Knight News Challenge: Tim Berners-Lee back for more

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded $5.5 million dollars to 16 innovative new media projects. According to the press release, winning ideas included:

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; and,

Blogging to discuss the idea of interactive games where students measure and track their personal demand on natural resources.

Amongst the sixteen award recipients is father of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Lee's project, Media Standards Trust, proposes a system where journalists "source tag" their stories with phrases like "eyewitness account" or "from original documents". From there a reader can filter stories based upon their source preferences.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ACCURATE
Fair and accurate news has always been a challenge. While Media Standards Trust aims to highlight stories using good sources, it fails to address the fact that human beings are often incapable of being objective. Whether an eyewitness uses colorful language to describe an alleged bank robber, or whether a journalist paraphrases the words of an unsavory informant - the news is tainted with the journalist's own preconceived notions.

If only we could produce a program that recognized proper nouns and the negative or positive adjectives that qualify them. Only then would we know the story biases that color our perceptions.

(Damn. These painkillers are making me sound like a forlorn hippie.)

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Knight News Challenge: Tim Berners-Lee back for more

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