This is a writeup of today's Center for Civic Media lunch event. If you're in the Cambridge area, come join us!

Today's Civic lunch featured the digital team from the Boston Globe, led by Jeff Moriarty, VP of Digital Products. He was joined by Chris Marstall, Marck Chang, and Grace Woo. They've just launched a new standalone site for the Globe, spinning off from the Boston.com portal and its ubiquitous popup ads. It's not a redesign -- they got to design a newspaper site from scratch in the year 2011, and the benefits of having a blank slate are evident in their award-winning design (here's more background on that design from some of its designers).

In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, Editor and Cofounder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN.

When we started telling people about our "nutrition label for the news" project, one question came up fairly frequently: “Do nutrition labels even work?”

Of course, when people ask if labels work, they implicitly mean, "Have nutritional labels prevented America from growing more obese each year?" In this case, the obvious answer is “No.”

This doesn't mean that labels don't serve their purpose, or that we don't need them to get healthier. Your political identity is shaped by many things other than where you get your news: your parents, your siblings, your childhood, your education, your workplace, or hey, maybe even your most basic morals or the type of bacteria in your belly.

This is a collaborative blog post between Hailey Lee and I about our final project for CMS.360, Intro to Civic Media. Our project is entitled “Television Newsroom Diversity and Civic Engagement.”

Abstract

(For MIT undergraduates only.)

With the increasing proliferation of mobile digital media tools and online video distribution, there is a need for secure easy-to-use platforms for sharing and organizing media content among youth. While capturing and tagging digital media with time and location is possible, editing and organizing it for producing seamless narrativesthat can be easily shared online remains complicated. This project seeks to undertake development of mobile tools and online platforms that support young media makers and citizen journalists to create, organize and share digital narratives produced in their own neighborhoods over time, while allowing new forms ofinter-generational learning, location-based storytelling and civicadvocacy.

Surface dedicated in Newspapers front pages vs. Twitter about #Occupy Nov. 17th after Occupy Wall Street eviction.

Friday at MIT CSAIL, Lada Adamic gave a talk on "To friend and to trust: eliciting truthful and useful ratings online". Lada is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information & Center for the Study of Complex Systems. I met her in 2009 at the SIGWEB Hypertext conference, and we did a small collaboration (together with her student Jiang Yang) when I was a software engineer at KGB. It was great to hear Lada again; she always brings fascinating examples, unexpected insights and humour into what are serious in-depth quantitative research projects.

Here's your breakdown of news in civic media this week...

VIDEO

Mapping Media Ecosystems
Hal Roberts, Erhardt Graeff, and Gilad Lotan

FEATURED EVENTS

Over the last three days of the Mozilla Festival, the team from the MIT Media Lab & Center for Civic Media has been asking people to visualise their media diets. This is part of a larger project we're doing with our director Ethan Zuckerman to develop a nutritional label for the news. You can read more about it in this great post on the Nieman Journalism Lab, "Ethan Zuckerman wants you to eat your (news) vegetables". Clay Johnson of InfoVegan is also writing a book on the topic, set to be published by O'Reilly in the near future.