Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The Tiziano Project launches multimedia platform StoriesFrom
- Context, code, and community: Source is one-stop shopping for newsroom developers
- Knight Foundation funds new projects for fact-checking and transparency
| The Tiziano Project launches multimedia platform StoriesFrom Posted: 24 Jul 2012 11:23 AM PDT
StoriesFrom allows professional and amateur filmmakers a relatively easy way to produce an online multimedia package by using tools found around the Internet. StoriesFrom builds off Tiziano’s previous work like 360° Kurdistan, which combined personal accounts from Iraqi civilians and imagery from professional photographers. StoriesFrom makes it possible for anyone, regardless of experience, to create interactive video features, said Jon Vidar, executive director of the Tiziano Project. “The idea was to take the Iraqi Kurdistan project we did in 2010 and build a platform that would let individuals and organizations build those immersive documentary experiences,” he told me. StoriesFrom came out of the $200,000 in funding Tiziano won in last year’s Knight News Challenge. The idea was a content management system for video storytelling that would simplify the process of corralling and presenting the different parts of a multimedia project. The Tiziano Project’s wants to recreate the experience from the Kurdistan project not just in video, but in creating the capacity for ordinary people to tell stories that go unreported. StoriesFrom is a vehicle for that, an off-the-shelf product that could be used for teaching, amateur video, or professional work. Instead of publishing material independently around the web — videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr — StoriesFrom lets people pulls content from those different sites into one place. The platform was also built to make it simple to shoot, edit, and publish video straight from an iPad, Vidar said. Visually they wanted to offer a different kind of experience, so the site offers a map view (displaying features from around the world), as well as a tiled view that presents a variety of entry points for different stories. “We’re creating a presentation layer that sits on top of existing tools on the Internet and uses the resources you’re already using to cull content together into a showcase to tell a deeper story,” Vidar said. In the short time the project’s been live, Vidar said, the average time on site is around 15 minutes, with about six pages viewed per visit. “The way you engage with content makes it much more interesting and fun to play around with,” he said. StoriesFrom was built with the iPad in mind, both for capture and for viewing. The functionality of the site is the same on the iPad as it is on desktops and laptops. Though StoriesFrom is now in beta, Vidar told me they plan to make it open source. (That openness was a requirement for News Challenge winners.) Going to StoriesFrom.us you’ll find a handful of examples like On The Rez, a project created by students on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona, or 360 Palestine, which tells the story of people living in East Jerusalem. In each case, the Tiziano Project partnered with local groups to help produce the videos. Sometimes that means demonstrating how to use the software, other times it’s more of a multimedia training course, Vidar said. And, in the case of a less-than-successful attempt at a StoriesFrom project in the West Bank, it means setting up training only to get kicked out of the country. While StoriesFrom will be open source, Vidar said training and custom development of the platform represents a business model. The CMS will come with a few basic design options, but with a little knowledge (or hired work from Tiziano), the design could be more customized. So far, Tiziano has sustained itself off a mix of grant funding and training contracts. In that way, StoriesFrom also acts as a marketing tool as well. Vidar said their overall mission is helping people tell stories in areas where everyday voices aren’t often heard. The technology they’ve built will help advance that. “We consider [StoriesFrom] to be a stage that can be customized to tell a story,” he said. |
| Context, code, and community: Source is one-stop shopping for newsroom developers Posted: 24 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT A lot of newsroom developers are doing good work, and part of that good work is talking about their work. See ProPublica, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune for a few examples.
“There’s not really a central place for…journo-coders to go into really geeky details about the projects they’re working on, outside of the handful of journo-code blogs,” she told me.
“Context, code, and community” is how Dan Sinker, the OpenNews director, describes the project. He and Kissane met with developers in newsrooms to understand what they yearn for most. The biggest request was for an index of code repositories, like a specialized GitHub for journalism. You’ll find a Ruby client for interacting with The New York Times’ Campaign Finance API; a JavaScript library from The Guardian that helps manage the datasets behind visualizations; and TimelineSetter, a ProPublica app that turns ugly spreadsheets into pretty timelines. The site pulls live data from GitHub repositories, displaying who’s working on which projects and what’s changed. You’ll be able to search for all projects by a particular person, organization, or topic (say, campaign finance or crime tracking). The plan is to be able to add repositories from other networks, too. Source is a full embrace of the “show your work” ethos — second-nature for open-source software makers, but novel for newsrooms. The whole idea is to get news organizations sharing their code and make it easy for others — even competitors — to steal that code and make it better. “I think that there's real work to be done in advocating for, shining a spotlight on, and helping to generate community around the code that's being written in journalism,” Sinker wrote in first describing his idea last year. “Because the more community that can be built, the better the code is and the better off journalism is because of it.” Kissane said being open source is not a requirement for inclusion in the Source database, however. Developers are also welcome to post portions of otherwise closed-source projects to the site. |
| Knight Foundation funds new projects for fact-checking and transparency Posted: 24 Jul 2012 06:14 AM PDT
The Washington Post will receive money for TruthTeller, a live fact-checking tool for audio and video content, which the paper plans to use during this fall’s presidential debates. Wired magazine plans to use Knight funds to build off its journalism-on-Github experiment by developing a WordPress plugin that would allow readers to assist in error reporting, translation, and other feedback. Sourcemap, which allows users to track the supply chain of products, is developing a mapping tool for the Concord, Mass., school department to follow the path of food to the schools’ meals. All three projects will be funded out of Knight’s new Prototype Fund, which provides organizations or individuals with $50,000 or less to test ideas. Knight is offering its more traditional line of grant funding to startup projects TheLi.st and SuperPAC App. Developed at the MIT Media Lab, SuperPAC App, as the name suggests, helps users capture audio from ads with their smartphone and identify who’s paying for a political ad, where it’s airing, and more. TheLi.st is a project from Rachel Sklar, founder of Change the Ratio and more, and Glynnis MacNicol, a founding editor of Mediaite. More on TheLi.st from Knight:
John Bracken, Knight’s director of journalism and media innovation, was in Cambridge Monday to announce the new projects at the Awesome Foundation’s Awesome Summit: Connect. Bracken told me several of the projects announced today came to Knight through the most recent round of the News Challenge. Though they didn’t get funded through that route, the projects still showed enough promise to support through other means, he said. The beauty of the Prototype Fund, Bracken said, is that it gives Knight the ability to use a small amount of money to see where ideas can go. Knight — by far the largest philanthropic funder in the journalism-innovation space — has been tinkering with its funding methods in the last several years to emphasize speed in innovation. Bracken told me the revamped News Challenge was designed to produce projects that build off existing work and can succeed under their own power. But with the Prototype Fund, he expects to see some failures. Broadly speaking, the News Challenge is aimed at stable projects; the Prototype Fund should be pursuing riskier bets. “If the vast majority of those projects work, we’re doing our jobs wrong,” he said of the Prototype Fund. The basic steps of the fund’s work: “Idea, test, learn, share.” With the News Challenge, the Enterprise Fund, and the Prototype Fund, Knight is setting up systems to help companies and entrepreneurs at different stages in their growth. Bracken said Knight is trying to learn lessons from venture capital firms on how to structure investments and better support companies in their network. Though the foundation is refining its methods, Bracken said its goals of supporting journalism and the information needs of communities hasn’t changed. “When you set up a mechanism for people to tell you their ideas, and the people are awesome and the ideas are awesome, it’s incumbent upon you to mine that,” he said. Disclosure: The Knight Foundation is a funder of the Nieman Journalism Lab. |
Knight News Challenge winner the 
There is a loose community of code-savvy journalists sharing code, working through problems over Twitter, and meeting up at at meetups. “What there isn’t, right now, is a place for people to look at all of those code projects next to each other,” said 
The remedy is 
The Knight Foundation added to its investment in media on Monday, | You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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