Reflections on the Future of Civic Media

Posted on by

The twitters were ablaze at Future of Civic Media conference at MIT this week. I was in attendance as a beneficiary of one of the Knight News Challenge grants, Rich Gordon‘s brilliant idea to create a new class of programmer/journalists by sending hackers to j-school. Woot!

After 14 years of reading Wired, visiting the Media Lab was fanboy heaven, but the many brilliant folks I met were the truly inspiring part: writers, teachers, film makers, tech-minded journos, media freaks and geeks, innovators and inventors, all focused on making the future work better.

If there’s a belief I’ve taken away from these amazing people, it’s that journalism may be an institution barely alive, but we can rebuild it. We have the technology. More importantly, we have the people. Together we can make it better than it was before. Stronger, faster, and more democratic.

Also, in perfect MIT tradition, beer and geeks got together and conceived a beautiful idea: government needs a bug tracker. Much more on that soon.

What makes a news API tasty? NYT: Gimme some sweet metadata!

Posted on by

Amy Gahran did a great write up on the upcoming NYT API over at E-Media Tidbits:

I think it would be great if more news organizations and journalists could learn a different approach to presenting news — one that provides structure to information that supports both conventional storytelling and remixing, analysis, or alternate representations.

JD Lasica’s take on why it’s important is spot on:

The salvation of the news industry — if there is to be one — will come not from corporate board rooms but in unleashing the pent-up power of the citizenry as part of a multipronged social media/participatory media strategy.

Let’s just hope the folks over at the Times write a good one. APIs are not guaranteed to be useful. If they quit at movie listings, they’ll have given us little. But if they coat their stories in layers of delicious metadata, the web will eat them up. (Personally, I’d prefer a Microformat for news metadata, but I’ll take what I can get.)

What do you want to know about a news story?

There are obvious useful bits: date, headline, author, location, etc., but what else would be neat? How about translated headlines? Or full translations? Related news? Related videos? Related links on other sites?

Sources!

Tags!

Target demographics!

Krishna Bharat told me after his talk at Journalism 3G that the Google News bots would love to know if a particular story was from a wire service.

What uber-mash-upable goodies would you want from the NYT?

Links: NYT catching on, Tribune so far behind it makes my webs weep

Posted on by

“The WWW world consists of documents, and links.” — Tim Berners-Lee, in alt.hypertext, 1991.

red light district, by SMN
red light district, by SMN

Why do newspapers publish AP articles online? Why not just link to them? David Cohen says “Stop buying Associated Press articles.”

They are called hyperlinks. They are blue. They are useful. Look Ma’ – here’s an AP story. And it didn’t cost me a thing to link to it!

Money spent on the AP could be money saved and then used for… Innovation!

But, there’s hope! Scott Karp wrote on the Publish2 blog:

The New York Times has certainly embraced blogging, but it was striking to see… just how much they’ve embraced link journalism.

In a traditional newspaper article, all of these facts and analysis would have been synthesized, but the reader wouldn’t have had the opportunity to read for themselves the source material. This post does what journalism is supposed to do — empower people with facts, understanding, and perspective about important issues.

My local paper, the Chicago Tribune, doesn’t just suck at linking, they suck at being a web site. Their documents die. I don’t link to Trib articles because within weeks, they almost certainly vanish.

Ben Estes, editor of chicagotribune.com, spoke to our class last week. When I asked why the links died, he said that it was because they (I don’t know exactly who “they” is… I’m supposing the Trib brass.) don’t want to spend the money on, get this, disk space.

Disk space. Cheap-ass disk space.

Lame.

Content crises, the oppression biz, tips from EveryBlock and Twittering — 6w link rodeo

Posted on by

The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome — A List Apart

We have lots of “brand identity guidelines,” but not so many “style guides” (for content, at least). We have “strategists,” but no “commissioning editors,” and we more often “go live” than “publish.” Hence, we tend to first think “copywriter” when trying to get our content sorted, whereas very often an editor is the person we should be engaging.

Cisco Leak: ‘Great Firewall’ of China Was a Chance to Sell More Routers — Threat Level

The document is the first evidence that the networking giant has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression. It reinforces the double-edged role that Americans’ technological ingenuity plays in the rest of the world.

Recent EveryBlock-themed conference keynote — The EveryBlock Blog

My talk… focused on EveryBlock and some lessons we’ve learned while developing it.

And there’s a great conversation going on at Meranda Watling’s blog on Wired Journalists:
How is your news org using twitter?

Video how to: find Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr

Posted on by

Last week, I posted about finding and using Creative Commons-licensed content. It seemed a bit long, so I thought I’d pack the good bits about Flickr into a video. Check out the earlier post for more about how to attribute an image to an author, and other neat things you can do when you’re down with Creative Commons.

http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fsixthw%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F944116%3Freferrer%3Dblip%2Etv%26source%3D1&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf

(Blip.tv is totally neat, by the way. It’s got CC licenses built right in!)

UPDATE: Fixed the link to my previous post.