Knight Foundation

Poynter’s News University, a Knight-funded program that provides affordable journalism-related training for writers, editors, bloggers and students, has nearly 200,000 registered users. To celebrate, it's sharing the stories of users and offering prizes, including an Apple iPad, for the best ones. A previous contest winner, school newspaper advisor and English teacher Elisabeth McMullin wrote, “I was surfing the Web and trying to find some help when a high school newspaper advisors resource site pointed to NewsU. You were the answer to a desperate prayer from a desperate advisor! Everything I saw was excellent and easy to understand.”  One of this year’s contestants, Drew Selman of the St. Louis Photojournalism Project, explained the importance of NewsU for their project.  “Their practical classes along with courses that cover more in-depth topics keep my photographers well armed to gather truly great stories,” he said.  NewsU’s online resources include a wide variety of webinars and self-directed courses. Hundreds of courses, including Introduction to Reporting, Cleaning Your Copy and First Amendment for the High School Journalists are free thanks to the support from a Knight grant.  NewsU plans to expand its curriculum with additional courses with topics including investigative journalism, business, Web design and user interface design and understanding media audiences. NewsU is also launching The J101 Project, a 16-week, college credit Introduction to Journalism course that will be available to students at NewsU’s partner schools: Florida Atlantic University, Missouri State University and California State University, Fullerton.

Starting Nov. 2, the newspaper I once edited, the Oakland Tribune, will be officially dead, its remains combined with several other papers under the name East Bay Tribune. This may make Oakland the largest city in the United States without a daily newspaper all its own. But what does that mean? As the managing editor in 1991 of the Tribune owned by Bob and Nancy Maynard, I ran a newsroom with 130 full-time professional journalists. Attrition over the decades has left today’s Tribune with just a dozen reporters. That’s less than 10 percent of the staff we had. As the FCC’s Steve Waldman reports in Information Needs of Communities, the biggest impact of this shrinkage is a shortage in something called “local accountability journalism.” Here’s just one example of why journalism matters and what Oakland has really lost: Twenty years ago, 10,000 people fled for their lives when a 2,000-degree inferno raged over three square miles in the city, killing 25 people and gutting more than 3,000 homes – the most destructive wildfire in state history. During the first week

  Tech enthusiasts and local hackers in Nairobi, Kenya are building educational tools to help community users shape and learn more about Ushahidi's .ke Evaluation findings.  The launch is part of a nine-month look into the impact of the organization's projects in Kenya since addressing post-election corruption almost four years ago. To include the broader open-source community, the event is being blogged live through Scribble Live, Twitter and a livestreaming video.  Check out Ushahidi's official post about it below to find out more about what participants are saying: Cross-posted from blog.ushahidi.com The ihub in Nairobi, Kenya has been buzzing all morning with conversations about the Ushahidi .ke Evaluation launch. We are honoured to have our local community and some guests like UNHCR and NetHope join us to talk about best practices and improvements for deployments and Ushahidi. Here is our Ustream for the day: (recorded) Video streaming by Ustream