St. Paul is on the national radar this week as The Central Corridor Funders Collaborative’s annual stakeholder event made the HUD Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities update.

The collaborative is a group of local and national funders that strongly support the Central Corridor Light Rail Line that will connect Minneapolis and St. Paul because it offers opportunities to strengthen the regional economy and makes the surrounding neighborhoods better places to live, work and access opportunity.

An excerpt from the HUD update notes:

“In the Twin Cities the HUD team joined a gathering of 200 community leaders and foundations to celebrate the progress of the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative. Mayors Coleman and Rybak joined Sue Haigh, chair of the Met Council, a HUD regional grantee, to spotlight efforts to support local businesses and create strong neighborhoods throughout the corridor.”

As the Central Corridor light rail project moves closer to completion, the Corridor’s “beyond the rail” initiatives are beginning to take shape and are transforming into action.  This was reinforced by presentations during the event from working groups that focused on issues like affordable housing, business development, contractor and workforce inclusion, a public/private investment framework and job access.

The 2012 Progress Beyond the Rail report, which focuses on how trends are taking shape, is available online. The Central Corridor light rail is now halfway complete, a milestone covered earlier this week by CBS Minnesota, Fox9.com and the Star Tribune. The project is scheduled to be completed and fully operational by 2014.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Koen Vereeken

The Knight News Challenge is being offered three times this year, in short, focused rounds to better mirror the pace of innovation. Winners of Round 1, which focused on networks, will be announced June 18. Here, Journalism and Media Innovation Program Director John Bracken gives a preview on the upcoming Round 2.

We’re excited to announce that the next Knight News Challenge will focus on data.

Starting May 31 through June 20, we’ll be looking for ideas that help unlock the power of data, by collecting, processing, visualizing or otherwise making it available, understandable and actionable. Applicants - whether for-profit startups or non-profit ventures - will have 21 days to submit their projects.  

We had planned to make the second round a completely open call for innovative news ideas. But we received feedback from the advisers we gathered last month to review News Challenge applications that themes encourage sharper proposals and better ideas, and we decided to take their advice.

So, why data?

The world has always been complex, but we are now challenged with making sense of the rapidly increasing amounts of information that we are creating. According to IBM, nine-tenths of the world’s data has been created in the last two years. Cisco predicts that information generated by mobile devices will hit 130 exabytes in 2016 -  that’s the equivalent of 520,000 Libraries of Congress in one year. A report from McKinsey anticipates that the amount of data we generate will increase 40% annually. Facebook users alone add a billion pieces of content every 24 hours.

Knight News Challenge: Data is a call for making sense of this onslaught of information. “As data sits teetering between opportunity and crisis, we need people who can shift the scales and transform data into real assets,” wrote Roger Ehrenberg earlier this year.

Feet In Two Worlds at the Ippies. From left: Von Diaz, Lan Trinh, Cristina DC Pastor, John Rudolph, Mohsin Zaheer.

Four participants in the Feet in Two Worlds project, which was funded by the Knight Community Information Challenge in 2010 via the New York Community Trust, won Ippies, which recognize excellence in ethnic media. 

Reporters from Feet in Two Worlds, which provides training for journalists from ethnic media and helps them find greater exposure in public radio, won more awards than any other single organization. 

Cristina Pastor won an award for her commentary on how cases like the one against Dominique Strauss-Kahn can play out in the asylum hearings of accusers. Lan Trinh won in the video category for her coverage of coverage of how Chinese-immersion schools are attracting both parents with Chinese heritage and those without who believe that the NYC language programs will give their children a leg up.  

Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska won an award in the audio category for her wonderfully atmospheric piece on rooftop pigeon-tenders in New York, which aired on NPR.  Von Diaz's story on the struggles of immigrant LGBT youth, which originally aired on Publig Radio International, also won an award.