I’m at the MIT Center of Future Civic Media today and tomorrow meeting with fellow Knight News Challenge winners, Knight Foundation staff, and rock stars from the MIT media lab who are building all kinds of crazy stuff.
Seriously, there are lots of cool kids here, few of whom I’ve met in person before.
Say hello if you see me.
I’ll post cameraphone pictures to Flickr when I’m not physically underground…
Yesterday, Brein McNamara, another News Challenge winner, said more or less that we’re all in over our heads to some extent.
That’s the right idea.
We’re supposed to take a good idea that we don’t necessarily have the resources to polish into a great idea on our own, then use the funding from the Knight Foundation and the growing network of winners to finish the process.
And that’s the challenge.
I’ll add a link to the full list of winners when I have a free moment, but I’m betting you’ll be able to find it at newschallenge.org.
There are some awesome projects on the list, including Radio Engage (Margaret Rosas and the whole Quiddities crew are seriously representing Santa Cruz out here), Spot.Us (David Cohn’s community-funded enterprise journalism project), and a CMS/front-end system project headed up by the editors of the Daily Bruin.
Nothing about ReportingOn has changed today. Follow reportingon on Twitter, send a tweet about what you’re working on to @reportingon, and find journalists working on similar stories.
Then, the easy part: Help each other out.
Huge congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to everyone involved in making this happen so far. Now the real fun starts…
Here's a short list of what I think is important about working with developers and choosing a technology for your media startup or nonprofit project, written for the Knight News Challenge blog.
Andy Dickinson provides an overview of a few question & answer tools at local news sites aimed at mixing reporters and readers to distribute solid information.