Cur­rent:

I am involved in the Knight News Chal­lenge, which has com­mit­ted $25 mil­lion over five years to fund­ing news inno­va­tion. The win­ners were announced in June 2010 at the MIT Future of News and Civic Media con­fer­ence.

I help orga­nize Hacks/Hackers, a journo-geek organization.

I’m very inter­ested in any local-to-local (Internet-enabled) com­merce model, whether adver­tis­ing, pro­mo­tions, or mobile. I’m hop­ing to help these tech­nolo­gies pair with news sites. Among them are the Groupon and a burst of oth­ers in that space (Tippr, Buywithme.com, Liv­ing­So­cial, Scoop Street). In addi­tion, there is a push for white-label Groupon-type sites like Closely and Chom­pon.  If you know of any note­wor­thy pro­grams or pilots, I’d love to hear about them.

I think about how tra­di­tional news orga­ni­za­tions can take advan­tage of the plat­forms like Twit­ter, Scribd, and Pos­ter­ous. I’ve been known to write a memo or share a best prac­tice here and there.

I have helped out Spot.us, a San Francisco-based start-up which pro­vides infra­struc­ture for crowd-funded jour­nal­ism (and a Knight News Chal­lenge winner).

I chime in a bit at Nie­man Lab, a Har­vard project which cov­ers the evolv­ing jour­nal­ism indus­try with an eye towards what is working.

On the agenda:

I am intrigued by all the energy around visu­al­iza­tion, specif­i­cally data visu­al­iza­tion, and would love to fig­ure out a way to get data folks and jour­nal­ists to pool their strengths — num­ber crunch­ing and sto­ry­telling. The New York Times team has won acco­lades for set­ting the stan­dard. I like WNYC’s crowd­sourced milk price map, which asked radio lis­ten­ers to report prices of gro­ceries. Sta­men Design in San Fran­cisco has done some high-profile work on incident-level crime maps. And Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg and Fer­nanda Vie­gas have built the ground-breaking Many Eyes tool. Tableau, a Seattle-based com­pany known for its desk­top visu­al­iza­tion soft­ware, has recently released a consumer-friendly tool tar­geted at blog­gers and jour­nal­ists that is embed­d­a­ble. I think their tool could do for data visu­al­iza­tion what spread­sheets did for number-crunching. I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out how to get all these mov­ing pieces together.

I think schools and teach­ers can nur­ture civic engage­ment among kids via writ­ing, report­ing and news con­sump­tion. This is an impor­tant skill set, espe­cially as jour­nal­ism becomes more dis­trib­uted and two-way. One great exam­ple is Alan Jacobson’s TweenTribune.com which is curated for the younger set and allows kids to upload their own news sto­ries. Another part of this effort may be to push cur­ricu­lum changes. Esther Woj­ci­cki, a high school jour­nal­ism teacher and chair­per­son of Cre­ative Com­mons, is writ­ing a curriculum.

I am con­cerned about the diver­sity in the emerg­ing areas of jour­nal­ism. If you are work­ing on this or have thoughts, I’d love to hear from you.

Non-journalism:

The Peabody Award-winning team behind King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, and I are part­ner­ing on a doc­u­men­tary about Chi­nese food in Amer­ica, based in part on the research in my book, The For­tune Cookie Chron­i­cles. The ten­ta­tive name is “The Search for Gen­eral Tso.” (The orig­i­nal name of my book is “The Long March of Gen­eral Tso,” so it was a total mind-meld). We got a devel­op­ment grant fron the National Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties. It is a non-profit project and they are cur­rently apply­ing for grants and funding.

I help out with the Har­vard Asian Amer­i­can Alumni Asso­ci­a­tion. When I was in col­lege, I was on the Asian Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion exec­u­tive board and worked on a cam­paign for eth­nic stud­ies. The Har­vard fac­ulty recently approved eth­nic stud­ies as a minor (but what they call a sec­ondary field).

I am try­ing to learn more about the edu­ca­tion of girls in devel­op­ing nations. As Kofi A. Annan has said, “There is no tool for devel­op­ment more effec­tive than the edu­ca­tion of girls.” The United Nations has issued an 160-page report [pdf]. If you don’t want to down­load that, there is also an html-friendly sum­mary. The Coun­cil for For­eign Rela­tions also has an excel­lent pub­li­ca­tion called “What Works in Girls’ Edu­ca­tion,” which is a 2004 sum­mary of all know aca­d­e­mic work at that time by Bar­bara Herz and Gene Sper­ling.
The Pop­u­la­tion Coun­cil also has a 2009 report called “News Lessons: The Power of Edu­cat­ing Ado­les­cent Girls” [pdf], that lays out a roadmap of what needs to be done by Cyn­thia Lloyd. We’re try­ing to find peo­ple who are also think­ing hard about this area.

There are also other lit­tle projects that pop up from time to time. Other side projects: Street Pac­man, a geo-enabled ver­sion of the 80s video game with real peo­pleAwe­some Foundation.