Innovation Journalism: Copyright and the Use of Creative Commons

Information technology has topsy-turvied the sense of who can do what with the creative work of other people. Ten years ago, nobody would have imagined the Pirate Party - the Swedish political party proposing it is a human right to share music and entertainment on the Internet without following the standard copyright rules.

Today, everyone - including journalists - who want to understand innovation in markets for creative work must understand the copyright debate. It is about how we relate to art, entertainment or journalism, and how people working with it will earn a living. It is about how we will use computers and how the computer industry will look like, because the source code for computer software is under copyright protection. With the Internet, it has become a new game, but the copyright rules are still pretty much the same as before. Many people are ignoring them. The consequences are very strong in all fields that publish creative work.

This is the reason why EJC - the European Journalism Centre and my Injo program at Stanford organized the conference "Innovation Journalism: Copyright and the Use of Creative Commons" at the EJC HQ in Maastricht on 13 Oct 08. EJC has an excellent coverage of the event on their website.

Here is a short presentation of the invited speakers:

The key issue in all copyright protection is that of 'fair use'. 'Fair use' is the exception to the rule, cases where it is OK to copy, because you are adding so much of your own creativity that the end result is to be considered as yours. The Director of the Fair Use Project, Tony Falzone from Stanford, talked about this, and how it is applied on the Internet. Tony works with Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig , the father of Creative Commons that "provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry." It is an effort to carry copyright into the Internet age.

Richard Horning is a partner at law firm Fish and Richardson and advisor to the Innovation Journalism program at Stanford. He talked about intellectual property protection and the freedom of the press (the first amendment here in the US). Rick showed how laws covering intellectual property and trade secrets have increasingly been used in order to silence journalists. Paradoxically, blogging is also making it more complicated to protect free speech in the court rooms - it is no longer obvious who is a journalist and who is not, and who should be protected by the first amendment. A typical case is Apple vs. Bloggers, where Apple sued a group of bloggers for revealing company secrets. Rick has a long background in both first amendment and intellectual property and innovation, and shared a number of glimpses into history with us. He for example was the legal councel of the Rolling Stone magazine when they were subpoenad to reveal the sources for their interview with the Symbionese Liberation Movements, the kidnappers of news tychoon heiress Patty Hearst, who after being kidnapped started appearing as one of them. (The Rolling Stone magazine was a venture capital funded startup at that time, with the same investors as a semiconducter startup called Intel.)

Evi Werkers and Sari Depreeuw, law researchers from FLEET - Flemish E-publishing Trends in Brussels, discussed the controversies between Internet search companies and content producers. They told the details about when Belgium became the center world attention two years ago, when a court in Brussels ordered Google News to remove all links to stories published by Belgian newspapers. The news stories are until today searchable only through local Flemish and French search sites.

In 2001 poet Jonathan Bailey got the adrenalin shock of his life when he found a large part of his own poetry and prose republished on an anonymous website. He tracked down the owner of the site and phoned the person, prepared for a hard fight. He found himself speaking to a 14 year old kid. Jonathan got fascinated by the problem of online plagiarism, and founded the website PlagiarismToday. He has since then resolved over 700 cases of plagiarism and turned it into a business. Jonathan has published a series of papers with thoughts on how to stop plagiarism on the Internet. He has written his own blog post about the Injo event in Maastricht (here).

Prof Gundolf S. Freyermuth from the International Film School in Cologne is an old friend of the Innovation Journalism program. A former lifestyle journalism pioneer in Germany, he has told stories about not fitting into the traditional news beats that many innovation journalists are living with today. This time Gundolf traced the origins of copyright, starting in the renaissance. Five hundred years ago, making a copy was just as expensive as making the original. The introduction of the printing press made copyright a real issue. Now that the printing press is being replaced by the Internet, another big change is under way. Gundolf thinks we will all be winners.

The presentations of the speakers are available on the EJC website.

I want to thank everyone at the EJC for putting together this enjoyable event: Willi Rütten, Biba Klomp, Bianca Lemmens, Arne Grauls, Bernd Kapeller, Ivan Picart, Kathlyn Clore and Ruth Spencer. They are very valuable friends, doing very important work.

Injo @ World Economic Forum

I have recently come home from a trip to Dubai, where The World Economic Forum organized the Summit on the Global Agenda. In their own words:

The Summit on the Global Agenda is a new, unique gathering of the world’s most influential thinkers – leaders from academia, business, government and society. Its purpose is to advance solutions to the most critical challenges facing humanity. This inaugural Summit of the members of the Forum’s Global Agenda Councils, the world's foremost intelligence and knowledge network, was held in partnership with the Government of Dubai on 7-9 November.

The world needs to examine the basic operating systems that drive its economies, markets and societies and aim for a “fundamental reboot” to establish a fresh platform based on renewed confidence and trust, and on sustainability, responsibility and ethical principles. That was the over-arching message that 700 of the world’s top thought leaders from business, government, academia and civil society delivered at the end of the inaugural Summit on the Global Agenda, convened by the World Economic Forum in partnership with the Government of Dubai.

I am a member of the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Media, together with Injo-colleagues Willi Rütten, director of the EJC, and Zafar Siddiqi, founder of CNBC Pakistan/Arabiya/Africa (both speakers at IJ-5), and roughly a dozen other top people from the world of journalism.

The detailed issue description of the council is available on the WEF website. WEF had selected the a number of input dimensions for us:

• Social Media
• Intellectual Property and Copyright
• Media and Global International public opinion
• Media new models
• The role of Media as public service
• Women in Media
• Innovation Journalism
  

It is gratifying that Injo is included in this list.

We quickly decided that our key issue was the future of journalism, not the media. The challenge is that journalism is needed more than ever - 'we live in an over-connected, under-informed world' and 'journalism is vital to help societies develop'.

Here are some key sentences from our initial report:

The same technology that has allowed people to create and share content has also undercut the media providers that served their communities with information. As blogs and social networks shine a light on new parts of the world, in other parts newspapers are turning the lights shutting down, cutting reporting jobs and
coverage.

But throughout that change, the professional, public purposes of journalism – to stimulate, educate and inform public debate, and to call to account – remain vital to the process of improving the state of the world.

Journalism needs to be reliable and credible, and that requires training and professional education –especially in societies striving to develop open and representative government. A missing component in many developing countries is a lack of professional journalists.

The full initial report is available here.

We discussed the need for journalism to be hosted by a business model that provides incentives to be loyal to the audience. If it does not, it can lead to conflict of interests. The present business model which is based on controlling the physical medium - that's why it is called the 'media' - does not have a long term future, even if it in certain parts of the world is still doing very well. The council asked itself "So how can we save journalism to help it save the world?"

Not surprisingly, we did not produce a new bumper business model for journalism. The council did, however, suggest that the WEF lifts journalism higher on its agenda. It was discussed if the WEF may start its own initiative for journalism, focussing on the global agenda issues. Here is a snapshot video interview with our council chair Pat Mitchell who is spearheading the idea of a WEF Global News Service.

The overall message from the councils was a call for continued innovation and globalization as we are heading deeper into this mother of financial storms.

Here is the video with the whole ending plenary session of the Summit on the Global Agenda:



Ulrik Haagerup, head of the Danish national news (at 2:18:00 in the video) suggested journalism needs to "re-boot faith in the future". He offered other journalists to join him in making "constructive journalism", journalism looking into possibilities, not only at problems. Ulrik Haagerup, Willi Rütten and I will be running a workshop next summer at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Summit, labelled "Constructive Innovation Journalism".

Klaus Schwab's summary of the Summit can be viewed at 2:19:30 in the video.

I am very much looking forward to continuing working with the Global Agenda Council. Also, the WEF Media and Entertainment Network will be arranging a seminar within the Innovation Journalism Fellowship program 2009.

InJo Seminar on Intellectual Property Nov 13 in Maastricht, Netherlands

The Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford, IIIJ and EJC - the European Journalism Centre are arranging a seminar on intellectual property on Nov 13 at EJC in Maastricht, Netherlands. Here is the press release by EJC:

Maastricht - October 16, 2008

To share or not to share: this is a question which has already been answered. Now a group of thinkers will gather in the Netherlands to discuss the more complicated quandary: How?

Innovation thinkers like David Nordfors of Stanford University and Richard Allan Horning, a Silicon Valley insider, will join intellectual property experts like Anthony Falzone, a lecturer/litigator for a free conference at the European Journalism Centre.

They will analyse the moving intersection of copyright and innovation from several sides. Innovation in the realm of intellectual property is ongoing; it is perhaps most visible in the proliferation of Creative Commons licensing.

The conference, titled Innovation Journalism: Copyright and the Use of Creative Commons, will be held Thursday, 13 November, at the main office of the European Journalism Centre. The EJC is located in the heart of Maastricht, a picturesque southernmost city in the Netherlands.

To register, please e-mail Bianca Lemmens or Anniek Reintjens.

The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science will sponsor this one-day event.

This is the second in an EJC series of innovation seminars held in Maastricht. Last year’s event focused on Innovation Journalism at large.

During that conference, Nordfors, who is originally from Sweden, stressed the benefit of innovation in a democratic society and the need to understand innovative processes and ecosystems through Innovation Journalism. InJo treats innovation as a topic and follows its development in technology, business, politics, etc.

If innovation could be covered as a distinct topic within the mainstream media, society would be better able to understand the processes which are behind it and contribute to its development, Nordfors said.

This year’s event will concern itself with the role of copyright within the innovation sphere. This free seminar has limited space, so please contact the EJC as soon as possible in order to guarantee your spot.

How to Report on Environmental Innovation / Cleantech

Only a few years ago almost nobody was thinking of cleantech journalism. There was business journalism and there was environmental journalism. Environmentalists were rejecting the market forces, and the commercial players were not charmed. Business journalism would not cover environmentalists, and environmental journalism would not engage in market analysis. Back in 2005, before most people ever heard of cleantech, the Innovation Journalism program looked into how to bridge these worlds.

Injo Fellow Birgitta Forsberg hosted by the SF Chronicle blended her expertise in business journalism with her passion for environmental issues in a project we branded 'environmental innovation journalism', not far from cleantech journalism today. She did a number of successful cover stories for SF Chronicle and summarized her tips for others to use in the essay 'How to do environmental innovation journalism'. It is a very nice mix of analysis, thumb rules and examples of real stories. Reading it now makes me realize how pioneering and timely her work was.

There are so many business and tech journalists today who are interested in getting into the cleantech field, it makes sense to post her essay again.

PS. Birgitta is presently working with Swedish business weekly Affärsvärlden.

Mexico Interested in Injo Initiative

I have had a three day tour in Mexico, with fifteen conferences and meetings on Innovation Journalism, all inspiring. The meetings crossed the 'triple helix', involving news organisations, universities, industries and government.

I gave a keynote in the parliament, the Congreso de la Union, for journalists, PR-people and politicians. It was hosted by Jesus Vicente Flores Morfin, member of parliament and secretary of the Commission of Science and Technology. He also participated in the panel discussion after my talk. You can read the coverage of the event here (html) (pdf) in Spanish and here in Google-translated English).

I also keynoted a journalism conference at the Tecnologico de Monterrey university campus in Mexico City. Coverage here (html) & here (pdf) in Spanish and here in Google-English.

The man who brought the idea of Injo to Mexico is Jorge Zavala, Mexican entrepreneur and founder of the Mexican TechBA accelerator in Silicon Valley, which is connected to FUMEC - the United States-Mexico Foundation for Science. Jorge pretty much grew up in a newsroom. His father was a well known journalist, who often brought his boy along to work. People like Jorge, who work with entrepreneurship and public innovation policy, and also have strong personal ties to journalism culture, often immediately grasp the concept of innovation journalism and the potential for it in the innovation economy.

Jorge and Fumec brought a sizeable Mexican delegation of journalists and funders to IJ-5 at Stanford in May, and they now followed up by arranging this visit with funding from Conacyt - the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology.

FUMEC is headed by CEO Guillermo Fernandez and chairman Leopoldo Rodriguez. The visit program was put together by Madai Quiroz Uria. Together with Jorge they form an entrepreneurial team, bridging Mexico and Silicon Valley, who want to drive an innovation journalism initiative.

Mexico is very well positioned for it. There are well connected people in journalism, universities, industry and government who get the Injo concept, that the Fumec/TechBA team can include or leverage on.

A Mexican Injo initiative has a great potential for both Mexico and Silicon Valley. Here in Silicon Valley there is a large Mexican population, but most of them are not in the innovation ecosystem. There is cultural separation between the Hispanic workers and the hightech workers in the Valley which is not constructive. If high quality Mexican journalists will be Injo Fellows working with Silicon Valley newsrooms, it will create networks between journalists in both countries enabling them to bridge subconcious cultural divides, and connect the dots between Mexico and Silicon Valley in the innovation economy. Given the large constituency of Mexicans in the Valley, this can be huge.

InJo Fellowships 2009

A more detailed description of the InJo Fellowship Program 2009 is available here.

We are planning the sixth round of the Innovation Journalism Fellowship Program at Stanford, starting Feb 2 2009. Innovation journalism fellows will go through an orientation at Stanford before beginning their work off campus with hosting US newsrooms. Potential hosts this year: AlwaysOn-Network, Bloomberg, CBS CNET News.com, Fortune Magazine (New York), GreenTechMedia, San Francisco Chronicle, Seed Magazine, Technologizer, Time Magazine (New York) and VentureBeat

Fellows based in Silicon Valley will meet regularly at Stanford for lectures and discussions. Past lecturers have included among others Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse and Vint Cerf, father of the Internet, Dan Maydan, who built up Applied Materials, and Curtis Carlson, President of SRI International. All Fellows will take active part in arranging IJ-6, the Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism, which will take place May 18-20 2009 at Stanford. Fellows will also participate in two seminars held together with The World Economic Forum Media & Entertainment Industry Partnership and the US National Academies.

So far, four countries are participating in nominating fellows to the program: Sweden, Finland, Pakistan and Slovenia. If you are a journalist/editor who wants to apply for a fellowship, please check with your national contact (check the program description).

The call for the Swedish program is here - the call closes on November 3; the call for Pakistan is here; The Finnish call closes on Oct 17 - contact Turo Uskali for more information (Tel: +358-40-534-0249).

The Innovation Journalism Fellowship Program is funded by VINNOVA, Competitiveness Support Fund, Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, SITRA and the Scholarship Agency of Slovenia.

To set up a program for nominating fellows or to start any type of innovation-journalism program, contact me. Note that the program at Stanford does not fund other programs. External funding must be arranged before nominating fellows.

The Speed of New Words as an Innovation Indicator

I recently had the great pleasure of being one of the World Economic Forum "Innovation 100" who convened here at Stanford in order to discuss the reasons behind innovative clusters. I will tell you more about the details when the WEF releases its report.

The World Economic Forum Innovation 100 summit is a part of their work on producing an 'Innovation Heatmap' of the world. People have ideas all over the world, but where are the places they are being successful, and what is it with these places that makes it happen just there? Finding the places is not so tricky, once they are successful in innovating - like Silicon Valley. But it is very difficult to nail down a good set of indicators that are useful for benchmarking innovation hot spots, offer a clue of why innovation is going well or not, and that can predict which are the coming hot spots.

So far, the number of registered patents is considered as one of the most important indicators, but it is far from the whole story. Patents can be key in some sectors, like pharma industry, but in other innovation fields like software and services, patents are much less relevant. A few years ago I edited a book that looks at intellectual property issues in the context of commercialization of academic research. It is a complex issue.

There are today lists that rank innovative regions. The European Innovation Scoreboard is one of them. The rankings usually use indicators like those provided in the US Science and Engineering indicators from NSF, or the EU Science and Technology Indicators from Cordis. These indicators are good for assessing things like educational level of workforce, number of registered patents or published research papers - the types of numbers that are possible to measure in surveys or by scanning public registers. They usually miss out on one crucial issue for innovation: mobility. Mobility can be between various professional domains: innovation is not driven by science OR technology OR business OR politics, but by the interaction between them. Mobility is also geographical: Silicon Valley hosts people from all over the world. Even though it seems doable to trace the mobility of people, it is a controversial thing to do - people have the right to privacy. It is also difficult to quantify in an easy way (its much easier with number of patents or math test ratings)

Innovation is often about new combinations of existing concepts, or re-framing something in a new context. In the seventies, very few thought of computers having anything to do with storing pictures, even less music. Bringing artists into the world of computers and vice versa was probably more important for innovation than doubling the number of excellent Cobol programmers (the biggest programming language of that day). At the same time, many innovation scoreboards will care more for programmers than artists, and not think of addressing the communication between them. The people running such scoreboards may have some valid concerns about how to address such issues: how does any measurable quantity relating to artists relate to innovation? Does the number of art galleries scale with innovation? How? How can the innovative interaction between artists and programmers be measured?

I have a hunch that innovation hot spots are more likely to be places with low thresholds between people doing different things, where people easily get to know each other, and where they can easily interact in making novelties happen. I imagine they are places with a high concentration of people that find few things as important as the next big thing, who want to be a part of it, and who like chatting about it with anybody who is interested, regardless of profession or background. In Silicon Valley, it happens that people start companies with people they met at their children's birthday parties.

All this requires one thing: This diversity of people in the innovation ecosystem need to share a language that allows them to chat about the stuff that interests them. Otherwise they will have a tough time sharing interests and adding their own parts to it in a way that other people will understand. Innovation is about the introduction of novelties, which often come with new words and narratives, so I guess I am suggesting that innovation hotspots are more likely to be places where people in the innovation ecosystem can rapidly develop new shared language.

Since a few years back, there are tools on the Internet that can measure the development of language. Google Trends is one entertaining example, it 'charts how often a particular search term is entered relative the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages' (Wikipedia). I think future key innovation indicators can be found through sources like Google or Facebook, finding the hotspots on the geographical world map, as well as the social map, where new language is growing the fastest, also analyzing how the new language connects to market value, weighing these things together.

Today, not many of the people dealing with how we innovate give much conscious thought of how we generate the shared language that is needed for any process of innovation or successful outcome thereof. Sociolinguistics and studies of innovation can be a great pair!

Here are some arguments, linking the thought about language as an innovation indicator back to earlier thoughts posted on this blog:

The formation of new shared language is always a part of innovation.

A concept requires the following language components in order to be shared by people:

1. A Name - so that it can be referred to
2. A Definition - so that it can be identified
3. A Narrative - so that it can be related to and put into context; a narrative is needed to relate a concept to the surroundings and lives of people, to cultures, or to other concepts

Innovation is "the process of creating and introducing new customer value to the market" (as defined by C. Carlson and W. Wilmot). This makes it always into interaction between many people, requiring new language.

1. Innovation is the creation and introduction of new customer value to the market
   
2. In order to introduce something, it needs to be communicated
3. Communication requires shared language
4. New concepts need new names, definitions and narratives to be a part of the language
5. The new names and definitions need to be called to peoples attention so that the new things can be discussed and introduced in our language.
6. People's attention will influenced by attention workers - professionals who generate and broker peoples attention, such as journalism, PR, marketing or lobbying - who have a stake in innovation. They typically take part in the innovation value chain by acting either in the interest of the sources of new language (PR, Marketing, Lobbying) or in the interest of the audience for new language (journalism). The attention workers of different sorts interact with each other, forming an ecosystem which will be facilitating the formation and introduction of new shared language. It may be referred to as the innovation communication system.

As I said above, innovation is not about science OR technology OR business OR politics, etc. - it is about the connection between them! All involved professional fields have their own language. The concept of 'attention workers' and the 'innovation communication system' introduces incentives and mechanisms for creating shared language between different sectors and professions who come in touch with each other through innovation.

I believe our ability to generate new shared language is one of the bottlenecks for innovation. It is especially challenging to 'bridge verticals'. People in different professions can be talking about the same things without understanding each other, because they have different language for it. Sometimes different specialists don't have words for what other specialists are doing: Most politicians don't understand radioengineering and most radioengineers don't understand political science. Bridging them is an opportunity for attention workers, the key professional group from the societal point of view are the journalists - the attention workers who act in the interest of the readership (PR are attention workers who act in the interest of the sources - they are both needed in the bigger game).

The Intrapreneur's Dilemma

I was the other day at the World Economic Forum Media and Entertainment industry network meeting in New York. It was a really valuable meeting with lots of very enlightening discussions on the future of the media industry in these innovative times.

Here is a thought that is relevant for the present challenge of the media industry. It is generally valid, not only for the media industry, and applies to all people and traditional organisations who are seeking to innovate. Let's call it 'The Intrepreneur's Dilemma'. An 'intrapreneur' is an entrepreneur within an organization. Here goes:

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'. This situation requires a constructive interaction between a skilled intrapreneur and an enlightened organizational leadership. A good innovation system within the organization may help provide solutions, but I don't think it can replace individual savvy and diplomatic skills.

If anybody who reads this has a good story to illustrate the 'intrapreneur's dilemma', or knows of descriptions of similar phenomena under different names, send me an email or leave comments and links here below.

The World Economic Forum Innovation 100 Summit

I had the pleasure of being one of the hundred at the The World Economic Forum "Innovation 100 Summit" on Sep 3-4. The WEF is a leader in spotting global economic trends, and publishes yearly the Competitiveness Index at the meeting in Davos. They are now looking at innovation, the Innovation 100 is the start of a major effort to penetrate the topic thoroughly. The WEF is interested in the role of journalism in the innovation economy, which was a reason for them to invite me.

Here is a picture of "the Innovation 100":
Here is the World Economic Forum description of the event:

While most agree that culture and people are the most important drivers of innovation, business leaders are finding it hard to understand how to respond with new management and operational models. The World Economic Forum is partnering with Harvard Business Review, McKinsey & Co, SAS, and Thomson Financial to synthesise the most relevant data available globally to create the most complete factual basis for discussions on technology innovation. This meeting - aimed at the top 100 thought leaders - is one part of many dialogues occuring, to help set the tone of the global discussion on innovation. The objective was to explore this topic from a global, regional and corporate level, with two clear areas of focus: Culture of Innovation and Location of Innovation.
- Innovation 100 - Photos

Finnish Innovation Journalism Research Gets 900.000 Euro

Injo as a theme for academic research has taken a big step.

Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes) has awarded a big research grant (almost 900 000 euro) to a Finnish research consortium in order to execute research on global innovation journalism 2008–2010. The research consortium will cooperate with my innovation journalism program at Stanford.

The Finnish consortium consist Department of Mass Communication/University of Tampere, Department of Communication/University of Jyväskylä, and Futures Research Centre/Turku School of Economics. All aforementioned institutions have already done research on innovation journalism for several years, but mainly in national, Finnish context.

The main aim of the new research project (acronym as Ginjo) is to enlarge and deeper the knowledge of global innovation journalism, and also develop new working methods and tools for news media. Case studies will concentrate on topics such as “green tech” and eldercare
innovations.

All together different Finnish funders, Tekes, Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, and Sitra, have already agreed to invest 1,6 million euro for innovation journalism research and education until year 2012.

According to Tekes it invested 329 million euro in R&D projects and innovation activities by companies, universities, institutes of higher education and research institutes during January–June 2008.

For more information, please contact Dr. Turo Uskali.

Tekes: http://www.tekes.fi/eng/

Department of Mass Communication/University of Tampere
http://www.uta.fi/jour/index1.html

Department of Communication/University of Jyväskylä
http://www.jyu.fi/hum/laitokset/viesti/en/

Futures Research Center/Turku School of Economics
http://www.tse.fi/EN/units/specialunits/ffrc/Pages/default.aspx

Injo Program Presented at IAMCR Conference

The first five years of the Innovation Journalism Program were summarized at the IAMCR conference in Stockholm "Media and Global Divides". IAMCR is the worldwide professional organisation in the field of media and communication research. The conference this year hosted 950 researchers from 85 countries.

The Injo paper was written by Turo Uskali, running the Finnish innovation journalism research program, Jan Sandred, who runs the Swedish innovation journalism program, and me (David Nordfors, running the Innovation journalism program at Stanford).

The paper summarizes trends among the 410 stories in US news outlets written by the 38 Injo Fellows between 2004-2008. 

The conference draft (the paper is being finalized at this time) sketches some recommendations to innovation journalists:

• Be innovative.
• Enjoy mixing business, politics, technology, science and culture.
  
• Try to “shop”, and use “enough” time for your work.
• Use wide variety of sources, not only the easiest (PR) ones.
• Try to include futures perspectives into the stories by predicting possible scenarios instead of having only one possible. (This could for example prevent different, too enthusiastic new tech or other innovation related “bubble” manias.)
• Remember that publishing a story in online environment is just only the beginning of the process. Therefore one should create interactive tools, e-mail feedback, and online discussion forums in order to get readers involved in reporting, feedback, and discussions.

IJ-5 Final Conference Documentation

Here is the final website of IJ-5, the Fifth Conference on Innovation Journalism, which took place at Stanford on May 21-23 this year.

All conference documents are available through one portal (here):

• the program
• the presentations including summaries, articles and slide presentations
• speaker bios
• list of conference participants

The conference website was made entirely with Google Docs and Blogger, which turned out to be very efficient for working interactively in a group in building the conference.