Let’s play oddsmaker for a moment. I’m unaware of any sports books offering prop bets on who’ll win the 2010 Knight News Challenge. We’re still early in the application process, and wannabe grantees must still navigate a multi-layered process that no one can predict. But just for fun: Who might be some early favorites?

The closed applications are anyone’s guess. But the 222 open ones are posted for anyone to see — and to critique. Setting aside subjective opinions, there are two publicly visible datapoints that can give us an indication of how an app is doing: how many times each application has been viewed by the public — suggesting the level of interest in the proposal — and the average rating (on a five-star scale) each app has received from site users.

So, by those measures, who are the leaders in the clubhouse? Here are the five most-viewed applications: Keep reading »

The sad-spin headline might be this: “Dreams of 2,000 journalists crushed.” But when you have nearly 2,500 applications for what at most will become a few dozen Knight News Challenge grants, there’s necessarily plenty of disappointment to spread around.

I talked with Jose Zamora, who works on journalism programs for Knight, recently to get an update on the most high-profile competition in the future-of-news space, which is in its cutdown stage. This year, Knight received 2,489 applications, roughly 35 percent of which were in the open category. (This year, Knight gave aspirants the choice to keep their applications private during the judging process or to make them open and readable to the public.)

Zamora said that number is now down to around 500, after the first round of winnowing. (There are 222 left in open, with the remainder in closed.) Each of the surviving applicants was asked to submit a full application — more than just the precis they submitted initially — and a panel of judges is currently reviewing those full apps. “Our goal is to review all of them by the end of the month,” Zamora told me, at which point the field will be narrowed again to “50 or 60 projects.”

Those will be put before a new panel (“with fresh eyes”), which will do another round of narrowing on March 31. After conversations with the applicants still standing, a final group will be recommended to Knight’s board in June. The winners will be announced at an event at MIT shortly thereafter. Keep reading »

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad last month, there were immediate debates over what kind of impact it would have on both the news habits of consumers and the bottom lines of news organizations. But one thing seemed obvious: that the iPad would be a glorious playground for user-interface designers, information architects, and others who think about how information should be found, structured, consumed, and designed. That 9.7-inch screen, combined with the iPhone’s multitouch interface, will inspire some innovative new ways to present news. At the unveiling, the only taste we got of these new ideas was The New York Times’ iPad app (above), which brought a bit of the typography and layout DNA of the print newspaper onto the device.

To think about these issues, I got in touch with John-Henry Barac. He spent a decade at The Guardian on the print side, as an art director and designer, then moved to the digital world. As a consultant, he designed The Guardian’s first iPhone app, which stands out as one of the more interesting within the iPhone news app world, much of which bears a certain bland sameness. (I particularly liked the small tag icon that allows the curious to quickly match other stories to the keywords of the current one.) John-Henry’s now an independent design consultant, anxious to get his hands on an iPad and to explore the new medium.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation. Among the topics we discuss:

Keep reading »

So, it’s official: There is an Apple tablet, and it’s called the iPad. And, at least to these Apple-friendly eyes, it looks really, really nice. I can feel my credit card getting warm already.

But for future-of-journalism junkies, the question was never whether or not Apple could come up with a sexy new device. The question was whether it could have an impact on the news business. Phrases like “save the news business” and “alter the economics and consumer attitudes of the digital era” have been tossed around an awful lot in the last few months.

So what did we learn today about how the iPad will impact journalism? Here are my first thoughts:

— It will have a real impact on consumer behavior. This thing’s going to be popular — I suspect it’ll sell at multiples of the Kindle (assuming Amazon ever decides to tell us how many Kindles they sell). And the form factor will be attractive in a lot of contexts, and that’ll likely increase the amount of news and information that people consume. Anyone who loved the Kindle will love this (unless they’re e-Ink junkies), and the iPad will also appeal to big crowds who would have never thought of a Kindle — gamers, mobile workers, YouTube addicts, and more.

— I don’t think the iPad changes the paid-content equation. The dream of the news business is that a device will come along that will convince people to pay for digital news. That was the dream of the Kindle — people will pay $10 a month to “subscribe” to all the news we give away for free on the web! And while that dream has dimmed on the Kindle, the same ideas kept popping up on the road to the iPad. As Brad Stone and Stephanie Clifford wrote in the Times: Keep reading »

Keep reading »

Without a formal announcement, Amazon.com has started allowing authors made it easier for authors to publish their ebooks for the Kindle with or without digital rights management (DRM), the technology that limits how consumers can use the ebooks they’ve bought. [See update below.]

The change appears to have gone in effect around Jan. 15, when a few Kindle publishers spotted changes in Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. A new option gave publishers the choice to “not enable digital rights management.” A science-fiction author named Joseph Rhea appears to have been the first to notice the change. On Jan. 15, Amazon announced an expansion of its Digital Text Platform to non-U.S. authors, but made no mention of DRM changes.

Amazon’s brief explanation of the new feature inside the DTP:

You may choose, on a per title basis, to have us apply DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology which is intended to inhibit unauthorized access to or copying of digital content files for titles. Once your title is published, this setting cannot be changed.

The Digital Text Platform is aimed at small publishers and authors; it’s gained a foothold in short fiction, but it’s a platform with potential for both independent journalists and small news organizations. It’s unclear whether similar changes are afoot for newspapers, magazines, or large publishers, who use a different system to publish to the Kindle. I’ve asked Amazon for explanation of what exactly this new choice entails and haven’t heard back. I’ll update this post if I do. Keep reading »

Doesn’t that look like the kind of place you’d like to spend a year?

That’s Lippmann House on the Harvard campus, where I’m lucky enough to come to work every day. It’s also the home of the Nieman Fellowships, the wonderful program that allows journalists to spend a year at Harvard, taking classes and researching the topics of their choice.

The deadline for American journalists to be part of the next class of fellows is coming up soon: January 31. (The deadline for international applicants has already passed.)

To recap, Nieman Fellows get to spend a year at Harvard, auditing whatever classes they want in any part of the university (or down the road at MIT). We pay you for the 10 months you’re here (at least $65,000, with more for fellows with children to care for). You spend the year with a couple dozen of the best journalists from around the world, your fellow fellows. The idea is to give you the chance to step away from the daily pressures of your work life and dive into the subject matters that interest you. Keep reading »

There’s a school of thought that says video is the future of information, that rich media is the endpoint of the evolution of text. I don’t know that I buy that, since text still has so many advantages over video: its scannability, its searchability, how much easier it usually is to create and polish. But some of those edges might be temporary, as technology evolves to solve away some of video’s problems.

SpeakerText, a new startup, is trying to become one of those problem solvers by directly tying videos to their corresponding words.

Cofounder Matt Mireles, 29 and an occasional commenter around here, used to dream about being a war correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. But “reading Romenesko and getting depressed” pushed his interest more toward the intersection of journalism and technology.

Here’s his argument: It’s relatively easy for the value of a piece of text content to be shifted from its creator to someone else. Let’s say your news organization breaks big news. What happens next? Other people start writing about your big news — summarizing it, excerpting it, putting their own spin on it. Maybe also linking to it — but a lot of those links don’t get clicked on, and the “credit” in terms of eyeballs ends up spread around a lot of different sites, not just the one doing the original reporting. Or, as SpeakerText cofounder Matt Mireles puts it: “Text is easily commoditized.” Keep reading »

The leaves are turning and there’s a chill in the air, which can only mean one thing: It’s time to think about applying for a Nieman Fellowship here at Harvard.

For 70-plus years, the Nieman has given accomplished mid-career journalists the chance to step away from their work and spend a year studying at Harvard. Niemans can take classes in any branch of the university (or at MIT), learning from all the disembodied brains around here, not to mention their fellow Fellows. Some use the year to get a rich academic grounding in the issues they cover as journalists; others use it to explore a new area of interest. As a member of the Nieman Fellow Class of ‘08, I can tell you: It’s a pretty great deal.

Did I mention we pay you? We do. And your husband/wife/significant other gets to come along and take classes, too. Plus, if you’re interested, you get to work with us here at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

The fellowship class is half U.S. citizens and half journalists from around the globe. While for many years the class was made up primarily of newspaper reporters, that’s changed; along with newsprint types, we now see a mix of freelancers, magazine writers, documentary filmmakers, TV and radio producers, online journalists, and more. I’d love to see some great non-traditional applicants in the pool this year — brilliant bloggers are very much eligible.

You’ve still got some time to get your applications together; the deadline for international applicants is Dec. 15, and for Americans it’s Jan. 31. But it’s never too soon to start thinking about what you’d do with a year in Cambridge, or how you’d like to convince us we should give you one. This year, for the first time, you can apply completely online, so you can start working on your application today and sharpen it up in your spare minutes over the next couple months. Trust me: It’s worth the effort.