Transparent Journalism
Inventor of the Web, Timothy Berners-Lee won $350,000 to reform new media journalism. According to The Wall Street Journal: “The Knight Foundation just announced the winners of its second annual Knight News Challenge, a contest that funds ideas to transform community news through digital technology. A total of $5.5 million is being awarded to 16 different projects. The summary of Berners-Lee’s winning submission is interesting (from newschallenge.org):
With the copious amounts of information – and misinformation – on the Internet, the public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data - the “story behind the story” - to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.
It will be interesting to follow Berners-Lee and see what he comes up with. I referenced the recent Washington Post-TechCrunch deal in a post earlier this week. I think there could be an interesting connection between Berners-Lee’s work and the way old and new media relationships are developing. With all the information on the web and more specifically, all of the “news” on the web, it’s surprising to me that our news consumption and contextualization technology hasn’t improved beyond where it is today.
I think we are on the verge of taking a fairly large leap forward in this area in the near future. Its something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
Best of luck to Berners-Lee in his quest.
(via Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins Tweet)
