Kamis, 23 Januari 2014

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

How the BBC is thinking about native advertising

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 10:05 AM PST

Beet.TV has an interview with the BBC Worldwide's vice president for strategy and sales Tom Bowman about how the news goliath is thinking about native advertising — an idea both old and new that’ll be at the center of online advertising discussions in 2014. (BBC Worldwide is the commercial arm of the BBC that oversees how its content gets distributed outside the U.K.; it’s ad-free inside the country.) A couple standout quotes in here:

It’s not really a question of whether you should do it or not. It’s rather more a question of how you do it.

And indeed, this has operated in print for many a long year. I mean, It’s actually nothing new, really — it’s just been rebranded and made a bit of a comeback. It’s true! If you look at the International Herald Tribune, for instance, you can get “This article brought to you in association with” has been running for donkey’s years.

Knight seeds innovation (journalistic and otherwise) with its latest Prototype Fund grants

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 07:28 AM PST

Knight Foundation is giving a boost to 24 early-stage media projects with its latest funding round from the Knight Prototype Fund. The projects, including 10 with a journalism focus, will each receive $35,000 in funding from Knight as well as training and additional resources.

Two of the projects come from former Nieman Fellows: !nstant is a proposed mobile app that to help readers verify and look for context around breaking news on social media. Keepr is a data-mining tool to help journalists better track signals on social media. !nstant was conceived by Paula Molina, Borja Echevarria de la Gandara, Ludovic Blecher, and Alexandra Garcia, all from the Nieman Class of 2013. Keepr was created by Hong Qu, a 2013 Nieman Visiting Fellow.

These projects and the 22 others will go through a six-month prototyping period where teams learn about human-centered design and prepare for a demo day.

Here are the more journalism-focused projects receiving money from the Prototype Fund. You can see the full list of winners, with more information on each, here. Have an idea for a prototype Knight should fund? They’re taking applications for the next round until January 31.

Zago: Seeking to make newsrooms more efficient by building a mobile app that will allow secure data sharing between reporters and their newsrooms.

Data Driven Detroit: Informing the public and addressing important community issues by developing an interactive tool that helps Detroit residents discover and use relevant data about their city.

Vizzuality: Building an open source tool that allows journalists and other users to quickly turn data, maps and other content into interactive stories for online publication.

University of Missouri: Developing a system to collect and report noise data to better track problems of noise pollution in Columbia, MO that will be informed by community hacking events and prototype tests.

The Center for Rural Strategies: Testing an approach to generate data-driven, localized news stories that media and other organizations in rural U.S. counties can use to produce local stories.

Moneca Core: Making it easier to capture community-generated news by creating an open source code library to capture multimedia content by citizen journalists in mobile apps.

Keepr: Creating an open source data-mining tool for journalists to track breaking news stories, so they can easy find quality news sources.

!nstant: Building a mobile app designed to verify and provide context to breaking news on social media so that the public is given a more accurate and clear picture of news stories.

Restatement: Making legal information more accessible by producing a design-driven system for the creation and parsing of machine-readable legal text.

Argos: Making news content easy to digest by building a design-driven news platform that aggregates and analyzes news stories and creates concise news backgrounders, including insights and connections regarding specific stories.
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