• Article

    100 Words Film Festival

    Published November 20, 2014 by

    100 Words Film Festival. Shorts, an original film under 40 minutes, used to be a widely popular type of movie widely shown in conjunction with a major feature film in the early years of cinema. But with the extravagance of movie making these days both in...
  • Article

    WeXchange returns to Miami to promote women’s high-growth entrepreneurship

    Published November 20, 2014 by

    WeXchange 2013 drew women from across Latin America and the Caribbean to Miami to network and pitch to potential investors. WeXchange is a forum organized by the Multilateral Investment Fund, a member of the Inter-American Development Bank Group. It offers women entrepreneurs who operate in Latin America and the Caribbean opportunities to network with mentors, investors and each other. The second annual WeXchange forum, powered by Demand Solutions, will be held in Miami Dec. 11-12. Knight Foundation is among the event’s sponsors. Susana Garcia-Robles is principal investment officer in charge of the the Multilateral Investment Fund’s early-stage equity group. So much of the “conventional wisdom” about women entrepreneurs is just not true. Women do have a tolerance for risk. Women are highly motivated to start their own businesses. Women are starting businesses in high-tech fields. Women’s businesses are just as successful as men’s—under comparable conditions.
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    Tim Eads and his optical bacchanal at Pentimenti

    Published November 20, 2014 by

    The mind of Tim Eads must be an astonishing place. Fortunately, by setting foot in Pentimenti Gallery right now, it is possible to wade through the extraordinary imagery of this prolific patternmaker, and catch a brief glimpse of the fantastical features that pepper this artist's outlandish imagination. In “Vector Forms,”...
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    Circ X cabaret holds fundraiser

    Published November 19, 2014 by

    Photo from Circ X on Kickstarter. Diana Lozano is founder and artistic director of Circ X, a traveling performance troupe and production company based in Miami, and a 2013 Knight Arts Challenge winner. When we first set out to create the Circ X cabaret, we strived to make a production that was entertaining, provocative and affordable. Thanks to Knight Foundation, Miami Beach Cultural Affairs and all of our Kickstarter supporters, we were able to do just that.   We offered tickets at just $15 and sold out our first set of shows at the Fillmore at the Jackie Gleason Theater to rave reviews.  Now, with Give Miami Day, the communitywide 24-hour online giving campaign just around the corner, we are holding our second fundraiser tonight in Wynwood!  Join us at the House of Art from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. where you will get to meet our fabulous cast and enjoy complimentary cocktails from our sponsors.  
  • Article

    ‘Knight Cities’ podcast: Leslie Koch on transforming New York’s Governors Island into a vibrant public space

    Published November 19, 2014 by

    How do you create a radically open platform for building new cultural capital in cities? That’s been the job of Leslie Koch, president of the Trust for Governors Island, a nonprofit organization created by the city of New York to run what is an historic former military base being transformed into a park by and for New Yorkers. With the lightest possible touch, she has transformed a set of empty buildings and grounds into a platform animated by artists, collectors, and passionate hobbyists.   It’s a model every city can learn from.
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    Eric Newton: Why I’m worried about newsroom training

    Published November 19, 2014 by

      Way back in 1938, Agnes Wahl Nieman’s bequest launched a fellowship program at Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism.” Even then journalists wanted to know more, not just about the skills of our craft and the issues of our profession, but about the complexities of the topics we cover in trying to make sense of the world. In the decades since, training has gone from an add-on frill to a survival skill. Journalists and newsrooms that can’t reinvent training in the digital age will face at best a bleak future. Today, a Knight Foundation-funded report by the Poynter Institute looks at training in 31 newspaper newsrooms. The report -- “Constant Training: New Normal or Missed Opportunity?” – worries me.
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    Give Miami Day should be good for arts, too

    Published November 19, 2014 by

    The South Beach Chamber Ensemble. The Miami Foundation’s Give Miami Day hopes to top last year’s $3.2 million total of giving in this year’s 24-hour donate-a-thon that begins Thursday. A lot of worth nonprofits are competing for dollars in this event, and that includes arts groups:...
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    Small news startups try to survive and cover ‘ignored’ New Jersey news

    Published November 19, 2014 by

    Justin Auciello was honored in 2013 at the White House as a Champion for Change for his work during and after Hurricane Sandy. Photo via NJ News Commons. This post is one in a series on what four community and place-based foundations are learning by funding media projects that help to meet their local information needs. All are funded through the Knight Community Information Challenge. The ideal of abundant local news, informed communities and an engaged citizenry may rest on some seriously overworked people — in newsrooms with trimmed staffs, and in startups that often struggle with finding sustainable business models. That's the case in New Jersey, which continues to suffer from a shrinking of the number of working journalists, and thus less community coverage. In addition, the state's northern region often gets overshadowed by news from bordering major metro markets in Philadelphia and New York City, leaving Jersey residents short-changed.
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    Making sound searchable, many voices at a time

    Published November 19, 2014 by

    Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith are co-founders of Pop Up Archive, a winner of the 2012 Knight News Challenge: Data and one of the companies in the portfolio of the Knight Enterprise Fund. Since we launched Pop Up Archive in 2013, we’ve made almost 1 million minutes of sound searchable. This is just the beginning. A question we ask ourselves a lot at Pop Up Archive. In the past year, we’ve helped hundreds of radio producers log raw tape, get audio stories online faster, and optimize their stations’ sites for search engines. We’ve worked with the Hoover Institute at Stanford to index interviews with founders of the Communist Party, processed thousands of hours of sermons for the Princeton Theological Seminary, and helped WFMT and the Studs Terkel Digital Archive catalog Terkel’s 40 years of radio interviews with everyone from Janis Joplin to Shel Silverstein. We’re experimenting with some of the most innovative digital media properties to make sure that audio and video content are indexed by Google and just as easily found and shared on the Web as text. Anyone can search over 10,000 public audio items at Pop Up Archive.