Tag Archives: innovation

Preliminary results from our informal Knight News Challenge survey

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Infographic by Lauren Rabaino, updated April 18th

In preparation for a roundtable discussion this weekend about the Knight Foundation’s commission on the information needs of communities, a few of us decided to survey past News Challenge grantees. A big thanks to Chris Amico, Will Mitchell, Max Linsky, and Lauren Rabaino for helping out with various parts. We wanted to pull together data like how many of the projects are still active, whether the grantees started their projects before receiving funds, and whether the amount they received was sufficient to achieve their objectives. On a program-wide scale, we wanted to know the percentage breakdown of content vs. education vs. software projects, the average lifespan of a project, and what type of institutions typically received funding. Some of this we were successful in collecting; some, not so much. All of our data is available as a Google Spreadsheet. Continue reading →

Universities as hubs of journalistic activity

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In the first Carnival of Journalism of the new year, David Cohn asks: How do we increase the role of higher education as hubs of journalistic activity?

First, the why. Educational institutions often have long-standing ties to a local community, both in terms of physical location as well as relationships. In New York City, there are families with multiple generations who have attended CUNY. Educational institutions are also in a unique position where they have access to continually fresh human capital. These are the strategic advantages.

As to the how, there are dozens of projects we could embark on. For instance, we could team with computer science students build a tool that maps a community’s information needs. Or we could offer low-cost multimedia reporting courses to active community members in hopes they will take the initiative to cover their own neighborhoods. Or we could reorient the entire institution to be a working newsroom and task hundreds of students as boots-on-the-ground reporters. Continue reading →

Startup lessons from now defunct NewsTilt

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Lesson: Transparency is tough

It was important to the journalists that we were a very open and transparent company. From the start, we tried to put as much information out there as we possibly could, and the most efficient way was to put every journalist we accepted onto a mailing list. However, this meant that our blunders and critical feedback were visible for all those journalists to see. Lots of them hadn’t started writing, we didn’t know them, and they had simply signed up, so we were always aware that our emails were semi-public. As a result, when we decided to close up shop, our closing down email was “leaked” to Poynter, leading to all sorts of speculation.

It takes a lot of time to be open like this, and a lot of effort to communicate effectively. The lesson here isn’t so much that we did it wrong, but that it’s difficult to do well.

Awesome postmortem. Reminds me that I still need to do a debrief on CoPress.

College from scratch

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Clay Shirky hosted an impromptu discussion section this evening on redesigning higher education. He’s put together a wiki page of the best responses, but I feel like I need to record a few too for posterity. The question was simple: If you were going to create a college from scratch, what would you do?

AFG85: @cshirky Classes would create wikis for specific topics and students would be graded on the quality of their contributions.

AFG85: @cshirky And the same wikis would be used year after year, so new students would have to add to the contributions of last year’s students.

digiphile: @cshirky Fund multidisciplinary labs for applied innovation & incubation. And learn from the example of PCU & “Accepted” http://j.mp/4LHTkG

sewsueme: @cshirky instead of having a college counselor you would have a concierge/ curator who would help you make sense of your education journey

sewsueme: @cshirky as @ccoletta & I were debating earlier in the evening: there would need to be a new accred system. Employer or performance based?

sewsueme: @cshirky learners cld collect “credits” (learnings) from anyplace–Apple store, a uni course, an apprenticeship as long as they cld prove

sewsueme: @cshirky there might be some new course creation but aggregation from multiple places wld be important

ricetopher: @cshirky Why build anything? College as aggregator, filter set, facilitator of networked learning better model in an age of ubiquitous info.

AFG85: @cshirky for professors, have a small full time staff supplemented with practitioners from different fields teaching for one semester

AFG85: @cshirky for students, go YCombinator style–systematic applications, then one weekend of ten minute interviews.

ekstasis: @cshirky single biggest failure of education is the focus on grades as a proxy for learning. they don’t always track. #CollegeFromScratch

I still think that accreditation is going to be the toughest nut to crack. All of the other pieces, distributed collaboration, access to learning materials, etc., are falling into place thanks to the disruptive tendencies of the web. People are learning, by golly, but the record of their learnings is all over the map. For any of these zany ideas for new universities to fly, the students will need to have an equally new method for articulating their accomplishments. Right now, this legitimacy comes from the accreditation board.

If you can convince employers that your new mechanism for accreditation is more accurate and effective than the standard college degree then, well, I think you might have a new college worth starting from scratch.

How J schools can encourage innovation

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… is a solid topic for the Poytner Chat being held this Thursday at 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern. A few months back, CoPress published a video called “A Case for Innovation”:

In it, we identify the historical context for the issues that a number of print publications are having today, and lay the groundwork for why innovation is critical for the transmogrification and survival of these organizations. Innovation, in our world, is about experimenting and taking risks. It’s “trying what’s radically new” with the hope that some ideas will be good learning experiences while others will be tremendous successes.

It’s critically important that journalism schools experiment as well, and I look forward to a productive conversation about approaches they can take to create an environment that fosters innovation.