2008
Recently we've been getting a lot of emails from people seeking advice on applying for the Knight News Challenge. We're excited to see so many of our friends and fans of Beanstockd applying to the contest! Good luck, and for some advice writing the full proposal, be sure to check out this article by Amy Gahran...

What Bloggers Are Saying About the U.S. Election

Posted on November 03, 2008
Tomorrow's American election stands out for many reasons; among them that a large percentage of the world's 6.5 billion people will have something to say about who wins. Never before have so many individuals shared so many opinions about any other single topic in the history of humanity...

The IncluderEpisode 8People Vs. Ideas

Posted on November 01, 2008
The Includer stays alive, as an idea, thanks to last year's Knight News Challenge. At the Las Vegas awards ceremony, I told one of the judges, maybe I got lucky? He assured me that I won because my idea was original. A billion people live within walking distance to the Internet, but there is no device for them, no Includer, so that they might read and write emails at home onto a USB flash drive, and then upload and download them once a week at an Internet cafe...

Not all colleges are hip on social media

Posted on October 31, 2008
Right now I'm attending a national conference in Kansas City (Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers) for student news organizations, and I must say I've been underwhelmed. There was a keynote yesterday afternoon from Rich Beckman, a professor at the University of Miami School of Communication...

Media R&D: How Philanthropy, Journalism Education and Industry Can Partner

Posted on October 31, 2008
The Crunchberry Project is now officially past the halfway point, and I'm getting a clearer picture of what our student team can accomplish in the remainder of the fall quarter at the Medill School. The students' vision is coalescing around a Web site that enables young adults to interact with news and information via different types of "comment structures," which we're defining as forms of user interaction...

Apply for a Knight News Challenge Grant by Nov. 1

Posted on October 30, 2008
Here at MediaShift Idea Lab, you get to hear directly from all the innovators who received grants from the Knight Foundation in the News Challenge. Now, you have the chance to join them by coming up with an idea that will help connect communities with technology and the Internet and help create the next generation of community news...

The Role of Citizen Media in Ensuring Fair Elections

Posted on October 30, 2008
Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times describing the fears some voters in Duval County, Florida have that their early votes will be lost and never counted. I found the article deeply disturbing. It wasn't because it surprised me that people fear their votes won't be counted (that fear has some precedent in Duval County, where 26,000 ballots were discarded in the 2000 election), but because it brought into focus for me the apprehensive feelings I've been having about the upcoming election...

The IncluderEpisode 7Vote For Losers!

Posted on October 29, 2008
The Includer is the voting machine for ones dreams.(There are no apostrophes on this Bosnian keyboard.) I am blogging thanks to last years Knight News Challenge.  November 1 is the last day to apply this year. What I really like about this contest is that everybody can see your entry...

Agile Programming: a Good Model for Journalism-Technology Collaborations?

Posted on October 28, 2008
In my experience in media companies and academia, developing or implementing new software is almost always a painful process. The people who are going to use the software can't communicate what they want, and the developers don't understand the end users' needs...

The IncluderEpisode 6Help Room

Posted on October 26, 2008
The Includer gives way to the Help Room. The more intensely we work offline, the more intensely we engage each other online. I share my proposal to the Knight News Challenge. The deadline is November 1. I ask for $180,000 for this three-year project...

Who's Watching the Elections?

Posted on October 24, 2008
Every election, Gotham Gazette publishes a last minute voters guide. We almost always include every local race along with a round up of our coverage of the issues in that district and the race itself. From Surrogate Court and judicial convention delegates to NYC congressional races; and sometimes we're the only publication in town that can tell you whether there's a race in your precinct...

MobileActive in South Africa

Posted on October 22, 2008
Brenda Burrell, technical director of Kubatana.net has attended the two previous MobileActive conferences and has found them very useful. It was at the 2005 MobileActive Conference in Toronto that Brenda first discussed the idea of Freedom Fone and where she was able to meet developers to help her make her idea a reality...

Is Barack Obama the newsroom of the future?

Posted on October 20, 2008
This thought occurred to me over the weekend when I heard that Barack Obama's campaign had purchased advertising space in video games. According this Associated Press Article: "Nine video games from Electronic Arts Inc., ranging from the extremely popular 'Madden 09' football game to the street racing 'Burnout: Paradise,' feature in-game ads from the Obama campaign...

Scaling the Beanstockd Game

Posted on October 20, 2008
When we developed the Beanstockd concept we created it with a specific target demographic in mind: college students and young professionals with a taste for trends, technology, and some passing knowledge of the green movement. These were our friends on campus and fresh out of school- intelligent young adults who were aware of the environmental crisis, but were busy! As such, they did not have enough incentive or structure to enable them to "go green" in their everyday lives...

The IncluderEpisode 5Hardship Letter

Posted on October 18, 2008
The Includer is a device for listening to a person's deepest thoughts. This may take twelve years, which is how long I have known David Ellison-Bey. In July, his house was foreclosed. He then asked for my help to review his many bills. They reflect the American economy, which weighs on his shoulders...

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