This Saturday is the annual BarCamp News Innovation event at Temple University. This year, I'll be participating as a judge of the Open Gov "News" Hackathon. I appreciate being asked to judge the hackathon and look forward to seeing what awesome mobile tools the teams of coders and journalists conjure up Saturday.
An exclamation of glee appeared on the #nicar12 Twitter stream last night. Thanks to Derek Willis (no, really, thank you!) dozens of journalists from the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting 2012 conference descended on the City Museum in St. Louis.
Today, I tried to figure out how to explain what made last night so friggin incredible. First, the museum is amazing. It's pure fun. I realized that the museum also echoes many of the things that can happen in amazing newsrooms.
This month's Carnival of Journalism asks what emerging technology will have a major impact on journalism next? Within the setup for this prompt is the answer: People. Changes in leadership and culture is the emerging technology that will allow those amazing new tools and opportunities to be fully utilized.
What is the deal with the nonprofit news model? I think about this a lot and have plenty of different answers, but in considering it recently, my first reaction was emotional: It's about being a part of a community.
Growing up, the publication I remember most clearly around our house was People magazine. The most talked about paper was probably the Chilton school newspaper (I kid, I kid). We read the local paper (I delivered it for four years) and watched the news, but life was not organized around the news cycle.
Life was organized around the election cycle.
Do we make good journalism to support capitalism or to support our communities? Do we write to support the bottom lines of an increasingly consolidated group of corporate media conglomerates, or do we write to engage and inform our communities?
This month's Carnival of Journalism prompt, "Can a good journalist be a good capitalist?" reminded me of conversations that followed a recent conference in Philly. The Center for Public Interest Journalism brought together journalists and citizen media makers for a conversation on "Engaging Communities." During a session on citizen-produced media, panelists described how to engage citizens in the production of media. They also discussed an important underlying question: Why do citizens make media?