At this year's Council on Foundation's conference in L.A, Knight Foundation is taking part in several discussions on innovations in the field, including why the future of philanthropy is mobile, how data is impacting the sector and how games can create social change and more. 

On Sunday, a new evaluation on the social impact of real-world games was the center of a panel led by Jessica Goldfin, strategic adviser to the president at Knight Foundation. Knight recently released its evaluation which explored aspects of real-world games that are most effective in addressing community issues.

Today, John Bracken, director of journalism and media innovation, will participate in a panel discussion around funding mobile for social impact. Zero Divide is hosting “The Future is Mobile” at 10 a.m. PST / 1 p.m EST. The conversation will feature both funders of mobile projects and practitioners who will provide hands-on demos, including two Knight grantees, VotoLatino and Safecast. 

Also today, Vice President for Strategy & Assessment Mayur Patel will offer his insights as to how advances in digital technology and changes in how people access and engage with news and information have altered the way foundations operate. The event will be livestreamed, starting at 12:30 p.m PST / 3:30 p.m EST.

Damian Thorman, Knight's national program director, will also help lead a conversation around high-impact investing for economic rebuilding, with Knight grantee, National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

Knight's Director/Strategy & Assessment Jonathan Sotsky, will also take part in a conversation about innovative ways grantmakers build data into their work, both as a tool for assessing the needs of individual grantees and as a resource for program design and sector-wide change.

Tomorrow, Knight's Vice President of Communications Andrew Sherry will share communication strategies to transform philanthropy. He'll talk candidly about the strategic and critical role of communications, as well as successes and challenges the foundation faces. 

Below you'll find more detailed information about each of the panels, including meeting room locations. For those following on Twitter, the hashtag is #cofLA.

Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism announced today it will launch a new research effort to develop best practices for digital journalism, with funding from the Knight and Tow Foundations. Each of the projects will be short term, to help newsrooms evolve quickly. Here, Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, writes about the initiative. 

Ten years ago, the benefits of a web presence were still debatable in many newsrooms, five years ago almost nobody used Twitter for journalism, four years ago ‘data journalism’ was a minority interest, three years ago most news outlets had never developed a mobile app, today very few newsrooms use sensor networks or automated text services to help provide stories for consumer audiences.

Nobody who works as a journalist needs to be reminded of the pace of change in the field. New tools, different platforms, dynamic audiences and an extraordinary expansion of options for storytelling  challenge every individual journalist and every newsroom  on a daily basis.

The melting of what was once a predictable industrial process into a fluid stream of possibilities is at the same time liberating  and threatening, as it brings with it questions of skills and sustainability.  When I joined Columbia University from the Guardian in 2010 as the first director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, one of the motivating  factors was the need to find out more about what journalism’s needs and opportunities might be.  The funding from Knight Foundation and the Tow Foundation for this major research initiative gives us the ability to do exactly that.

Dr. Frank Douglas, ABIA president and CEO

Recently, the Austen BioInnovation Institute in Akron held a value-driven engineering conference including some of the country's leading doctors and innovators. The two-day conference, which attracted nearly 300 people, focused on topics such as maximizing value for patient and healthcare systems, medical device complexity and educating the next generation of value-driven engineers. 

The institute, which is supported by a $20 million grant from Knight Foundation, is a collaboration of five major clinical and academic institutions focused on making the Northeast Ohio region a leader in using polymer technology for patient-centered health care. The institute seeks to expand on the area's strong tradition in industrial and material science to help lead the next generation of life-enhancing and life-saving innovation.

About the conference and the institute's broader goals, Knight's VP/Chief Financial Officer & Treasurer, Juan Martinez said:

"The conference, which was held at the John S. Knight Center, included institutions such as Johns Hopkins, MIT, Stanford, NASA, NIH and FDA, as well as companies like Zimmer, Medtronic and local clinical and commercial businesses. The institute actively engages our nation's leaders in various sectors to explore the promise of maintaining our country's competitiveness through the development of innovative medical devices that focus on improved clinical utility for, and ease of use by, the patient or provider of care, as well as cost efficiency for the healthcare system."

Crossposted from knightcommission.org.

The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics has distributed a communication to all FBS presidents and conference commissioners.

The purpose of the April 20, 2012 communication is to offer a new approach to distributing shared media revenues that the Knight Commission believes should be discussed and considered by FBS conferences in conjunction with the discussions currently underway to change the postseason football format.

The Knight Commission is advocating consideration and discussion on a new approach for distributing new projected revenues that are expected in upcoming media rights renegotiations for the FBS football postseason competition. 

The Commission’s April 20 communication has been the subject of recent media interest and coverage; therefore, in an effort to clearly present the Knight Commission’s position and the new approach itself, the related communication is accessible HERE .

This weekend, a Miami landmark takes an important step into the digital future of film.

The Olympia Theater at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts is hosting a benefit concert Saturday, bringing together local leaders and talent as part of  its new campaign to digitally upgrade the 86-year-old theater. The effort is part of an overall effort to upgrade the theater’s facilities and engage new audiences in the performing arts.

The benefit concert, Renascentia, features Jon Secada, the Spam All-Stars, Robert Elias & The Revenge, Enrique Santos, Jencarlos Canela and more. It's scheduled for 8 p.m on Saturday, April 28. Tickets, which start at $20, are available online or by calling 305- 372-0925. With a VIP ticket, audiences are invited to attend a cocktail reception beforehand.

Funds raised will go toward acquiring a new digital film projector for the theater, which will give it the ability to show first run movies, participate in more film festivals and even host live events via satellite.

Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news at the New York Times, was one of the 19 readers for the 2012 Knight News Challenge projects moving on to the next round. Here, he provides his thoughts on the entries the committee considered.  

The folks at Knight asked me to jot down a few thoughts about some of the common themes and interesting trends that emerged from this year's crop of News Challenge applicants -- a task that ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Going back over the 50-plus entries the committee considered to move forward in the challenge, it finally dawned on me that the one unifying theme of this year's challenge is that there was no unifying theme.

Applicants were entrepreneurs, academics and technologists, pitching projects that touched every imaginable form of digital communications I could have imagined. Remote sensors? Drones? Mesh networks? I can only hope jet pack journalism isn't far behind. As in the past, there were very few applications overall -- and only a handful of folks heading into the final round -- emanating from "traditional" newsrooms. And even those proposals were more about getting information directly into the hands of citizens than they were about improving the toolset available to working journalists.

Txt2Wrk, an Apps for Communities prize-winner which helps people with limited Internet access find jobs, is cited in a new report as an example of funding mobile projects for impact.

A new white paper on funding mobile projects seeks to ramp up the conversation among funders as to how they can best support non-profits using technology to achieve their missions. The focus is on mobile by and for underserved communities in the U.S. and suggests ways for funders to strengthen the quality and quantity of support for these efforts.

It features several Knight Foundation approaches to grantmaking, including its Community Information Challenge, which engages community and place-based foundations in playing leading roles in meeting the information needs of their communities.

“Funding Mobile Strategies for Social Impact: The Future is Now” is released by ZeroDivide, which works to transform underserved communities through the use of technology. Its 2011 research found a lack of philanthropic investment in mobile strategies for community change. Despite examples of impact and the widespread availability of cell phones (it estimates 87% of the world’s population are now mobile phone users), most funders were unaware of mobile strategies or unclear about how to invest in them.

The paper highlights the “Circuit Rider” program of the Knight Community Information Challenge, which makes tech experts available to help community and place-based foundations think through their proposals to meet local information needs. According to the report, fostering strong ties with technologists is one of the keys to the success for projects.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Theresa Thompson

Engaging young people in civic life is a perennial challenge. This year, Knight Foundation, MTV and a group of non-partisan civic media partners are teaming up to make youth engagement a reality through fantasy. They will build Fantasy Election, a game modeled on fantasy football but built around the 2012 presidential and congressional races.

“It’s a fantasy game but the stakes couldn’t be higher. If a fun format, competitive prizes, and credible information give young people the habit of engagement in civic life, it will be a big win,” said Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of Knight Foundation, principal funder of the game.

A record 52% of Americans ages 18-29 voted in 2008, totaling nearly 23 million votes— 16% of the total electorate. A growing body of research shows that new voters who vote twice are considerably more likely to continue voting for life. The challenge, then, is to sustain or increase youth participation in a year with a different political environment, to help young people develop a lifelong habit of civic participation.

For decades, MTV has used its reach with young audiences to run social campaigns on issues from sexual health to cyberbullying to civic participation. Chief among these was the Choose or Lose campaign, an election participation initiative, in partnership with Rock the Vote, encouraging young people to make their opinions heard. This year, MTV's Power of '12 campaign is focused on encouraging young Americans to understand and leverage their immense power as a demographic group, and in providing new "onramps" to participation for young people who haven't been engaged in the past. That's where Fantasy Election enters.

This post is one of a series focused on how community foundations are investing in news and information projects to make an impact on issues they care about. The following video was filmed during Knight’s 2012 Media Learning Seminar, where five community foundations gave brief, TED-like talks on how the projects they launched are impacting their cities.

In the video above, Margot Rawlins shares how the Silicon Valley Community Foundation helped bring the community together to address the impact of population growth in the Bay Area.

Two million people are expected to move to the region over the next 25 years, representing a 35% increase in the community’s population. The impact on the community and the quality of life for both its existing and new residents is significant, says Margot Rawlins of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

That’s why the foundation took a three-pronged approach to “try to get enough information out to people to learn that the way we grow has a big impact on the things they care about in their community,” Rawlins said.

Above: an event from last year's Philly Tech Week

Today marks the start of a week-long celebration of technology and innovation in Philadelphia. Philly Tech Week seeks to increase the impact of innovation in the city by focusing on how technology and collaboration can improve the community.

One of the city’s major challenges is the lack of digital access: 40% of  residents lack broadband access at home.

To help engage others in finding solutions, Knight Foundation and KEYSPOT, which delivers free Internet access, training and technology at 70 sites around the city, are co-sponsoring the event’s Access and Policy track.

An insert in today’s Philadelphia Daily News maps out those free Internet access points in the city and highlights other activities taking place during the week, such as a panel on the intersection of print and digital literacy. Another session will feature leading women and minority tech entrepreneurs who will share their personal and professional stories from the technology industry. All events are free and open to the public.

The International Symposium on Online Journalism is happening today and tomorrow at the University of Texas at Austin.  

Hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, it is a home for sharing and learning about what is working in online journalism.

The program's keynote was given by Richard Gingras (pictured left), head of news products at Google, who talked about the digital disruption and business models in news.  Key topics throughout the symposium so far are about platform specificity, revenue generation and the importance of mobile.

Follow the International Symposium on Online Journalism via live-stream, Nieman Lab or #isoj12 on Twitter. 

By Amy Starlight Lawrence, project specialist at Knight Foundation

Amid declining circulations, dwindling revenues and a lower barrier of entry for smaller and more-varied competitors, journalism faces a distressing, uncertain and, simultaneously, exciting future.

This was the consensus during the annual meeting of the Knight Chairs in Journalism, held earlier this year in  Miami. Eighteen preeminent thought-leaders in the field answered the questions, “What concerns you most about the state of journalism today? What excites you most?” Watch the videos above to hear their answers. 

The chairs work to ensure a brighter future for journalism involves several areas, including content innovation and business model adaptation. For example, a number of chairs have worked in the mobile and digital space to disseminate stories across new and varied platforms. At the University of Miami, Professor Joseph Treaster has created environmental journalism-focused websites as vehicles for documentaries, investigative reports and interactive modules. From her post at Syracuse University, Professor Charlotte Grimes has retrofitted the Democracy in Action and Democracy Wise projects to tell the stories of voters via multimedia videos.

Visitors to Miami Beach don’t have to go too far to get a little culture - in the winter it’s often broadcast on a 7,000 square-foot wall. Members of the community are encouraged to bring a blanket, share a picnic dinner and enjoy the sights and sounds of the New World Symphony, thanks to innovative video and audio technology which broadcasts the symphony for free at the Miami Beach SoundScape.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the city’s premier Latino culture group is set to launch a series of live concerts under the stars. Performances will celebrate the arts of Latin America and the Caribbean and feature both world-renowned and local-area artists.

Both Knight-funded projects are examples of innovative ideas that exemplify the Knight Arts’ program mission of engaging communities in the arts.

On Monday, tune in to find out the winning projects of the 2012 Knight Arts Challenge Philadelphia!

More than 1,200 ideas were submitted by artists, artist-run groups and organizations who pitched their big ideas for engaging the Philadelphia community through the arts. Earlier this year, Knight announced the 55 finalists.

Our reviewers whittled the list down to a few dozen winners and on Monday at 6 p.m., Knight will post the winning projects at KnightArts.org. We’ll also tweet the winners and other updates from the announcement ceremony via @knightfdn. The hashtag to follow along is #knightarts.

This year’s winners offer a wide array of innovative ideas to engage and enrich Philadelphia’s communities through visual arts, music, film, theater and more.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Jeremiah Peterson 

I spotted a wonderful convergence of two things which Knight is passionate about, namely community foundations and its Soul of the Community research.  The current issue of the Giving Forum features community foundations and uses Knight’s Soul of the Community research to set up how important it is that community foundations focus on the quality of life in a particular geography. The research showed a significant, positive connection between residents’ emotional bond to a place and local economic growth.   

Giving Forum is the online and print publication of the Minnesota Council on Foundations that covers Minnesota philanthropy news by and for grantmakers, givers and nonprofits.  The article includes work of the Saint Paul Foundation and Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation, both of which have rallied around the importance of addressing the key drivers of community attachment identified by the Soul of the Community: social offerings, openness, aesthetics and education.

Today, Knight Foundation and the NEA announced the winners of its Community Arts Journalism Challenge. Here, Knight's Eric Newton gives some insight into why both organizations decided to fund innovations in arts coverage and criticism.

Update: Two of the winning projects, CriticCar Detroit and the Charlotte Arts Journalism Alliance, were recently profiled in The Huffington Post and The Charlotte Observer, respectively.

When Knight Foundation first started working with the National Endowment of the Arts on the issue of arts journalism, we asked four questions: Is arts journalism in trouble? Does it matter? Can anything be done to help? How can we - the Knight Foundation, the nation’s leading private funder of journalism innovation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation’s leading advocate for the arts – improve the situation. Let’s look at the questions and answers:

1.    Is arts journalism in trouble? 

Nationally, arts journalism is doing well. Locally, it is not. 

Nationally, the medium of film is an example of the positive post-internet trend. Even as film critics shrink in traditional media, the victims of the new economics of the digital age, they are blooming in cyberspace. Typical was famed film critic Roger Ebert reporting in his January 2011 Wall Street Journal article, “Film Criticism is Dying? Not Online.”: “The Web and HTML have been a godsend for film criticism. The best single film criticism site is arguably davidbordwell.net, featuring the Good Doctor Bordwell and his wife Kristin Thompson. Their names are known from their textbooks, studied in every film school in the world. But they are not users of the obscurantist gobbledygook employed by academics who, frankly, cannot really write. They communicate in prose as clear as running water.”

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, helps make technology work for communities. Here, its Director of Community Engagement, Shannon Dosemagen, blogs about an exciting new development.

Yesterday, we announced that 45 Public Laboratory maps had been integrated into Google Earth. Adding maps to Google Earth means that our community-created imagery, made with cameras attached to balloons and kites, will reach even more people as this is a hugely popular platform for people to view geographic data. The integration of Public Laboratory maps transforms the representations of the earth available on Google Maps/Earth because these maps are made by communities and they document sites of civic concern -- wetlands impacted by the Gulf Oil Spill, Superfund Sites in New York City, natural gas wells on personal property and social protests. Imagine a Google Earth where the most high resolution imagery of sites of civic and environmental concern is made by local communities whose lives and livelihood they influence.  This is the kind of outcome that helps to fulfill the hopes that brought me to this project -- organizing communities to make their own maps of the Gulf Oil Spill.

In April 2010, I met Jeff Warren and Stewart Long, two of the other co-founders of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. The BP oil spill had just happened and in a mad dash effort, Jeff and Stewart had come to the Gulf Coast to help train residents and volunteers on using balloons and kites to map the oil spill, before, during and after it reached the Gulf Coast shoreline. Throughout the spill, they, and others, provided continuing remote support and the Gulf Coast team trained and organized the efforts of 100+ volunteers who collected over 100,000 images, resulting in over 50 maps of the region from during the time of the spill. With these images as a base, in spring 2011, Public Laboratory created the Public Laboratory Archive, modeled on the data.gov site. In summer 2011, Public Laboratory released the first Grassroots Mapping Forum of Wilkinson Bay, Louisiana. Since then, we’ve worked towards providing libraries in the Gulf Coast region with digital data sets of maps and images from the period of the oil spill and have been feeding images into Open Aerial Map.

The James L. Knight School of Communication at Queens University teaches digital media and literacy to students and the community, with Knight Foundation support.  Here, Dr. Alexis Carreiro describes some of the school's recent digital citizenship workshops.

Recently, five faculty members from Queens University of Charlotte led ten digital citizenship workshops throughout Charlotte, N.C.

The digital citizenship program, which I created, is part of a required Modern Citizenship course at the university. The course, which all traditional undergraduates take in their freshman year, explores what it means to be a citizen in contemporary society and encourages students to contribute to the communities in which they live.

This spring, part of the course focused on digital citizenship and how it relates to modern society. It's part of the Knight School’s “Knight Vision” that aims to help people see how they can use digital technology in meaningful ways that contribute to the social health and long-term viability of their communities.

This post is one of a series focused on how community foundations are investing in news and information projects to make an impact on issues they care about. The following video was filmed during Knight’s 2012 Media Learning Seminar, where five community foundations gave brief, TED-like talks on how the projects they launched are impacting their cities.

In the video above, Tycoma Miller shared how the West Anniston Foundation has taken a leadership role in addressing environmental threats facing her Georgia community by investing in a community information project.

For nearly 40 years, the city of 25,000 was unknowingly exposed to PCB contaminants from a nearby chemical factory, which led to a myriad of health problems including cancer and diabetes.  

With support from Knight Foundation, the community foundation launched the weekly radio program West Anniston Today to provide a way for people to ask questions and share stories.

A handful of calls turned into hundreds a month. Miller described how the show not only gave people a voice,  but also the ability to share what mattered most to them about what to do moving forward.

The Tiziano Project, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, provides new media tools and training to community members in conflict, post-conflict and developing regions.

Nine months after being named winners, the people behind the 2011 Knight News Challenge projects gathered in Miami for a day of discussing their wins and road bumps in moving their ideas forward.

Several themes emerged - including deep discussions on how projects are developing or tapping into existing user communities to have an impact.

Some have already had success: The Public Laboratory, for example, which uses technology to make grassroots data gathering and research easy and affordable, has already recruited 600 “citizen scientists,” said Project Lead Shannon Dosemagen. They’ve used creative methods, like employing balloon mapping to capture aerial imagery of oil spill-affected areas along the Gulf Coast. The projects, which started out appealing to the mapping community, grew to include environmentalists, people interested in data visualization and more.

Others stumbled upon existing communities that ended up becoming audiences and providing useful information.

·           Spending Stories, which gives relevant and useful context to news stories about government finances, started out creating a tool for journalists, said the project’s Community Coordinator Lucy Chambers. “As it turns out - it’s mainly advocacy groups who have more time and specialist knowledge who use the software for research, who then reach out to journalists to help raise awareness. We've been working more proactively with advocacy groups to leverage this interest.”      

·           Waldo Jaquith recently launched the Virginia Decoded site, which offers a user-friendly presentation of his home state’s codes, including links to court decisions and information from legislative tracking services. Jaquith said he was surprised to see how much enthusiasm there was nationally from the legal scholarship community. “It was great to have people who’ve given so much thought to the structure and organization of legal data for many years come to me and say ‘here’s what I’ve learned.’ That’s going to save me an enormous amount of time. I expected to have to spend months researching this kind of information, but instead it’ll take a few weeks because people who’ve already been doing it want to share what they’ve learned.”

Knight Foundation currently supports Code for America as part of its Technology for Engagement Initiative, which funds projects that help communities use technology to take action. Here, Abhi Nemani, director of strategy and communications at Code for America, blogs about the launch of the organization's new startup accelerator.

Code for America is now accepting applications for its new civic startup accelerator. The accelerator is designed to disrupt the massive $140 billion government IT market and provide new and better services to citizens.

This first-of-its-kind, four-month program will "turbo-charge" select civic startups by providing them a springboard to amplify market awareness of their product, additional funding, business mentoring specific to the “government 2.0” space, and introductions to a broad network of civic leaders and potential investors. Code for America has recruited experienced telecommunications and consumer software entrepreneur Ron Bouganim as program director. 

Applications will be accepted until June 1 at codeforamerica.org/accelerator

The accelerator has an esteemed list of mentors and advisors including CTO of the United States Aneesh Chopra, Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Pinwheel, Peter Schwartz, author and founder of the Global Business Network, and Ron Conway, angel investor and partner at SV Angel. (Read the full list.)

How the accelerator works:

Today, Knight announced a $400,000 grant to Business Volunteers Unlimited (BVU), which will launch a new program to connect our diverse young business professionals with service opportunities in our nonprofit community. We hope the program will more deeply engage young professionals and increase the probability that they will stay and build lives in Northeast Ohio as they take on leadership positions and become embedded in the community.

Now, young professionals can combine their hard work, passion and skills with BVU’s program to launch them as recognized young leaders in the community, and build on Akron’s focus to engage the next generation of talent.

In Akron, as in many communities, civic leadership matters. Just being CEO of a company does not equate to leadership. One must be actively, civically engaged to make a difference. And the next generation of talent is ready to participate. 

BVU will work with young professionals groups like Torchbearers, which recently received a grant from Knight to helps its members become Changemakers and take risks on innovation.

Read more in today’s release and in the Akron Beacon Journal.

By Jennifer Thomas, program director/Akron at Knight Foundation

From a new website that tests technology to see what works for journalists to looking at new ways of engaging young people in politics, Knight Chairs are involved in a variety of projects advancing the field of journalism.

The video above highlights what Knight Chairs, who are leading journalists now working as tenured professors at top universities, say about their teaching, their students and the state of their profession. 

Many chairs acknowledge that while it may be a challenging time for young people to go into journalism, there are also many opportunities for innovative and entrepreneurial students to make their mark.

Photo Credit: Mark Glaser, PBS Media Shift                          I received the 2012 Markoff Award last night from the University of California at Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program for Knight Foundation's support of investigative reporting. 

The award was presented Saturday at the Logan Symposium by Lowell Bergman,  the former 60 Minutes investigative reporter who founded the Berkeley program and has led it to financial independence and a series of award-winning collaborative investigations.

The Logan Symposium is an annual conference at UC Berkeley attracting many of the nation's leading investigative journalists. This year's participants include investigative leaders from the New York Times, ABC, ProPublica, Frontline, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Financial Times, Thompson Reuters and many others.

The Markoff Award is named for New York Times reporter John Markoff, whose stories about Hewlett Packard so angered  HP that it spied on  him -- and got caught.  

Knight Foundation has invested some $20 million in investigative reporting projects. They range from establishing an endowed chair, supporting  professional and training organizations, establishment of university-based investigative reporting projects, funding for specific investigations and direct support for independent nonprofit investigative  reporting newsrooms. 

Photo Credit: Jose Zamora

Today in Miami, 19 experts are reading and voting on the projects moving on to the next round of the News Challenge on Networks.

We’d like to thank the following people who are dedicating their time and energy to helping us with this process:

Hannah Eaves/LinkTV

Cody Elmore/University of Nebraska

Seth Flaxman/TurboVote

Brooke Gladstone/WNYC

Daniel Greene/Gates Foundation

Hilary Hoeber/IDEO

Elise Hu/NPR

Raina Kumra/Agency for Holistic Branding / Juggernaut

Melinda Lee/Uncensored Interview

Scott Lewis /voiceofsandiego.org

Olivia Ma/YouTube

Colin Maclay/Berkman Center

Aron Pilhofer/NYTimes

David Porter/Video Journalist

Nick Reville/Participatory Culture Foundation

David Rosenberg/Foursquare

Dan Sinker/Mozilla

Karen Wickre/Twitter

Ethan Zuckerman/MIT Media Lab

How do you describe the role you play in community?

Are you a community organizer or a network builder? Are you a content provider or a new media platform? Are you a grassroots operator or a strategic convener?

Wherever you sit, and however you describe yourself, we invite you and your firm to consider joining the BME Challenge as our National Implementation Partner, helping to oversee the black male engagement effort in a growing number of cities.

When we launched BME last August, all we knew was that black males are assets in our communities and that it’s important to highlight, celebrate, and support their leadership. Eight months later, our opportunity is even bigger than we’d imagined.

After more than 2,000 men and boys joined the BME community in Detroit and Philadelphia by sharing their stories of engaging others, and 20 among them were selected as winners of the BME Leadership Award, BME is set to expand.

Knight Foundation endowed the James L. Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte to teach digital and media literacy to students and the community. Here, Susan Patterson, Charlotte program director/Charlotte, writes about a distinguished member of the university's faculty. 

A professor in the new Knight School of Communication was honored with a Distinguished Professor Award this week at the university’s annual spring convocation.

Dr. Zachary White joined the faculty just two years ago and says the teaching experience at Queens has been even better than he could imagine it. He is part of the Knight School team introducing digital and media literacy to freshmen students in the university’s core curriculum.

Here's what one of his students had to say about him: "If I had to explain his style, it would be personable, witty, intelligent and fun. Whenever he teaches I can tell it is with true passion....the most used sentence I have heard is he is such a cool guy...What stands out to me...is how much he loves learning, even though he is the expert. His facial expressions when students give great answers that make him think, speak for that."

The Joseph W. Grier Jr. Distinguished Professor Award was established in honor of the former chairman of the Queens University of Charlotte board of trustees. Nominations for this award are solicited from members of the board of trustees and the alumni board, from faculty, students and staff. The recipient must have made an outstanding contribution to Queens University of Charlotte and the teaching and learning process.

Earlier today, Knight Foundation announced the 52 projects advancing to the next round of the News Challenge on Networks. Here, consultant Ryan Jacoby, a former business designer at IDEO, reflects on trends he saw while reviewing this year's entries. 

I had the distinct pleasure and daunting challenge of reviewing all 1000+ entries submitted for this year’s Knight News Challenge on “Networks.” As I reflected on what I read, my goal was to look for themes, surprises, and outliers. I also gave some thought to areas that might have been overlooked.

Without question, networks are powerful constructs. As John described, today’s networks not only allow us to reach people with information, but they also allow us to create direct connections amongst people, resources, and ideas. New connections yield new solutions. Today’s networks reduce friction and transaction costs, allowing people to coordinate and mobilize with relative ease. Distances can be overcome and boundaries can be spanned. Barriers can be avoided and modest resources can be amplified. In essence, networks allow us to accomplish more together than any small group can do on their own.

Based on your entries, here are ways (in no particular order) that you sought to leverage the power of networks:
 

• Creating new “network knowledge” by amplifying weak signals, distributing analysis, creating metadata, and data mining
• Giving a voice to underrepresented groups of people
• Educating people; providing them with new skills, critical health information, perspective on current events, and information about their environment
• Credentialing, authenticating, and validating network participants and information
• Challenging conventional wisdom and overcoming unilateralism
• Creating “safe” and “private” networks that escape scrutiny
• Encouraging civic engagement
• Monitoring and maintaining the quality of shared resources, especially ecological resources such as water
• Organizing marketplaces, especially for journalism
• Mobilizing and coordinating people for particular events, whether it be for disaster-recovery efforts or covering a timely news story

Photo Credit: Flickr user Thomas Hawk

We just finished selecting the 52 proposals that will go to the next round of the Knight News Challenge on networks. (You can see 49 of them listed below; two were closed entries and we don’t have permission from the applicant to share.)

Included in this 52 are the five applications that generated the most chatter on Tumblr: Amauta; Cont3nt, the Unconsumption Project, MediaReputations.com and PreScouter.

This week, 19 experts are reading and voting on those final 52 in preparation for an all-day gathering at our office on Friday. Our goal is to leave that meeting with 10-15 projects that we will explore even more deeply over the next couple of weeks. We expect to bring 4-6 of those for consideration by Knight Foundation trustees in mid-June, and publicly announce the winners at MIT on June 18.

Later today, consultant Ryan Jacoby will have a summary of the trends he saw in reviewing all of the 1,078 applications we received. I’ll just add that the review process was a difficult one - we’ve had to decline a lot of promising ideas. Each application was read three times, many were read more. However, I am excited about this final batch and confident that we’re going to end up with some exciting projects.

I want to say thanks to all who applied, as well as to the extraordinary group of people who reviewed the review of the entries with us:

Joaquin Alvarado Brian Boyer, Steve Buttry, Blaine Cook, Amanda Cox, Jake  Dobkin, Kate Gardiner, Josh Greenberg, Julie Moos, Catherine Orr, Julie  Shapiro, Hari  Sreenivasan, Kio Stark, Elena Rue, Kristen Titus, Sarah Rich, Jeremy Mims, Tim Hwang, Eric Rodenbeck; Andrew Golis, Amanda Lenhart, Ryan  Jacoby, Max Ogden and Benjamen Walker.

Here’s who is moving forward in the challenge:

Above: a photo from a slideshow on a recent Center for Investigative Reporting piece "Arms race on America's streets." Photo Credit: Andrew Becker, Center for Investigative Reporting.

If successful, the channel will result in new, web-centric forms of investigative reporting—resulting in new audiences and new ways of telling important stories.

Knight Foundation has funded SoChange.com to convince companies to behave in socially responsible ways. Here, Mike Norman, its co-founder, shares key insights and lessons learned from the project's first year. 

One year ago, my co-founder and I launched SoChange.com to empower the use of consumer spending as a tool for improving corporate behavior. We had grown increasingly frustrated at our inability to let responsible companies know that we supported them because of their impact on issues we cared about. We wanted to use our spending to convince companies to be better, and market research showed that we were not alone. Enough consumers were like us that taken together, we controlled enough buying power to make a real difference in how companies thought about their social and environmental impact.

We set out to build a tool that would show consumers that shifting where they spent money could meaningfully impact issues they cared about. Over the past year, we have learned a great deal from our own experience and those of other social entrepreneurs. Here are a few of the key insights we have learned and a overview of how it has informed our strategy moving forward.

Knight currently supports the Center for Collaborative Journalism in Macon, a unique community news and journalism training partnership aimed at improving news flows and engaging citizens. The following post, written by the center's new director, Tim Regan-Porter, provides highlights of several of the center's new efforts. It is crossposted from PBS Media Shift.

April 1 marked my first month on the job as director of Mercer University's new Center for Collaborative Journalism. While the center doesn't open its doors until August, and the bulk of the program starts in late 2013, I already feel the pressure.

The vision established by Mercer, the Knight Foundation, and our media partners, The (Macon) Telegraph and Georgia Public Broadcasting, could hardly be loftier -- not only establishing a new model for journalism education but also helping to transform local communities and save democracy itself. But it is the very audacity of that vision that, in two weeks' time, spun me around from plans to move to New York with my favorite magazine conglomerate to accepting an offer in Macon, Ga. (not long after telling my wife that Atlanta was "just too small" for me).

The ambition of the program is backed by $4.6 million in grants from the Knight Foundation and enabled by a unique collaborative arrangement between a liberal arts program, a public broadcaster and a daily newspaper. The center itself occupies the ground floor of a new development and houses the newsroom of The Telegraph, a McClatchy paper serving the region, and radio and television facilities for GPB. Students will take classes in the midst of a daily newsroom and radio station; some will even live in housing set aside for them above the center.

STUDENTS EMBEDDED IN NEWSROOMS

At the heart of the academic program is an adaptation of the medical school model of education. Students will train in a working newsroom, alongside professional journalists, throughout all four years of the program. Class projects will be integrated with the work of our media partners and the center's own digital news outlet (modeled after the University of North Carolina's reesenews).

Students will contribute to background research, shadow reporters, file reports, engage the community with social media, and perform most duties expected of a professional journalist. They will leave the program with a full portfolio of professional bylines, radio reports, and multimedia stories. This clinical model and high degree of collaboration offers students a truly unique experience.

The following op-ed, written for National Library Week, is co-authored by Paula Ellis, vice president/strategic initiatives at Knight Foundation, Deborah Jacobs, director, Global Libraries Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Julie Stasch, vice president of U.S. Programs at the MacArthur Foundation. Above: The Seattle Public Library, photo credit: Flickr user Joel Down.

For many of us, the public library will always be synonymous with books.

The books drew us to the library in the first place, helped us discover new worlds—both real and imaginary—beyond our day-to-day experiences.

Libraries continue to embody that same spirit of search and discovery, but in a manner that has been transformed as dramatically as the way we generate, share, and consume information. They make this new digital era available to all Americans.

In Chicago, for example, an innovative space at the main public library called YOUmedia lets any teen with a city library card have in-house access to computers plus video and audio recording equipment, to create their own content with the help of a mentor. At another YOUmedia space in Miami, workshops help teens think critically and creatively about their lives, by teaching them to publish an autobiographical digital story, or to visualize their favorite books. In a world where information is increasingly available, learning to analyze it, create it, and make it your own is a valued skill.

This post is one of a series focused on how community foundations are investing in news and information projects to make an impact on issues they care about. The following video was filmed during Knight’s 2012 Media Learning Seminar, where five community foundations gave brief, TED-like talks on how the projects they launched are impacting their cities.

In the video above, Jennifer Ford Reedy shares how Minnesota Philanthropy Partners responded to rapid changes in the field to fundamentally change the way it’s addressing community issues from obesity to interfaith barriers.

Reedy cites the Knight-funded Minnesota Idea Open, a community challenge that asks residents for their best ideas for solving local issues. Residents then vote on proposals to name a winner. More than 10,000 people voted for their favorite idea in the second iteration of the challenge, which focused on water quality issues in the state:

“What we found is that people want to participate. It has made us rethink what it means to engage members of the community. [It has] also made us more accessible, collaborative and creative than ever before,” said Reedy.

This week in Philadelphia, just ahead of Philly Tech Week, we helped introduce a new tool to the public.  It aggregates locations across the city that provide access to the Internet.

The tool, called Connect Philly, helps people find free, or affordable, online access and also computer training opportunities. It allows residents to send their address via text message to 215.240.7296 and find the closest available Internet access point.

In a city, where according to a 2008 report, 40% of households lack broadband access, finding a connection is critical to promoting informed and engaged communities.

I had the pleasure of kicking off yesterday's launch with Technically Philly, J-LAB, the city of Philadelphia, KEYSPOT and the Free Library of Philadelphia in City Hall’s Conversation Hall.  Brian James Kirk, co-founder of Technically Philly, demonstrated the website and SMS text application.  Chris Wink, co-founder of Technically Philly, moderated a great panel discussion on the progress that we’ve made in Philadelphia since the 2008 report as well as the challenges ahead.  The panel featured  Siobhan Reardon, president and director of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Brigitte Daniel, executive vice president, Wilco Electronic Systems, Charles Kaylor, visiting assistant professor in the department of geography at Temple University,  Bryan Mercer of Media Mobilizing Project and Bret Perkins, V.P. government relations, Comcast.  

Knight Foundation has funded Mobilize.org to expand its community-based, millennial-led engagement projects into five Knight communities. Here, Mobilize.org's CEO Maya Enista Smith, blogs about the organization’s upcoming Target 2020 Summit in Miami, Fla.

On June 1-3, 2012, 100 students from South Florida’s community colleges will gather to identify barriers they face in achieving their educational goals, develop student-led solutions to address them and have the chance to win funding to turn their ideas into a campus or community project. 

It's the Target 2020 Florida Summit in Miami, Fla. and Mobilize.org is currently recruiting students to participate. Are you a student enrolled in a community college? Have you faced or overcome difficulties in completing your education?  Do you have creative ideas on ways your community and school can better support you and your peers in completing their education?  Could you use a share of $25K to launch your idea? Or do you know a student that could? If so, Mobilize.org wants to hear from you.

All selected Target 2020 participants will receive meals and two-night hotel accommodations, provided by Mobilize.org. Travel reimbursements are also available upon request and approval by the Mobilize.org staff. Participants interested in attending should visit www.mobilize.org/Target2020FL to learn more and apply.

The Mobilize.org team recently announced the participation of Martha J. Kanter, Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, as summit’s Keynote Speaker.

As Under Secretary, Kanter successfully implemented the Direct Student Loan Program. This program resulted in a 50 percent increase in college enrollment, showing her devotion to increasing graduation and employment opportunities for community college students.  With roots as a community college leader in the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, and as an alternative high school teacher, Kanter is well aware of the challenges facing the education system. Her leadership over the years is a testament to the passion she has for educational equity.

Three years ago, Knight Foundation set out to find ways to bridge the digital divide in Detroit, a formidable task in a city where less than 40 percent of households have broadband access.

We approached the challenge by focusing on three, high poverty neighborhoods, and set out to fund a broadband network there in addition to digital literacy training.

What we discovered with this project could provide lessons on what works and what doesn’t for communities trying to digitally connect the 100 million Americans without home broadband access.

The insights are part of our new report on digital access in Detroit.  Written by journalist Fara Warner, it details the significant difficulties faced in installing a Wi-Fi network: one company considered building towers for free, but pulled out; another donated several towers but the signal didn’t, in the end, cover the entire area. 

Nonprofits and civic leaders seeking to close the digital divide in their communities should instead consider these major insights outlined in Warner’s report:

Eric Newton, senior adviser to the President at Knight Foundation, launched KnightApps.org this morning at the American Society of News Editors meeting in Washington D.C. on a panel called "What Should Newsrooms Be Doing Now?" 

Newton said daily newspapers needed to experiment with digital journalism tools three times faster and ten times more frequently than they are now doing and suggested a good place to start was with already available open source software. 

More notes from the panel are available at Niemanlab.org/asne.

KnightApps.org is the place to learn more about Knight News Challenge projects and the other Knight grants that have created and released open-source software.

The Rising to the Occasion program in Akron is well under way and showing signs of early success.

Supported by Knight since 2010, the program seeks to increase the retention and graduation of African American males from the University of Akron.

Troy Roebuck and Travell Wright (pictured), two of the first year students in the African American Male Learning Community this year, have just been admitted into University of Akron’s Honors College.  

Additionally, Travell has also been named Outstanding Student of the Year in English by Summit College.

The University of Akron is exceptionally proud of these two young men as well as the entire Rising to the Occasion Program. 

The Rising to the Occasion Program is part of Knight Foundation's Black Male Engagement Initiative, which seeks to engage black men and boys in strengthening their commuinities.

By Jennifer Thomas, program director/Akron at Knight Foundation

David B. Smith, executive director of the National Conference on Citizenship, writes about the launch of its Civic Data Challenge today in San Francisco, which is supported by Knight Foundation. 

Today, the National Conference on Citizenship is excited to launch the Civic Data Challenge. The challenge turns the raw data of “civic health" into beautiful, useful applications and visualizations, enabling communities to be better understood and made to thrive.

We believes that data is essential to understanding how our communities work and uncovering ways to motivate greater participation. Together with our partners, we have collected and used civic health data for years. This year, we’re thrilled to join forces with Knight Foundation to explore how community engagement and attachment help build thriving communities.

We are also thrilled to have an opportunity to make this trove of community insight even more valuable and accessible to decision makers and the public. The Civic Data Challenge will bring new eyes, new minds, new findings, and new skill sets to the field of civic health.

How: Challenge participants will be provided civic health data, as well as data on health, safety, education, and the economy.  Participants will analyze the data, identify connections and correlations, and create visual representations and interactive products to showcase their findings. These may include infographics, apps, animations, videos, or other innovations.

Knight Foundation has funded the Sunlight Foundation for a series of national data aps that deliver data to the public. Here, Nicko Margolies, communications coordinator, Sunlight Foundation, blogs about the launch of its newest app, Upwardly Mobile. The following is crossposted from Sunlight's blog. Photo Credit: Flickr user Joe Nicora.

We're excited to announce Upwardly Mobile, Sunlight's new webapp funded by the Knight Foundation that allows you to research where in the country you could enjoy financial security and an improved quality of life. Upwardly Mobile is an easy-to-use relocation research tool backed by powerful economic data, allowing granular comparisons without digging through arcane government reports for each indicator. We sifted through all this data so you don't have to, and this information is now presented seamlessly on any mobile or tablet platform.

Just enter your zipcode, career information and cost-of-living importance and then Upwardly Mobile gets to work generating a list of ideal places for you to move. Alternatively, you can browse individual cities to compare them to national averages. Through charts and graphs, you can explore how metropolitan areas of similar size compare to where you live now, including:

·       Occupation: Both the average salary for the selected occupation over time and income data for the entire metropolitan area.

·       Housing costs: Rents, as well as maintenance services and goods such as furniture and appliances.

·       Cost of living: Apparel, education, food and childcare.

·       Quality of life costs: Recreation, transportation and health care.

Often before non-profit news sites start their path to sustainability, they depend on IRS determination letter to confirm their tax-exemption status. 

A new guide is intended to help journalism and non-profit news orgs better understand the IRS’ standards when it comes to determining whether they are eligible for tax-exemption status.

With more journalism-oriented non-profit sites applying for tax-exempt status, there has been confusion as to how the IRS reviews these applications and makes decisions. Tax-exempt status is often critical to the start-up capacity and long-term sustainability of many of these sites.

The guide to the Internet Revenue Decision-Making Process seeks to simplify the process and answer questions that journalism and publishing non-profit organizations may have.

The Digital Media Law Project released it as an interactive Internet-based resource as well as a PDF.

An original documentary airing tonight will highlight the experience of 11 South Floridians who served during the early years of the Peace Corps.

A unique mix of interviews, archival film and photographs, the documentary will feature personal stories from returned volunteers, detailing their service and idealism while simultaneously tracing the history and heritage of the program.

"Serving America: Memories of Peace Corps" airs tonight at 7:30 p.m. on WPBT2.

The South Floridians featured in the film include Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto  Ibargüen, who served in Venezuela and Columbia from 1971-1976, Donna E. Shalala, president of the University of Miami who volunteered in Iran from 1962-1964, and Roland Foulkes, founder & chief strategist, One Broward, who served in Ghana, West Africa from 1982-1984, among others.

Beverly Blake, program director/Macon at Knight Foundation, blogs about the community's annual Soap Box Derby. Above: a photo from last year's event. 

I wish y’all had been here -  it was an example of the people of Macon at our best: 1,000 of us enjoying the picture perfect weather,  music in Washington Park, the kids playing in the water and writing on the sidewalks with colored chalk while the adults with a cool beverage and good conversation. And lots of dogs.  

It was the beginning of the 2012 Second Sunday concerts in the park (moved this month due to Easter), a program of the College Hill Alliance aimed at getting people to come out and enjoy an afternoon of free music, each other’s company and the beauty of Macon’s Intown Historic District. As wonderful as the concert was, the Soap Box Derby that followed exceeded expectations!

Originally suggested by Scott Page at Interface Studios in Philadelphia, our College Hill Master Planner, the idea of the Soap Box Derby was to get people involved in something fun to engage with one another and build a spirit of community.  And it has done exactly that.  Now in its fourth year, the derby was started by College Hill Alliance and had four entries our first year including one car without brakes!  As with all things College Hill, the goal is to identify a great idea, nurture it and then turn it over to an organization or individual for sustainability. Last year, the Magnolia Street residents and the Intown Neighborhood Association stepped forward to claim ownership of the Soap Box Derby.  The Community Foundation of Central Georgia awarded a Knight Neighborhood Challenge grant and the new owners were on their way, and what a fabulous job they have done in just two years!

This post is one of a series focused on how community foundations are investing in news and information projects to make an impact on issues they care about. The following video was filmed during Knight’s 2012 Media Learning Seminar, where five community foundations gave brief, TED-like talks on how the projects they launched are impacting their cities. Here, Chris Barge shares his experience with the The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County.

Boulder County has Colorado’s largest achievement gap, separating low income kids and their peers from middle or upper income homes, said Chris Barge, director of philanthropic services for The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County.

“[The problem] is astonishing to most people locally,” Barge explained. “It means despite having one of the most competitive school districts in the state, we are failing the kids from low-income families.”

In the video above, Barge described how the foundation decided to do something about what it identified as the two key problems surrounding the issue: a lack of public awareness and no public funding capacity to combat it.

Barge also shared what the foundation learned when it did research to find out what would motivate the public to act, and in particular how women and men saw the problem differently.