Tim Berners-Lee and Martin Moore have won a grant for their project to create tools for transparent journalism and better navigation on the web (the project will be open source). This is something to watch:
The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data – the “story behind the story” – to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.
There were other notable winners of the Knight News Challenge also:
- Using the Web to solicit funding from the public to pay for investigative journalism projects
- Creating software that allows a computer to become a digital radio transmitter, significantly reducing the cost of setting up community news stations in India
- Blogging to discuss the idea of interactive games where students measure and track their personal demand on natural resources.
