The idea for NewsVerse emerged over a series of discussions about the Indian news media and the challenges it currently faces. The discussions focused on what we perceived to be the biggest problem facing the Indian news environment today: the homogeneity of content, despite an increasingly competitive and experimental market. While new newspapers and television [...]
About
NewsVerse is an open-source start-up and research and development project aimed at developing the next-generation citizen journalism application in India and other emerging markets in Asia and Africa
Recent News
Brief introduction to project
I made a shortened introduction to project that we are developing to get some taste of what we have been developing / working on. It’s a very brief version of a longer presentation we made earlier for some social venture funding applications, but done in a more visually pleasing style.
A lot of the elements that we will talk about here eventually – Code, Content, Creativity / Criticism – will ideally involve a mixture of the technical, the design and the wider theoretical-philosophical issues that inspire our project. We shall make all of these public. But while we develop the basic core and establish a smooth workflow of the project, meanwhile do check out a “Brief Introduction to Newsverse.” The Flash-presentation can be accessed by clicking on the image above. The filesize if a bit biggish (500 KB) and requires Flash 9. Also you need to click on the screen to be able to navigate the file with your arrow keys. In case it does not work.
Knight News Challenge
Our NewsVerse application was selected as one of the top 64 from over 3000 applications in the recent Knight News Challenge social grant application. Knight News Challenge describes itself the following way: “The Knight News Challenge is a contest awarding as much as $5 million a year for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.”
We came close, very close, but, alas – no luck this time. So as a result, while we look for other support, we have decided that the best way to develop our unique blend of cutting-edge software development, grassroots journalism and media criticism is to launch our application as an open-source project. This project will be also accompanied by a foundation that will act as the central hub for the various activities around NewsVerse. Among other things, we are planning on starting an Internship Programme for talented coders and journalists, a online portal for learning “Code”, “Content” and “Criticism” and many other things. The idea is to open up every step of the development and to provide opportunities for other people to benefit and learn from this development process.
Please watch this space as it develops. And have patience; we all still have our day-jobs.
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