Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Under consideration: Some interesting entries in the latest Knight News Challenge Posted: 09 May 2014 08:34 AM PDT Fifty-six semifinalists in the Knight News Challenge have been hard at work refining their entries and preparing for the next round of cuts. (They’ll be narrowed to a group of finalists next week; the winners will be announced at the Knight-MIT Civic Media Conference on June 23.) There were 704 initial entrants to the challenge, which will offer $2.75 million to the winners. The current iteration of the News Challenge is focused on answering this question: “How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation?” The OpenIDEO platform Knight switched to a few cycles back enables a lot of public input into and evaluation of News Challenge applicants. You can see both the semifinalists and other entries that didn’t make the cut online. After looking through all the entries, here are a few that stuck out to us. These aren’t our predictions for who’ll win, and they aren’t even necessarily the ones we like best — consider this less an exercise in Vegas oddsmaking than an attempt to highlight some of the interesting ideas in the pool with ties to journalism. (No offense — and good luck! — to those we didn’t pick.) CheckdeskCheckdesk is a Middle East-focused application that provides news organizations a one-stop platform to verify user-generated content using a variety of methods. “What we propose is not a silver bullet for verifying digital media, but a more structured, easy-to-use and expandable toolkit that makes it easier for you, the journalist, to use the best techniques already out there,” wrote Tom Trewinnard, the research and communications manager of Meedan, the nonprofit behind Checkdesk. Six news organizations across five Middle East countries are already using Checkdesk, and Meedan hopes to use Knight funding to expand access to the platform and make it available on mobile. MapWhateverFed up with the limits of Google Maps, the excessive costs of commercial GIS software, and the difficulty of learning open source mapping applications, James Baughn decided to build his own program that takes advantage of public information and allows users to easily create high quality maps. Baughn, who oversees the websites of The Southeast Missourian and other affiliated sites, wrote in his application that his goals are to create an effective script for downloading and processing data from maps, create a consumer-facing website, and open source the system so others can customize it.
Though he imagines MapWhatever could be used for a variety of purposes, there is no doubt that it could be used in newsrooms as well, Baughn wrote in his application. “Newspapers wanting to produce map-based infographics (for print or online) could generate a vector base map, import it into Adobe Illustrator or similar applications, and then fine-tune as necessary,” he wrote. NewsA11yMany news websites are not accessible to users with disabilities, argues Emily Stewart, who created NewsA11y as a means to connect members of the disabled community and news organizations to overcome these barriers. In her Knight application, Stewart wrote that NewsA11y has three goals: to allow users to point out barriers on news sites, to provide a space where individuals can collaborate on ways to overcome those barriers, and to act as a network where news organizations can look to hire coders or testers to help develop sites on case-by-case basis that better serve users with disabilities. Stewart built a prototype of NewsA11y as part of her graduate school work at the University of Missouri, and she said she would use the funding from Knight to “transition NewsA11y from a working prototype to a real product. I would have the resources to build a robust application with a passionate user base that connects two groups of people. NewsA11y would motivate news sites to become more accessible and provide a place for rapid testing.” OverviewSorting through a large set of documents can often be a nightmare for journalists, but Overview believes it can make that process easier. The platform has been under development since it won a 2011 Knight News Challenge grant — project lead Jonathan Stray is a Nieman Lab contributor — and Overview is already being used in newsrooms as a way to organize and navigate reams of documents being used for investigations. Now, Overview wants to continue to develop the product and build it out into free and paid tiers. (Overview also offers consulting services.) Still, Overview has recognized that the journalism field won’t be big enough to support the program, so it’s hoping to expand its user base beyond traditional reporters. “It will take sustained effort to reach a critical mass of paying users,” Stray wrote in its application. “Although we have increasing visibility within journalism, journalism alone is unlikely to provide enough revenue to support our organization. We need to broaden our user base into the non-profit sector generally, which means we need to learn what these new users need, build it for them, support their use, and market our product.” SecureDropFirst developed by the late Aaron Swartz, SecureDrop is an open-sourced application that allows whistleblowers to securely submit content to news organizations. The product is already in use in several newsrooms, including ProPublica and The New Yorker, and the team behind SecureDrop hopes to use Knight funding to improve the tool’s encryption to make it safer for sources to share information.
“While the current version of SecureDrop leverages US legal protections to provide unprecedented protection for sources and journalists, the current version still potentially leaves international journalists at risk if governments are willing to raid newsrooms and seize servers, or hack into the servers themselves in an attempt to find sources,” wrote Trevor Timm, executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, the group that manages SecureDrop. |
| This Week in Review: Weak net neutrality and stifled startups, and a glimpse of U.S. journalists Posted: 09 May 2014 07:51 AM PDT This week’s essential reads: The three key reads this week are Stanford professor Barbara van Schewick on net neutrality and innovation, Indiana professors Lars Willnat and David Weaver’s findings from their survey of American journalists, and The New York Times’ David Segal on unwatched online video ads. Will new FCC regulations harm startups?: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s proposed Internet regulations, which are set to be formally presented next week, are coming under fire from all corners, led by commissioners of the FCC itself. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel called for FCC chair Tom Wheeler to postpone the presentation of the regulations because of the “torrent” of criticism they’ve prompted, a suggestion Wheeler promptly rejected. Another commissioner, Mignon Clyburn, reiterated her opposition to the sort of Internet “fast lanes” Wheeler is proposing, urging the FCC to revisit its approach to Internet regulation. Meanwhile, more than 100 Internet companies, including giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Microsoft, sent a letter to the FCC expressing their concerns about the proposed regulations, calling them “a grave threat to the Internet.” Recode’s Amy Schatz and Time’s Sam Gustin provided some context for the backlash against Wheeler’s plan to allow Internet providers to make deals with content providers allowing them to provide faster access to their sites than everyone else. Mozilla, which makes the Firefox browser, went a step further, filing a proposal with the FCC to create a different class of Internet access connecting edge providers like Netflix and Dropbox to Internet users, which would be regulated as a utility like telephone service. The Washington Post’s Brian Fung and Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin offered good explanations of what Mozilla’s proposing and how it fits into the history of U.S. Internet regulation. Concerns about the proposal are coming from the startup world in addition to tech giants. MIT Technology Review’s David Talbot reported that some venture capitalists say they’re steering clear of startups that would require fast connections for services like video or audio. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin countered that weak net neutrality won’t hurt startups based on fast connections, because the cable TV system is still so ripe for disruption, and startups targeting that system will still be magnets for VC funding. VC Fred Wilson warned that if the regulations go through, the “period of ‘permissionless innovation’ is likely to come to an end,” and at The Atlantic, Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick argued that a pay-to-play structure would upend the economics of Internet entrepreneurship, in which costs are low enough that entrepreneurs can make their apps available to users without initial outside funding. Now, up-front capital will be necessary, she said, making it so that investors can’t rely on the market to determine what startups might be successful before they invest. Despite the protests of a few major companies — most notably Netflix — The New York Times reported that most media and tech companies are simply trying to befriend broadband providers like Comcast, which is in the process of merging with Time Warner Cable. That merger got some stiff opposition from within the industry in testimony before Congress on Thursday. Still, Ron Fournier of the National Journal wondered why we’re seeing so little resistance to the new regulations and the merger compared with the flood of outrage that swamped SOPA and PIPA. Vox’s Nilay Patel wrote that between the FCC regulations, the Comcast merger, and the Aereo decision, this summer will radically change the Internet and media industries one way or another.
A bleak picture of the American journalist: Researchers at Indiana University released results this week from the most recent edition of a survey of American journalists they’ve conducted each decade since the 1970s. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic provided the broadest summary of the study’s widespread findings, highlighting journalists’ decreasing job satisfaction and increasing age and ethical scruples, as well as its continued domination by white men. Several aspects of the survey drew additional attention: Jim Romenesko noted that the majority of journalists believe journalism is headed in the wrong direction, and The Wire’s Eric Levenson pointed out that the number of journalists who approve of the use of confidential or personal documents without permission is decreasing. The most newsworthy finding for many media observers (particularly on the right) was the decreasing number of journalists who identify as Republicans — just 7 percent, down from 18 percent in 2002. The number of Democratic journalists is declining as well, with 28 percent describing themselves that way compared to 36 percent in 2002. Instead, the number of journalists identifying as independent is booming. Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post said the shift toward independence mirrors a movement in the broader electorate, The Atlantic’s Thompson suggested that the statistics should be good news for conservative journalists, who should find themselves in demand if public desire for more conservative news truly outpaces the amount offered. Reading roundup: It wasn’t too busy of a week on the journalism and tech front, but there were a few other stories worth following: — As The New York Times reported, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law this week requiring popular bloggers to register with the government, a measure that many observers believe will serve to more closely track and stifle online speech. A Reporters Without Borders article from last month does a good job of explaining the new law, how it works and where it fits in Russia’s recent recent of online repression, as does an Animal New York piece from this week. Meanwhile, as The Washington Post reported, pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine have been intimidating and attacking journalists and taking them prisoner.  — New York magazine published a long story by Joe Hagan going deep inside Lara Logan’s tenure at CBS News and raising doubts about whether she will ever return to the network after being put on indefinite leave for her erroneous 60 Minutes report last fall on the Benghazi attack of 2012. Slate’s Amanda Hess flagged the story for its sexist characterization of Logan in various spots. — Finally, two more pieces to take a look at this weekend: The New York Times’ David Segal went deep into the paltry numbers of people actually watching online video ads and the difficulty in measuring them, and at the Lab, News Corp.’s Raju Narisetti offered a variety of creative ways to make the Pulitzer Prizes more useful in promoting good journalism.Photo of FCC chairman Tom Wheeler testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in December by AP/Susan Walsh. Photo of graffiti by Jonny Hughes used under a Creative Commons license. |
SecureDrop hopes to redesign the platform to simplify the API to allow newsrooms to simplify how information is submitted and allow for different utilities depending on the level of confidentiality needed for a particular source or type of information. It also plans to implement end-to-end encryption and other security measures.
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