Tools
Coeds Create CoPress – Innovation from the Ground Up
Posted on 22. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
If you are ever worried about the fate of our the journalism industry take a moment to check out and appreciate CoPress – building a better ecosystem for college publications.
This is a fantastic case of young journalists scratching their own itch. The group recently formed their own nonprofit and are discussing what they need to do to get to the next step.
Next step? They are already getting college publications off College Publisher and onto Wordpress. They are being the change they want to see in the world. They are already making waves, their next step is simply iteration and scaling.
Meet Greg Linch one of the forces behind CoPress who gives more details.
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Aggregation is Creation – Adrian Holovaty
Posted on 21. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
Last week I had the unique pleasure of spending some time at the Poynter Institute to discuss the future of journalism.
I also had the chance to catch up with Adrian Holovaty who, for many, needs no introduction. He is most known for pioneering Django, a model/view/controller framework to deploy web applications and then using that framework to create EveryBlock.com – a news feed for your block.
I asked Adrian only two questions. First – to explain a little known aspect of EveryBlock whereby the editors help explain some of the obscure aspects of city infrastructure. My take away: If you still have any doubt that aggregation is creation or that filtering is an editorial service that journalists can hone and use to make money….. you are missing a VERY lucrative bus.
The second was Adrian’s advice to a young journalist/programmer. Scratch your own itch.
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Never Quit and Be Honest With Yourself – An Interview with Tristan Harris
Posted on 07. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
I’ve had the good fortune to run into Tristan Harris and finding out that we live in close proximity.
Tristan is the founder of Apture. Similar to two other Stanford computer scientist, Tristan understands and wants to improve how people find information on the web. Apture allows reporters to link out easily without necessarily losing the reader to another page.
More intriguing to me, however, is Tristan’s general experience as a young journalistically minded entrepreneur.What has he learned and what is advice to those that may come after him?
The first half of this interview focuses on Apture and his experience creating it – the second half about working on a startup in general. Never quit…..and be honest with yourself.
Untitled from Digidave on Vimeo.
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Alan Levy – BlogTalkRadio
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
As CEO and co-founder of BlogTalkRadio, Bob Charish and I have created a platform that is currently allowing over 3,000 hosts to broadcast live call in shows online. This social broadcasting platform allows anyone to have a voice and say they’re peace. You don’t have to be Rush Limbaugh to be a host on BlogTalkRadio—you just need a phone and a vision, and you get to be a citizen journalist when you speak what’s on your mind.
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Rick Burnes – Faneuil Media
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I’ve spent the last year and a half bootstrapping Faneuil Media, an online news startup. Initially, my partner Theo Burry and I focused on creating content for news sites using public data and open applications like Google Maps. Last year we broadened our scope with Atlas, a mapping tool that simplified map and data work for news sites.
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Bill Allison – Sunlight Foundation
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism:
At the risk of adding to the nomenclature, we like to think of our projects as being “distributed research.” While the goal is to dig out information or link relevant information, much of which can be used to tell stories, we often leave the telling of stories to others.
Sunlight has started several distributed research projects to bring more transparency and accountability to Congress. Each project differs greatly; we’ll describe just a few here. Congresspedia, which we launched with the Center for Media and Democracy, is a wiki-based “citizen’s encyclopedia on Congress” that anyone can contribute to and edit (though we have an in-house editor to oversee it for fairness and accuracy). Our “Is Congress a Family Business” project provided citizen researchers with an online tool that guided them to online databases to look up information about spouses of House members (specifically, whether or not a spouse drew a paycheck from the member’s campaign committee), and enter their findings into the form. The tool both guided their research and collected their data, even displaying updated totals on the number of members checked and the number who had been tentatively identified as paying their spouses. We engaged citizen journalists an effort to find out which Senator had effectively blocked passage of S. 223, a bill that would require Senate campaigns to electronically file their contribution information with the Federal Election Commission (as House and presidential candidates already do); they called all 100 Senate offices in an effort to find out, and reported what they learned to us via comments on blog posts and emails. Finally, we have recently launched EarmarkWatch.org, a site that lets users connect the dots between lawmakers, lobbyists, campaign contributors and earmarks, plus share info and comments on whether earmarks meet pressing needs, pay off political contributors, or are simply pure pork. The site is at once an investigative tool for finding information on earmarks, a repository of that information, and a social networking site for those who want to bring transparency and accountability to congressional spending.
Additionally, we have provided grants to other organizations involved in citizen journalism, including Capitol News Connection for a project that would allow citizens to have their questions asked of lawmakers by CNC reporters; the Center for Independent Media to train citizen journalists and establish a Washington bureau to cover Congress; Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to create an Open Community Open Document Review System, enabling citizens to review and annotate documents obtained from the government through the Freedom of Information Act; and we’ve also supported both NewAssignment.net and the Center for Citizen Media. A full list of our grantees can be found at http://www.sunlightfoundation
What are your goals?
Our main goal is to bring transparency to Congress, and each project we do is designed to further that goal. Sometimes we are trying, explicitly, to answer a question (how many House members were paying their spouses from campaign funds in 2006; who has the secret hold on a transparency bill) that require the same steps to be repeated dozens or hundreds of times (calling Senate offices, looking up expenditure records for House campaigns). For other projects, the goal of aggregating the distributed research is secondary to the task at hand (scoring each member’s official Web site for transparency; evaluating the merits of individual earmarks), though we can still answer big questions (how many members post their schedules on their Web sites; how many earmark recipients lobby Congress).
What are some of your notable achievements?
Using the Web in innovative ways to make the distributed research process user friendly and even enjoyable: We launched “Congress’ Family Business” at 3:30 p.m. on a Friday of a holiday weekend, and expected the research to take three or four weeks. Within 40 hours, the project was completed—citizen journalists found that 19 spouses were paid by a member’s campaign committee in the 2006 election cycle, totaling more than $636,000. The amazing thing about the project was that our researchers found that doing the research was almost addictive. Most participants researched multiple members—anywhere from 10 to 100. And remember, this project involved searching through campaign committee expenditure reports—the sort of task that normally causes eyes to glaze over.
Designing research projects around available data sources: One of the most important things we do is to steer our volunteer muckrakers to reliable data sources they can use to find information for our projects, providing enough instructions to familiarize them with their use. Our hope is that by making them aware of these resources, they will check them again when they need government information in the future.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
We’ve learned a lot as we’ve gone along, largely through making mistakes. Our first effort in this field, after Sunlight broke the story of then-Speaker Dennis Hastert personally profiting from a $207 million earmark for a highway project, we asked our readers to investigate their own member’s personal financial disclosures, and let us know what they found. We had about 100 eager volunteers, but no way to train them and, except for email, no way to communicate with them. There was also no methodology, no set of questions we were trying to answer, just a suggestion that people take a peak at their lawmaker’s financial disclosure form and report back to us on anything that looked odd. While a lot of people did a lot of work looking, only one story emerged from it (and that one on the Web site of Harpers, as one of our citizen researchers tipped off a reporter there to what he had found). Our second effort, a 2006 project called Exposing Earmarks (conducted jointly with a coalition of other groups) similarly suffered from a lack of thought on the front end: While a lot of people looked at individual earmarks, there was no means of collecting and correlating that information at one site, so that we ended up with a scattered effort. Since that time, we have learned that there is no substitute for having a research tool that helps guide research and collect information. Our newest effort, EarmarkWatch.org, also allows for interaction among researchers–a research, publishing and social networking tool.
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
No, we don’t get revenue for this. The Sunlight Foundation is a 501(c)3.
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
What we need most of all is more transparency from Congress! Beyond that, we’d like to develop means of distributing tasks like fact checking, we’d like to be able to create a network of volunteers who would take on more responsibility for running the projects we create. We’d also like to come up with more cool tools using data from other sources while allowing others to make tools using our data.
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Dave Winer – Scripting News
Posted on 04. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I started blogging, RSS and podcasting, and have worked with various organizations to level the playing field so that anyone can participate in gathering news.
What are your goals?
Better information flow so we can have richer lives and solve the big problems before us.
Notable achievements?
I’ve created several award-winning products, open standards, and developed new technologies. I was one of the first bloggers, podcasters, online publishers.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
Progress comes slowly.
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
I’d like to see open newsrooms so bloggers can start working together collaboratively. I think the local professional news organizations should host this.
Anyone you’d particularly like to talk with, learn from
I wrote up the two ideas I’d like to discuss at the conference here…
http://tinyurl.com/3xpkmo
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David Stern – MixedInk
Posted on 04. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
MixedInk is a startup building a democratic, collaborative, web-based writing platform. The platform is something like a wiki, except that it would allow an infinite number of simultaneous contributors, it enables mass expression of a collective opinion on a subjective or controversial topic, and it generates a final, aggregated, concise text within a limited time period.
Within the sphere of journalism, MixedInk will allow large groups of people to co-author op-eds and news articles. As journalism becomes increasingly transparent, crowdsourced and collaborative, we will help citizens and amateur journalists brainstorm, vet ideas, and craft effective narratives together.
What are your goals?
At a concrete level, our goal is to enable masses of individuals to express their opinions through collectively authored text in a fun, community-driven environment. Speaking more broadly, we aim to help bring about a more democratic public sphere.
Notable achievements?
We have not yet launched publicly and are currently in the midst of early (private) beta testing, so we don’t have much to brag about yet. When the time comes, you’ll hear from us.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
We have learned that there are often trade-offs between democracy and usability. Specifically, after watching how new users respond to our tool, we have had to compromise on some of our loftiest goals in order to make our platform simpler and more fun to use. If we cannot encourage participation, all our ambitious, idealistic aims are for naught!
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
After launching, we will offer a free, ad-supported version on our site, and a white-label, enterprise version to partners and clients.
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
1) We plan to expand testing over the next couple of months to larger and larger groups. We have the first several of these groups lined up, but will require additional partners to organize testing at the largest scale.
2) We are looking for investment to help build our organization and finalize the development of our software as quickly as possible.
3) We expect to launch publicly in January 2008.
Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
Pretty much everyone in attendance is doing interesting work, and many are potentially partners, so please feel free to approach me. In particular, though, I would be interested in speaking with Jonathan Weber, John Wilpers, Michael Meyers, Steve Rubel, Mike Krempasky, Micah Sifry, Emily Gertz, and the organizers, David Cohn and Jeff Jarvis.
