Knight News Challenge Round 3: Evening Edition

A few months ago, we launched a small project called Evening Edition over at Mule Design. We built it because it was something we wanted to exist and, much to our delight, people really seem to like it. We want it to be even better so we’re applying for a grant from the Knight Foundation to take it to the next level.

The first thing we want to do is hire more editors. Last month, we expanded beyond the U.S. West Coast to our first international edition. Our London editor, Felipe, has been doing phenomenal work and we want to bring the idea to more places and even more languages.

We also want to rethink our platform. Right now, we’re running on WordPress, which is great if you’re running a blog, but we’re already running into limitations. We’ve got some ideas about how to do a better job publishing as well as lots of lessons learned from building our own podcast network. We know we can build a world-class mobile news site.

All of this is going to take time and money. We’ve found some awesome sponsors to help us keep get started but if we really want to expand, to pay our editors, to build our platform, we’re going to need some help. We love what The Knight Foundation is doing to enable new ideas with the News Challenge and we hope that Evening Edition is something they’ll consider.

Here’s how you can help: if you like the idea of Evening Edition, if you’d like to see us expand around the globe, if you want to see us build a kick-ass mobile platform for news, heart this post. If you think it’s really great, feel free to reblog, tell your friends, send a tweet, do … a … whatever it is people do on facebook. (Quick-n-dirty: go here and click the heart in the blue box to the left)

We’d really appreciate it. Thanks.

People will tell you that Bill raped the place clean, was greedy, didn’t know when to stop

—

This is sort of a throwaway line from today’s Rolling Stone article about how the Federal Government bailed out Romney’s Bain & Co.

It’s sourced to “a former Bain consultant” who could be anyone. But the phrase “raped the place clean” says a lot about the kind of person attracted to a place like Bain.

doughcountryforoldmen:

“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” 

-Joseph Conrad

This is amazing.

The once-dignified portrait now resembles a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic (via BBC News - Spanish fresco restoration botched by amateur)

Be Brave. Have Fun.

I really love the idea behind my pal Dave’s new show. It’s gonna be great fun to watch (oh, and Leah does a great job leading off).

There’s a popular belief that projects like this are going to be very advanced but there are things that mitigate against that. These designs were proposed in 2004, and you don’t get to propose one specification and then go off and develop something else. 2MP with 8GB of flash [memory] didn’t sound too bad in 2004. But it doesn’t compare well to what you get in an iPhone today.

—Mike Ravine, a project manager for the Mars Curiosity rover, explains one of the reasons why it only has a 2 megapixel camera.

In addition to the layoffs, The Daily will try to save money in other ways. For instance, it will no longer create digital pages that work in both vertical and horizontal layouts, and will only produce vertical pages from now on.

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This is actually serious.

Evening Edition will work regardless of how you hold your phone.

mrgan:

Ever since we shipped The Incident, Matt Comi and I have been working on a new game. We’ll be previewing it at XOXO Arcade, XOXO Festival’s indie-game showcase on September 14, 2012, right here in Portland. (Matt will be there too!) The event will be open to the public, so come check it out!

Trust me. This is gonna be awesome.

Now that Twitter’s a media, not a technology, company, I’m picturing a bunch of ad sales guys in shiny shirts standing around a Thinkpad.

“The site’s down?”

“I guess.”

“Can’t we reboot it?”

“I think we have to get one of the nerds.”

“They don’t come in until noon.”

“You wanna get a Starbucks?”

Pick your news feed on new BreakingNews.com

The smart folks over at BreakingNews.com are doing all kinds of great work.