Chicago, Cambridge: A June Travel Blur

the tumblr-sponsored green room at mcon14. there's our pal azita in the middle, and at left is record exec todd moscowitz. pizzas just cause.
The Tumblr-sponsored green room at MCON14. Pizzas just cause.

Between my day job and teaching our master’s program journalism class at Georgetown, somehow I squeezed in a few trips. Was delighted to moderate the final on-stage chat at the Millennial Impact Conference in Chicago, in which Warby Parker and Harry’s co-founder Jeff Raider and I joked around about beards. We followed that up in Tumblr’s green room, in which we made a shitty gif.

goofing off with jeff raider after closing out #mcon14.
Goofing off with Jeff Raider after closing out #MCON14.

When I tried to go home from Chicago, your standard incompetence at O’Hare (which they called “weather” — a huge affront to actual weather situations) led to the cancelation of my flight home. So I stayed an extra night in Chicago, in a lovely boutique hotel called the Ivy. My only beef with it was the mattresses there rest on these dark wood bed frames that jut out to stab your ankles when you’re not careful. I am pretty banged up from my bed.

Spent one night at home before flying to Cambridge for the Knight/MIT Center for Civic Media’s annual Civic Media Conference. That conference is always special because of the sheer brain power and wit that gets squeezed into an overly-air conditioned room. And it’s a reunion, of sorts, for a lot of the Knight family of friends and advisers.

This year I also got a story out of it, when Friend Noah laid out the complexities of a legal debate over whether a burrito qualifies as a sandwich. Seriously.

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All of this was punctuated with you sending me Yo’s at random times. Thanks, yo.

Boston With Some Big Brains

Over the past couple of days, the Center for Civic Media at MIT and the Knight Foundation gathered about 200 of the brightest minds in media and technology to talk about data, algorithms and how they’re changing storytelling. (It was also a chance to announce the winners of the Knight News Challenge, which I helped judge this spring. Congrats to the six inspiring winners!)

One of the takeaways from our two+ days together was that in discussing the future of news we are in many ways arguing for a return to the past — a more distributed one, before media producers were aggregated at gatekeeper institutions, and back to a time when storytelling was produced slower, with more context, as exemplified by the presentation of Paul Salopek‘s fascinating plan to spend the next seven years on a slow-reporting journey around the world. And with the big trend toward more data journalism, AP’s Johnathan Stray and others reminded us that data has fingerprints all over it — that data journalism requires many selective decisions by humans, which means “there’s no such thing as objective data.”

Chatting with Michael Maness and Joi Ito at MIT’s Center for Civic Media.

Monday, I sat down for an on-stage chat with Knight’s VP for Journalism and Media Innovation Michael Maness and Joi Ito, a Knight trustee, venture capitalist, early tech pioneer and the director of the MIT Civic Media Center. During the conversation about funding trends for information efforts, Michael announced Knight’s new Prototype Fund, part of a a new effort to fail fast in funding new ideas by giving out 50-60 smaller grants for innovative ideas each year. Both men both delivered some memorable gems, and I got to wear one of those motivational speaker type headset microphones, which was the highlight of my week. (You can’t even tell it’s there, it’s so skin-colored and invisible!)

Michael wrapped up some of the big themes that came out of the conference in his closing session on Tuesday. Check out the notes from the liveblog. And Stiles did some great data visualizations on the attendees and the Twitter volume during the confab. More resources/coverage of #civicmedia after the jump:

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