Ushahidi in 3G: How media outlets could extend the mapping platform beyond...
Since its launch in early 2008, the crowdsourced mapping platform Ushahidi has been used to monitor elections in Burundi, to track violence in Pakistan, to coordinate aid in Haiti. Its platform has...
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GameChanger sees a business model in baseball scores
One of the truisms of the paid-content conversation is that sports information — game scores, analysis, team-specific details — is one of the few types of content that, online as everywhere else,...
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All Our Ideas facilitates crowdsourcing — of opinions
What do readers want from the news? It’s a hard question to answer, and not only because we don’t often know what we like until we find ourselves liking it. To figure it out, news outlets have traffic...
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Truth-o-Meter, 2G: Andrew Lih wants to wikify fact-checking
Epic fact: We are living at the dawn of the Information Age. Less-epic fact: Our historical moment is engendering doubt. The more bits of information we have out there, and the more sources we have...
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MuckRock makes FOIA requests easy, but will reporters use it?
Making freedom of information requests can be a daunting task. If it’s not an agency dragging its heels on releasing documents or asking for a fee large enough to buy a compact car, then it’s the...
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Crowdsourcing chocolate cake: How a New York Times foodie stumbled upon the...
[Ken Smith, a professor of English in Indiana, noticed a New York Times piece that he thought showed an evolution in how journalists think about their audience. I'm happy to share his post with you...
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It’s people! Meet Soylent, the crowdsourced copy editor
The phrase “on-demand human computation” has a sinister tinge to it, if only because the idea of sucking the brain power out of a group of people is generally frowned upon. And yet, if you call it...
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The crowd reconstructs Moldova’s “Twitter Revolution”
Here’s another cool experiment in crowdsourcing, courtesy of the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism and our friends down at the MIT Center for the Future of Civic Media. Uncut: Revolution...
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A year later, lessons for the media from the Haiti earthquake response
Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, as well as the anniversary of one of the largest ever humanitarian responses to a natural disaster, with almost $3.8 billion...
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The Newsonomics of 2011 news metrics to watch
[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.] In the digital...
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1.4 million fans can’t be wrong: NPR’s Facebook page
“They swear like sailors, but boy, they’re smart.” That’s how NPR strategist Andy Carvin described the 1.4 million fans who comment and share stories through NPR’s Facebook page. The page — originally...
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The Egypt list: Sulia curates content by curating expertise
One of the biggest challenges in covering the unrest in Egypt — or, for that matter, in covering any event that’s in some way “foreign” — is determining who can provide relevant and accurate news...
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Voices: News organizations must become hubs of trusted data in a market...
Editor’s Note: American readers may know Geoff McGhee for his video project Journalism in the Age of Data, released to acclaim last fall. Here he teams up with two European colleagues — Mirko Lorenz,...
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A perpetual motion machine for investigative reporting: CPI and PRI partner...
There is a flaw in the investigative reporting model and it has to do with longevity. Follow me on this for a second: A reporter works months at a time scouring documents, meeting sources, verifying...
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The newsonomics of story cost accounting
Editor’s Note: Each week, Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of news for the Lab. What’s a story worth? Last...
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With its newest round of Knight funding, DocCloud will figure out how to...
Two years ago, DocumentCloud received $719,500 from the Knight News Challenge to build a tool that news organizations could use to upload, share, and then collaboratively read and analyze documents....
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Broadcasters don’t want to put campaign ad data online, so ProPublica pitches...
Earlier this year, when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a multimillion-dollar television ad blitz for (and against) candidates running for federal office, I wanted to know how much it spent to...
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MIT’s Open Documentary Lab: part think tank, part incubator for filmmakers...
Documentary filmmaking — the medium of Dziga Vertov! Richard Leacock! Werner Herzog! Errol Morris! — has struggled as much as any medium to find its place in the Internet age. Does the linear...
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Who watches the watchmen? The Guardian crowdsources its investigation into...
As Guardian journalists were preparing to launch their new investigative project on cookies and other online tools that track you around the web, they realized they had to figure out just what kind of...
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A lesson in collaboration: How 15 news orgs worked together to tell a single...
Shared bylines are common enough. But what about a story with the names of 15 reporters and more than a dozen news organizations attached to it? Last month, Education Week, the Education Writers...
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