MIT’s recent Civic Media Conference and the latest batch of Knight News Challenge winners made one reality crystal clear: as a new era of technology-fueled transparency, innovation and open government dawns, it won’t depend on any single CIO or federal program. It will be driven by a distributed community of media, nonprofits, academics and civic advocates focused on better outcomes, more informed communities and the new news, whatever form it is delivered in.
The themes that unite this class of Knight News Challenge winners were data journalism and platforms for civic connections. Newsrooms, the traditional hosts for information gathering and dissemination, are now part of a flattened environment for news, where news breaks first on social networks, is curated by a combination of professionals and amateurs, and then analyzed and synthesized into contextualized journalism.
As we grapple with the consumption challenges presented by this deluge of data, new publishing platforms are also empowering us to gather, refine, analyze and share data ourselves, turning it into information. In this future of media, as Mathew Ingram wrote at GigaOm, big data meets journalism, in the same way that startups see data as an innovation engine, or civic developers see data as the fuel for applications.
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