Four key trends changing digital journalism and society - O'Reilly Radar

Following are four themes that jumped out when I looked across the winners of the latest Knight News Challenge round.  [1] Networked accountability...  An intercontinental project that bridged citizen science, open data, open source hardware, civic hacking and the Internet of things to monitor, share and map radiation data? Safecast is in its own category. Adapting the system to focus on air quality in Los Angeles — a city that’s known for its smog — will be an excellent stress test for seeing if this distributed approach to networked accountability can scale.  If it does — and hacked Chumbys, LED signs, Twitter bots, smartphone apps and local media reports start featuring the results — open data is going to be baked into how residents of Los Angeles understand their own atmosphere. If this project delivers on some of its promise, the value of this approach will be clearer.  If this project delivers on all of its potential, the air itself might improve... [2] Peer-to-peer collaboration, across newsrooms ... One (welcome) reality that jumps out in this series of Knight grants is that there are journalists from newsrooms that compete for stories who are collaborating on these projects independently.New York Times and Washington Post developers are teaming up to create an open election database. Data journalists from WNYC, the Chicago Tribune and the Spokesman-Review are collaborating on building a better interface for Census data. The same peer networks that helped build the Internet are forming around building out civic infrastructure. It’s an inspiring trend to watch... [3] The value of an open geo commons ... In the wake of '#MAppleGate,' there’s suddenly a lot more attention being paid to the importance and value of mapping data, including how difficult it is to do maps right. And that’s where OpenStreetMap comes in. That’s also why the Knight Foundation is putting more than $500,000 behind tools from Development Seed: it will help to sustain and improve an open geo data commons that media organizations large and small can tap into to inform communities using maps... As with Wikipedia, there will be people who doubt whether an open source digital map revolution enabled by MapBox, Development Seed’s open source mapping suite will come to pass. Then again, how many people believed a decade ago that Wikipedia would grow into the knowledge repository it is today? ... [4] 'Open' is in ... Open data is a common thread that connects the winners — but the openness doesn’t stop there. Open maps. Open source. Open government. Open journalism. That this theme has emerged as a strong pulse isn’t a tr