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Knight News to Award Internet Innovators
BOSTON – June 23, 2014 – Nineteen projects that strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation will receive $3.4 million as winners of the Knight News Challenge. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation made the announcement at the 2014 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference at the MIT Media Lab.
The winners provide a mix of solutions to promote an open Internet that is free and accessible to all. They address issues from privacy and censorship, to expanding the diversity of the tech workforce, to improving digital access and connecting communities with online content in easier, more useful ways. Three of the projects support the work of libraries as essential resources for community information access. Nine of the winners will receive investments of $200,000 to $500,000 each, while 10 early-stage ideas will receive $35,000 each through the Knight Prototype Fund, which helps innovators take media and information projects from idea to demo.
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Do you know Elise Andrew?
The creator of the Facebook page “I f*cking love science” is journalism’s first self-made brand
In retrospect, I could easily have ignored the picture that appeared on my Facebook feed on a lazy Sunday two years ago, labeled simply “Sand under a 250x magnification.” Cheesy, I thought, glancing at the post, not noticing until my nose grazed the monitor that I’d leaned in closer to look. The grains looked like tiny manmade sculptures, ceramic bulbs of fuchsia, orange, and beige. The gee-whiz appeal of the image was sort of embarrassing, but the result was unquestionably beautiful—and the 5,000-plus people who debated its authenticity in the comments section, calling it, variously, “bullshit,” “impossible,” and “stunning, just stunning,” seemed to agree. In total, 102,832 people “liked” the image, which had been shared by a six-month-old Facebook page with an unforgettable name: “I Fucking Love Science,” or IFLS.
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Ex-Google Hacker Takes on Spy Agencies
During his last six years working as an elite security researcher for Google, the hacker known as Morgan Mayhem spent his nights and weekends hunting down the malware used to spy on vulnerable targets like human rights activists and political dissidents.
His new job tasks him with defending a different endangered species: American national security journalists.
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A beginner’s guide to data visualisation
As a growing number of international NGOs are using infographics, charts and interactive maps to share success and highlight disaster, how can organisations with less resources create high quality visualisations without having to pay to outsource them?
The Guardian has put together a beginner’s guide for visualising development data.
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Putin’s Fear of the Internet
In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Brezhnev’s Soviet Union introduced a law aimed at stifling ideological dissent. Article 190, Part 1 of the Soviet Criminal Code criminalized “the dissemination of the intentionally false insinuations defiling the Soviet state and social order.” The post-Stalin regime was not the sort of dictatorship that exterminated its own citizens, but it insisted that public expression be in full compliance with the Communist Party line. It was not uncommon for people to be sentenced to years in work camps for “disseminating” three or four copies of underground literature.
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Scrivener 2 – a tool for writers
Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.
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Method Journalism
With the launch of new site after new site in 2014, it’s been a fascinating time to watch digital media try to figure itself out. Amid the turmoil of disruption, buffeted by tech companies’ control over information distribution, but aware of new fields of possibility, the past few years were filled with defending legacy brands.
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Death of Homepages & Future of News
This is the clearest illustration of the demise of homepages I’ve seen. (Well, not literally the clearest; it’s somewhat grainy, in an apropos way.) News used to be a destination, and you would go find it on your driveway and in your browser. Now you’re the destination, and “information—status updates, photos of your friends, videos of Solange, and sometimes even news articles—come at you; they find you,” Quartz’s Zach Seward writes.
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Net Neutrality Rules for Debate
On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to open for public debate new rules meant to guarantee an open Internet. Before the plan becomes final, though, the chairman of the commission, Tom Wheeler, will need to convince his colleagues and an array of powerful lobbying groups that the plan follows the principle of net neutrality, the idea that all content running through the Internet’s pipes is treated equally.
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Immediacy vs. importance
The tension underlying how the NYTimes.com homepage gets made
In this excerpt of her new book — based on months spent observing the inner workings of the Times’ newsroom — Nikki Usher shows how some of digital news’ most important real estate gets allocated, minute by minute.
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After the Protests
A well articulated op-ed by Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina and a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, on the strengths and pitfalls of social media in modern day revolutions.
“Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime. And whether these take place in Turkey, Egypt or Ukraine, pundits often speculate that the days of a ruling party or government, or at least its unpopular policies, must be numbered. Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.”
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Does Digital Media Mean Better Media?
Back in 2005, we launched Television Across Europe, a study that examined the state of broadcast regulation in 20 countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, in an attempt to nail down problems in the way broadcast media was regulated and to recommend ways to improve the regulatory environment in which journalists and media operated.
The findings were rather grim. Pressures on journalists from mighty owners, ailing public service broadcasters, and politicized regulators were making the work of journalists in this region a painful enterprise.
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iPad Microsoft Office: Delightfully Familiar
“If you love Office on your computer, you’ll love it on your iPad. If you’ve always hated it, that won’t change, either; now you’ll just have one more place to hate it.”
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10 free online tools for teaching and learning
Louisa Mellor reveals ten free online tools that might change your teaching for the better.
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Web Fiction, Serialized and Social
Every few days, Anna Todd uses Wattpad, a storytelling app, to post a new episode of this couple’s torrid tale. Chapter 278 of “After” came out last week, moments after Ms. Todd, a 25-year-old former college student in Austin, Tex., finished writing it.
The first comment appeared 13 seconds after the chapter was uploaded. By the next day, there were 10,000 comments: always brief, overwhelmingly positive, sometimes coherent. “After” has more than a million readers, Wattpad says.
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The NSA files and the network effect
The modern leak needs a new kind of reporting, and news organisations are adapting by finding collaborations of scale.
“The impact of the NSA files will reverberate for a generation. It has already forced a re-evaluation of the relationship between powerful technology and telephone companies, the government and the consumer. It has raised the issue of digital human rights and how to control a covert surveillance state. It has made the internet potentially unstable and untrustworthy.”
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The Future of Internet Freedom
We have the technology to defeat censorship. But do we have the will?
“OVER the next decade, approximately five billion people will become connected to the Internet. The biggest increases will be in societies that, according to the human rights group Freedom House, are severely censored: places where clicking on an objectionable article can get your entire extended family thrown in prison, or worse.
The details aren’t pretty.”
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The 40 Best Blogs for Journalism Students
Because journalism as a whole constantly ebbs and flows along with the currents of new technologies, students hoping to graduate and enter into the industry need to understand how its myriad facets change over time. Seeing as how blogs — one of the cornerstones of digital media and citizen reporting — inherently boast a current, updated structure, they provide an ideal conduit through which to trace all the most timely trends, concerns, and opinions. No matter their specialty or area of interest, at least one of the following will provide some nourishing food for thought and effective supplements to classroom lesson.
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FastCompany
FastCompany, a website with a unique editorial focus on innovation in technology, ethonomics (ethical economics), leadership, and design, lists the world’s top 10 most innovative companies in big data.
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Innovation, Optimism and Jobs
Is digital technology destroying middle-class jobs? Does it exacerbate income inequality? Does it boost economic growth and productivity — without creating the jobs that ought to come with economic growth?
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29 Awesome Things About Google
What would the internet be without Google? Sure, there are other search engines out there, but the world’s biggest and arguably its best one serves up over one billion results out of Mountain View, Calif., every day to people in 146 countries.
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Architect of Madness: Ferrari’s Héliographias
León Ferrari (1920-2013) was an Argentinian conceptual artist who worked with a series of extremely different medias through the years. Trained as an engineer, he gained notoriety in the 1960s thanks to his polemical works on religion and politics. Exiled in 1976 in Brazil, he started a series of plans using heliography, the technique traditionally employed by architects,until the advent of the computers, in order to reproduce their drawings. Combining letraset icons to hand sketches, he invented labyrintic worlds which became part of a series called “The architecture of Madness”.
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Glass, Darkly
“I HAD, IN THE BEGINNING, never heard of Google Glass, but that was part of the point. This was June, and Glass, as time-strapped “wearable computing” enthusiasts had quickly taken to calling it, had come to market just two months earlier, and then only in the most limited of limited releases. Just ten thousand had been made available, the first 2,000 sold to those fortunates who had attended Google’s 2012 I/O conference in San Francisco and witnessed the Glass demo, for which a series of hands-free-videotaping parachutists, stunt-bicyclists, and rappellers were employed to deliver the device to Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who was already wearing one. Another 8,000 went to the winners of a Twitter contest, who described their “use case” (clearly a more specific term than mere use) for Glass under the hashtag #ifihadglass, and were rewarded with the $1,500 opportunity to buy one.”
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Saudi net generation & the authorities
Conservative country boasts world’s highest use of sites per capita, but criticising Islam remains a clear red line
Turki al-Hamad paid a heavy price for a tweet. Last year the novelist told his followers that Islam as practised in Saudi Arabia was not the “message of love” preached by the Prophet Muhammad. The outcome was six months in prison without trial.
Conditions were immeasurably better than when he was detained in the 1970s, but the hazards of speaking out in the digital age were still painfully clear.
Hamad’s case was unusual though not unique. Like Hamza Kashgari, a journalist from Jeddah, he had provoked conservative religious zealots who oppose change in the kingdom – or provide the government with a handy excuse to do so. But Twitter is immensely popular and largely tolerated. According to recent research, Saudi Arabia has the world’s highest Twitter and YouTube use per capita – a staggering 90m views of the latter a day. It also has the highest Facebook use in the Gulf.
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Unlocking Your Inner Movie Director
A guide to apps for editing the video shot with your mobile device.
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