The Next Newsroom Project

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The Knight Foundation has released an assessment of the impact of the first two years of the News Challenge program, of which The Next Newsroom Project was one. I received my grant during the first year, in 2007. And while my grant only ran one year, the [...]

The Carnival of Journalism is back for month two, under the guidance of ringleader David Cohn . The question this month:

“Considering your unique circumstances what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources ?”

I expect there are a nearly limitless number of ways to approach this. I’m going to start with an example close to home: [...]

At the end of the morning session at the Gamification Summit , Amy Jo Kim challenged everyone to complete the following elevator pitch for their project:

My company, (company name), is developing (a defined offering) to help (target player) (solve a problem) using (secret sauce/unique differentiator).

I’ve been thinking about that a lot. And I’ll give my version [...]

The second day of the Gamification Summit was a smaller workshop conducted by Amy Jo Kim ( @amyjokim), who has gained a reputation as a leading guru on community, social media, and game mechanics. Kim walked us through a series of presentations and exercises. You can get a comprehensive set of notes here . I’m going to focus on some [...]

I didn’t get a chance to hear the presentation by Wanda Meloni of M2 Research. But she gave an overview of the Gamification industry, including vendors, spending, and a few interesting trends in her slides:

I have a bunch of stray notes and quotes from the various panels of Day 1 of the Gamification Summit. In most cases, I’m not sure who said what. But the messages stuck with me, so I wanted to round up a few of the most important points I heard during the day. ——— One representative [...]

I recently interviewed Jane McGonigal for my day job at the Mercury News . The subject was her new book, “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.” I just finished it myself, and can’t recommend it enough. In particular, the first one-third of the book breaks down the elements of good [...]

As I proceed with this project, I’m going to post notes periodically about things I’m learning. For experienced game designers, much of this will be old hat, of course. But I want to leave a bit of a trail for others new to these concepts to follow along, if they wish. I’m going to start [...]

Gamification Workshop (Day 2) – Google Docs docs0.google.com Chris O’Brien says: Really great set of notes on day 2 of the Gamification Summit – contributed by @nitya. Gamification gets popular, but it’s still finding its feet | VentureBeat venturebeat.com Chris O’Brien says: @deantak report from Day 1 of the Gamification Summit. #gsummit The ‘game mechanics’ misnomer: Why gamifying the news [...]

Notes taken by Nitya Narasimhan:

Gamification Workshop Day 2

On Friday, I returned to the Gamification Summit for Day 2, which was a workshop to provide more focused training and advice on how to develop a gamified service. The workshop was led by Amy Jo Kim , a noted game designer. I’ll post my notes from Day 1 and Day 2 over the weekend. But [...]

The Gamification Summit on Thursday kicked off with a presentation by Wanda Meloni of M2 Research who tried to put some numbers to the growing use of game mechanics across the Web. Here’s her slides from the talk:

Welcome to the Carnival of Journalism , which has been reincarnated courtesy of David Cohn. While I recall the carnival in its heydey of three or four years ago, this is my first time as a contributor. This month’s topic as posed by Mr. Cohn:

The changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community : One [...]

Today marks the official public launch of the NewstopiaVille project. To learn more, you can check out my post explaining NewstopiaVille over at the PBS IdeaLab blog . I’ll be posting regular updates here in the coming weeks, including dispatches from the Gamification Summit on Thursday and Friday . Meanwhile, to get regular updates, you can ‘like’ the NewstopiaVille [...]

I just caught this interview with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz from a USA Today event. She discusses a wide range to topics with USA Today’s David Lieberman. About half way through, they come around to the subject of Yahoo’s move into building local news sites:

Q: You are starting a local news operation for San Francisco. Tell us about [...]

Block by Block: Community News Summit 2010