At the beginning of October, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy made headlines with its report "Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age." Today, the FCC announced it would act on that report by hiring journalist and entrepreneur Steven Waldman to "lead an agency-wide initiative to assess the state of media in these challenging economic times and make recommendations designed to ensure a vibrant media landscape."

From the press release:

Earlier this month, the bipartisan Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy called for 'new thinking' to 'ensure the information opportunities of America's people and the information vitality of our democracy' and proposed FCC action. The Pew' Project for Excellence in Journalism has highlighted the dire circumstances for newspapers, and' both the Knight report and a recent study from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism called' for a full reassessment of the media marketplace both inside and outside of government,' including at the FCC. [...]

 

'A strong consensus has developed that we're at a pivotal moment in the history of the media and communications, because of game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn,' said [FCC Chairman Julius] Genachowski. 'Highly respected entities have called on the FCC to assess these issues. At such a moment, it is important to ensure that our polities promote a vibrant media landscape that furthers long-standing goals of serving the information needs of communities."

In response to the announcement,'Knight Foundation CEO and President Alberto Ibarügen said, "Now comes the hard work of building a national, digital grid and ensuring that every American has digital broadband access. We have formed an outstanding partnership with Aspen Institute on this and expect our ongoing work together to continue to yield results."

Read more coverage of the announcement from USA Today and elsewhere.

In USA TODAY, Don Campbell writes that media executives'are'the ones responsible for the future of news.'"Publishers and news executives face perilous challenges, but they don't need, nor should they accept, help from government at any level," he says. " They have to save themselves."

Campbell wants'to squash a controversial idea by former Washington Post Editor Len Downie that government give local news grants to private news organizations. And sure, that's'a debateable idea.

But it is really true that news executives'do not need any help from government at any level?

Consider'the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. It'says'we'need plenty of'intelligent help from government.'We need government to provide good schools to teach news literacy. We need government to'be serious about freedom of information. We need government'to provide'great public libraries. We need'government to push'public broadcasting into local innovation. We need government's help with our biggest need of all --' to build'a society with'universal digital access.

Downie,'Knight Commission and others who have thought about this, including'Geneva Overholser in her "manifesto,"'agree on much. We should focus on those'points of agreement. Because the big picture'is that free societies'get the news'that they deserve. All of us'(not just media executives) are responsible for the future of our media ecosystem.

Eric Newton is vice president/journalism at the Knight Foundation.

From Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

The International Women's Media Foundation, IWMF, selected Firle Davies, a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation, as the 2009-2010 recipient of the Knight Foundation-funded Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship.

During her fellowship, Davies will be a research associate in residence at MIT's Center for International Studies and will also have access to The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

Each year, one woman in print journalism, broadcast or online media is selected to become an Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship recipient. The recipient then works on human rights journalism and social justice issues.

The fellowship is named after a Boston Globe reporter and winner of the 1998 IWMF Courage in Journalism Award who was killed while on assignment in Iraq in 2003.

'From Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

People are easily lured in by the sweetness, beauty, smell and sometimes even intoxication of certain plants. What if plants have their own hidden agenda that we didn't know about?

''''''''''' Michael Pollan, Knight Chair in Science and Technology Reporting, is featured in'a two-hour long documentary based on his best selling book The Botany of Desire. Pollan explores the natural history of four plants: the potato, the apple, the tulip and marijuana. The well-reviewed film'examines the mystery between humans and plants and how they each use each other to get what they want.

''''''''''' The documentary, which''airs Wednesday at 8 p.m. on PBS, begins in Pollan's garden and then travels to the potato fields of Peru and Idaho, the apple orchards of Kazakhstan, the tulip markets of Amsterdam and finally, medical marijuana grow rooms of the United States. See a clip here.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

The first Knight funded Drupal project to release its open-source code, Managing News, launched last week. You can read about it here: Media Innovation with Drupal.

This week, on the fifth day of being publicly available, the project has been downloaded more than 1,000 times.

Here are 50 examples of what people are doing with it.

* rowingnews.org.uk * pulse.buzzr.us United Nations World Food Programme * climap.net * news.freejacksonvillenews.com * news.1qk.com * mn.newslogs.com * managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk * catholicnewslive.com * noticies.consultes.cat * mn.forest.linnovate.net * www.cafepresse.ch * mn.mwu.dk * news.kultur-online.net * beta.metaboone.com * news.twodogsdigital.com * mnews.webandfinearts.com * augmentions5.omega8.us * http://planete.magento.fr * news.nguyentiensi.com * zensci.com * earthfeeds.com * managingnews.peopleatwork.fr * news.positivechoices.com * managingnews.rhizom.nl * news.krongnang.com * news.fen.net * news.freejacksonvillenews.com * managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk * skateboarding.com * earthfeeds.com * jaunum.iem.lv * news.soniccat.com * news.investic.net * pg.galaxy.esn.org * www.wotcher.co.uk * rowing.magnity.co.uk * www.freshfail.com * gamemakerstream.com * news.sotak.cz * menanews.org * managingnews.aegir.erdfisch.de

How are you using it? Please let us know or send us your ideas on how it could be used to inform local communities.

By Meredith Hector, program director for Bradenton

Residents of Manatee and Sarasota counties feel the painful effects of the recession daily. It won't surprise many to know that according to the Brookings Institution's Metro Monitor, of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country, Bradenton-Sarasota is the second-worst-performing in terms of employment, wages, economic output, home prices, and foreclosures (neighboring Tampa is the third worst).

While the current economic situation is bleak, many believe it is cyclical and will stabilize. But what about the region's ongoing workforce challenges? This area faces a dual dilemma - businesses with long-term shortages of skilled workers and low-skilled individuals who lack the necessary training to secure jobs with family-sustaining wages.

A new collaborative of public and private funders has emerged over the past year to confront those challenges head on. The Manatee Sarasota Workforce Funders Collaborative, or MSWFC as it is currently known, is an entrepreneurial alliance composed of businesses, city and county governments, educational institutions, foundations and community organizations that will strengthen and accelerate regional workforce development. It is pooling nearly $2.5 million of local, state and national funds. Those monies will be a source of flexible capital, in the form of targeted grants, for innovative projects that:

• Provide basic skills courses and occupational training to workers in health-care, manufacturing, technology and transportation careers;
• Develop employer-based career pathways and
• Help partner organizations implement career-coaching programs.

MSWFC aims to:

• Support the movement of at least 300 people into promising, career-oriented jobs
• Support at least 10 area employers in their efforts to train and advance employees into mid-skill-level jobs
• Serve as a regional knowledge resource - conducting research and impact assessments and publishing findings that inform regional workforce strategies
• Stimulate greater regional planning and cooperation

MSWFC is not simply a job placement program. This is an opportunity to move low-wage individuals into careers with a living wage. It is a long-term, industry-specific intervention strategy. The role of this collaborative is to serve as a workforce intermediary - organizing key stakeholders and local resources to help workers gain the skills they need and to give employers access to the skilled labor they need. There is evidence from an existing funders collaborative in Boston (the SkillWorks partnership) that program participants there earn an average $4 an hour more than their pre-enrollment wages.

For more details about the collaborative, please check out these resources:

• MSFWC_Primer-10-24.ppt- PowerPoint
• National Fund for Workforce Solutions - PDF
• MSWFC Planning Retreat - PDF
• Service Providers Meeting Session Notes - PDF

Cross-posted from the Knight News Challenge Blog and the Sunlight Labs Blog

The reason why we extended the Knight News Challenge deadline is because we want to invite and partner with organizations that share our mission, values and goals, and that have networks of software developers and entrepreneurs. Our first partner is the Sunlight Foundation and its Sunlight Labs.

You're part of a community doing amazing work on some hugely important issues of government transparency, especially at the state and national level. We're partnering with the Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs in hopes of engaging you in a complementary challenge: bringing your great ideas to cities and other local communities.

The Knight News Challenge is an annual $5-million contest to fund the best ideas for reinventing local news. The contest deadline for 2010 was originally set for October 15, but we extended it to December 15 in large part because we saw an opportunity to partner with more folks like you all. The Knight News Challenge projects meet three criteria: 1) use digital, open-source technology to 2) distribute news and information in the public interest to 3) to a local, geographic community.

In past years, we've already funded projects that are terrific complements to the work done by Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs. For example, take a look at one of our 2009 winners, DocumentCloud (which recently announced a partnership with the Sunlight Foundation). DocumentCloud will allow some of the most robust investigative journalism outfits in the country - organizations like the New York Times, ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, the ACLU, and Talking Points Memo - to share, publicize, collaborate on, and crowdsource the documents they're uncovering every day in Freedom of Information Act battles. Or check out the Transparency Initiative we funded in 2008, creating a microformat - hNews - to mark up news stories with metadata about sourcing, geo-location, and more.

Becoming a Knight News Challenge grantee would put you in the company of some of the leading innovators at the intersection of technology and information - folks like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, and Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of the Django programming framework and originator of one of the first Google Maps mashups, which evolved into his 2007 Knight News Challenge award.

We've got the money and the mission. You've got the ideas we'd like to fund. If you're interested, check out our website (the FAQ is a great place to start), and feel free to send any questions to newschallenge@knightfoundation.org.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Here's'evidence that the Knight News Challenge projects, experiments we hoped will speed media innovation, are having impact: The Transparency Initiative announced this week that AOL and TownNews have adopted the Knight funded microformat - hNews - to mark up their news stories. They also announced that the Associated Press will start publicly using it by the end of the year.

Background: In 2008 Martin Moore from the Media Standards Trust and Tim Berners-Lee from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) received a Knight News Challenge grant to develop a project to help news providers "mark up" their news stories by providing additional information about the sources of the facts in their stories.

To do that they designed hNews, a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of 'source tagging.' For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Additional information could describe the credentials of the reporter or the ethics of the news organization.

Search engines would then use this additional data -- the 'story behind the story' -- to help people find news that is higher quality as they define it.'A reader searching the phrase 'balloon boy' for example, might find 12,000 articles. But filtering by 'eyewitness accounts' would yield a more selective list. Or filtering by the type of news provider.

Moore and Berners-Lee have been working with media organizations on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists' normal workflow. You can read more about the project and the adoption of hNews by AOL and TownNews on Martin Moore's recent post on the MediaShift Idea Lab blog.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation Managing News released its open-source code. It is the first out of six Drupal projects funded through the Knight Drupal Initiative to do so.

Managing News is a news and data aggregator that also maps and charts the information it collects to let users visualize the news. It can help teams scattered across cities, communities or people around the world share news and information. It can also be used as a news hub to show news on a given topic (think Google News, but focused on a topic or local community and with stories shown on a map). It has been packaged as a "product" so that any person or organization can quickly set it up on a web server.

It is also built to be fully extensible and used for other data aggregation and visualization purposes.' For instance, it has been extended by one group and is currently being used to visualize voting data for every province and district in Afghanistan as part of that country's runoff presidential election.

Below are examples of projects that could now be more easily done using Managing News:

D.C. bikes Map Stumble Safely Food Security Portal Knight Journalism Tracker H1N1 News Tracking

To download the code visit: http://managingnews.com/download or Drupal.org.

We thank the Drupal community for partnering with us to speed media innovation through the creative use of the free, open-source technology in communications.

Bill Fitzgerald, Knight Foundation grantee and alpha tester of Managing News, wrote a post about the project, "An Early Look At Managing News", where you can see step by step how the application works.

From Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation:

CPJ's Global Campaign Against Impunity -- the legal impunity'too often enjoyed by'those who would murder journalists -- has produced a bright red infographic detailing the cases of 758 journalists killed since 1992.' The graphic leads a new section of the CPJ web site launched this week. Here's how you can get involved in the Knight Foundation-underwritten'Campaign Against Impunity.

The CPJ campaign follows up on the Impunity Project launched in 1995 by the InterAmerican Press Association.' In addition to investigating the cases of' journalists murdered in the Americas, the project reached out to government leaders to better investigate the cases. A public advertising campaign in print and online media included more than 400 news organizations.'The'decreases in the impunity rate have reached as high as 50 percent.

From Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation:

What's cool about News 21 -- the investigative reporting project now in its fourth year at'top U.S. journalism schools -- is not just that the students are producing Changing America stories worthy of being used by the nation's largest newspaper group.' It's that they are also inventing new digital storytelling methods while doing so, including a new kind of video player, talking bar charts, moving infographics -- and then sharing what they have learned.' These students are showing that'advancing journalism excellence is as challenging a pursuit as any other.'They are learning to'connect the data and events of today's'news to the issues and ideas modern people need to understand to run their communities and their lives. 'On the agenda for the future of the project, headquartered at Arizona State: adding'web pages' to universities set up their own future of news projects, and to'help news managers use the content and technology developed by the students -- and tracking where all the alumni have ended up.

From Eric Newton, VP/Journalism Program, Knight Foundation:

Much well-deserved buzz over the Reconstruction of American Journalism, a new report by Leonard Downie, Jr., and Michael Schudson. To its credit, Columbia Journalism Review is reporting even critical reaction. Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab calls the report "a welcome palate cleanser."

The report supports easier nonprofit designation for news organizations, more foundation money for journalism, changing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting into the Corporation for Public Media, more news organizations based at universities, an FCC Fund for Local News and greater government transparency. The document credits Knight Foundation's work in media innovation. (More on foundation support for news can be found here, for example, and more on open government can be found here.)

On Oct. 2, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy issued its own report with 15 recommendations for improving the flow of news and information to communities. Topping that list: universal broadband access, digital literacy and greater news innovation in both the public and private sector.

If you've been following this blog, you probably already know Knight Foundation is giving $3.3 million to libraries in 12 communities to transform them into digital centers for their communities. We often think of libraries as being good places to find books, and they are. But in the 21st Century, they're serving many other functions as well, and this grant is about expanding those functions.

Here are five ways these grants will help communities:

• They'll create and expand wifi access.Increased bandwidth and new hardware in communities such as Wichita, Kan., and Myrtle Beach, S.C., will allow libraries to better meet a vastly expanding need for Internet access. Wichita's public library system has seen demand for Internet access increase by 25 percent (pdf) over the last year alone.


• They'll allow the libraries to purchase new equipment. In places such as Tallahassee, Fla., and Conway, S.C., money from these grants will cover the costs of updated equipment, including dozens of laptops for patrons to use all throughout the library. These additional capacities will greatly increase the ability of the library to serve patrons. In Tallahassee, for example, the new computing power is expected to mean an additional 380,000 hours of Internet access a year.


• They'll bring the capabilities of the library to under-served communities. Libraries are more than physical buildings. In places such as Lexington, Ky.,, Knight's grants will go towards the creation of mobile computing labs, enabling libraries to reach rural areas, retirement complexes and neighborhood centers.


• They'll help people find jobs.Lacking Internet access to search for jobs and correspond with prospective employers can leave job-seekers at a profound disadvantage. To help provide relief from a severe recession, Knight's grants will allow libraries to beef up their services for the unemployed. In Charlotte, S.C., for example, our grant will fund the creation of a Job Help Center, projected to assist 22,500 residents in its first year of existence. As a reminder of how powerful this assistance can be, don't miss this video featuring a patron of the library system in Charlotte.


• They'll help train people on using digital technologies. In many communities, the local library is the chief hub for continuing education. As digital skills become increasingly vital for citizens to actively participate in their democracy, these grants will allow libraries to give patrons critical training in digital technologies.

Marly Falcon is a contributing blogger at Knight Foundation

Journalists are anxious to shift from print-only responsibilities in the newsroom to multimedia responsibilities, according to the survey' 'Life beyond print: Newspaper journalists' digital appetite'. The survey is part of a report issued by the Media Management Center.

Out of almost 3,800 journalists in print, online or hybrid jobs at 79 U.S. newspapers surveyed, most were found to be involved in digital activities within their personal lives and wanting the same digital involvement at the workplace.

The typical newspaper newsroom in 2009, according to Life beyond print, has six types of journalists ranging from the 'Digitals' who spend a great deal of time online, to the 'Turn Back the Clock' type, who wish print was still the ultimate ruler. As the chart'shows, there also'is the extreme 'Major Shift' group, which'would give five times its effort to online if it could. And the'"Moderately More" group, which would like its digital and print efforts to be equal within the newsroom.

I've written before about News21, the Knight-funded initiative pulling together students from university newsrooms all across the country to produce innovative multimedia journalism.

The project was intended partly to produce work that can be syndicated in other newsrooms, and it is. In fact, it's being syndicated to affiliates of one of the largest media organizations in the country, Gannett. From the News21 blog:

The first of our weekly packages has moved on the wires of the nation's largest media company, Gannett. Nineteen Gannett TV stations and more than 90 newspapers received a budget advisory on a package of education stories Friday. By mid-December, about a dozen News21 packages will be released to Gannett's ContentOne and members who subscribe to this wire service. Next up is a collection of immigration stories.

Also, the project won several awards in the National Press Photographers Association's monthly multimedia contest in September. Congrats to the News21 team!

This week, a new website launched to mark a collaboration between Knight Foundation, the Salzburg Global Seminar and the Global Forum for Media Development. The Strengthening Independent Media site will include insights and strategies from a team of global media development leaders.

From the President's letter:

Through the SIM initiative we will seek to bring influential investors and innovators in the field of media development together with others who have made significant breakthroughs in related fields to set a framework for the future and act to achieve specific goals. Through scenario building, examining innovative examples, and identifying key barriers and unfolding opportunities, we also hope to set an agenda for further investigation leading to recommendations for future investment. As we proceed, we believe we can also strengthen the case for why independent media matter fundamentally in the quest to achieve economic and social advancement.

At the site, you'll find posts like this conversation between Jeff Jarvis - a Knight grantee and director of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism's Interactive Journalism Program - and Christopher Callahan - dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. You'll also find a number of other posts highlighting the myriad approaches to building a strong independent media ecosystem.

The site is a public counterpart to a series of six in-person meetings comprising a group of media investors and innovators. The initiative also involves convening twelve Knight Fellows, a group of leading journalists from around the world.

Take a look and add the site to your bookmarks.

Missed last Friday's event at the Newseum announcing the release of the Knight Commission report "Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age"? The entire event is archived in two parts from C-Span (Part 1 | Part 2). You can view video of specific speakers by finding them in the "People" module at the right side of the page.

Update (10/8): Video of all four sessions from the Newseum event is now embedded below. Feel free to embed the videos into your own site.

9:30 a.m. session

10:30 a.m. session

11:30 a.m. session

12:15 p.m. session

One of the outcomes of the Knight Commission's exploration into the information needs of communities in a democracy was a $3.1 million grant to libraries in 12 Knight communities across the country, including the Freedom Regional Library in Charlotte, NC. At the event to announce the grant in Charlotte, a library patron delivered this touching testimonial about how the library helped put her back on her feet:

Video of the grant announcement at Freedom Regional is below the jump:

From Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation:

Big news day: The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy has released its'report. National coverage from the AP, Washington Post and many others.' Friday's launch featured pledges from the leaders of the Federal Communication Commission and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as the nation's chief technology officer, to use the report to advance universal broadband access, public media innovation and open government. CPB announced its committment to innovation in a partnership with Knight Foundation on National Public Radio's' Argo Project, to bring online reporting to a dozen cities. In all, Knight Foundation's new grants advancing the report amounted to'more than seven million dollars, including more than a dozen in public libraries in places such as Charlotte and Tallahassee, and new nonprofit reporting projects like the Texas Tribune.

Aspen Institute is hosting a forum to discuss the commission report here. The grassroots group Free Press wants to push ahead with the recommendations.' New America Foundation is launching new media policy fellowships to track and critique responses to the report.' Interesting also that Google's new project (to spend millions on top ideas that people vote for), contain three that are totally in line with'the Knight Commission's recommendations.' You can vote for news, data and open government here.

Here are the 15 recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. You can download a short summary of the report here, or download the full report here (both PDFs).

Recommendation 1: Direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.

Recommendation 2: Increase support for public service'media aimed at meeting community information needs.

Recommendation 3: Increase the role of higher education, community and nonproft institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.

Recommendation 4: Require government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public'records, and make civic and social data available in standardized'formats that support the productive public use of such data.

Recommendation 5: Develop systematic quality measures of community information ecologies, and study how they afect social outcomes.

Recommendation 6: Integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration'among federal, state, and local education ofcials.

Recommendation 7: Fund and support public libraries and other community institutions as centers of digital'and media training, especially for adults.

Recommendation 8: Set ambitious standards for nationwide broadband availability and adopt public policies'encouraging consumer demand for broadband services.

Recommendation 9: Maintain the national commitment to open networks as a core objective of Internet policy.

Recommendation 10: Support the activities of information'providers to reach local audiences with quality content through'all appropriate media, such as mobile phones, radio, public access'cable, and new platforms.

Recommendation 11: Expand local media initiatives to'refect the full reality of the communities they represent.

Recommendation 12: Engage young people in developing the digital information and communication capacities of local communities.

Recommendation 13: Empower all citizens to participate actively in community self-governance, including local community summits to address community afairs and pursue common goals.

Recommendation 14: Emphasize community information flow in'the design and enhancement of a local community's public spaces.

Recommendation 15: Ensure that every local community'has at least one high-quality online hub.

This morning, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy presents its report - "Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age." (You can watch a livestream of the proceedings at KnightComm.org, and follow tweets about the event with the hashtag #knightcomm.) The findings of the Knight Commission have already prompted $7 million in grants from Knight Foundation, as Alberto Ibarügen will announce in his speech at the Newseum this morning. The investments already underway as a product of the Knight Commission's work include:

• A $3.3 million Library Initiative to go to the libraries of 12 communities.
• $2.28 million in new broadband access projects in underserved neighborhoods in Miami, Detroit and Lexington.
• $1 million to National Public Radio for Project Argo, to set up web-first reporting projects and improve member station web sites in a dozen cities, from Boston to San Francisco.
• A $250,000 grant to help TexasTribune.org promote civic'engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government,'and other matters of statewide concern.
• A grant to the Knight Digital Media Center at UC-Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism to support the Bay Area News Project, a new nonprofit news organization in California.
• $250,000 to the New America Foundation to establish Knight fellows to track what others are saying and doing to follow up on the commission's recommendations.

These are some of the ways Knight Foundation is putting the report into action. Stay tuned for highlights from the report itself.

The Bradenton Herald's editorial board weighed in on Knight's 2009 survey by Gallup:

Hometown pride points to growth potential | Exploit link between economy, resident loyalty

October 1, 2009

Manatee County's determination to diversify the economy and attract new business received a major boost this week. Bradenton's top ranking in a Gallup study, funded by the Knight Foundation and entitled "Soul of the Community," should help convince business prospects that this is indeed the right place to locate their enterprise.

Gallup surveyed 25 other American communities to identify the reasons why residents become emotionally bonded to their town. Thanks to a surge in community passion and loyalty in 2009, the Bradenton-Sarasota-Venice region scored highest of all for emotional attachment. The rise in ratings for three key factors fueled that score: our appreciation of local social offerings, the area's natural beauty and our friendly and open nature.

Not even the sour economy, the worst in decades, could dampen our enthusiasm - even though unemployment took the top spot as the most important problem among survey respondents.

The study also found a strong connection between emotional attachment and economic vitality, suggesting communities can improve the latter by increasing the former. Happy residents make the best employees. Those workers boost the financial performance of businesses. Stronger companies spur a community's economic growth. Pretty simple stuff.

To bring that line of thinking back to the beginning, how can Bradenton score even higher on the resident passion and loyalty meter?

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation points to Realize Bradenton, the broad vision for a vibrant downtown complete with additional social offerings and cultural options, which, in turn, would increase retail, housing and office opportunities and thus the economy, and ultimately build upon that passion for place. This looks like the proverbial field of dreams. Build it and they will come.

The foundation also provided financial support for Realize Bradenton, a blueprint for cultural improvements and downtown revival created by residents at numerous gatherings. Implementation began some five months ago.

Some of the findings in Soul of the Community point to challenges ahead.

The region scored poorly on the availability of affordable housing, current employment opportunities and whether community leaders represent citizen interests.

Bradenton also rated low on being a good place for talented college graduates.

A community discussion on the study will be held next week, and we encourage citizens to check out the 21-page report on Bradenton beforehand (details at the end of the story).

The end game of Soul of the Community - the 2009 study is the second installment of a three-year project - is helping communities thrive.

Gallup researchers have discovered that communities with greater proportions of loyal and passionate residents have produced stronger economic growth over the past five years.

This new report shows Bradenton's potent potential for economic gains. This also hands our economic development leaders and business recruitment team a powerful tool to help achieve that goal.

Survey results can be found online at www.soulofthecommunity.org/bradenton. A town hall forum on the study will be held Oct. 8 at 5 p.m. at the Selby Auditorium at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. Interested parties can register by calling 359-4602 or by visiting www.sarasota.usf.edu/ippl.

Copyright 2009 The Bradenton Herald