2008 Notable Entries

Or, browse by category: Citizen Journalism | Interactive Narrative Entries | Hyperlocal | Election Entries | News Games | Rich Databases | Unconventional

Patchwork Nation

http://www.csmonitor.com/patchworknation/

Christian Science Monitor, Washington

This clever project bridges journalism, demographic data and blogging while tracking the travels, strategies and messages of the presidential candidates. It includes a fascinating and fresh new way to define various communities and provides entry points for citizen participation.

Purple States

http://purplestates.tv/view/268

Purple States, LLC, New Haven, Conn.

Reality TV with a meaningful mission: Purple States produces quality video of real people covering the presidential campaign. Their first season was broadcast on nytimes.com. A national online newspaper will feature their election documentaries.

Who’s Running for What? by Gotham Gazette

http://www.gothamgazette.com/city/campaigns/

Citizens Union Foundation, New York

A deep, rich and flexible online database provides citizens and others the ability to track currently elected politicians, announced and rumored candidates seeking public office in New York City.

Iowa Caucuses

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=caucus

The Des Moines Register, Des Moines, Iowa

Faced with the daunting task of informing Iowa caucus go-ers about the crowded field of 18 presidential candidates, The Des Moines Register produced innovative multimedia tools to explain how and where to participate in the caucuses, where candidates stand of a range of issues, based on their statements in debates and interviews.

DesMoinesRegister.com/caucusvideos

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=YOUTUBE

The Des Moines Register, Des Moines, Iowa

The DesMoines Register partnered with YouTube to invite and Webcast citizen videos leading up to the Iowa Caucuses. Thirty people were given cameras and got to keep them if they uploaded five segments. These videos were politically diverse, some humorous, some serious, but pretty popular. It was a successful collaboration.

OffTheBus

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/off-the-bus/

OffTheBus, New York

OffTheBus is a pioneering experiment in citizen-powered crowdsourcing of presidential election coverage, led by expert investigative journalists, savvy former Web political campaigners and one of the nation’s most popular and trusted blogs/news vetters. OffTheBus got scoops, broadened and deepened reporting and modeled a new spirit of journalistic collaboration with traditional news institutions, emerging online platforms, and non-profit watchdog groups.

EarmarkWatch

http://earmarkwatch.org/

Sunlight Foundation, Washington

The Sunlight Foundation and grantee Taxpayers for Common Sense have created a tool that gives citizens access to the tools necessary to do real investigative journalism on the issue of congressional earmarks, the once-hidden budgetary amendments to federal appropriations where members can funnel pork to pet projects and campaign donors. The research tool has also led to professional journalistic investigations and citizen action.

EveryBlock

http://www.everyblock.com/

EveryBlock, Chicago

Adrian Holovaty, creator of 2005 Batten Grand Prize-winner chicagocrime.org, has created EveryBlock.com, which offers a Web “newspaper” for every city block in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. Enter any address, neighborhood or ZIP code in those cities, and the site shows you recent public records, news articles and other Web content that’s geographically relevant to that address. Included are civic information (building permits, crimes, restaurant inspections), news articles and blog entries, local Flickr photos and Craigslist postings, among other things. This project is the product of a $1.1M 2007 Knight News Challenge grant.

USA TODAY Travel Communities

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/cruises/default.aspx

USA TODAY, McLean, Va.

USA TODAY’s Gene Sloan had been writing a blog about cruising for over a year. In January 2008, USATODAY.com launched its new Cruise Log Community site, which added a variety of new tools to the basic architecture of the blog and recast Sloan as a “curator” of cruise content. Because of its success, within two months they launched “Today in the Sky” concentrating on the airline industry. They’ve built widgets called “Cruisedex” and “Flightdex” which track news buzz around cruise lines and airlines.

Budget Hero

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/features/budget_hero/

Center for Innovation in Journalism at American Public Media, St. Paul, Minn.

American Public Media created this Flash-based budget balancing game for the U.S. budget. Users choose what their core values are, then are forced to decide what needs to be cut to fully cover those values. Users are shown the strengths and weaknesses of their budget and can see how their proposed budgets stack up against other users.

The Garbage Game by Gotham Gazette

http://www.gothamgazette.com/games/garbage.php

Citizens Union Foundation, New York

Gotham Gazette’s game educates, entertains and engages residents of New York City in thinking about their own waste-producing behavior while crafting solutions to the city’s problem of solid waste. The well-written text, hard facts and bold graphics make the game attractive, simple and powerful.

Virtual Grocery Store

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/health/childhoodobesity/store/

washingtonpost.com, Arlington, Va.

The Washington Post created this interactive “grocery store” where users can select a category and then choose between name brand products to compare nutritional information while Post health and nutrition columnist Sally Squires offers tips via video. The goal is to help people make smarter decisions when grocery shopping, and the virtual grocery store is one piece of a five-part Post series on childhood obesity.

World Press Photo Interviews

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/images/stories/videos/Interviews/index.php

University of Miami, Coral Gables, Fla.

University of Miami professor brings the experience of attending the World Press Photo Awards to Web. This site allows viewers to not only see the winning photos but to listen to the photographer tell the story behind the picture.

Water Wars: Ethiopia and Kenya 2008

http://clpmag.org/content/contentpages/2008/eastafrica.php

The Common Language Project/CLPMag.org, Seattle

This powerful international multimedia reporting project by emerging journalists documents the struggles of Africans to cope with water shortages and changing landscape. Packages are distributed through mainstream and alternative media. Storytelling is accompanied with behind-the-scenes blogs. Supported by Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Living to the End

http://next.oregonianextra.com/lovelle/

The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.

Living to the End is a project that, for the first time, gave a close-up view of how Oregon’s unique assisted suicide law works. In a series of online video diaries, Lovelle Svart, an Oregonian dying of terminal cancer, spoke directly to readers and online viewers, telling them about the tasks of her days, her thoughts, her feelings, her fears of dying. And about a big decision that lay before her: whether to use Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act to hasten her death. Readers/viewers were able to comment online and shared and contributed to the conversation about this controversial topic.

To Catch a Killer Series

http://www.star-telegram.com/killer/

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas

A 24-part serial true-crime novel, television documentary and multimedia Web package about a serial killer who victimized the Hispanic community of Fort Worth. The novel stuck to journalistic standards, but each part had a cliffhanger ending to keep readers coming back to the Star-Telegram for weeks. On the Web, users could examine documents, use interactive graphics, hear audio and video interviews and chat with the authors. Response was astoundingly positive, including from surviving victims.

Heroes/Hope

http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/palmbeachpost/hiv/index.html

Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Washington

The Pulitzer Center led a multi-platform, highly collaborative in-depth reporting project on HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean. The project brought together old and new media and reached out into both schools and the blogosphere to foster citizen engagement.

CNN.com - Impact Your World

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/impact/youssif.html

CNN, Atlanta

“When disaster strikes or horrible events unfold, these are opportunities to effect change.” CNN.com’s Impact Your World reports on crises and tragedies around the world and provides links to relevant reputable charities so that readers can help. Links are to the highest rated charities by Charity Navigator, an independent non-profit that evaluates charity groups. A story about a 5-year-old Iraqi boy who was doused in gas and burned by unknown masked men has spurred 13,000 donations totaling more than $800,000 to Children’s Burn Foundation.

Collective Journalism

http://current.com/topics/511_collective_journalism;jsessionid=41A459B9881016578BEB2B6B167C8A02

Current TV, San Francisco

Current TV’s citizen journalism program gathers information from Current’s social networking site, Current.com, to build stories that then go on Current TV and the Web site. Current uses an online assignment board - usually full of ideas suggested by users - to post story ideas and keep everyone on the same page. Users can then contribute with something as basic as tips or written first-hand experiences, or as complex as eye-witness video. This information and video is vetted and put together into one video news feature rather than posted separately like many other CitMedia sites.

FirstPerson on msnbc.com

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16712587/

msnbc.com, Redmond, Wash.

The FirstPerson collection showcases citizen reporters, photojournalists and video journalists. The site allows users to participate in discussions surrounding the news through message boards, live votes and predictions, blog comments, and links to a whole community news site, Newsvine.com. The project is a cooperative citizen journalism effort between NBC News and msnbc.com. It solicits breaking news reports from users and funnels those reports to the news desks of the television network and Web site.

KQED QUEST

http://www.kqed.org/quest/

KQED, San Francisco

This public radio science and environmental program in San Francisco seeks to attract a new and younger audience by hosting its audio and video features for easy playback on the KQED site and making it easy for users to embed features on other sites with a simple code cut-and-paste. In the program’s first season, 18 percent of QUEST’s audience came from online views and listens, but that number has ballooned to 40 percent (or 755,000 views and listens) in season two.

The Associated Press Mobile News Network

http://www.apnews.com/

The Associated Press, New York

This service from AP recognizes where your Web-enabled cell phone is in the world and gives you the latest news relevant to that area. The content is provided by local newspapers as well as the AP wire. Over 100 news publishers are currently on board and providing content.

LoJoConnect.com: location-based technology + journalism

http://lojoconnect.com/

Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.

A team of journalism graduate students, working under the direction of Associate Professor Rich Gordon, set out to explore “locative storytelling” - seeking to understand how journalists might use location-based technologies (such as GPS-enabled devices, mobile phones and interactive maps) to tell richer, more compelling stories. The most novel result of the students’ work was a series of three stories about Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid. The stories included narrated Web slideshows, downloadable audio tours and GPS-triggered multimedia.

The Back-of-the-Envelope Bush Library Design Contest

http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i26/26b01401.htm#7

The Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington

For the Back-of-the-Envelope Bush Library Design Contest, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked its readers to sketch out their visions for the Bush Library with the main rule being that the designs were submitted on a size-10 envelope. The contest generated more buzz and Web hits than anything the Chronicle has done in recent history.

E-mail Newsletter Sign Up

Privacy Policy

About J-Lab

J-Lab helps journalists and citizens use digital technologies to develop new ways for people to participate in public life with projects on innovations in journalism, citizen media, news games, interactive stories, entrepreneurship, research, training, and publications

E-Learning Portals

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
J-Lab is a center of American University's School of Communication in Washington, D.C.

Subscribe to J-Lab's RSS feed (What is RSS?)

Print this page | Site design by Hop Studios