The following blog post is written by Roger Macdonald, director, Television Archive; Brewster Kahle, digital librarian, Internet Archive. Photo credit: IceNineJon

We are seeing more and more public benefits arising from applying digital search and analysis to news from our most pervasive and persuasive medium— television. That’s why, we are thrilled to announce that the Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest public digital libraries, is expanding our television news research library to make readily available hundreds of thousands of hours of U.S. television news programs for users to search, quote and borrow.

The expansion plan is being supported by $1 million in funding from Knight Foundation. With this support, we will grow our TV News Search & Borrow service, which currently includes more than 400,000 broadcasts dating back to June 2009, to add hundreds of thousands of new broadcasts. This means helping inform and engage communities by strengthening the work of journalists, scholars, teachers, librarians, documentarians, civic organizations and others dedicated to public benefit.

Above: Miami's O Cinema. 

Today, ArtPlace America, a nationwide initiative that puts the arts at the heart of community revitalization, announced $15.2 million in funding for new projects in 44 communities across the United States. We're excited to see that arts leaders in seven of the communities where Knight invests - Miami, Philadelphia, St. Paul, San Jose, Macon, Detroit and Charlotte - are receiving support for their ideas.

Knight Foundation is a founding funder of ArtPlace, which is a collaboration of 13 leading foundations and six of the nations largest banks. 

Our goal at Knight is to make the arts a part of people’s everyday lives and create the kind of collective experiences that attach people to place. Through our work in the Knight communities, we have seen that artists can be major players in revitalization efforts that contribute to more vibrant, open places. We believe in the power of art to transform and engage communities.  And each of the projects chosen from amongst 1,200 submissions, are driven by teams that are doing just that. We are thrilled to announce this round of funding with ArtPlace and look forward to seeing the work of placemaking leaders unfold— to the benefit of so many communities.

ArtsPlace has highlighted all of these important projects on their website, including those in seven of the Knight communities:

Charlotte, S.C.:

The following, about Knight Community Information Challenge project Floodlight, is written by Rebecca Arno, VP/communications for the Denver Foundation. This year's challenge is accepting applications from community and place-based foundations through June 1. Photo credit: Floodlight.

This time of year in Denver, gardeners know that deep freezes and spring snow are behind us and it’s finally safe to plant. It’s also when the residents of the Whittier neighborhood will begin putting in their community garden – on a site formerly used by gangs to hide drugs and guns.  They’ll need to recruit volunteers, but that shouldn’t be a problem, because they’ve already started telling their story and connecting their neighbors to the vision, through a new tool called Floodlight.

Floodlight is a partnership of The Piton Foundation, a private operating foundation created by energy entrepreneur and philanthropist Sam Gary, and The Denver Foundation, the oldest and largest community foundation in the Rockies, with generous support through the Knight Community Information Challenge. Both Piton and The Denver Foundation have longstanding commitments to helping people in low-income communities make change by using the power of data and storytelling. 

Floodlight provides an easy-to-use, intuitive set of story-building tools to help users create a visually rich, shareable story that is tagged by subject and geography.  The tool can embed video, audio, photos and data visualizations easily with text.  The design team, using the flexible Django open source platform, used research about effective storytelling to put together templates that walk users through the complex process of crafting a compelling story.

The site also contains numerous skill-building tools to help storytellers up their game.  They can learn from Denver writer Patricia Dubrava about the elements of an effective story (structure, detail, authenticity, and emotion), walk through a guide on data and visualizations, and discover how sound can bring an online story to life.