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| 2009 Knight Batten innovations wow the crowd in D.C.
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Location: Blogs ICFJ SpeaksJessica Weiss |
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| Posted by: Jessica Weiss |
9/18/2009 6:00 AM |
Yesterday I joined journalists and new media gurus at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., to learn about innovations in journalism from the past year.
Yesterday I joined journalists and new media gurus at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., to learn about innovations in journalism from the past year.
The event, the annual Knight-Batten Symposium and Awards, felt like the Emmy’s of New Media in the U.S., with panelists hailing from the New York Times to YouTube. I left awed and inspired.
I must say, some of the innovations presented at the event felt eerily futuristic. Personally, I thought the most jaw-dropping innovation of the day was Custom Times, a prototype for personalized New York Times news reports that transition across print, Web, mobile, television and even the car. PLEASE watch this 3-minute video on Custom Times: http://nytlabs.com/customtimes/
Overall, the New York Times swept top honors with six entries that netted the $10,000 Grand Prize for a dynamic body of work in the past year. They are ALL cool:
Perhaps surprising to some: not one of the winners in this year’s award was a citizen journalism site. According to Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, which administers the awards, citizen journalism isn’t innovative anymore. “We already know how to do citizen journalism,” she told the crowd.
These days, the technology comes first, panelists overwhelmingly agreed. As Internews put it in a tweet from the event, @Internews: Newsrooms need developers, coders, data scientists, with journalism instincts. Not necessarily reporting backgrounds. (The event hashtag was #kb2009. For full archived Twitter coverage see http://twitter.com/#search?q=kb2009)
But not all panelists were thrilled about the trend towards the journo-nerdy. During a panel on “Delivering Cool Data,” investigative journalism guru David Kaplan, who heads the D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity (CPI), stressed how difficult it has been to essentially “reinvent” investigative journalism in this new age.
“It’s been heartbreaking to see our colleagues fall,” he said, as a result of the changing model and the recession. But, he said, new models of investigative journalism are hard-hitting and innovative.
“Sometimes we feel like monks in the middle ages,” Kaplan said, referring to traditional journalists amidst a tide of innovation and technology,” and “you’re offering us Guttenberg Presses.”
CPI won a $1,000 Knight-Batten Special Distinction Award for Nonprofit Journalism. Its international body of work included:
Winners of $1,000 Special Distinction Awards were:
- Printcasting, a Web site that allows people to create niche magazines for their communities from their own blog posts and from other blogs and publications that have registered on the site. http://www.printcasting.com/
- Apture, a powerful multimedia program that allows Web content creators to embed images, video, audio and screen grabs into articles so that the content pops up in a small window in the same screen, allowing users to get more information without opening new windows or tabs. http://blip.tv/file/2136007
- Change Tracker, a Web application developed at ProPublica that monitors content changes on www.whitehouse.gov and that is being shared to allow other news organizations to monitor Web sites. http://www.propublica.org/ion/changetracker
- Patchwork Nation, a Web site shared by The Christian Science Monitor and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that uses reams of demographic data to track how the nation’s 3,100-plus counties are dealing with an era of dramatic changes in politics, culture and the economy.
(My favorite example of data used in Patchwork Nation was: areas in the country where there is a Whole Foods + Obama voters. A lot of overlap, I'd assume :D)
Winner of a $1,000 Citizen Media Award for innovative and useful citizen participation:
- MyReporter.com, a vehicle by the Star News in Wilmington, N.C., that lets people ask questions and get answers from reporters that are cataloged for future reference. http://www.myreporter.com/
This year’s winners were selected from 92 entries.
To learn more, go to http://www.j-lab.org/about/press_releases/2009_knight_batten_release/ or access the archived Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/#search?q=kb2009. |
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