Statement of The World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Journalism

Three days of intense meetings in Dubai are over, we made some significant steps this year. The key point made by the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Journalism - the council I take part in - is that "journalism" and "the media" are no longer synonyms. Journalism is still very much needed, but needs to reorganize, to exist in a different capacity than "the media".

Here follows a summary from the WEF web site and other places:

The second World Economic Forum Summit of the Global Agenda closed today with participants putting forward a host of ideas for redesigning the global system. The proposals debated by the Global Agenda Councils will form the basis of discussion at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, in January. For more information on the Summit and the Network of Global Agenda Councils, visit http://www.weforum.org/gac

Here below is the final statement of the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Journalism. The committee members who participated in the council meeting in Dubai:

• Amadou Mahtar Ba, Senegal
• Charlie Beckett, United Kingdom
• David Nordfors, USA/Sweden
• Guido Baumhauer, Germany
• Rui Chenggang, People's Republic of China
• Shekhar Gupta, India
• Sulaiman Al Hattlan, Saudi Arabia
• Susan King, Chairman, USA
• Ulrik Haagerup, Denmark
• Wilfried Ruetten, Germany
• Zafar Siddiqi, Pakistan

The Global Agenda Council on the Future of Journalism believes there is a need to reconstruct journalism and its relationship with the citizen and society. Public engagement is transforming journalism, offering an historic opportunity to create unprecedented increased value.

The media industry in general, and journalism in particular, have been experiencing drastic changes which call into question their role in mediating information to the benefit of their audience as well as disrupting traditional business models. Yet in an age when information is more important than ever, journalism is vital for building societies. It is a systemic part of the social, environment. We need to build a new technical, political and financial eco-system to support it.

There is a need to reinforce its basic principles: freedom of expression, holding power to account, providing information and a forum for debate, empowering citizens to take decisions about their lives. But mainstream journalism must also recognise its past failings and take advantage of new technologies and new social forces to reframe its practice, role and purpose. Journalism has a responsibility to not only mediate today’s realities, which go beyond national borders, are complex and inter connected, but also to engage local and global audiences/societies.

This poses an unprecedented set of professional challenges. Even in regions where conventional journalism is still growing as a commercial sector, it is also subject to the impact of the same kinds of technological and social changes. Likewise, the opportunities this paper identifies are available in diverse ways to all news media markets.

The Council believes that it is necessary to redesign organisations and identify business models that ensure the sustainability of professional networked journalism as the digital and mobile media have disrupted traditional distribution models and revenue streams. As a response, news organisations need to ensure constant refining of their talent pool’s professional skill set and equip them with innovative tool kits. At the same time, to ensure sustainability and relevance, organisations with journalism and journalists at their core may likely develop joint networks and forge strategic partnerships by pooling resources and sharing revenues.

At the same time, the journalism itself is changing and so the business model that creates it must also be reinvented. There is a need to support the opportunity afforded by networked media to develop a more constructive journalism. This is based on some traditional values such as the Right to Know and some familiar kinds of editorial work such as investigative reporting. But new technologies enable a different functionality. Internet and digital journalism allows for fuller and more expansive story-telling.

It affords the opportunity for a much greater connectivity between experts, journalists and the public. But most importantly, it allows the public to participate at all stages. Journalism can now tap into the boundless resource of knowledge and opinion within the audience. The role of the journalist changes from gatekeeper to a networker. The best obtainable version of the truth remains the goal but trust is not a given, it is a mutual relationship between the public and journalist. The authority of journalism will be built by the value it offers working with the citizen, not by a professional code alone.

The Global Agenda Council on the Future of Journalism sees as a priority the establishment and (self) enforcement of global guiding principles for professional independent journalism.

Existing Gaps:

1. Can a global concept and practice for independent professional journalism be encouraged in countries or environments where a different set of values exists and censorship still prevails?

2. Journalists are inadequately appreciated and protected. If journalism hopes to reinforce its role of watchdog for abuses of power and democracy, how can accountable journalists be valued and safeguarded?

3. Journalism needs the following in their new business models to continue to exist and fufill their commitment to the global society:

• Innovation and new partnerships
• New and improved system of journalism education
• Increased transparency and accountability

4. News organizations need to understand and leverage the new dynamic of the social media revolution. Traditional models of journalism are in danger of being marginalised as public discourse shifts to direct and networked media platforms, Journalism – both citizen and professional needs to be fostered in these new spaces.

Journalism needs to integrate the two new principle characteristics of digital media:

• public participation
• connectivity

Internet and social media permit engagement between the audience and professional journalists as never before. The new media interactivity promises a more dynamic business and society - but there will be a period of creative reordering that presents a challenge to all stakeholders.

This council believes that there are common values across diverse news media marketplaces as well as a global interconnectedness. Journalism has a world-role as well as a local or national function. This council believes that when it is networked, journalism offers a more sustainable business and a more socially useful way to inform and communicate about our world. Journalism at its best will continue to inform and inspire public debate and action. But this will not happen automatically and needs investment and strategic thinking, primarily by the journalism industry itself, but also by government and civil society

IAMCR Conference 2010: The Role of Journalism in Innovation Systems

Innovation Journalism and the concepts of innovation communication systems and attention work are being addressed by the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) World Conference in Braga Portugal (2010) on “Communication and Citizenship: Rethinking Crisis and Change".

IAMCR is the worldwide professional organisation in the field of media and communication research. It was founded in 1957 and is present in 40 countries today.

The Journalism Research & Education Section of the IAMCR is inviting people to submit research papers to the conference within five selected themes. One of these themes puts a special focus on the issues that are at the core of the Innovation Journalism initiative:

Second Theme: Innovations in Journalism:

• What evidence for journalists as stakeholders in innovation systems?
• How do current innovation diffusion models treat the role of media?
• What available models and evidence for the innovation communication system (interplay between journalists/ communicators/others)?
• What lessons could be derived from historical evidence about the role of media systems?
• What is the role played by media in the social construction of reality?
• What measures and metrics to identify the influence of journalism on community identities?
• How does journalism education could be optimized?
• How does journalism contribute to the formation of the public perception of an emerging industry?
• Will journalism increase economic growth?

Looks like a great opportunity for Innovation Journalism and Innovation Communication researchers.

Innovation Journalism Course at the University of Jyväskylä

The University of Jyväskylä in Finland is running a course in Innovation Journalism this autumn. The course is headed by Turo Uskali, fmr visiting researcher at the Injo center here at Stanford:

JOUS026 
Innovation Journalism and Innovations in Journalism

University of Jyväskylä, Finland

10.9.-1.12.2009, ToB 216

Turo Uskali, Ph D

The course is all about innovations and innovations in journalism. In these challenging financial and environmental times, new ideas, concepts, tools, methods, and innovations are needed in societies in many different levels; also in news business and journalism.

Innovation journalism was coined by Dr. David Nordfors in 2003, and can be seen as one example of the evolution and possibilities of quality journalism. In terms of traditional newsbeats, innovation journalism is multidisciplinary. It is a 'horizontal' beat, spanning across the old beats, consisting economic, and financial news, science, politics, and culture. Furthermore, it is focusing on long-lasting innovation processes and complicated innovation ecosystems.

In this course the basics of innovation journalism is taught, as well as the latest innovations in journalism. The course consists of lectures to local sources of innovation news, as well as working in online-environments, and participating a Guru-seminar on innovation journalism.

The main task (final exam) for a student is to produce a journalistic product, which can be defined as an example of good innovation journalism. An injo product can be a traditional newspaper, magazine, or news wire article, but also a video, web site, or a social media service (Twitter feeds etc.) contribution can be accepted.

The course has links to national, and international innovation journalism education, and research programs, such as Global Innovation Journalism -research project, and the Vinnova-Stanford Research Center for Innovation Journalism at Stanford University, California.

Innovation Journalism Fellowships 2010

We are now in the process of launching the Innovation Journalism Fellowships 2010. Read more about it on the Stanford Injo web.

1st Nordic Conference on Injo, Helsinki 25 Sep

The 1st Nordic Conference on Innovation Journalism will be taking place at the Communications Research Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland on Sep 25. It is supported by Helsingin Sanomat Foundation and Sitra, who are funding the Finnish Innovation Journalism initiative. These are the funding organizations who have made it possible for Finnish journalists and researchers to come to theVINNOVA-Stanford research center of innovation journalism.

I will be keynoting the conference, so if you are going I will see you there! The conference program and registration is available on the conference website.

Here is an excerpt:

1st Nordic Conference on

Innovation Journalism:

Weather-casters of Future?

The Role of Journalism in Understanding Technological and Social Innovations

In recent years “innovation” has emerged as a key concept in which many issues of modern societies – solution to social problems, belief on economic growth, survival in international competition – seem to culminate. Central to the discussions on innovation have been the idea that traditional institutional boundaries between different sectors of society, such as politics, economy, culture and technology, have to be crossed more than before. This means that journalistic practises have had to become more flexible than before. The concept of Innovation Journalism was coined in 2003 by David Nordfors. For Innovation Journalism the process of innovation itself is the central concept, treating business, technology, politics, etc. as nested components of a news story. It is a ‘horizontal’ beat, spanning across the old beats, reporting on innovation processes and innovation ecosystems. Elina Noppari and Erkki Kauhanen have further defined innovation journalism as a kind of future journalism involving also cultural and social innovations emerging from outside of the ‘official innovation structures’.

Communication Research Centre CRC is pleased to invite everyone who thinks journalism and innovation is important to a one-day confence to discuss the role of journalism in understanding technological and social innovations.

Time: Friday, 25 September 2009, from 9 am until 5 pm

Venue: University of Helsinki Main Building, Fabianinkatu 33, Helsinki

Keynote speakers are Professor Kevin G. Barnhurst and David Nordfors, Executive director of the Research Center of Innovation Journalism, Stanford University.

Further contributors include Jyrki Alkio, Ulrik Haagerup, Risto Kunelius, Hannu Nieminen, Vilma Luoma-aho, Turo Uskali and Esa Väliverronen.

Conference language is English.

There is no registration fee. However, the number of participants is restricted due to limited seating; therefore, participation

Innovation Journalism Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia - Sep 3

The yearly regional innovation journalism conference in Slovenia takes place on Sep 3. There are are grants for covering the participation for journalists from the Balkan region. Others are welcome to the conference, but need to cover their own costs.

The conference is co-organized by Vibacom, who are running the Slovenian Innovation Journalism initiative, and EJC, the European Journalism Center in Maastricht.

I will be participating in the conference over video, I hope to see you there!

See the call below for applicants to the funded spots:

Journalists, editors, communicators and media employees from select Eastern European countries are invited to a conference on innovations in journalism on September 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Participants can come from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, Austria, Italy and Hungary; the number of spots is limited.

The event is being organized by the European Journalism Centre and Vibacom, a business solutions company. The event will examine key points discussed at a Conference on Innovation Journalism which took place at Stanford University in the United States in May. It will also discuss innovation as a journalistic topic, the education and professional development of journalists and new media business models.

Accommodation and travel expenses will be covered by the organizers. The draft program is available here.

Interested applicants should send a CV (in English), including area of specialization and clips to Biba Klomp at klomp@ejc.net or Estera Lah at estera.lah@vibacom.si.

IJ-6 Conference Summary in Spanish

Mexican journalist Manuel Meneses Namihira from ID Investigacion Y Desarrollo has published a summary in Spanish of IJ-6, the Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism, Stanford University May 18-20 2009. Manuel's summary is here. The official website of IJ-6 is here.

Keynote at the Innovation @ Creative Industries Conference in Berlin

Projekt Zukunft Berlin - the futurist initiative of the city of Berlin organized the conference "Innovation @ Creative Industries", and invited me to make the opening keynote. The conference website is here.

Here is the short description of the event:

Creativity and innovation are of key importance for the economic and social well-being of Europe’s cities. At this, creative industries play an important role due to many reasons: They are a major source of innovative ideas. They offer services and products which contribute to the innovative activities of other entrepreneurs within and outside the creative industries. And by being intense technology users and fast trend follower they often demand even more new developments. Yet, the high impact of creative and cultural workers on the cities’ innovation performance is often not widely known.

Therefore, the international and high profile conference „Innovation @ Creative Industries“ brings together 200 creative workers, artists and key stakeholders from public, private and NGO sectors around Europe to reveal the benefits of the booming creative industries and approaches to stimulate their contribution to innovation capacity of regions.

Here is the keynote I delivered at the event:

I wish to thank the organizers for inviting me to speak here today. This is an important event. The creative industries are important in the innovation economy – not only as an industry among others producing innovation, but as a part of the mindset that drives innovation, that enables society to incubate ideas and transform them into value, across the spectrum of human activity.

Also, Berlin is my mother’s home town, which makes it an extra treat to be here.

The VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism at Stanford University is based on three new concepts: Innovation Journalism, attention work and the Innovation Communication System. Innovation Journalism is Journalism covering innovation. It tells us how innovation happens, covering the innovation processes and the innovation ecosystems that nowadays determine our futures. In 2003, I did a Google search, and got thousands of hits on the expressions technology journalism and business journalism, but zero hits on innovation journalism. Journalists were covering innovation, but there was no name for it. It was done within traditional news beats – technology or business or politics or culture. But innovation is not about technology OR business OR politics. Innovation is about the combination of them. Innovation journalism can be seen as a horizontal news beat, crossing the traditional news beats.

People think innovation something techie. As a physicist and techie myself, I will stick out my neck and say that innovation is about language. Every innovation is an innovation in language. It needs a name so we can call it something. It needs a definition so we know what it is. And it needs a story, so that we can relate to it. If any of these three things are missing, the innovation will not happen.

I suggest society can not innovate faster than it can create new shared language. Society has an infrastructure for creating new shared language, for example journalism, communication and PR. Today we live in an attention economy, where attention is a scarce commodity. It has attention workers – people who generate and broker attention professionally. These are, for example, journalists working for ad-based media, or communicators and PR people. They are all stakeholders in public attention, and when there is public attention, then shared language is more easily created.

They are key players in the innovation communication system, which influences the flows of attention around innovation issues.

Innovation journalism, attention work and innovation communication systems are concepts that are constructive for discussing how innovation systems work, how innovation happens. They help society create new shared language around innovation processes and ecosystems.

Innovation journalism connects the innovation economy and the democratic society, which are not well connected today. I get worried when I hear innovation business leaders in democracies speak highly about the innovation policies of governments in non-democratic countries, at the same time expressing frustration over the lack of good policies by their democratically elected governments in Europe. I think this is because we lack the ability to have a public discussion around innovation issues. There is little incentive for elected politicians to spend much time on innovation, when journalism is not organized in a way that it is able to cover it.

The EU is hopefully recognizing this, and I hope they will address journalism and the creative industry it in their policies for developing Europe as the worlds leading innovation economy. Innovation funding can be used for developing innovation journalism, VINNOVA in Sweden is doing it already, as are Tekes and Sitra in Finland, together with the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. More countries will hopefully do it, and hopefully more of the creative industry can be involved.

Storytelling is very important for innovation. Innovation needs vision and scenarios, and they need to be imaginative and inspiring. It needs new metaphors, introducing us to new things by analogies to things we already know.

We only need to look back at the role of science fiction to realize how important creative storytelling is for innovation. Science fiction gave us grand fantasies of futures shaped by scientific discoveries and technological progress. We grew up reading about how the interaction between people and technology conquered the universe. When these stories were written, they were fantasies, made to tickle and entertain. But in fact they were blueprints of the future. Young people got inspired, and chose educations and professions that enabled them to make the science fiction stories come true.

These science fiction stories were powerful, because they put science and technology into a social context, fantasizing about how it would change the human mind, the way societies work, and culture and art. We can see the results today.

And still, science fiction was until recently not considered good literature.

Our parents and teachers rarely looked upon science fiction as a respected form of literature. They preferred we read the classics.

The thing about science fiction was that it bridged popular science, technology and the humanities. That is tricky. The British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow gave in 1959 a well known lecture about how the breakdown of communication between the "two cultures" of modern society — the sciences and the humanities — saying it was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. He noted that “literary intellectuals” felt no requirement to know anything about science and technology, they would even take pride in not knowing anything about it.

Innovation is often about bridging and mixing things that are separated, and this there comes with challenges for the innovators. It will trigger controversies and there will be politics. Think of, for example, convergence in information technology, where phone companies and computer companies are finding themselves increasingly in the same business, going from being complementary to being competing. That comes with a lot of politics both within organizations and between them.

Many useful innovations fail, because they did not manage to build a constituency, they lost the politics.

And even when innovations succeed, the innovators may fail. Entrepreneurs know how difficult it is to survive success. They need to be good politicians.

Innovation will continue to increase, and so will the politics, as our whole society gets increasingly affected.

The world economy is going through a fundamental shift. Economic growth used to be driven by doing more of the same. Now it is more about the new replacing the old. In the more-of-the-same economy, we switched our phones when the old one broke, in the innovation economy we switch our phones because we want the newer models.

In the more-of-the-same economy, researchers lived apart from the market people. The researchers focused on the future, while the market people played the more-of-the-same game. There was a chasm separating the techies and the market folks, they had different interests, different priorities and different languages. A version of C.P. Snows two cultures in the industrial economy.

Today, in the innovation economy, every launch of a product, process or service, is just a step on the way, a preparation for the next launch. The most important thing now, is to work on what comes next. That is the nature of the innovation economy. This means that researchers and market people are moving closer to each other, they need to bridge the techie and the market cultures. We need to bridge that to politics and the broader society, as well.

Many people still think of innovation as something very technological. This is a reason to why C.P. Snow’s “humanities culture” has until recently not cared very much about it, some people taking pride in being ignorant about it. Unfortunately, leading newsrooms live with the cultural divide between science and tech on one hand and the humanities and social issues on the other hand. This is not helpful for the democratic society in the innovation age.

The humanities are as important for innovation as science, technology and business. But most important of all is to bridge between them, to let social aspects, arts and humanities interact with science, technology and business in the same story.

Now, at the core of innovation there must be creativity, free spirit, and radical thought. The key value of an innovative society is not acceptance. It is tolerance. No entrepreneur will expect to be accepted all the time, few people will know what they are doing or the potential significance of it. But new initiatives need to be tolerated, so they can develop to the stage when people will be able to accept them.

My grandmother was a psychologist here in Berlin in the 30s, working closely with Wilhelm Reich. Reich was free-spirited and provocative. He changed the world by marrying two concepts: sexuality and revolution, he coined the expression “the sexual revolution”, planting one of the seeds for the youth rebellion and counterculture of the 60s. The “Sexual revolution” was a social innovation, not a technological innovation or a business innovation, but it has driven technological and business innovations, for example in healthcare.

It is the concept is the essence of an invention, and how this concept succeeds in creating change is what is the essence of innovation. This is the difference between invention and innovation. An invention can be done by one single inventor. But in order to be an innovation, it needs to engage people and make some change to their lives. Innovations are the outcome of innovation processes driven by ecosystems of stakeholders.

And, I will continue to repeat, innovation is about people.

Doug Engelbart in Silicon Valley is known as “the inventor of the mouse”. Doug is a pioneer of human-computer interaction, the invention of the mouse was only a small part of his big contribution, which was manifested in the so called “mother of all demos”, where he and his team at SRI in 1969 demonstrated live a fully functioning computer network with computers running interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, and hypertext, using a mouse. The idea behind the demo was to show how computers may help people interact better with each other.

Before getting his job at SRI, Doug had missed a number of job opportunities by saying that computers could be used for augmenting human intelligence, when everybody knew that computers should be used for automation. He said that computers should be small, when everybody knew that the bigger computers were, the better they were. Doug was bridging C.P. Snows two cultures, but few people on either side knew what he was talking about.

The people working with Doug were hippies, children of Wilhelm Reich’s sexual revolution, which was big stuff in California in the end of the sixties. They were young intelligent revolutionaries trying out LSD and and testing programming computers so that they would produce artistic sounds and patterns that would assist transcendental meditation. They loved reading science fiction. For them, technology and humanities were the same. That mindset shaped the way we relate to computers today.

Doug’s higher goal has remained throughout his life. He says we need to develop our collective intelligence in society, so that we can solve the big complex problems that are threatening humanity, like nuclear wars, global warming or pandemics. For this, he says, we need to develop technology that develops us. He talks about the “human system” and the “tool system”, where the humans develop the tools and the tools develop the humans. That is the core of the collective intelligence. When Doug spoke at my yearly journalism conference at Stanford two years ago, he pointed at journalism s the perceptive system of our collective intelligence. Not the sensory system, but the perceptive system, that helps us formulate concepts and deliberate what they mean. That is another way of describing the importance of creative industry in the innovation economy. Storytelling, creativity and art needs to be there.

Now let’s talk a bit about the risks that entrepreneurial innovators have to live with. For their visions to come true, they have to engage people around them, to bring in different stakeholders. They will need to play politics, and they need to do it good, because they are stirring the pot, and they are connecting things that people often feel don’t belong together.

In Silicon Valley, innovations are nowadays often developed by small companies, that then are acquired by bigger companies, except for small companies that themselves grow into big companies, like Google. This is a trend that we can see coming to the rest of the world. There is something with big companies, which makes it difficult for them to innovate radically. Not impossible, but still difficult.

This is what I call “the intrapreneur’s dilemma”. An intrapreneur is an entrepreneur who innovates inside an existing organization. The “intrapreneur’s dilemma” goes like this:

When someone tries to innovate within a traditional organization,
few will understand what he/she is doing,
but everybody will understand who is a trouble-maker.

After the innovation has been embraced by the organization,
few will remember who started it,
but everybody will remember who was a trouble-maker.

This is the dilemma encountered by many intrapreneurs - they risk punishment for success. Organizations that want to be innovative need to find solutions to the intrapreneur's dilemma and its consequences, if they don't wish to set negative examples that will scare off people from intrapreneurship. Here is an example: as long as a new project is of little impact and not well understood, the intrapreneur will be fighting for its continuation while others may ignore its existence or perhaps wonder why it should be allowed to steal attention from the more important core activities. Once a project has impact and receives recognition, incumbents within the organization will want to influence or control it. People may reason that 'a project as important as this one should not be run by a trouble-maker'.

Many entrepreneurs I know say it is futile to be an intrapreneur. Any entrepreneurial spirit must leave and start their own startup. Then they are in a better position to balance the forces, so that they can come out on top.

This can be true, but it can also be that there are ways of organizing companies and societies so that creativity and innovation can be a part of the system, without killing off the creators and innovators.

In order for us to discuss these very important issues, we need the creative industry. We need storytellers of all sorts, who can earn their living on helping society develop shared narratives about how we can change things for the better, how we can solve problems, and that can stimulate our brains with creative visions and scenarios about what our lives can look like. Just like science fiction did.

But keep in mind that this requires creative storytelling that is horizontal. We need to bridge C.P. Snows two cultures to succeed. The storytelling should not preserve and isolate the silos in society. It should punch through the silos, and help people understand how they relate to other people in the system, who have very different skills from their own. When the creative industry does this, it will be a central component of the innovation economy.

Injo talk @ Copenhagen Business School - Danish Injo Research Scholarship

Here is a press release by the Copenhagen Business School about my talk there. The purpose of the talk is to interest Danish researchers to apply to be a visiting researcher at the VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism. The scholarship is funded by DASTI, the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation, represented in the Silicon Valley by Lars Beer Nielsen. Lars and I are in touch about the scholarship. (Full press release available on the Copenhagen Business School website)

For journalism to survive, it must succeed with innovation. Journalism needs to innovate to survive as a business. Citizens, students, workers, executives, all of us need to innovate in response to tectonic economic upheaval.

Dr Nordfors will present his research on Innovation journalism and introduce the opportunity for a scholarship at Stanford.
Do you want to do research in Innovation Journalism at Stanford?

As part of a partnership agreement between the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (DASTI) and Stanford we invite PhD students and scientists employed by a Danish University or a Danish public research institution to submit applications for visiting scholarships at Center for Innovation Journalism at Stanford University. The visiting scholarship is for a total of four months for the fall of 2009 or the spring of 2010.
Executive Director at the Center for Innovation Journalism at Stanford University Dr. David Nordfors will be at Copenhagen Business School Thursday June 25th 2009 where he will explain about the visiting scholarship and the research program at Center for Innovation Journalism.

About David Nordfors:
David Nordfors is co-founder and Executive Director of the VINNOVA Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism at Stanford University. He is a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's H-Star Institute. He coined the concepts of Innovation Journalism (2003) and Attention Work (2006) and started the first innovation journalism initiatives, in Sweden (2003) and at Stanford (2005).
Nordfors is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Media, and is taking part in the World Economic Forum Global Redesign Initiative.

The details:
DASTI pays a slotting fee to Stanford, which covers the various administrative costs associated with the visit at Stanford by the visiting scholar from Denmark. In addition to the Visiting Scholarship, a Visiting Scholar has the possibility of receiving a prepaid travel grant of 10.000 DKK from DASTI. Visiting Scholars will accordingly have to fund their own lodging and living expenses and assume responsibility for their own salaries, benefits, and health insurance.

Nordic Conference on Innovation Journalism

The Finnish Innovation Journalism research initiative is organizing a Nordic Conference on Innovation Journalism, taking place on Sep 25 at the University of Helsinki.

The conference is named "Weather Casters of the Future? - The Role of Journalism in Understanding Technological and Social Innovations". The conference is sponsored by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. I will be attending the conference as a keynote speaker.

The Finnish Injo initiative was started in 2005 by media entrepreneur Seppo Sisätto, and has in recent years been spearheaded by Turo Uskali. The Finnish initiative, backed by Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, SITRA and Tekes, includes a major research project - Global Innovation Journalism - performed in collaboration between the Universities of Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Tampere.

IJ-6 Conference Sum-Up

IJ-6 The Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism took place at Stanford on May 18-20 2009. The conference carried the title "Task: Journalism succeeding with innovation". It was the most successful IJ-conference so far. For details about what was going on, check out the conference website.


IJ-6 hosted 241 people from 15 countries. This is our record so far, last year we had around 180 participants. The conference had a new format this year - instead of lots of panel discussion following each other, we arranged massively parallel workshops, so that all participants could take part in discussing topics that interested them. It was very successful. We had only three plenary presentations the two first days - all of them keynote sessions, which I had the pleasure to moderate.

The opening keynote was delivered by Vint Cerf, "father of the Internet" and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, who co-invented TCP/IP and co-founded the Internet-culture. We had a surprise visit by Doug Engelbart, who sat in with us on stage for the Q&A. Doug invented the computer mouse, as a part of demonstrating the first computer system with GUI, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, email and hypertext. Doug's lab at SRI was responsible for more breakthrough innovation than possibly any other lab before or since.

It was good to have them both on stage at the same time, they both have a big part in changing the world. The picture with both of them will be something to show the grandchildren one day. Both Vint and Doug take an interest in the future of journalism and are friends of the Injo Initiative at Stanford. Vint is on our advisory board, and keynoted once before, at IJ-3. Doug keynoted IJ-4.

The second keynote was by Curt Carlson, President SRI International, followed by a panel of three ace journalists: Gregg Zachary - now working with developing journalism in Africa, Michael Kanellos from Greentech Media and Eric Eldon from Venturebeat. Curt is just like Vint and Doug a regular guest of IJ-conference, and he is a member of our advisory board. Curt has a particularly deep understanding of how innovation happens, the impact it has on the world, his knowledge spans across tech, business and politics, and he is at home on all these arenas. The discussion among them was how journalism is managing to cover innovation today.

The third keynote was given by Jason Pontin, CEO and Editor in Chief of the Technology Review - which won a gold medal for best technology magazine last year. Jason's point was that for a publication to survive, the leadership needs to know both journalism business and content, it's not enough to know only one of them. He was joined by Amir Jahangir, CEO of SAMAA TV from Pakistan, and Thomas Frostberg, Senior Business Columnist of Sydsvenska Dagbladet from Sweden.

The third day of IJ-6 was dedicated to two parallel tracks, whereof one was case studies from the practice of innovation journalism in various places around the world.

The other one was the Academic Track, held for the first time this year. When we made the call for papers we expected perhaps half a dozen contributions - Innovation Journalism is a very new research topic. We got many submissions, and could accept no less than 20 papers. The Academic Track has a website of its own, where the conference papers are available - check out http://ij6ac.innovationjournalism.org

Location-Awareness Story Wins Stanford InJo Pick Contest

Wired Magazine’s Contributing Editor Mathew Honan’s story ”I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle” has been chosen as Stanford InJo Pick 2009: The Best Innovation Journalism Story & Journalist of the Year. Honans’ story described his experiences after starting to share his iPhone’s location with everyone in San Francisco.

The choice was made by over 200 attendees of IJ-6 The Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism at Stanford University. Sixteen stories were nominated by Stanford Innovation Journalism 2009 Fellows from five different countries and discussed in depth by attendees in 16 separate groups, led by the proposing Fellow and attended by the nominated article writer.

Founder and Editor of Earth2Tech Katie Fehrenbacher received the second place award with ”The Story of Grid Net: How Ray Bell is Betting WiMAX Can Fix the Grid.”

Xconomy’s Chief Correspondent Wade Roush was voted to third place. His story was ”SiOnyx Brings ”Black Silicon” into the Light; Material Could Upend Solar, Imaging Industries.”