Immediately following the announcement of our new blog, my inbox was flooded with questions like these: Is Knight Lab making a content play? Are you all trying to be Nieman Lab? Reporters' Lab?
Short answer: No.
As this journalism nerd lab evolves, we have found it necessary to expand the definition of our output. We are interested in building software and technology, first and foremost … Of course. And, we are primarily driven to create, and contribute to, open source journalism and publishing projects. However, since community plays a key role in both journalism and open source technology, we are increasing our emphasis on both events and editorial content.
Our community — tech savvy innovators driving change in news media on the web — resides in small pockets around the globe. In order to meaningfully participate in and contribute to this disparate conversation, we need the right platform. Hence, the new blog and our work recruit contributors to its body of editorial content.
Our content strategy is illustrative of some of our core values: Community, outreach and education. As we move forward, we will continue to improve our project and content presentation, as well as evolve our content strategy to fit both the needs of the Lab, as well as the community.
For now, we plan to share as much as we can about what we are working on in-house — experiments, prototypes, projects, products and services — as well as news from around the industry. You can look to us for updates on project development, lessons we’ve learned, and entry points into our code repositories.
While we will focus particularly on artificial intelligence and information design — two areas in which the Lab has particular expertise, you can also expect profiles on interesting people and projects, how-tos, and best practices from around the community. Occasionally, we might share a team update or an event recap … you’ll be you’ll be able to find it all here.
This blog will be our platform, our tool to allow us to develop technology in an open way, our collection of artifacts as we learn, as well as our conduit to our community.
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