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 channels were being launched at an unprecedented pace, the diversity of voices represented was nonetheless shrinking. With each news channel targeting the richer segments of the audience because of their spending power, the scope for a plurality was reducing. Ironically, this lack of diversity is taking place amidst the backdrop of the unprecedented possibilities offered by emerging new media technologies. India has currently 190 million mobile phone users and the numbers are, according to some estimates, growing by more than a 100 million each year. Internet and broadband penetration rates are also rapidly growing and for the first time reaching beyond the old enclaves of metropolitan centres touching people previously not affected by the global information revolution.

So the question that we were interested in was: how could these two parallel developments be reconciled: the shrinking space for public opinion amidst the possibilities for communication offered by new media forms and technologies. We find this to be one of the most important social challenges facing India, but, more broadly, all emerging economies in Asia and Africa today: that is, how to use new media technologies to democratize the production of knowledge as the Internet and mobile use gains new users in previously unaffected areas and demographics.

NewsVerse therefore emerged out of desire to bridge these two: the need for a diversity of voices offered by citizen journalists and the increasing interest amongst the mainstream media and organizations for such activity. In specific, it does this by providing a novel structure for citizen journalists to produce news and communicate in a social network environment while collaborating with the mainstream media and organizations to provide financial incentives to do so. Thus, it aims at promoting the formation of a more pluralistic news environment but, as importantly, it aims at getting mainstream news channels to actively promote and benefit such citizen journalist activity by forming close collaborations between citizen journalists and the more established mainstream media and organizations.

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.

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.