Spurred by recent comments on our July 31st Knight Blog entry about his work, Mario Garcia posted on the Garcia Media blog yesterday asking readers what they think about four organizations Knight Blog commenter Robert Ivan cited as innovative:

- Rob Curley and The Las Vegas Sun
- Adrian Holovaty and Everyblock
- Alan Taylor and The Big Picture
- The New York Times audio slide shows (NYT Multimedia)

One of the four, Everyblock, is a “news feed for your block” and a Knight News Challenge winner. As we’ve posted previously, Everyblock continues to add cities to its roster (most recently, Boston, Seattle, and Washington, DC), delivering information about crimes, news articles, and road construction, among other data sets, as well as special reports.

What do you think about these four projects?

As Garcia writes:

Dear readers, as I am not familiarized thoroughly with the innovators mentioned by Robert Ivan, I ask you to enter the dialog and contribute your comments on them, and what you think makes them special. I am sure we can learn tremendously if we profile these cases and benefit from their experience. All of us are interested in reviewing products that have encountered success via experimentation and it is my hope that we can profile these four innovators in future blogs. I need your help to do so! If those involved in these products wish to engage in dialog through this platform, I would appreciate that as well.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and join the discussion in the Garcia Media post comments.

On Wednesday, the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) Web site, ijnet.org, relaunched with new tools for their global group of journalists.

Site users are now able to set up a profile and use tools in Arabic, English, Persian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Knight sponsors ICFJ and funds the Knight International Journalism Fellowships; you can apply here and see where Fellows have traveled on the interactive map.

In this video, watch Knight International Journalism Fellow Arul Louis talk with Dr. R. K. Pachauri, director-general of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi about media and climate change.

Per the IJNet.org e-learning post:

Knight International’s Louis has been working with TERI to create new online resources for media. With TERI and other partners, he is leading innovative environmental programs for regional journalists in local languages. He also has helped the Indo-Asian News Service expand its environmental coverage.

Also in e-learning, the ICFJ will offer an introductory online course on investigative reporting for Arabic-speaking journalists; applications close September 5th. Details here.

The New York Times writes about Knight News Challenge (the ~$5 million yearly contest to fund innovative news delivery ideas) winner David Cohn’s Spot.Us project today:

“Spot Us would give a new sense of editorial power to the public,” said David Cohn, a 26-year-old Web journalist who received a $340,000, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to test his idea. “I’m not Bill and Melinda Gates, but I can give $10. This is the Obama model. This is the Howard Dean model.”

You can contribute to (help “crowdfund”) the Spot.Us campaign the article mentions that will check political advertisements in San Francisco for accuracy here (campaign is 89% funded as of this morning). More details about that project are on the Spot.Us wiki.

The article also mentions Knight Foundation Trustee Paul Steiger’s new ProPublica organization, which produces “journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.” An interesting ProPublica site feature is the “Scandal Watch” sidebar, where progress on highlighted stories is charted throughout the week; read Friday’s summary by Alexandra Andrews.

The NYT article lets another News Challenge winner, Jay Rosen, (who blogs along with Cohn and the other News Challenge winners on the IdeaLab group blog; you can read his entries here) have the last words about alternative reporting models:

“The [traditional] business model is broken,” [Rosen] said. “We’re at a point now where nobody actually knows where the money is going to come from for editorial goods in the future. My own feeling is that we need to try lots of things. Most of them won’t work. You’ll have a lot of failure. But we need to launch a lot of boats.”

What do you think about crowdfunding?

The Milledgeville Union-Recorder ran a story yesterday about the new Milledgeville Municipal WiMax Network, part of a universal access initiative at Knight Foundation.

Milledgeville Program Director Beverly Blake made clear Knight’s commitment to connect individuals in physical communities through this initiative:

“The Knight Foundation does not come into a community, say we have this great opportunity, realize it and then walk away,” Blake said. “Milledgeville made this happen, we’re here to help you build this plan for the future.”

Find out more about the Digital Access Initiative here; the Milledgeville article is here.

Questions or thoughts on the Milledgeville Munical WiMax Network?

This week, leading thinkers in digital media will begin to mentor many of the thirty-five projects in the News Challenge Garage, a new incubator site for the News Challenge contest (a Knight media initiative that awards ~$5 million a year to innovative news delivery projects).

You can join the Garage by signing up here; you may also want to follow progress through the Garage news feed and the Garage new project feed.

You can ask questions about the Garage in the welcome blog entry comments, through the contact form, or on Seesmic, a video service where members post short videos and video responses.

Heidi Miller, who is heading up marketing for the News Challenge this year, has posted on Seesmic and others have joined the conversation with their video responses:

Knight News Challenge offers $5MM in fundingPitching bloggers, podcasters and vidcasters! If your audience includes citizen journalists, digital innovators or open source developers, the Knight News Challenge is a not-for-profit contest awarding $5M in funding. If you have a blog or podcast and think your readers/viewers would like to enter, email or comment to sign up to receive information on this year’s Challenge to share with your own audience.

Have a question about the Garage? Let us know.

This weekend, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about Knight News Challenge winner Everyblock and its founder, Adrian Holovaty.

And yesterday, the Everyblock project (”a news feed for your block”) expanded into three new cities: Boston, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Director of Knight Journalism program Gary Kebbel gives Everyblock background:

Adrian Holovaty won a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to create a public data and aggregation site on steroids for at least 10 cities. Called EveryBlock, the sites have launched in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Charlotte. Public databases are pulled together and then made so easily accessible that all anyone has to do is put in a street address to find out what is happening on their block or the next block over.

Holovaty started this work with ChicagoCrime.org, which was the first major “mashup” of public data (Chicago crime reports) on a Google map. The site won the Knight-Batten Award for Innovation and was the beginning of Holovaty’s efforts to help people find previously inaccessible information relevant to their lives.

The Tribune article references the Everyblock widget, a small application that has let readers associate a physical location with Tribune stories for the past month.

Also in the article, Holovaty explains how to launch a project from the Windy City:

“There’s the dot-com, Silicon Valley, blow-all-your-money-on-booze style,” says Holovaty, 27. “Then there’s the Chicago thing: Do something, do it well and be modest about it.”

Read the entire article here.

What are your thoughts on Everyblock? How would you explain a digital project launched in, say, the DC, Austin, or Vancouver Way?

The new morning radio multi-platform news program The Takeaway, partially funded by Knight, has recently introduced a game on Facebook (the popular social networking service) called VeepStakes.

Takeaway Web Editor Adnaan Wasey explains the game:

If you already have a Facebook profile, you can start playing the game here.

Look for more seriously fun content from The Takeaway team soon–what do you think about VeepStakes, and what would you like to see the show do more of online?

In April, Knight sponsored a conference in Paris on press freedom and the Beijing Olympics with Asia Presse (Paris), Committee to Protect Journalists (New York), Human Rights in China (New York, Hong Kong, Brussels), Reporters Sans Frontieres (Paris), World Association of Newspapers (Paris), and the World Press Freedom Committee (Washington, D.C.). There was simultaneous interpretation in Chinese, French, English.

Statements from that conference are here and can be downloaded as a pdf.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) blog has recent posts about the Olympics and Chinese media, including one post on a 21-point directive from the Central Propaganda Department.

Global Voices, the 2006 Grand Prize winner of the Knight-Batten Awards for innovation in journalism, has special coverage of the Olympics from their worldwide network of bloggers (here’s the feed and the Twitter feed).

The Global Voices Beijing Olympics page also links to Play the Game for Open Journalism, a site to assist and inform journalists covering the Beijing games.

Other resources? Please leave them in the comments below.

As we’ve previously blogged, one section of Knight’s annual progress report asks what you think about the Miami arts scene and the new Knight Arts Partnership, a $20 million matching challenge to fund individuals and organizations with ideas for the future of arts in Miami.

I asked Rick of the South Florida Daily Blog (SFDB), who summarizes area blogs, to help us identify art bloggers whose audiences might be interested and have ideas for arts in Miami.

Rick posted an entry on SFDB yesterday (thank you, Rick), asking his readers which art blogs they followed.

The readers suggested a few in the comments (TuMiami, ArtLurker, a new Miami Art Exchange url). We plan to follow up with these blogs, and we’ve noted Roger L’s comment that summer isn’t, perhaps, the liveliest season of the Miami art scene.

What you think about the Miami arts scene? Other Miami art blogs you follow?

Tell us in the comments below or on the annual report site.

Watch the video below to find out why former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is wearing a spider pin at the Knight-sponsored Forum on Communication and Society at the Aspen Institute today.

Madeleine Albright on her spider pin - and the Web from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.