MediaShift Idea Lab

Introducing Switch, A News Game About New York City's Energy Gap

Amanda Hickman — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:00:59 -0500

Our latest (and last, for now) news game, Switch, is live. It is no Energyville but we think it is pretty awesome. Not only is it live, the source code and installation instructions are already available.

With gadgets guzzling evermore energy, New York City faces a looming energy gap. New Yorkers will have to cut back on our electric use or start generating a lot more power. Our game lets people explore the options that are on the table, along with a few that aren't. Should the city ban air conditioning? Harness the tides? Go nuclear? Warning: the game is addictive.

Switch is a concentration-style game that deals each player 18 pairs of cards, each representing an opportunity for the city to conserve or produce electricity. As players match pairs, they're asked to decide whether each policy initiative is a good fit for New York City. At the end (or whenever the player grows bored!) players "flip the switch" to see how the measures they've accepted would add up against the city's predicted 2030 energy needs.

We worked with Will James of Tekimaki, whom we met through his very cool subway map project at onNYTurf which, in addition to being both early and awesome, is the only online NYC map I know of that is available in Estonian.

We've learned a lot about gaming and news games over the last two years, and a lot about building them on the cheap. More on that after you've all played Switch!

Journalism Teachers Get Mobile-ized in South Africa

Guy Berger — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:19:41 -0500

Most Africans don't have computers or access to the Internet. Cell phones are a different story.

So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places -- even in places with access to computers and the Internet.

Answers to this challenge were provided in Grahamstown, South Africa last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas, a Knight grantee, ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University.

Participants were brought together under the auspices of another Knight project, the Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami. Veteran multimedia teacher Rich Beckman put together five days of high-powered training for a handpicked group from countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, Kenya, Senegal and South Africa.

The group learned about audio-driven slide shows by MSNBC's Jim Seida, and online video storytelling by the University of Westminster's David Dunkley Gyimah. Debate around digital ethics was led by Sam Terril from the University of Miami.

But it was the session with Verclas that brought home the obviousness of why there should be a strong focus on mobile in African journalism schools. Take Muda Ganiyu, head of the Lagos Polytechnic, who told colleagues that he had seven video cameras for 1,200 students. Video-enabled cell phones, he pointed out, could fill a rather large gap.

He proved this point when he and colleague George Nyabuga used a cell phone to capture dramatic images and video of a shack being set on fire and the arrest of the alleged arsonist -- all while out on a workshop exercise.

Second-Rate Technology

"What about the problem that cell phones don't usually have as high end capabilities as specialized video cameras?" asked Verclas.

She then answered her own question: "Having second-rate technology to tell a story is better than no technology at all."

More than that, participant Harold Gess argued that journalism teachers need to focus on storytelling; the technology is secondary to this task. So, if a cell phone can enable students to learn to tell stories effectively, that amounts to mission accomplished.

Ayesha Ismail, another participant, added that the value of teaching students to use the power of their phones is that they can then do reporting at any time, and not be constrained to times when they booked out a school's scarce equipment.

That point brought home the importance of students learning to use -- to the fullest extent possible -- their own phones.

Highlighting the value of capitalizing on having a communications tool in your pocket, Verclas herself snapped pictures on her cell phone of a smashed window at the local newspaper, Grocott's Mail. Overnight, thieves had stolen a TV set located in the window bay that had been part of the Knight-supported Citizen Newsroom, launched the previous week during the Highway Africa conference in the city.

Newsroom co-ordinator Michael Salzwedel and editor Steven Lang had also grabbed a picture on their cell phones with the aim of posting it online and generating community discussion around the crime.

Reporting by SMS

Back in Verclas' class, another participant, Brian Garman, proposed that classes on mobile journalism should start with the most basic of a phone's capabilities by teaching the principles of reporting via SMS. Courses could then move to images, audio, video and multimedia packages done on -- and sometimes for -- cell phones.

Garman also argued that when students have access to higher-end equipment, they tend to replicate familiar genres and formats. Conversely, if they are required to experiment with the new medium of mobile, there's a greater chance that they could drive change.

This point put the participants at the workshop into temporary pause mode, the reason being that using cell phones for journalism is as new to them as it is to students.

As realization of the possibilities set in, it was almost as if the room became energized with light bulbs flashing, brainwaves churning, and spirits soaring.

In assorted projects for Verclas during the day, the group came to grips with practical production using cell phones. They came up with pretty creative content, such as a documentary made in French using cell phones, as well as the shack fire story.

Innovative Use of Cell Phones

The groups also cooked up clever schemes for using cell phones in innovative ways. One idea was to sign up people during the 2010 World Football Cup in South Africa and, using a signal sent via text message, trigger an avalanche of user-generated photos of what was happening at that given moment in time.

Another proposal was for software tools that would enable an entire audio slideshow to be edited, compiled and compressed for upload on a cell phone. A third idea planned to enlist carriers to load phones with social mobilization images and audio, which would kick in to users when calls were made or received.

It wasn't all blue skies, however. Verclas highlighted the importance of context in that powerful cellular carriers can determine what lives or dies on their network. Along with that, metadata about locality can be abused, prices are insufficiently regulated in some countries, and privacy can never be guaranteed.

There's no problem in acknowledging the downside. Journalism teachers need to convey the negative aspects to students as well as the positive potential.

And thanks to the workshop, they know they can do both.

AP News Registry Aims at Most Flagrant Infringers

J.D. Lasica — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 01:25:40 -0500

I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry.

The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components:

• All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc.

• The wrapper also will carry a built-in "digital beacon," or tracker, to monitor use of the content by others to track usage and compliance. (As I understand this, the content is not encrypted but carries a lightweight bug technology.)

As a social media consultant and journalist who spoke at the summit just an hour earlier, I asked whether the dialogue and AP's plans were public information, and Kevin Walsh, AP's Kevin Walsh, Vice President of Marketing, responded, "It is now."

AP's plans were met with the predicable negative reaction in the blogosphere (see, for example, the comments at bottom of this article). But AP should be credited with its transparency during this process, and from what I heard at the summit, its plans make a lot of sense. Thousands of sites are unfairly piggybacking off the work of journalists, and if newspapers and news organizations like the AP are to survive, there has to be a mechanism for compensation.

As an internal AP document titled Protect, Point, Pay - An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News put it: "The evidence is everywhere: original news content is being scraped, syndicated and monetized without fair compensation to those who produce report and verify it."

Fair use won't be easy to define

It's a topic I have some familiarity with, having written Darknet and reported on Hollywood studios and media companies' reluctance to embrace their digital future. At the time I wrote the book, there was widespread music file sharing (there still is) but also an increasing recognition that the original Napster was misguided and the music industry needed to devise legitimate forms of compensation for the artists. (Apple's iTunes and Rhapsody are among the companies still trying to create a frictionless business model.)

My view on the new AP initiative is similar: Some reuse of AP's content is socially and legally acceptable, but there needs to be limits. What will matter, in the end, is how this plan will be carried out by AP and the cooperative's members. If they go too far and claim "all rights reserved" around the first two sentences of every AP article, the blowback will be enormous. Fair use exists, and in the past the AP has paid too little heed to those concerns — even though AP reporters rely on the same fair use doctrine in their reports nearly every day. (For example, I didn't get the AP's permission to use the graphic at the top of this post.)

Todd B. Martin, AP's Vice President, Technology Development, reassured the publishers in the room that the intent of the news registry isn't to go after every blogger who borrows a snippet of an AP news story.

Instead, Martin said, "We're not going to stop a blogger from cut and pasting an article. But we are giving you visibility into the 20,000 other domains where your content appeared and the top users and where it was monetized. So you can get a list of the top 100 [infringing] sites with over 100,000 views, and then facilitate business development opportunities" with the sites in question. The registry, Martin said, would help create new business opportunities and products and also buttress more rigorous legal enforcement of the AP's intellectual property.

That business development, presumably, would go something like this: You're taking our content without authorization. Sign up for a subscription, remove it, or face the legal consequences. It sounds as though AP will be creating a new category of subscribers that falls short of a standard membership subscription.

I asked the first question: When a blogger or third-party publisher reproduces part of an AP story on his own site or blog, how much borrowing is permissible? What is the cutoff point between fair use and a trigger mechanism that requires a subscription payment?

"We're focused on removing the ambiguity around the use of our content," Martin responded. "The registry will help you decide whether that use is permitted or whether it's a business development opportunity" requiring payment.

Which, of course, doesn't answer the question at all. For a simple reason: There is no bright line. But I do agree with AP on this: There is a line at some point. It comes down to context: reasonable lightweight borrowing vs. patterns of appropriating reportage and photographs for profit. It appears AP and its members will take things on a case-by-case basis until some conventions and rules of the road are established.

Recently in his MediaShift blog, Mark Glaser did a brilliant job of exposing the unscrupulous practice of sites like Gawker and site scrapers that reuse copyrighted material without authorization, payment or transforming it in a significant way: Using the 'Steal-O-Meter' to Gauge if Stories Steal or Promote.

It's a conversation we've avoided for a long, long time.

Overcoming Drupal Challenges as SochiReporter Nears Launch

Alexander Zolotarev — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:24:37 -0500

SochiReporter is getting ready to launch on the web and for mobile users. We spent the last three weeks fixing linguistic, technical and design bugs, all with the goal of maximizing ease of use.

So far we have drawn a fabulous group of people from both local and virtual communities: garage tech geeks and web schizophrenics, coffee-shop amateurs, and folks who want to use the site and offer feedback. Their comments have helped us to get better. We also attracted an avid gamer in Sochi who spends most of his time in an underground Internet café at the center of the city. He first took our Games Section (devoted to the preparation for the Winter Olympics) for a repository of Olympics-themed computer games, which was funny.

We are building the site using Drupal, a great platform. But the biggest challenge at this stage is that Drupal isn't as good at handling languages other than English. So our programmers had to invest a lot of energy into making it take Russian as a default language. In many cases, Drupal was unwilling to accept the correct phrases, and it especially disliked the cases (the correct endings of the Russian numeral adjectives). As for design, it is getting easier at this stage and we recently added magenta as our main color.

If you'd like to learn more about the story of SochiReporter so far, please watch this making-of video. It's about the 100-day process of creating the SochiReporter layouts.

SochiReporter by the numbers

Here are some numbers about our process so far: 7 designers, 11 versions of the logo, 17 pages and 3 backgrounds created, 1048 cups of green tea consumed, 17 nights per designer spent in discussions. We spent so much time discussing things because of the shared enthusiasm for the project, which often took the brainstorming deep into the night.

So, with only a bit of time left before the site is launched, here's an overview of some key details about SochiReporter:

SochiReporter was a winner of the 2008 Knight News Challenge and is being implemented thanks to the grant from the Knight Foundation.
SochiReporter is the first ever initiative to build a multimedia archive about the preparation of a host city for the Olympics.
This is an experiment to help define the future of news. We hope to work out a successful business model as well as the accompanying website that will satisfy the community's information needs.
This is a project aimed at supporting the Sochi community by enabling citizens to track and debate how the Olympic preparations are changing the city over a five-year period.
The project will create a repository of multimedia resources and content about the preparation for the Olympics. It will document information that otherwise might be lost or not captured at all.
The project will create a database of information and content that will be of interest to journalists who come to Sochi in 2014 to cover the Games.
This project will help improve local traditional media and introduce them and the community to the concept of citizen multimedia journalism.
The model being developed for SochiReporter will be able to be replicated in any country in the future, whether in connection with the Olympics or other similar grand events.

New Tools For Journalists From TechCrunch 50

Chris O’Brien — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:18:18 -0500

Earlier this week, I spent two days at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. The conference organizers pick 50 web companies who officially launch at the conference. The overall group was pretty mixed, but a few start-ups offer interesting services or ideas that might be of interest to folks thinking about the future of news and information. Here's a selection:

Citysourced: The company has a platform for "citizens to identify civic issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to City Hall for quick resolution." They are launching soon with a project with the city of San Jose. For now, you can sign up to be alerted when the full site is launched.

Insttant: The site provides "real time people-generated news." According to the founders, Insttant will use "Twitter's public stream to generate a comprehensive overview of what's happening in real time through headlines and visuals." You can sign up to get an invite to the beta.

DocWrite: An iPhone application that allows you to easily perform dictation and transcription. The sound file is automatically uploaded to a site where you can listen to it while using a window to type up the transcription. (Yes, you still do the transcription yourself.) Still, it could be handy for journalists.

Improving Access to Information is One Way to Make Reporting Cheaper

Amanda Hickman — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:21:01 -0500

When he's not toasting escapism, our tireless editor Mark Glaser has been asking why reporting costs so much. I can't tell you much about investigative reporting (a $400,000 product of which started the conversation), except to say that six figure salaries do add up. But I can tell you that when it comes to local reporting, improved access to information could make a big dent in the expense of getting a story written.

If you want to take a look at distribution of discretionary funds by the New York City Council, you have to start with a 400-page PDF full of tables of information. And then you need someone on hand who knows how to pull tables from a PDF into a workable spreadsheet. That, or you need a pencil sharpener and a calculator. And while highlighters and pencil sharpeners are not blowing holes in anyone's reporting budget, the hours required to process this information certainly are. The situation is absurd: this information started out in a database and there's no reason that anyone -- whether they're a reporter, civic gadfly or deli manager -- should have to jump through hoops to put it back into a database.

Of course, those hoops are just for information the city already makes public. If you want to know where pedestrians are being hit by cars, or how parking placards are distributed in a city where curbside space is valuable and abuse of parking privileges is well documented, you'd better know who has that data and have someone on hand who can write an iron tight FOIL request. Want to know about the distribution of lead poisoning cases in the city? For that you'll need lawyers.

FOILs take time, which means money. Lawyers, too, tend to want money for their time. One way to make information cheaper is to step up the data requirements in local transparency laws. New York City is considering legislation that would amend existing public records laws to require that information be made available and that it "be presented and structured in a format that permits automated processing." That is to say, raw data. Just publish it -- don't make us ask.

With the law itself lingering in committee, the mayor's office announced a competition, NYC Big Apps, for applications that will use city data. Perhaps the idea is to deflect attention from the bill, which the mayor is no fan of. The contest, which offers a prize that includes dinner with the mayor, is not really a substitute for making data available.

Steve Romalewski, a pioneer of web-based GIS and community mapping projects, is also skeptical of the contest. He notes that it offers no explicit guarantee that any datasets will be fully available for the long haul, and that no one has offered any explanation of why just 80 data sets are included.

Romalewski also rattles off a good list of datasets that are currently only available on a per-request basis -- which means, among other things, that you need to know they are there. His list includes the types and locations of small businesses, green spaces, recreational spaces and housing violations, as well as interim multiple dwellings (aka lofts) throughout the city. He also points out that land use data currently must be licensed from the city at a rate of $1,500 per year if you want all five boroughs: not a trivial expense to small projects like Gotham Gazette.

Romalewski argues that we shouldn't have to ask for data--that most of what city agencies aggregate belongs in the public domain. I'm with him there, and curious as I am to see what comes out of NYC Big Apps, I'm not convinced that the contest going to help put city data in the public domain in New York City.

I don't know whether or not the legislation currently sitting in committee is the answer we need, but I do know that New York City is not alone in needing far better access to the data that civil servants use and aggregate in the course of their work. I also don't think that simply providing us with the raw data is enough -- but at least it's the bare minimum we need to fill the role of government watchdog.

By the way, if you want that list of under-publicized city data, skip to the comments in Romalewski's post.

How Talking into a Mobile Phone Can Help Change Lives

Prabhas Pokharel — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:00:00 -0500

The pre-cursors to mobile phones were two-way radios, also called Walkie-Talkies, that transmitted voice signals. The first generation of mobile phone networks were similar in that they also only supported voice communications. Second generation networks, and a happy accident, gave us SMS, and third generation networks provide even more advanced mobile data services.

Most mobile phone applications now use these newer channels of communication -- SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a major part of mobile phone communications. And when it comes to performing social work, voice communication is actually the most important feature in many parts of the world. I'm going to profile some of the most interesting of these initiatives, but first it's important to understand why voice is playing such an important role.

Voice has a big advantage over SMS and data transmissions because it channels spoken language directly. People of varying literacy levels are able to use voice technology with keypad and voice navigation, and this means applications can be run in local languages. Users can issue commands and requests and thus communicate more effectively. The downside of using voice comes on the receiving end. Voice data is much harder to process than text or other data. It requires considerable technical effort (or a lot of people power) to parse and separate voice data. Even then, the accuracy isn't perfect. Searching through voice data also remains a near-impossible feat. On top of that, airtime costs tend to run higher with voice than for text message.

Yet, even with these challenges, there are several notable projects that leverage the voice capabilities of mobile phones to deliver important information in interesting ways.

Question Answering Services

Two of the more notable projects provide a very simple service: they answer people's questions.

Question Box provides a service in India and Uganda. In India, phone boxes are installed in slums and villages that connect users to operators that will answer questions. In Uganda, users can call in from any mobile phone and ask their questions. The operators have access to a repository of previously asked questions (and their answers), and they can also occasionally consult the Internet. A special search engine and database were also built specifically for the project.

Another initiative, Avaaj Otalo, provides an audio community forum for farmers in rural Gujarat, India. Working with an organization that produced a popular radio program, Otalo provides a call-in number where farmers can exchange questions and answers. Users are also able to listen to archives of the radio program.

These projects differ in that Question Box avoids having to process users' questions by adding a human listener in the loop; Avaaj Otalo avoids processing by organizing their collection of audio prompts with into a menu. Both programs, however, have yet to deal with the problem of cost because they subsidize the service for users. Otalo operates with a toll-free number and Question Box provides the phones to call from in India. In Uganda, Grameen Community Knowledge Workers provides the mobile phones.

Wikipedia and News on the Phone

MobilED, which operates in South African schools, developed a program that delivered Wikipedia content via mobile phones. Users texted in a query and were called back by a speech synthesizer that read the text of the relevant Wikipedia entry. Users could also upload voice-based edits to articles, or create audio entries if nothing existed on a given topic. The queries were easier to handle because they were text-based, but the information delivery utilized voice in order to deliver the entry and ensure comprehension. Unfortunately, the service was expensive to maintain and MobilED eventually abandoned the project in favor of purely data-based services.

FreedomFone, a Knight-funded project based in Zimbabwe, is working on providing news using an audio channel. In an environment where the press is highly censored and access to news is scant, FreedomFone plans to implement a solution so users can either call or text and receive the latest news information. The cost structure has yet to be determined.

Recreating the Web, or Wikis Over Audio

Perhaps the most ambitious project is IBM's Spoken Web (also known as the World Wide Telecom Web) Project. The idea is to create an all-audio version of the web. The project aims to create voice-sites that are linked to specific phone numbers, much in the way a website has a URL. The project has already built a system called VoiceGen that creates VoiceXML content from an audio input. The group deployed part of the technology in the form of VoiKiosks, a service that allowed users to listen to information from different NGOs and upload professional advertisements. It proved to be a popular test service.

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also developing audio wikis, or "local repositories of audio information," that can be edited and created using audio. It essentially recreates wikis on a mobile-accessible audio platform. The system is not fully developed, but is expected to be deployed in India in conjunction with Microsoft Research India.

The barriers to voice services

Voice communication offers several benefits, especially when it comes to low literacy consumers. The question, then, is why voice-based technologies are not more of a player in the world today? The automation of these types of service is difficult, but Question Box, Avaaj Otalo, and IBM have shown that challenges can be overcome.

Cost seems to be the biggest issue when it comes to deploying and maintaining these services. MobilED ended its voice-based program because of cost. It's important to note, however, that airtime is particularly expensive in South Africa. The International Telecommunication Union reported in 2008 that costs for one minute of on-network airtime during peak hours was the equivalent of U.S. $0.59 when calculated using purchasing power parity. Airtime is much more affordable in India. The same minute in India costs only U.S. $0.07. Hopefully, this will encourage other voice-based mobile services in India, and we can eventually see the cost issue resolved once and for all.

Photo courtesy of gopal1035 on Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

"Programmer-Journalist" Scholarships Yield Finalists for Online Journalism Awards

Rich Gordon — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:06:39 -0500

Our Knight News Challenge scholarship program to educate "programmer-journalists" at the Medill School at Northwestern University just won some significant external validation. The Online News Association yesterday announced the finalists for this year's Online Journalism Awards, and two of the finalists resulted directly from the scholarship initiative.

News Mixer, the "conversations around news" site created by a team of master's students including the first two programmer-journalists, is one of four finalists for a new prize: the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism. The site is in some pretty good company; the other finalists are two important startup companies (Attributor and Publish2) and the Associated Press (for its AP Mobile initiative). As one of the two professors who directed the project (along with my colleague Jeremy Gilbert), I am incredibly excited and proud of what our students (Brian Boyer, Ryan Mark, Angela Nitzke, Joshua Pollock, Stuart Tiffen, Kayla Webley) accomplished. There's some wonderful student work represented in the contest's two academic categories, but the screening judges are saying that News Mixer is in a different league -- competitive with significant professional and commercial ventures.

Meanwhile, ChangeTracker, a project developed by Boyer during his internship at Pro Publica, won a finalist spot in the "Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies, Small Site" category. The award winners will be announced at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco, Oct. 1-3.

The awards announcement gave me an excuse to catch up with the News Mixer students (who dubbed themselves Team Crunchberry) to see what they're up to now. Here's a rundown:

Brian Boyer is news applications editor for the Chicago Tribune, where he leads a team responsible for creating news-based applications for the Tribune's Web site..
Ryan Mark, the other programmer-journalist on the News Mixer team, works with Brian at the Tribune as a news application developer.
Angela Nitzke is Web content associate at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she edits and publishes content and is helping redesign its Web site.
Joshua Pollock is an information technology project manager for Granite Telecommunications, where he's using project management skills he learned with News Mixer.
Stuart Tiffen is working in Bonn, Germany, at Deutsche Welle, the international broadcast news organization, where he writes, edits, creates Flash galleries and manages the organization's Facebook presence.
Kayla Webley recently completed a 15-nation Asia trip, including an internship with Time magazine in Hong Kong.

I was particularly excited to get updates from Angela and Joshua, both of whom told me their innovation experience at Medill played a critical role in helping them get their current jobs, and gave them skills and knowledge they are applying daily. Their experiences speak to the value of having journalism students collaborate with computer programmers; both Angela and Joshua clearly learned a lot from working on a software-development project at Medill.

It's noteworthy, I think, that the five jobs listed above did not exist before the digital era. The Crunchberry students' career trajectories demonstrate clearly that while there are fewer jobs in some journalism categories (for instance, newspaper and TV reporters), there are rich digital opportunities for students who have both journalism skills and an understanding of the interactive world.

Meanwhile, Brian and Ryan are showing through their work at the Tribune (such as searchable databases on pollution caused by dry-cleaning businesses and political influence in college admissions) that programmer-journalists can play a significant role in the reinvention of journalism for the digital age.

The Power of Proximity: Possibilities for Hyperlocal Journalism in South Africa

Harry Dugmore — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:44:45 -0500

Newspapers everywhere are being forced to rethink their role as simply providers of the news of the day. There is (and always has been) an appetite for immediate information and news you can use that is hyperlocal and also more detailed and granular, to use an increasingly popular word for the kind of gritty features implied.

Take crime for example: a newspaper might learn of a dozen small incidents taking place in their town, but only cover a few that are deemed newsworthy according a set of gate keeping decisions that differs by paper. Sometimes only bigger crimes get reported or, in South Africa, crime where there is actual violence. Cell phone snatching or clothes being pilfered off someone's clothesline is not likely to earn any column inches in even the smallest papers.

And yet it might well not be the size of the crime, nor its nature, nor the levels of violence that are interesting and newsworthy. Rather, it might have everything to do with proximity. You may already know if your immediate neighbor's laundry got pinched off the line, but you might not know that such deeds are happening two or three blocks away. A veritable small-scale clothesline crime wave may be happening (and may be coming your way!) without you knowing.

Of course it's very hard to cover all crime comprehensively using the print medium. But doing it online, and using various forms of visualization like crime incident maps -- elements of which can easily be reproduced in the print edition -- is an approach that holds a great deal of promise for small newspapers eager to reinvent their role in local communities.

There are lots of organizations, including the Knight Foundation and its grantees, that are looking hard at making this kind of hyperlocal information available. EveryBlock is the most famous and has done pioneering work. (It was recently bought by MSNBC.com.) David Sasaki, also a Knight News Challenge winner, wrote a very useful overview earlier this year about how maps can create social change and community involvement.

Inspired by these pioneers, what we have in mind in South Africa is to pursue a focus on the visual presentation of material, with map overlays and mouse-overs that reveal an incident and link it to further reports, context etc.

Mapping out a strategy

We are focused on launching at least four kinds of maps this year, and we know there are a lot of issues. Knight grantee Leslie Rule, in a thoughtful post about hyperlocal mapping, talks about being at a conference where an audience member argued that hyperlocal crime mapping websites can "reinforce stereotypes about where crime occurs, and more importantly, who commits it.... And don't necessarily inform the community, offer insight into issues, or shed light on potential solution"

David Sasaki also made the point that "2009 I believe will be the year of developing map-based interfaces which enable neighbors to share information with one another, leading to direct action and increased community involvement." (This is as opposed to, I suppose, just receving the information.)

We want to inspire people to take action, find community solutions, and pressure police to do their job well (arriving to help when called to do so is a big deal here in South Africa). We also want to help communities and the police see patterns of crime, For example, Grahamstown seems to be South Africa's leading city for laptop theft, with more than one pinched every day.

To do all of this well, we know we'll have to move beyond information provision and stimulate, encourage and possibly even facilitate organized responses. Hopefully,this powerfully conveyed new information and accompanying investigative journalism will spur action by readers and users.

We are of course looking beyond crime as well.

At Grocott's Mail, and as part of our Knight funded Iindaba Ziyafika project, we're also looking at ways of combining citizen reporting and local sources of data such as daily police reports, property valuations and sales, information about government services (such as opening times of government health clinics and when specialists are on duty), as well as a range of information about entertainment, sporting events, and upcoming community events.

Challenges of data-driven information

There appear to be three challenges in providing these kinds of data driven, information-heavy services. The first is getting a regular supply of data so the information is up-to-date, useful, and has a 'news' quality to it. The second is selecting ways of displaying the information so that it is most useful to readers. Will maps do the trick, and how scalable and searchable do they need to be? What kind of filters can we provide? The third challenge is allowing for comments, feedback and their aggregation, which will transform some of raw data into trend analysis type stories.

With the example of crime information, much of the required information appears to be available from local police stations and emergency response agencies. Depending on the country and the police station, it is often free available. In the U.S., the information is available in digital form, which is the whole rationale behind the automated parts of EveryBlock.

In South Africa, both the format and the level of accessibility seem to differ. It looks like we might be able to get access to crime reports at the local police, but only in hand-written form! So there's some work to be done!

This type of approach does take time and effort. It's a very different kind of journalism. But whether it focuses on hyperlocal crime, hyperlocal pollution and health issues, local economies, or information about the provision of local services, this approach provides an essential, missing link between what citizens find useful to know, and information that can inspire them to help change things in their community.

Getting off the ground in South Africa

Four graduate students have received scholarships from the Iindaba Ziyafika project and are working to getting these projects off the ground. They are being supervised by Vin Crosbie, an international expert in new media (among other things). You can read about his recent experiences working with us on his blog.

By the end of 2009, our work will be available online at the Grocott's website and in truncated form in the print edition.

In a separate project, we're also looking at how Grocott's online can be a conduit for greater involvement in civic life. We hope to create an early warning system that can alert people when important local issues are coming up for debate or decision by the government. Too much reporting of civic events is done in the past tense; it is critical, we believe, to anticipate and frame information for people in a way that encourages participation. I'll blog about some of our thinking and plans for that in the near future.

Meanwhile, and to conclude, the big news from South Africa is that the first (as far as we know!) Citizen Journalism Newsroom is opening formally on September 8 in the Grocott's Mail office in downtown Grahamstown. We're already using the facility, providing training and getting ready. (We have computer terminals and other facilities available for people come in and use.)

We're also launching our citizen Journalist "Photo of the Week" competition with a small weekly cash prize, and our CJ "Story of the Week," which also carries a small cash prize. We'll see if the walk-in facility at the office and the incentives start increasing the already impressive flow of stories and photos already coming in.

Finally, we also launching the Drupal based NIKA Content Management System at Highway Africa with two half-day trainings for community newspapers from across the country and the continent. Not only is NIKA a great CMS, but it also facilitates the direct reception of SMS through a modem and some Kannel-based SMS gateway bridges.

NIKA will initially be served over the web, but the stand-alone fully installed LAMP system, with Drupal and NIKA configurations, will be rolled out as users move beyond the web-only offering later this year.

Keep watching this space in September for some links to our official launch and some training photos!

HuffPost Social News Helps Close the 'Awareness Gap'

Rich Gordon — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Back in December, as a team of Medill students (including the first two Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalists") was developing the News Mixer project, I wrote an IdeaLab post called "The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here." It captured my thoughts based on my experience of working with the students on the News Mixer project, which offered new approaches to news commenting driven by the capabilities of the Facebook Connect service.

News Mixer was one of the first Web sites to take advantage of Facebook Connect to build an engaging social experience around news. It won praise from people interested in conversations around news and, more recently, was recognized by the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism.

News Mixer, though, was just a demonstration Web site, a prototype designed to show the potential for increasing engagement and improving the caliber of news conversations. This week, one of the top news sites on the Web -- the Huffington Post -- launched a new service (HuffPost Social News) that delivers on that potential. I've been playing around with Social News this week, and it's quite compelling.

As you can see in the screenshot I've posted on the right, now that I've registered for Social News, every page of huffingtonpost.com displays recent activity by my Facebook friends on the site. I can see what my friends are reading and the most popular stories among members of my Facebook network. I can also choose to highlight my Facebook friends' comments on each story, rather than see comments from every user.

Furthermore, as you can see from my second screenshot at the end of the article, each user's profile page looks very much like the one the News Mixer team created. It displays recent activity by your Facebook friends and a list of friends who have accounts on the Huffington Post.

Why is all this important? Because the biggest problem facing content creators today is what I call the "awareness gap." This refers to the fact that every piece of online content reaches only a fraction of the people who would find it interesting or relevant. On the Web, because the volume of content continues to grow dramatically, many others who might be interested in a particular piece of content never know that it exists.

How can we close the awareness gap? For a long time we've been waiting for better personalization engines to produce the "Daily Me" predicted in the 1990s by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. The problem is that it's hard to build a good personalization algorithm. Just because I found one article on a topic interesting doesn't mean I want another one on the same topic. But I'm very likely to be interested in content my friends are interested in, in part because my friends and I inevitably share some content interests, and in part because I'm inclined to keep up with what my friends are interested in so we have a common converational foundation.

Filtering news based on my friends' interests does raise some troubling issues -- especially the risk that my friends and I will build an echo chamber in which we close ourselves off from information that challenges our preconceptions, or that relates to topics that are important but not interesting to us. But the more I look at HuffPo Social News, the more I agree with Chadwick Matlin of Slate's The Big Money that it is in part "the future of journalism."

When FM Radio Meets the Mobile Phone in Pakistan

Corinne Ramey — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:30:54 -0500

In the United States, high-end smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry don't have built-in radios. But in Pakistan, even the cheapest cell phones, which don't have cameras or other features, come with the ability to listen to FM radio. Every day, and especially during cricket matches, people walk the streets with their phones pressed to their ears, tuned into their local stations, according to Huma Yusuf, a journalist based in Pakistan.

In Pakistan and other countries in the developing world, mobile phones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. In June 2009, Pakistan had 94.3 million mobile subscribers, or about 58 percent of the population, according to the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, a government agency. Mobile phones have become a popular way to tune into radio, a medium that has proven to be a powerful force for democratization and civil society. Although it's not clear what impact mixing cell phones and radio will have, it promises to be a powerful combination.

The evolving relationship between cell phones and radios was one of the subjects of a recent report by LIRNEasia, a think tank that studies ICT policy in the Asia Pacific. The most surprising finding was that in three of the countries studied -- Bangladesh, India and Pakistan -- more people own mobile phones than radios, according to Ayesha Zainudeen, research manager and demand side specialist at LIRNEasia. About 24% of people in Pakistan own radios, according to the study.

The study found that roughly 7% of people in Pakistan listen to radio on their phones. However, Zainudeen said the study likely underreported the number of listeners. In 10,000 face-to-face interviews conducted by researchers, people reported that families will often share a single phone, meaning multiple people could be using it to listen to the radio. This type of use was not counted in the study.

Traffic Reports Cover Urban Warfare

In Pakistan, where radio stations operate under state restrictions, radio operators will find creative ways to share useful information, according to Yusuf. "We have a poor government licensing department," said Yusuf. "There's a lot of stuff that happens, so they forget and don't realize they need to shut something down."

Radio stations have used traffic reports, which are permitted by the government, as a means of reporting gang violence, looting and other unsafe conditions. Yusuf detailed this practice in an article:

The radio journalist Waqar Azmat advised drivers to avoid the area known as Gurumandir, "because the conditions there are not good, there is no traffic in the area." A few minutes later, at 2:26 p.m., he returned to the airwaves to say, "traffic on Shaheed-e-Millat Road is very bad, as it is on Sharah-e-Faisal. There's madness all the way until Tipu Sultan Road. Drivers should choose their routes carefully so that they don't become victims of bad traffic."

Descriptions of traffic became code for urban warfare and violence, warning listeners about where it wasn't safe to travel or be outdoors.

Dueling Radio Stations

In the future, Yusuf thinks the combination of radio and cell phones could become especially interesting in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). "This is the place where radio can have most explosive impact," she said.

Currently, the Taliban has about 150 illegal FM radio stations in the area. The Pakistani government is considering allowing other stations in order to counter the Taliban. "That legislation is expected soon," said Yusuf. "If that passes, I think that lots of incredible things will happen."

Though the government is unlikely to allow community radio stations across the country -- Yusuf said they fear the power of local reporting -- it recognizes the role that community radio stations could have in fighting the Taliban. The Obama administration has also supported the use of cell phones and radio in this area. "The way Obama phrased it is that we're losing the information war against the Taliban," said Yusuf.

As more people in Pakistan and the rest of the developing world listen to radio on their mobiles, the growing number of listeners could have a potentially disruptive, and democratizing, impact. Most likely, these listeners won't just be tuning in to hear cricket scores.

This article originally appeared on MobileActive.org

Photo of cricket game by Pete Meade via Flickr.

Making Progress Toward Launch of Phoenix Light Rail Pub

Aleksandra Chojnacka — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:17:19 -0500

Daily Phoenix is a website and mobile app for Phoenix metro residents who use or live around the light rail. We are providing news and information per stop. Information includes business and services, events, promotions, gossip, networking opportunities, etc. all on a stop by stop basis.

Where are we today?

It has been an incredibly busy couple of months! As Adam mentioned in his last post, we were featured on "Good Morning Arizona" last month. They want to have us back when we finally launch the project and have us demo it on live TV. Very exciting!

We've made lots of progress in building the site. We've found two great guys (our programmer, Caige, and designer, Scott) who are helping us build and launch our project! Working with them has been a great learning experience, from building wire frames to information design. We're hoping to have a beta launch by the end of September. With this goal in minding, we are planning a launch party in Tempe, Ariz., the first week of October. The launch party will be a great way for us to demo our product and conduct a fun scavenger hunt using the mobile version.

One of the other things that has kept us busy these last few months has been getting in touch with stakeholders to get buy-in and assistance. We've met with the Tempe Chamber of Commerce, Phoenix Arts Council, Tempe Convention and Visitors Bureau, and have a few more meetings in the works. Everyone has been very supportive and excited about the idea.

Our next step is to meet with the local businesses around the light rail to build awareness, get their feedback on what we're doing and how we can make it better to serve their needs.

We still have A LOT of work ahead of us but are making great progress so far.

Sidenote: We are STILL debating the name of our site...

Source Code for Balance

Amanda Hickman — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:02:54 -0500

Okay, so you haven't been waiting for this with baited breath the way everyone was waiting for the EveryBlock code. Nonetheless, after a few months of wrangling on and off with Git Hub I finally sat down and worked through a bunch of nagging authentication issues and managed to post the code for Balance! our game about balancing city budgets.

Assuming we haven't made any terrible mistakes (I already spotted one little error. If you spot it too you can buy me a beer!), we'll post cleaned out versions of the other games we've developed in the next week or so.

One thing we didn't really budget for in these games was really good documentation. What we've got is pretty bare bones. And we certainly don't have the resources to support the software. That said, if you're genuinely interested in getting a Balance!-style game running yourself, I'll do what I can to lead you through it.

Using GRINS to Improve Technology and Processes at Community Radio Stations

Zahir Koradia — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 07:16:41 -0500

Radio Bundelkhand, one of the early community radio stations in India, started live transmission in October 2008. We visited the station in February 2009 as a part of Community Radio India Forum annual body meeting. During this visit we initiated talks of piloting the radio automation system being developed by us. We released the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System (or GRINS) in June, and setup GRINS at Radio Bundelkhand during our week-long visit in mid-July. This report describes (a) the operational setup at Radio Bundelkhand before GRINS was deployed, (b) the changes in the setup made by deployment of GRINS, © value added by GRINS to the setup, (d) challenges faced by us during the installation, and (e) future plans with the pilot setup. In brief, we describe below some important contributions made by GRINS. Please read the report for further details.

GRINS setup at Radio Bundelkhand

Playlist Management: GRINS now allows the staff at Radio Bundelkhand to not only prepare and save a playlist, but to also schedule a playlist for automatic transmission on air at a specified time in the future. As a result, there is no need for a person to be present near the computer to start the transmission. Other features like display of start time for each item in the playlist and the ability to preview items in the playlist while another item is playing on air have provided convenience to the staff.
Content Management: One of the primary concerns at Radio Bundelkhand was the need for a mechanism to manage content created by the station. GRINS enables content management by allowing users to save metadata regarding programs present in the system and to search for them at a later date.
- Users can store a variety of information like language of the program, details of creators of the program, description of the program, trivia about the program, and so on. Different categories can also be assigned to programs based on its content. For example, a program regarding an interview with a doctor on polio vaccination could be assigned categories of "interview" and "health". Once metadata information has been fed for programs, searching for them becomes extremely easy with our "facet" based search engine.
- GRINS library search engine allows one to search for programs based on several independent aspects or "facets". One could search for programs based on length of the program, categories assigned to the programs, trivia or description of the program, and so on, each of them reducing the search results independent of the other. Effectively the results thus obtained are a logical AND of all the constraints specified by the user. The ability of a user to search programs using constraints of so many types allows him/her to specify very powerful search queries. This is particularly useful when the content database grows very large. Once programs of desired kind have been searched for, GRINS allows users to obtain group statistics of the searched programs. These group statistics include total number of hours the searched programs have been on air, cumulative frequency of transmission of the searched programs, etc.
Diagnostics: One of our main concerns with deployment of GRINS at Radio Bundelkhand was the unavailability of a local expert with knowledge of GRINS. This is expected to be the case at most radio stations even for the future. This meant that in case of any kind of failure of the system, the station staff would be helpless. To avoid this kind of a scenario, GRINS includes a "Diagnostics Widget" that allows a user to diagnose the reachability of all "services" and connectivity of audio cables. A diagnostic test like this could be run by the station staff before a transmission to ensure that everything is in order. We believe this feature would significantly offset the unavailability of local manpower with knowledge of GRINS. The true value of this feature will become known as and when more deployments are done and the system is used for longer periods.
Robustness: In order to ensure that local staff could rely on GRINS, it was imperative that GRINS be robust in failure detection, resilience to network failures, and ensure recoverability with the least disruption. Significant effort was put in to ensure online detection of failure of many components of the system, resilience to temporary network failures, and recoverability in case a service encountered an unexpected error. Anecdotally, as can be seen in the picture below, the "magic box" and the switch connecting the "magic box" with the computer running the user interface was placed near the feet of the staff during the first week when the system for being deployed and tested! Given the situation it was quite conceivable that a slight kick to the network cables could cause temporary loss of connectivity.

Network hub and GRINS under the table, installed dangerously close to feet

Transmission Logging: GRINS logs programs that are played out on air. The staff therefore need not maintain a large archive of all audio that is played out on air. A "Log View Widget" allows them to simply look at all the programs played out between any two dates. This ensures that Government regulations can be met with the least effort.

We will keep working very closely with the staff at Radio Bundelkhand to ensure that there are no technical problems faced by the station. Our next visit to the station will happen very soon when we will deliver several minor features requested by the station staff. We will also collect logs of operation of GRINS at the station for further analysis.

Our next major upgrade will add telephony capabilities to GRINS. With these capabilities, the staff at Radio Bundelkhand will be able to accept phone calls and record conversations. Currently Radio Bundelkhand accepts song requests for only one hour during the day, where a staff member receives the call manually and records the conversation on a recorder by keeping the call on a speaker phone. With telephony capabilities, the station will be able to accept song requests throughout the day in an automated manner without the staff having to manually receive calls and talk to the caller.

We also intend to collect logs from the radio station periodically over the next one year to study if the system experiences any performance or robustness issues. In the long run, this would provide us with information regarding stability of the system.

Community Radio in India Includes Report on Eclipse, 'Bundeli Idol'

Balachandran Chandrasekharan — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:39:19 -0500

Gram Vaani successfully launched its first pilot a few days back with Radio Bundelkhand! Radio Bundelkhand is a community radio station operating in the small town of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh (India), and was the first community driven CR station to start broadcasting after the new policy. It is being run by Development Alternatives, one of the largest NGOs in India. This pilot has been an excellent experience for us. We saw the folks at the radio station produce Bundeli Idol, a strong competitor to the American and Indian Idol (!!), and a program on the recent solar eclipse, and got lots of feedback about our system. Bala and Zahir spent a week there setting up GRINS, our platform for community radio stations, and training the radio station staff and volunteers to use the system.

Up and running in a day!

Myself and Zahir reached Orchha on the 13th morning. We had a short meeting with Ms Anujaa (Station Manager - who handles bulk of the administrative work and also finds time to guide the reporters in their content creation), Mr Ashok Shukla (he is the top technical guy here and a jack of all trades!), and Mr Amit (who works closely with the reporters on content production). We took a few hours to set up our box, and figure out the cabling in such a way that the computer used for running the front end of our system could also be used for their usual production work. It seems they do have access to audio and computer related equipments of decent quality, through the city of Jhansi (Jhansi is about 16kms from Orchha). We could get some of the reporters to work on the system from time to time. We used the feedback from them to fix some usability bugs and improve the general stability of the system. These activities of testing, feedback and updating the system went on in parallel for the better part of the week we spent there.

Zahir fixing up some cables

Bala giving a tutorial on GRINS

The young reporters

One has to experience the infectious enthusiam and high motivation levels of these young reporters in person. They are mostly in the late teens to early twenties age group. They are a friendly, confident and talented bunch of people. Belonging to the villages near Orchha, they are able to connect with the local population and draw them out. Writing scripts for their own programmes is well within their comfort zone, and so is working on the computer to create audio content. They are quite proficient in using Audacity for their editing needs, and before GRINS was installed, relied on winamp for playing out their content on-air. The old system will be used as a backup for a few weeks before they come to rely solely on GRINS. Even though they are interested and motivated to learn new things, they face some barriers in knowledge acquisition. On the production side, their toolset is mostly limited to Audacity and some audio format convertion tools and the like. Content management is a tough nut with files stored in difficult to navigate folders. GRINS should be able to help them with this bit. I suspect that even a short training session on the variety of production tools available should do them great help. They have the inquisitiveness to explore things and follow things up on their own. So far, the training they have received has been on field work. They were unfamiliar with the concepts behind audio mixers and were not confident in their knowledge of the connections and configurations of their existing setup.

Content production

They do not have adequate access to quality content which they could use as raw materials for their content production. The nearest public library is in Jhansi (about 16 kms away), which, apparently serves mostly old content. They have access to an unreliable internet connection, but even when connectivity is available, they are unable to make effective use of it since most of them are not conversant in English. I think we should try to make quality content available in local languages. Lack of access to experts in fields like basic sciences is yet another reason why they are unable to produce radio content related to such fields. They were quite taken in by the 3D interactive globe on my KDE desktop. They found kstars quite interesting too. I believe we could make localized versions of similar educational software available to these students. I suspect software like Celestia, Kgeography, and Parley will turn out to be immensely popular! Next time Gram Vaani visits Radio Bundelkhand, we will be carrying some of these software with us.

Creating a program on the solar eclipse

We got a chance to watch them make a programme on the solar eclipse (July 22). They aimed to counter prevalent superstitions on the subject. Through discussions and reading articles from magazines, they quickly built up their own knowledge and promptly recorded a fifteen minute programme. We chimed in with our knowledge of Earth, Universe and Everything. (And yes Nishi, you were right, Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to the sun, while Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system. My bad.). She was pretty comfortable with her astronomy, since she had a chance to brush up on it when she prepared for the Railways Examination. All this happened under the watchful eyes of Shuklaji, who gave them a few suggestions on how to structure the show. His ability to contribute to things both technical and non-technical is invaluable to this station.

Bundeli Idol and advertisements

Radio Bundelkhand regularly broadcasts programmes on agriculture, folk songs, career opportunities, heritage and life of women. Recently, they have started airing advertisements too. The reporters themselves put in effort to bring in these ads which could potentially be a good source of revenue. Broadcast of an advertisement of a particular horticultural nursery seemed to get the attention of nearby local businesses and more of them have expressed their desire to broadcast their own ads. Amit had come up with an idea to have a Bundeli Idol contest which has generated a lot of interest from the public. We attended one of the audition sessions in the village of Niwari, about 30kms from Orchha. They had about 35 participants coming in that day, and fifteen more on the following day. The make-shift studio was an office belonging to Taragram. RB had taken a few instruments with them which the participants could use. They are required to sing Bundeli (local dialect) songs for the contest. Those who are selected in this round would be called up and invited for a recording session at the station. They have worked out the format of the competition and arranged for judges. The daily transmission time was to be extended by half an hour to accomodate this programme. This programme would give a boost to their collection of Bundeli songs.

Bundeli Idol recording in progress

What's next

We will visit Orchha pretty soon. During our next visit, we will add some minor features that were requested by our friends here. We will also make arrangements for getting the application logs that are created here back to Delhi. In another two to three months we should be here again with our brand new telephony related widgets. It should help them with running contests like Bundeli Idol, where the viewers can vote via SMS or through the telephone. Telephony service would also help them in disseminating basic information like programme schedules, without engaging the time of any of their staff members.