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Remember the young LUMS graduate who developed the fantastic Citizen’s Journalism portal? Well, the group is applying for the The 2009 Knight News Challenge Award – a contest which awards as much as $5 million a year for innovative ideas that develop platforms, tools and services to inform and transform community news, conversations, and information distribution and visualization. This would be a huge win for the young team and no doubt, help other young companies and projects to be highlighted from this part of the world.
You can see the project details and proposal here – Project entries are closed but you can at least help rate the project and leave your comments there. Good luck to the See N Report Team!
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Excuse me but … how on earth is this “news”? Someone *is applying* to a grant?
Did they get it, were they one out of 20 chosen for the next round?
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@Osama – Thanks for stopping by. Ummm… it actually isn’t “news”, especially since it has been posted under the “blog” category.
– Secondly, the grant is based on the number of votes their project gets, so perhaps I am missing the point, but it would seem that part of everyone’s obligation to get that word out, regardless of whether they get the grant or not.
If you like, we can re-publish this in the “news” category and we can have this discussion all over again.
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I tried to post a long comment on Osama’s related comment at G&W, but since comments are not allowed there, here I go:
Let’s see the definition of conflict of interest:
“A conflict of interests arises when anyone has two duties which CONFLICT.”
Apparently the two duties in question are not in conflict. They complement each other.
People in an industry know each other, and have multiple relationships. Rabia & Salaina have been the godmothers/ evangelists of almost anything IT in Pakistan, even if by honorary or remote association. You’d find them under every carpet with an IT pattern on it. Would you not think this whole episode be a case of EVANGELISM? What exactly could the duo make from writing a blog on a start up they give advise to?
Next, one has to see how news is created in a B2B magazine? One’s own contacts and sources are a very legitimate source!
Entertainment magazine reporters & editors for instance are friends with celebrities! That was NEVER EVER a conflict of interest, it’s rather in the line of duty! It’s such an open secret of the trade it’s strange to even point it out.
There is nothing grave about blogging this news. And it is news to me, because I have learned about the Knight News Challenge Award.
Blogs and social media are known for rallying people to causes, even if it’s moral support.
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Ramla I dont wish to drag this out more.
But the definition of a conflict of interest is having two interests about one news item or company or person.
E.g. one interest is to see See N Report become successful. Formally this interest can stem from being on an official company board.
The other interest is to provide objective reviews about See N Report.
The conflict here is bad because as a journalist you can easy buy into your interest in seeing see n report succeed and be tempted to write pieces of huge praise in an attempt that a lot of people would go to see n report, use it and hence make it successful.
This is entirely unethical. Its the same as only covering news about the election candidate that you personally WANT to succeed.
E.g. even look at the admin comment above… no its absolutely not the “obligation” of IT professional journalists to make sure to get the word gets out as much as possible “because the chances of success are based on viewer ratings”.
It would be fine if e.g. ALL the companies who applied to the knights bid were covered (and there were atleast 7 that I know of personally) to be fair to everyone…. that would mean the journalist chose the right path of (1) doing research on that story and (2) promoting entrepreneurship in general and (3) is letting the audience decide who to root for.
Promoting a company that you conciously have an interest in succeeding is a path of temptation to be biased and present misleading info… e.g. the fact that 2’s complement is not just one LUMs grad and have been in business for over a year before making the product. The story isnt the one where the poor hapless young student built something that became google.
We’d all like to look at the world in a very positive inspiring ways, where people only aim to help each other… but not at the expense of the integrity of the profession or industry.
And for the record, calling it a blog doesnt make a difference…. the integrity of the brand of IDG and CIO Magazine are still on the line.
A blog isnt a personal opinion but a perspective written in an informal way, and that’s a big difference.
I’d hate to quote something from spiderman but I’m sure you’ve heard that line.
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Most improtantly, its really easy to write the same story but not become something of an issue.
You can always write “Its my personal opinion that…”
Or write a simple disclaimer “Yes I’m on the board but this story is not influenced by that”.
Two lines, and no one would ever challenge it.
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Gosh we fight like cat n dogs! we are not even on the radar of international IT market but we have so much to say about each other. Probably, that’s why God never gave us Success in IT cuz we cant even stand each other..
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I guess our personal vendetta is more important to us than professionalism
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