Knight-funded innovations featured at ASNE convention
Posted 3/23/2010 4:22:00 PM
An afternoon session on the third day of the convention will feature quick-paced presentations of six groundbreaking journalism tools that have already been adopted in a number of newsrooms. Later the same day the presenters will participate in “Innovations Salons” — small-group discussions designed to allow ASNE members to learn more about the tools by speaking directly with the people behind them.
Innovation is one of the themes of this year's ASNE convention, and it's the primary focus of two of the sessions scheduled during the convention on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 13 -- Day 3 of ASNE's NewsNow 2010 Ideas Summit.
Six Innovations You Can Use In Your Newsroom will feature quick-paced presentations of six groundbreaking Knight Foundation-funded journalism tools that have already been adopted in a number of newsrooms. Later the same day the presenters will each participate in separate Innovations Salons — small-group discussions designed to allow ASNE members to learn more about the tools by speaking directly with the people behind them.
Here is a list of the presenters and a little about each of their innovations:
Rick Allen, Chief Executive Officer, SnagFilms
A movie theater in a widget, SnagFilms is focused on bringing documentaries to the masses online for free. The company has developed a tool for creating personalized widgets that can feature up to 10 different documentaries, embeddable on any Web page.
Bill Allison, Editorial Director, Sunlight Foundation
Built for election years, Sunlight Foundation's customizable "Politiwidgets" consolidate information taxpayers want to know about their congresspeople, such as voting records, top contributors, top contractors, earmark stats and interest group ratings.
Martin Moore, Founder, hNews
A microformat for news content, hNews expands on hAtom, delivering more richly formatted stories by adding fields that more fully define journalistic works.
Dan Pacheco, Co-creator, Printcasting
With the motto "people-powered magazines," Printcasting is software that lets anyone start a local publication. Targeted ads pair with easy-to-use templates to create niche magazines, which can be e-mailed or printed at home and distributed.
Jeff Reifman, Founder, NewsCloud
This Facebook-based application serves as an online news-sharing community, where members post and comment on stories and earn points for participation.
Eric Umansky, Co-founder, DocumentCloud
After published stories start to fade, too often the source documents that provided the backbones for those stories fade with them, into desk drawers or trashcans. DocumentCloud is an effort to save those materials in an online, easily searchable database so they can be shared with reporters worldwide.
The ASNE convention will be held April 11-14 at the J.W. Marriott in Washington, D.C. Other speakers at the convention include Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt, Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian, David Carr of the New York Times, The Huffington Post leader Arianna Huffington, Yahoo! News honcho Mark Walker, and the editor and author Dave Eggers.
ASNE is grateful to the organizations sponsoring this year's convention, including Google, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Bloomberg, Yahoo!, Gannett Co., Advance Publications and the McCormick Foundation.