Blog: Media

RHRealityCheck.org Named the Best Electronic Forum in the Global Media Awards

A big congratulations to RH Reality Check for winning a Global Media Award from the Population Institute!  I’ve been lucky enough to work on both ends of this project, first working to get this publication off the ground with RH Reality Check and then working to improve the website and the technology that drives it with Development Seed.  I know the team at RH Reality Check works hard to gather and put out great information on sexual and reproductive health and rights and works to stay on the cutting edge.  The work they have done to build a dynamic, issue-specific news hub is really impressive.

From the Population Institute:

“RH Reality Check will receive the Best Electronic Forum award for its commitment to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights. The website is an easily accessible online resource for evidence-based information, provocative commentary and interactive dialogue on these issues.”

It’s great to see the website get this recognition for accomplishing its goals. RH Reality Check was started back in 2006 with the aim to make credible information more accessible to people in the reproductive health community and to become an online hub for people in this community.

Development Seed teamed up with them to help them do this. When RH Reality Check came together, the format was a relatively simple blog layout. Within six months, they had brought together close to 100 authors and were posting content several times a day – ranging from breaking news stories and political commentary to stories about the real-world impact of different policies on women and children around the world. The website underwent a dramatic transformation to better feature the wide variety of content and turned from a blog into a newspaper-style website designed to showcase their content, make it easy to find related information and blog posts, and highlight the well-known experts that blog for RH Reality Check. The layout was made easy for their team to update by using Drupal’s panels module, nodequeue, and node as block.  

We also set RH Reality Check up with a version of Managing News to help them track all the news that was being published in their field and easily republish the stories they found most relevant to their readers. We continue to work with their team to maintain the website and keep improving it.

But this technology wouldn’t matter without the great editors and contributors at RH Reality Check who make sure the publication puts out excellent information that its supporters want to read.  Congrats again to the whole team, and nice work.

We just finished our beta work on "Managing News," our name for a team aggregator that allows entire organizations to track, manage, analyze, and act on news. It's like a corporate version of Digg meets Bloglines that allows an entire team to monitor news together.

We'll demonstrate the system and the suite of tools we built for Drupal-powered intranets tonight at the Drupal meetup here in Washington, DC. Stop by the Science Club at 7:00 pm to see the system in action. We'll also make a dataset available of news coverage of eight key congressional and senate races leading up to last month's election. We thought the political folks in DC would find this interesting.

The Financial Times has a fascinating article on its front page today about a new system in development that will track “market gossip” on the internet – from blogs to regulatory filings and everything in between.

Its initial purpose will be as a filter for hedge funds to analyze online chatter, and ten different hedge funds have already signed up to try out the system. I can see how this could be extremely beneficial to hedge funds, and I bet this would be useful for a myriad of other purposes too. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Here’s one reason from the article of why this system is valuable.

"It's important to know that the smoke is out there and that others see it," he [Scott Lessing, from Citigroup] said. "There may be more information value in online trends in the aggregate: 5,000 more web mentions of a product than the week before could be an important signal for an analyst covering the product's manufacturer."

Reporters Without Borders came out with its annual world press freedom evaluation
this week and not surprisingly China was one of the country's with the most restricted press. Regarding Internet freedom, it topped the list of jailed "cyber-dissidents" with 62 currently prison. Microsoft is adding to the problem.

Yesterday NBC Nightly News started posting its broadcast online -- in it's entirety.
This is the first nightly news show, or any tv show as far as I know, to put an entire show online and commit to do it every night. And what's even cooler is they did it for the right reasons. As anchor Brian Williams wrote on his blog (another good move!):

"While I'm just old enough to believe there's a certain magic that comes with that moment when our studio digital clocks hit exactly 6:30:00 eastern time each night (when the three network evening newscasts come on the air), not everyone is able to give us their attention at that exact time. And so here we boldly go." Read the rest.

Development Seed announces the release of our modifications to the Letter to the Editor tool originally created by Downhill Battle Labs. Changes to the module include several functions which make management easier for the admin of the Letter to the Editor.