I, Reporter

New Batch of Knight News Challenge Winners

It seems like not too ago that I,Reporter was one of the golden boys of the  Knight News Challenge contest, with our Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project among 25 recipients of the first year's awards. But now the new batch of prize winners is out and they're going to get a much-deserved spotlight -- and not just because the legendary Tim Berners-Lee is among them!

Here's a full list of the projects, which include a really impressive array of efforts, including a bunch from outside the United States to use the Internet to spread news and information -- in particular by using mobile phone technology.

Of course the Berners-Lee project will get big buzz; from what his partner Martin Moore of Media Standards Trust told me over lunch, it's focused on creating transparency for news content on the web.

But equally interesting to me, journalistically, is a great project by Dave Cohn, a former Columbia J-School student I've worked with, in which he will try to marry freelance investigative reporters with the small donors who want to support their work financially. I saw him here in Las Vegas at the Interactive Media conference where the awards were announced, and after talking with him about it more, really believe Knight is on the right track supporting smart young journalist/new media thinkers like him and many of the others. Best of luck to all of them!

Small Community, Big Obstacles

It might seem a good starting point for building virtual community when people already know each other in the real one. But for our nearly year-old project, Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker, we've been surprised to find that doesn't seem so true. For many potential users of our online group blog and forums, the risks of speaking about a controversial topic so openly in an online public forum appear just too great.

When we launched our project in the summer of 2007 in the wake of the city's approval of a carbon tax to fight global warming, we began with the premise that experts and interested participants from the community would have enough to say that at least some would want to become "citizen journalists," that is, frequent contributors on the pro-am group weblog we were setting up. After all, the subject of global warming was, er, hot, and Boulder had just become a pioneer in acting locally on a issue of planetary scale.

But while we got enthusiastic feedback, no one seemed to be stepping forward. We came to believe this had mostly to do with the psychological barrier of become a (capital "J") journalist, a daunting prospect for folks with little to no background in reporting and writing skills (something we hoped to address through training).

But last winter, we decided to experiment with a different approach to grease the skids for participants.

Lowering the Hurdle for Participation

I,Reporter's Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project is about to have its second major growth spurt since its start-up last summer. Today we launched a series of online forums, and with them hope to inaugurate a vibrant discussion of the city’s unique municipal carbon tax approach. But it'll be one that will be significantly easier for local residents to take part in. Check out the new discussion boards and read on to find out more about why we've gone this route. ...

Glimpse the Citizen Media of Tomorrow

The Knight Foundation, the funder behind the I, Reporter Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project, today launched a new web site that provides a fascinating window into the citizen media innovation. The group blog is called MediaShift Idea Lab, and the idea is to allow the folks behind each of the Knight Challenge Grant winners to explore the progress of their innovative Internet projects with each other and in the public eye.

As the blog editor Mark Glaser puts it, "Idea Lab will be a place where you can read about what innovators are doing to help reinvent community news. The dozens of authors at this new group blog -- hosted by PBS.org and funded by the Knight Foundation -- have received grants from Knight in their 21st Century News Challenge, and are going to report first-hand on the status of their projects."

Check out our first entries on Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker-- a blog post about our initial progress with the project, and another about some lessons learned.

Public Radio Puts Our Project in Spotlight

Salt Lake City temple at dusk

Public radio station KCPW in Salt Lake City gave over a live, 20-minute midday interview segment yesterday, June 29, to I, Reporter's newly launched Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project.  Blair Feulner, station president and host of the KCPW's Midday Utah segment, interviewed me about the project, which partner Amy Gahran and I launched following a $90,000 News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation in late May.

The radio interview focused on Boulder's global warming initiative and the journalistic challenges of  covering it, as well as the basic ideas behind citizen journalism. Feulner described the project nicely in his intro as a "new way to combine digital journalism and community interaction. ... the web-based project is meant to keep the focus on this single community issue, and add to the dialogue a variety of opinions from many sources, including the public, professionals, and city government.  The idea is to go beyond the spotty media coverage important community concerns often get."

Hear the full interview.

Ka-Ching! I, Reporter Wins News Challenge

I, Reporter co-founders Adam Glenn and Amy Gahran explain how they felt when they heard they'd won a Knight News Challenge grant. (Watch video)

We've got great news to share – an I, Reporter project last week was awarded one of the prestigious new Knight News Challenge Grants!

The whole citJ community has been abuzz since last year about this unusual news contest, in which the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promised a pot of gold (up to $5 million) to anyone who could come up with the big ideas to use digital news and information to transform real communities. 

Not to miss out on the fun, my I, Reporter partner Amy Gahran and I decided to put our already frequent brainstorming to work by pitching a series of proposals for the contest. We figured at least one would have a chance to stick – and it turned out we were right.