This report explores the journalistic uses of data from a variety of sensor systems and ethical standards for doing so. Journalists can serve audiences by researching which public and private sensor systems monitor their communities’ lives, not just because those systems are potential sources, but because it is newsworthy to investigate what sensor systems produce, how they are used, and who stands to benefit (or lose) from their data. Once journalists and the public start to understand more about the sensor systems that monitor our societies, the next step will be to work through the practical, legal, and ethical questions that should inform how much of the produced data can become public.
Project lead: Fergus Pitt
The financial pressures that digital technology have brought to legacy news media have forced many to close their international bureaus. Journalists often report on breaking news events without physically being there by immersing themselves in streams of content, whether live video feeds from cell phones, Twitter feeds, or blog posts. Through practical guidance and descriptions of this changing journalistic ecosystem, this report defines a new, hybrid foreign correspondent model that employs all reporting tools and a wide range of sources to bring audiences a better understanding of the world.
Project leads: Ann Cooper, Taylor Owen
Team members: Ahmed Al Omran, Burcu Baykurt, Jesse Graham, Anup Kaphle, Kelly Golnoush Niknejad
This research focuses on the intersection of citizen journalism and digital activism, producing a comprehensive database of international incidents of civic activism and non-violent conflict in which digital media had some role in the evolution of events. The project developed original data and the visualization and query tools to make all the data accessible to journalists and the public through Creative Commons licensing.
Project lead: Philip Howard
This report examines the current wide-sweeping trend of newsrooms downsizing into smaller spaces and how it will impact the future for post-industrial journalism in the digital age. While they can and do work from home, most journalists still find value in coming to a set, physical place. The creation of news hubs offers some insight into the industry-wide approach to thinking about digital workflow. Drawing upon six newsroom visits and over 120 interviews, the project highlights the value of physical newsrooms and hubs in the support of breaking news production and collaboration among journalists.
Project lead: Nikki Usher
This project is the first comprehensive report on the use of user-generated content among broadcast news channels. It finds an increased dependence on user-generated content among international broadcast news channels, often used only when other imagery is not available. The report calls for the necessity of training newsroom staff to discover, verify, and properly credit the rights for user-generated content as well as address its impact on their staff, their audiences, and the people who are creating the content in the first place.
Project leads: Pete Brown, Sam Dubberley, Claire Wardle
The Responsive Cities Initiative convened a workshop series examining the following question: What could a university center do to advance policymaking and planning for fiber-optic networks that provide everyone in the United States with high-speed Internet access, (a) improve local governance, and (b) support civic journalism? This report identifies the constraints, barriers, and opportunities in the long-term planning required for universal fiber access.
Project lead: Susan Crawford
This report identifies best practices for incorporating games into newsrooms by examining playful products and practices, disclosing business opportunities from the game industry, and critiquing the assimilation of play into the newsroom. By combining the work of journalists with game designers and developers, games and play can provide new means of disseminating news and engaging audiences. Open source formats could provide journalists with a repository of potential templates and tools, which is especially beneficial for those who do not have the budgets to build such products from scratch.
Project lead: Maxwell Foxman
After decades of research and development, virtual reality (VR) appears to be on the cusp of mainstream adoption. For journalists, the combination of immersive video capture and dissemination via mobile VR players is particularly exciting. It promises to bring audiences closer to a story than any previous platform. Through a literature review and case studies on early VR documentaries, this report investigates the evolution of VR technology and what it means for journalism—reflecting on its process, technical requirements, feasibility, and impact.
Project leads: Taylor Owen, Fergus Pitt
Team member: James Milward
This research paper identified key benefits of design philosophy in creating new possibilities for journalism, including the ability to rapidly prototype and modify new products before major resources have been committed; to improve journalism by deeply understanding its role in the real lives of those who consume it; and to work directly with the communities in which news organizations are embedded to generate coverage and tell stories of direct relevance. This report also cautions against making editorial decisions solely in favor of stories and products that bring the most success in financial terms.
Project lead: Heather Chaplin
For "You Are Here," the team built, tested, and refined a completely open-source system for distributing audio stories and other journalistic content to local audiences via a small, independent wifi router. In addition to providing a uniquely local audio portrait of two iconic New York City locations—Tompkins Square Park and the High Line—"You Are Here" is a template for distributing journalistic stories in a way that is affordable and resilient, requiring only a power supply and a user's smartphone. Such a system has the potential to keep information accessible, even when the Internet is not. The final report was published in spring 2017.
Project lead: Sarah Grant
Team members: Amelia Marzec, Susan McGregor, Dan Phiffer, Benjamen Walker
This project developed a way to simplify satellite data collection and interpretation, allowing journalists, urbanists, humanitarian agencies, and others to mine valuable information from satellite imagery during urban conflicts or natural disasters. The result is an open-source, interactive, layered map of Aleppo at the neighborhood scale. The layered satellite imagery allows the identification of sites of destruction over the course of the civil war, as well as analysis of changing landmarks and borders, and tracking of refugee populations.
Project lead: Laura Kurgan
Team members: Dare Brawley, Madeeha Merchant
This project uses a novel sensor technology to tell the story of several weeks in New York City from the perspective of rats.
Project leads: Jason Fields, Marguerite Holloway, Brian House
This report provides an analysis of the maturation of technology coverage. Some of the most novel critiques about technology and Silicon Valley are coming from women and underrepresented minorities, but their work is seldom recognized in traditional critical venues. Acknowledging the realities of society and culture, this report offers readers the tools and framings for thinking about their relationship to technology and their relationship to power. Besides deconstructing, naming, and interpreting technological phenomena, criticism has the potential to assemble new insights and interpretations around the role of technology in society.
Project lead: Sara Watson
This report explores how chat apps alter reportage, allowing journalists to acquire multimedia information, pursue stories, access private networks (particularly in contexts of censorship), and organize news production. Chat apps are becoming a common tool for newsgathering; they allow journalists to sit in on conversations and get in touch with potential sources, particularly in countries such as China where more public social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) are not as commonly used. Today, the most popular chat app, WhatsApp, has more than one billion monthly active users. Young, mobile people have shifted away from public networks to private chat apps because they are easier to use and offer greater privacy under surveillance. The report is a case study of chat apps usage in covering the recent youth protests in Hong Kong.
Project lead: Valerie Belair-Gagnon
Team members: Colin Agur, Nick Frisch