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    Charlotte ARTery keeps getting better

    Published November 14, 2011 by

    Charlotte ARTery is a small, but growing, local, artist-run collective leveraging marketing and business resources to provide a venue for emerging and mid-career Charlotte area artists. It has core members and guests who exhibit in each of its handful of shows throughout the year. This month, you can experience an...
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    Pradera & Martinez know what to do

    Published November 14, 2011 by

    Inkub8's monthly Inkub8r Open-Studio Series continued last Saturday with a “wet” and “dry” performance of “To Do or Not To Do,” a multimedia, multidisciplinary collaboration with performer and choreographer Carlota Pradera and experimental electronic musician Nicole Martinez. The...
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    How arts can anchor people to place

    Published November 14, 2011 by

    Stockholm Subway Image via Wacky Owl This post, written by Knight Foundation Arts Program Associate, Tatiana Hernandez, was originally published on the Americans for the Arts' Blog. The Animating Democracy blog salon on ARTSblog.org sought answers to a very big question: what will it take to move and sustain arts and culture in community development, civic engagement and social change? The 21st century is all about intersections, networks and hybridity. Our goal should be to ingrain arts in community development through cross-cutting projects that seek to anchor people to place. Carol Atlas nailed it by highlighting Arts & Democracy’s new book: Bridge Conversations, People Who Live and Work in Multiple Worlds.
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    Have an idea for the future of news and information? Apply now to the SXSWi accelerator competition

    Published November 11, 2011 by

    Knight Foundation is excited to participate in South by Southwest Interactive next March and sponsor the SXSW Accelerator Competition. Last year, we launched a new track for News-Related Technologies and we will continue supporting it this year. In fact, applications for the contest are due by next Friday, Nov. 18, at: sxsw.com/interactive/accelerator. At Knight, we are committed to seeing journalism to its best possible future. Over the past four years, we have invested more than $100 million in a Media Innovation Initiative, to among other things experiment with new media models for journalism. So far, our funding has helped launch more than 200 community news experiments. If you are a current grantee or a media innovator who is passionate about using journalism and technology to inform and engage communities, we want to meet you. We are eager to discover interesting projects, meet potential grantees or Knight News Challenge winners and learn about new technologies.
  • Article

    A taste of things to come

    Published November 11, 2011 by

    From here on out until early December, art will be bursting all over. Many of the once-a-year, site-specific works, or once-a-year spaces, are already opening or setting up in time for Art Basel Miami Beach, as are the year-round galleries....
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    American Public Media’s Joaquin Alvarado: Technologies don’t create communities; communities create technologies

    Published November 11, 2011 by

    Above: Joaquin Alvarado, Senior VP at American Public Media This post is part of "The Digital Revolution and Democracy" series. For more information on the series, read "Digital Democracy: A More Perfect Union." It's important to start asking how we can leverage digital media and social networks as a platform to improve our democracy, argues Joaquin Alvarado, the Senior Vice President for Digital Innovation for American Public Media. The formation of networks is not just a digital tech issue, but a question of how new ideas are socialized, he says.
  • Article

    Too much data, too few hackers

    Published November 11, 2011 by

    We've had a busy fall in the Journalism & Media Innovation Program and I wanted to share some of what we've been up to with you.  First, I want to highlight two grants we made recently. On Thursday, we announced a grant to Northwestern's Medill School to extend a scholarship program we began in  2007 to bring software developers into the field of journalism. In his post about the grant, Medill professor and project lead Rich Gordon highlighted the work being done by graduates of the first round of the program. Among them are Knight News Challenge winner (and 2010 Chicago Tribune Outstanding Employee) Brian Boyer, The World's Manya Gupta and Nick Allen and Andrew Paley, who are part of the team at Narrative Science. Poynter's Steve Myers pointed to the list of news developer jobs, noting that "if 48 news developers materialized out of thin air, they’d all have jobs too." Or, as Boyer puts it, "there’s too much data, and too few hackers." 
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    November at the Akron Civic Theatre

    Published November 11, 2011 by

    By Val Renner, Akron Civic Theatre The month of November has been a productive one for the Akron Civic Theatre. On November 6, 2011 The Firestone High School Theatre Dept presented School House Rock Live, Jr. The Emmy Award-winning 1970s Saturday morning cartoon series that taught history, grammar, math, science...
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    Meet Astral Artist Julietta Curenton

    Published November 11, 2011 by

    By Leslie Johnson, Astral Artists Astral Artists talked with flutist Julietta Curenton, an Astral artist who makes her Philadelphia recital debut on February 18, 2012 as part of Astral’s Spiritual Voyages Festival, supported by Knight Foundation. The festival is a three-concert event celebrating the musical expression of African-, Asian-, and...
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    Visually stunning and socially conscious duo at LGTripp

    Published November 10, 2011 by

    The dual exhibit at LGTripp Gallery showcases two different Philadelphia artists with colorful techniques. First, Matthew Stemler exhibits a new site-specific installation, entitled “Flotsam,” in the front half of the gallery. In the back part, Raphael Fenton-Spaid displays recent tiled painting work. [caption id="attachment_28216" align="aligncenter" width="574" caption="Matthew Stemler, "Flotsam," wood,...
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    Bay Citizen election simulator demystifies new way of voting in San Francisco

    Published November 10, 2011 by

    Bay Citizen election simulator The Bay Citizen, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news outlet, is covering the San Francisco mayor’s race with a ground-breaking interactive tool that manages to explain in simple terms the complicated ranked-choice voting system used by the city to choose the mayor and other public officials. Under ranked-choice voting, voters select their top three candidates in order of preference. The lowest vote-getters are knocked out and their votes are redistributed until one candidate wins a majority.
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    Extending Medill journalism scholarships for programmers

    Published November 10, 2011 by

    Image courtesy of Flickr user skyfaller. The following is written by Rich Gordon and is crossposted from MediaShift Idea Lab: Four and a half years ago, Northwestern University and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a novel program: scholarships for people with computer programming experience to study journalism in the Medill School's master's program. It was such a sufficiently unusual idea that it got the attention of BoingBoing, one of the most popular tech/culture blogs, which ran a short item under the headline, "Turn coders into journalists (hint: add spellcheck, subtract Skittles)." Today, the idea that journalism needs more software developers is mainstream. And that's why Medill and the Knight Foundation are announcing an extension of the scholarship program.