Ryan Sholin » Knight News Challenge http://ryansholin.com The future of news. And more. No funny stuff. Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:54:44 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 2006-2007 ryansholin@gmail.com (Ryan Sholin) ryansholin@gmail.com (Ryan Sholin) http://www.ryansholin.com/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/powered_by_podpress.jpg Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com 144 144 Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education. Ryan Sholin Ryan Sholin ryansholin@gmail.com no no q&a: brian boyer on the plan for panda http://ryansholin.com/2011/08/20/qa-brian-boyer-on-the-plan-for-panda/ http://ryansholin.com/2011/08/20/qa-brian-boyer-on-the-plan-for-panda/#comments Sat, 20 Aug 2011 10:53:31 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=8241 q&a: brian boyer on the plan for panda: Ben Welsh talks with Brian Boyer about the ingredients for PANDA, a Newsroom Data Appliance.

PANDA will be a place for folks in the newsroom to stash their data, and a tool for helping reporters search and compare data sets.

Trust me, your newsroom needs a PANDA. Excited for this.

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2011/08/20/qa-brian-boyer-on-the-plan-for-panda/feed/ 0 Knight Foundation expands into investment with an Enterprise Fund http://ryansholin.com/2011/07/26/knight-foundation-expands-into-investment-with-an-enterprise-fund/ http://ryansholin.com/2011/07/26/knight-foundation-expands-into-investment-with-an-enterprise-fund/#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2011 02:11:45 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=8176 Knight Foundation expands into investment with an Enterprise Fund: I missed this while on vacation last week, but as a sort of expansion of the Knight News Challenge, there’s now a 10 million dollar Knight Foundation fund to invest in for-profit companies. I continue to think this is a good idea.

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2011/07/26/knight-foundation-expands-into-investment-with-an-enterprise-fund/feed/ 0 Carnival of Journalism: An open email to Michael Maness, because no one writes letters anymore http://ryansholin.com/2011/03/31/carnival-of-journalism-an-open-email-to-michael-maness-because-no-one-writes-letters-anymore/ http://ryansholin.com/2011/03/31/carnival-of-journalism-an-open-email-to-michael-maness-because-no-one-writes-letters-anymore/#comments Thu, 31 Mar 2011 22:30:16 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=7898 This post is but one burning twig in the roaring campfire that is the rekindled Carnival of Journalism. This month’s two options both provide the carnibloggers an opportunity to give advice to organizations with a mandate to give away money and other resources for the sake of improving journalism. I’ve chosen the option that involves telling the Knight Foundation what to do as the five-year Knight News Challenge program winds down (or renews itself), and as Michael Maness steps up as the new VP for Journalism and Media Innovation.

Quick disclosures: Hey, I was a Knight News Challenge winner in 2008, and Michael and I worked for the same company for a few months, quite recently.

Hi Michael –

Ryan Sholin here. We’ve crossed paths once or twice at your previous gig, and had a good conversation or two about what you were up to back there.

Anyway, I wanted to write you to give you a bit of unsolicited advice about what to do about funding innovation in journalism and media at the Knight Foundation. (Well, OK, Dave Cohn solicited me, but he didn’t have to twist my arm or anything.)

A few ideas:

  1. Fund some for-profit companies. Startups. Take some equity. Focus on companies providing tools supporting new revenue streams and business models that support journalism. Alternatively, fund some disruptively innovative companies (Flipboard comes to mind) and point them in the direction of business models that support original, local journalism.
  2. When you do give out grants to journalists and not-for-profit innovators, include mandatory business sustainability training. Instead of asking grantees “How are you going to turn this into a sustainable project when your grant runs out,” make figuring that out part of your job from the beginning.
  3. It seems like the Knight News Challenge team has been working hard over the last two or three cycles to find grantees from outside the journalism world. Good idea, but make sure you don’t end up with a crop of edge case grantees building tools for edge cases. There are plenty of would-be innovators at small, unglamorous news organizations across the world. Do they know about the Knight News Challenge? They don’t read Nieman Lab or Romenesko or the Carnival of Journalism (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They just bust their tails 24/7 to put out a range of local news products, and when you look a little closer, you’ll often find they’re innovating their way around resource, technology, and even language issues to reach their community.
  4. Bring your IDEO-style innovation chops to Knight in full force. Send teams into underserved-by-journalism communities and find out what they need and want from local news sources. Then push grants, grantees, and programs in those directions.

That’s all for now. Eager to see what you do, and talk about it in person when we cross paths next.

Thanks,
Ryan

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2011/03/31/carnival-of-journalism-an-open-email-to-michael-maness-because-no-one-writes-letters-anymore/feed/ 1 A WordPress plugin to help readers correct your errors http://ryansholin.com/2011/02/28/a-wordpress-plugin-to-help-readers-correct-your-errors/ http://ryansholin.com/2011/02/28/a-wordpress-plugin-to-help-readers-correct-your-errors/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:29:51 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=7815 A WordPress plugin to help readers correct your errors: MediaBugs, Scott Rosenberg’s Knight News Challenge-funded project, now for WordPress.

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2011/02/28/a-wordpress-plugin-to-help-readers-correct-your-errors/feed/ 0 How to turn every reader’s mobile phone into a newsroom of one http://ryansholin.com/2011/02/18/how-to-turn-every-readers-mobile-phone-into-a-newsroom-of-one/ http://ryansholin.com/2011/02/18/how-to-turn-every-readers-mobile-phone-into-a-newsroom-of-one/#comments Fri, 18 Feb 2011 13:00:02 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=7789 On the occasion of the second stop on the Carnival of Journalism revival tour, we’re provided with a wide open question:

Considering your unique circumstances what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?

So without much further ado, we’re going to have a little “NOW IT CAN BE TOLD” moment here at Invisible Inkling. I promise it’s not (too) salacious, just an outdated, stale sort of secret project that never came to fruition.

To be specific, it was a Knight News Challenge entry submitted late in 2009 in the “remarkably private considering how many people must have screened and discussed the idea” category. It made the final 50 entries that year, and was my backup plan for what to do for a job in 2010-11 if I needed a backup plan.

Interesting story, eh? Well, to maybe four or five of you, so let’s move on to the actual idea, shall we?

LOOK LOUDOUN

The short version:

Using a smartphone app, “readers” take photos with location-aware mobile phones, and the phone provides them with a list of nearby news organizations to send them to.

Here’s the pitch, in full, as it stood abandoned in early 2010:

Look Loudoun will be a resource for local news organizations of all shapes and sizes to connect with the community in Loudoun County, Virginia, largely via photos taken with mobile phones.

The first product from Look Loudoun will be an iPhone application, using the geolocation feature set to suggest local news organizations to send a photo to, giving the user the opportunity to route photos of news in their community directly to a wider audience via local newspapers, hyperlocal news sites, and their own social media profiles.

Additionally, the project will begin to generate revenue by charging local businesses to list themselves on the screen using the same geolocation feature set. If the Look Loudoun user takes a photo near their business, they’ll have the option to send it their way, as well, supplying the business with content for their own efforts to engage the local community.

The revenue generated by Look Loudoun will go toward building a sustainable business — the long-term goal will be to share any profits with the participating local news organizations.

Loudoun County, a suburban, exurban and rural area in Northern Virginia (yet a short drive from Washington D.C.) is fiercely local and at the same time, highly connected, as a radically diverse base of families speed from work to school to activities to community service.

The county is covered by dozens of news organizations, some as large as the Washington Post, but many on the smaller end of the continuum, hyperlocal blogs run by passionate community members in their spare time. Local blogs Dulles District and Viva Loudoun are among the best sources for neighborhood news online, complementing a range of print newspapers that include Leesburg Today, the Loudoun Times-Mirror, and the LoudounIndependent.

You’ll notice a couple key things there:

  1. Yes, it was a KNC pitch in 2009, so it starts in one local community — the always popular for hyperlocal experiments Loudoun County, where I happen to live.
  2. Loudoun’s always popular for hyperlocal experiments because it shows up often at or near the top of the list of “wealthiest” or “richest” or “most full of money to be taken from consumers” counties in the country. Keeping that in mind, there’s a revenue component to this pitch: Users of the app can send their photos to local businesses, too. The business pays for the content, and/or the service of being included in the app, and the news organizations get a cut. Maybe the users get a deal?

Mobile! Location! Revenue! Hyperlocal!

What could go wrong, right?

So to answer the Carnival question directly:

A smartphone app like the proposed Look Loudoun, but on a larger scale with local, regional, and national news organizations taking part, would connect individual news “sources” — call them “citizen journalists” if you must — with traditional one-to-many channel news organizations in an unprecedented way.

Sure, 100 news organizations might have 100 of their own vendors/platforms/apps for collecting mobile photos from readers, but what I’m proposing here is 100 news organizations in one app, instead. Make it simple for the user to send their photo to the relevant news organization based on their location, no pre-existing relationship necessary.

Oh, by the way, here’s a Posterous blog I used as a brief scrapbook of inspiration at the time. Keep in mind this was pre-Instagram, pre-Facebook Places, and pre-Foursquare adds photos to checkins.

Now, it would be pretty easy to imagine Foursquare adding some features along these lines. I wouldn’t be surprised.

I’ll add some more bits of the old KNC proposal to that Posterous. If you were a screener back then, I’d love to hear what you thought of the idea. Like I said, it made the top 50, and having learned from my experience with ReportingOn, I was asking for enough money to make Look Loudoun my day job for two years.

(And yes, of course, I’m extremely pleased at the moment with the way things have worked out since the KNC entry was rejected, but it seemed like the right time to share the idea.)

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2011/02/18/how-to-turn-every-readers-mobile-phone-into-a-newsroom-of-one/feed/ 5 So long, ReportingOn http://ryansholin.com/2010/12/29/so-long-reportingon/ http://ryansholin.com/2010/12/29/so-long-reportingon/#comments Wed, 29 Dec 2010 11:55:16 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=2339 In 2008, I was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to build ReportingOn, a backchannel for beat reporters to share ideas, information, and sources. The goal of the project was to provide journalists of all stripes with a place to talk about content, not craft, or process, or skillset.

I taught myself enough Django — and sought out advice from friends and coworkers with little regard for their interest or priorities — to launch the first iteration of the site in October 2008. In July 2009, with fresh design and development from the team at Lion Burger, ReportingOn 2.0 launched.

And almost immediately, I stepped away from it, buried in the responsibilities of my day job, family, and other projects. To grow and evolve, and really, to race ahead of the internal and external communication tools already available to reporters, ReportingOn needed far more time, attention, and dedication than I could give it.

Yesterday, I shut down ReportingOn.

In its last state, it only cost a few bucks a month to maintain, but it has more value at this point as a story, or a lesson, or a piece of software than it has as a working site.

To head off a couple questions at the pass:

  1. No, you can’t export your questions or answers or profile data. None of you have touched the site in about a year, so I don’t think you’re that interested in exporting anything. But if you’re some sort of webpackrat that insists, I have the database, and I can certainly provide you with your content.
  2. Yes, the source code for the application is still available, and you’re more than welcome to take a stab at building something interesting with it. If you do, please feel free to let me know.

And a few recommendations for developers of software “for journalists:”

  • Reporters don’t want to talk about unpublished stories in public.
  • Unless they’re looking for sources.
  • There are some great places on the Internet to find sources.
  • When they do talk about unpublished stories among themselves, they do it in familiar, well-lit places, like e-mail or the telephone. Not in your application.
  • Actually, keep this in mind: Unless what you’re building meets a very journalism-specific need, you’re probably grinding your gears to build something “for journalists” when they just need a great communication tool, independent of any particular niche or category of users.

As for the problem ReportingOn set out to solve, it’s still out there.

Connecting the dots among far-flung newsrooms working on stories about the same issue is something that might happen internally in a large media company, or organically in the wilds of Twitter, but rarely in any structured way that makes it easy to discover new colleagues, peers, and mentors. Sure, there are e-mail lists, especially for professional associations (think: SEJ) that act as backchannels for a beat, but not enough, and not focused on content.

(Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong.)

As for me, I’m working on another (even) small(er) Knight-funded side project a few minutes at a time these days. Watch for news about that one in the coming weeks.

Here’s what a “beat” page looked like. Note the PR/spam in need of a “flag as PR/spam” button.

Here’s a single question page. (Thanks Joey, Chris, etc.)

Here’s a profile page. (Thanks, Greg.)

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2010/12/29/so-long-reportingon/feed/ 8 What I would fund: An imaginary challenge for news business models http://ryansholin.com/2009/12/16/what-i-would-fund-an-imaginary-challenge-for-news-business-models/ http://ryansholin.com/2009/12/16/what-i-would-fund-an-imaginary-challenge-for-news-business-models/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:17:26 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=1778 Last night, I was browsing this year’s public Knight News Challenge entries ahead of the midnight deadline to enter, and I caught myself thinking about what the project doesn’t fund when it comes to supporting journalism.

And the answer appears to be business models.

My friends at the Foundation might dispute this, or maybe not, but rather than make this into a post about what they’re doing right or wrong (after all, I won a News Challenge grant in 2008, and thus, am friendly with a wide swath of the winners thanks to some fun conferences the Knight Foundation was kind enough to fly me out to) I’m far more interested in just playing a bit of Fantasy League Foundation here, making a short list of the things I would support if I had 5 million dollars or so to give away. (Full disclosure: I do not have 5 million dollars to give away.)

Two specific projects I would fund:

1. Technically Philly’s News Inkubator

The team at this Philadelphia tech blog includes Sean Blanda, who you might remember as the organizer of BCNI Philly, along with his other varied credits as a student and professional. Their KNC10 proposal, News Inkubator, would serve as a source for news startups looking for help with the legal, financial, and administrative issues that come with running a real live business. In short, they would have allowed hyperlocal journalism impresarios to focus on content and outsource a modicum of worry on the business side of things to the Inkubator project. At the very least, they’d learn something and put it into action, rather than casting about for friends and neighbors to provide legal support, accounting, and a sales force.

From a post at Wired Journalists by Sean about the News Inkubator project:

“With the administrative burdens outsourced, the barrier for creating a sustainable news organization in the city is lowered dramatically.”

2. CoPress

(Full disclosure: I’m pretty sure I’m still an adviser to CoPress, which became a for-profit company earlier this year after their KNC09 proposal was rejected.)

CoPress is a disruptive innovator in student media, providing student news organizations of all shapes and sizes with hosting, support, and a network of interested developers and journalists to lean on as they move away from legacy content management systems with little flexibility and no room for learning about the actual management of content and systems.

Here’s an excellent short presentation from CoPress on innovation, especially in student news organizations, but with a stylish overview of the challenges facing everyone in the newspaper business:

And a few ideas for projects I’d like to fund:

  • Match up local businesses with mobile news consumers. Foursquare and Gowalla get this. Google certainly gets it. Show me a model that involves delivering deals to mobile news consumers based on their current physical location, and I’ll throw money at it.
  • Connect local nonprofits with local journalists and technologists to provide job training for underprivileged neighborhoods. I’ve written a bit about how I think a coworking space could fit into this sort of model.
  • Replace low-value remnant ad networks and AdSense with forms of advertising that don’t embarrass readers, journalists, and publishers. (Hint: I come to your news site for content and information, not to whiten my teeth.)

Here’s what I wouldn’t fund:

Anyone claiming that their hyperlocal news model is going to scale up to become a cross-country overnight success. Hyperlocal is made of people. You can build something awesome once, in one town, but neighborhood news and advertising is about shoe leather, guts, and determination — not about software. No two neighborhoods are the same, and no two hyperlocal mavens are the same.

What about you? What’s on your news business wishlist this year?

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2009/12/16/what-i-would-fund-an-imaginary-challenge-for-news-business-models/feed/ 3 Notes on managing technology decisions http://ryansholin.com/2009/09/11/notes-on-managing-technology-decisions/ http://ryansholin.com/2009/09/11/notes-on-managing-technology-decisions/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:50:46 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=1650 Over at the Knight News Challenge blog, I’ve contributed a short list of tips on dealing with developers and choosing a platform for your project:

“3. Hire human beings, not a programming language or Web framework. Unless you’re doing the programming yourself, stay focused on your end goal and steer clear of mandating how the humans you hire do the job. Don’t look over the designer’s shoulder and worry about which shade of eggshell white to paint the walls until you have something really great to hang on them. Like content, for instance.”

You are getting your Knight News Challenge application ready, right? The deadline is October 15. Get on it.

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2009/09/11/notes-on-managing-technology-decisions/feed/ 1 Catch up or get left behind http://ryansholin.com/2009/09/02/catch-up-or-get-left-behind/ http://ryansholin.com/2009/09/02/catch-up-or-get-left-behind/#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:28:43 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=1646 I’ve been a nomad for a few days in the middle of a short-by-my-standards 300+ mile move from the suburbs of Rochester, NY to the suburbs of Washington D.C. and boy are my legs tired.

But I’m catching up on my reading, and found a few things to share with you on the theme of catching up…

VIDEO: Investing in Your Staff

CoPress on Vimeo | September 2, 2009
The latest excellent video presentation from CoPress, making a case for innovation in your news organization.

2010 Knight News Challenge is now open for business
“Got a great idea for transforming the future of news? The 2010 Knight News Challenge is now accepting applications, through October 15th!”

The future of news in 4 dimensions: Charting new kinds of news orgs
Nieman Journalism Lab | September 1, 2009
C.W. Anderson builds the sort of continuum/quadrant chart that makes the mass communications scholar in me go all smiley.

brianboyer: If you’re a Tribune reader, this’ll make it nicer. RT @ryanmark: Update to ChicagoTribune.com userstyle http://userstyles.org/styles/20347
Twitter | September 2, 2009
If you understand what these two Chicago Tribune developers are up to here (providing savvy online readers with an incrementally improved stylesheet for the recent redesign long before the changes get built into the live site’s code), then you’ll understand why I think it’s pretty cool of them.

Five concrete steps to improving the news
Newsless.org | September 1, 2009
Matt Thompson follows up his post about what goes missing from most news stories with a few suggestions for how to roll out a contextual approach to a news story. I like #4, which includes this idea: “Keep a public list of the most important things you don’t know about your topic.”

New report: How to build a user community online
Mark Briggs of Journalism 2.0 and his team at Serra Media put together this great report on community management.

Young Families are the Real Early Adopters
Mash this market research up with the right Pew report, and you’ll have a good idea of how to deliver the news to an audience that is the most likely to want it.

mattwaite: Today, we launched Home Team, a local high school sports site: http://hometeam.tampabay.com/ And I now I need to sleep for a month.
Twitter | September 2, 2009
Matt and company at the St. Petersburg Times demonstrating what a solid Web framework and some experience can help you get done in a short span of time. More details in the tweets that followed this one.

Lifestreaming: Newspaper Uses Posterous to Solicit and Publish Reader Photos
The Steve Rubel Lifestream | August 30, 2009
Did you spot the Austin American-Statesman using Posterous to collect reader photos last week?

So, are you caught up?

If Posterous, Django, market research, community management, contextual news, CSS, the Knight News Challenge, and CoPress are all alien objects to you, pick any one and get up to speed.

Catch up or get left behind.

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2009/09/02/catch-up-or-get-left-behind/feed/ 1 Announcing: ReportingOn 2.0 is live http://ryansholin.com/2009/07/02/announcing-reportingon-2-0-is-live/ http://ryansholin.com/2009/07/02/announcing-reportingon-2-0-is-live/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:11:41 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=1562 ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions. And answers.

It’s still the backchannel for your beat, but it’s an absolute re-imagining of the network.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it’s a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source.

ReportingOn 2.0 on the morning of launch, July 2, 2009.

(You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts at the PBS Idea Lab blog.)

The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that journalists would use it like Twitter, asking questions of their followers and sharing ideas about stories they were working on.

That didn’t happen organically, or if it was going to, it was going to take years. So, with the help of a professional development and design team, we’ve rebuilt the site from the ground up, framed around the act of asking and answering questions.

There’s no 140-character limit, but what you will find are lots of basic features that make sense in this sort of social network.

You can ‘watch’ users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from the journalists, topics, and particular issues you’re interested in.

I think you’ll like it.

And, as the grant year for ReportingOn comes to a close, we’re also making the source code for ReportingOn available here under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. You can use that to build your own backchannel question and answer tool for the journalists in your news organization, or even let your readers ask and answer questions.

I want to repeat that and extend it a bit…

Here are four things that could happen next:

  1. ReportingOn.com itself is a stunning success, with thousands of journalists asking and answering great questions every day, finding peers and mentors, improving local news by adding context and insight gleaned from others working similar angles on stories in far-flung locales.
  2. A media company uses ReportingOn’s open-sourced codebase to build their own internal backchannel, probably on an intranet, or requiring authentication so they can limit it to members of their own organization.
  3. A single news organization uses ReportingOn to do the same thing — build an internal backchannel.
  4. A single news organization uses ReportingOn’s open-sourced codebase to build a public tool that allows readers, sources, and reporters to ask and answer questions in a sort of open forum.

What else could you do with ReportingOn? Give it a shot, and let us know.

What’s next for 2.01 and beyond? We’ll let the dust settle over the next few days and figure out which additional features we want to build first, then we’ll take a look at our budget and consider the options. Feel free to check out feedback.reportingon.com to get an idea of where we might go next, and add your own ideas, too!

Thanks to everyone who helped get this launch out the door on time and on budget, especially the Lion Burger development and design team, all the friends and colleagues who gave me their input over the last year, those of you that answered my last-minute call for beta testers, and the Knight Foundation staff for supporting the first year of ReportingOn.

So… Any questions?

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