Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Ford and Knight Foundation partnered to support the participation of 76 journalists and students at The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) convention.

Recognizing that the media landscape is in flux, the theme of the 27th annual NAHJ conference was: "Evolve.  Embrace. Reinvent." And the focus was on multimedia and digital journalism.

The program was designed to help journalists acquire the multimedia and technological skills they need to keep their jobs, find new ones or grow professionally.

There were thirty-three sessions offering multimedia skills that ranged from how to Blog and use Twitter to how to Podcast, stream live video and create Mashups.

The Knight Digital Media Center held a Multimedia Bootcamp, where conference attendees could learn the basic skills needed for multimedia storytelling and get hands-on training on how to record audio, take photos and shoot videos for the Web.

David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, moderated a panel on online media law and ethics that focused on legal issues that might arise from the daily practice of online journalism to legal and ethical issues related to user generated content and the bloggosphere.

If you are interested in learning digital media skills and on getting hands-on training, please start by visiting:

Knight Digital Media Center

J-Lab - The Institute for Interactive Journalism

Knight Citizen News Network

Citizen Media Law Project

Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

Julia Scott, who left her job at the Los Angeles Daily News to start BargainBabe.com, recommends being obsessed with your new business as a key to being a good news entrepreneur. That, and paying attention to social media as well as your advertisers.

Scott was a Fellow for the News Entrepreneur Boot Camp, the Knight Digital Media Center’s week-long program held in May in partnership with the Online Journalism Review and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, and Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

The boot camp taught 12 digital entrepreneurs selected by Knight such topics as developing a sustainable business plan and marketing and audience development.

The Knight Digital Media Center will hold a Multimedia Reporting and Convergence Workshop from July 12-17 at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The next boot camp for news entrepreneurs will be announced by the Knight Center when a date is set. Express interest through the center’s web site.

This post was written as a collaborative project by Knight's 2009 summer interns.

On Tuesday, June 23 Knight Foundation staff members and summer interns attended a performance of FUERZABRUTA at the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Centeras guests of Dennis Scholl, the Communities Program Director for Miami. 

FUERZABRUTA is an interactive visual spectacle that packs six to eight hundred people into a dark room for an hour. Eight cast members manipulate the dynamic set pieces with their bodies and engage the audience with disposable props and pumping music. A giant treadmill and a plastic pool suspended over the heads of the audience make up most of the set. 

It’s easy to get swept up in the sensory show; audience members touch, throw, dance and move from place to place like the actors do. In a recent performance, one audience member got carried away and was kicked out for repeatedly punching the plastic pool.

The show has been touring for three years, debuting in Argentina and traveling across the U.S. as well as to countries like the U.K., Brazil and Mexico. One cast member noted contrasting energies between audiences in New York and in Miami. Another performer said that in Argentina the show is considered more a theatre piece than a work of conceptual art. Apparently the experience changes from city to city and from night to night, but everyone agrees the real party happens on the weekends.

Dan Pacheco explains how the new Printcasting model will be tested in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Printcasting lets people become their own publishers by creating a way to package stories and generate advertising revenue. Anyone can create a “printcast” about their interests or community.

Printcasting will be beta tested with the MediaNews Group, which owns 54 daily newspapers.

Pacheco, a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, is currently expanding his project to such cities as Denver and Los Angeles.

Knight Foundation awarded the Bakersfield Californian a Knight News Challenge grant to develop Printcasting, which ties online content to publication templates.

Printcasts update themselves when the selected web sites and blogs are updated, and can be printed or sent to a mobile device. People who make printcasts can also make money from targeted ads by local businesses.

The Knight News Challenge hopes to speed adoption of digital innovations in community news.

Printcasting is one of several Knight News Challenge platforms that, once completed, will be released to everyone as open-source software.

At several of the BarCamp sessions at the Future of Civic Media conference Knight held with M.I.T., attendees spoke about using mobile technology and video and audio communication to bridge the digital divide.

The Web was thought to be the great leveler, but how about for people who don't have a computer, or can't read web site text?

In one BarCamp session on media and information in the developing world, 2007 Knight News Challenge Winner Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices said the developing world is better wired for mobile technology than it is for Internet use on computers. His smart phone works faster in Ghana than it does in the U.S.

Knight News Challenge grants have supported such programs as Mobile Media Toolkit and News on Cell Phones. Knight Foundation Director of IT George Martinez and his team are also working on universal digital access in U.S. communities.

Below, 2008 Knight News Challenge winner Jessica Mayberry of Video Volunteers explains how illiteracy contributes to the digital divide.

The Souls of Our Students video came out of a Knight-funded project with Mecklenburg Ministries, called Souls of White Folks. Faith leaders exploring issues of white privilege during the program were challenged to carry their new understanding into their congregations and communities. (more...)

On Wednesday morning, former Knight News Challenge winners like David Ardia and Lisa Williams gave their advice for web sites and non-profits at "Knight 101"

Wednesday evening brought a plenary called "Nerds, News, and Nabes" with Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibarguen, Henry Jenkins, principal investigator for M.I.T.'s Center for Future Civic Media (C4FCM), and N.Y.U. Professor Eric Klinenberg.

At Thursday morning's plenary session, Chris Csikszenmihalyi, co-direcotr of the C4FCM, talked about bringing communities near natural gas fields the news and information they need to preserve their communities and their health, and M.I.T. grad student Ben Fry helped us visulaize data.

One example of data visualization from Martin Wattenberg was Wordle, a program that generates images based on word frequency. The more times a word appears in a given text or blog, the larger it is in the image generated. Here's one for a press release on the KNC winners.

On Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, KNC winners and M.I.T. grad students and employees explained their digital media projects. Notable demos included Virtual Gaza, Sourcemap.org (in beta version) and a digital community storytelling effort.

Friday morning, we all voted on the best idea for collaboration among KNC winners developed over the course of the conference using Selectricity. TweetBill, a project linking constituents to one another and alerting them to bills and their representatives' contact info, won the $3,000 first prize.

Check out live tweets from the conference at #kncmit, #knc09, and #fncm09. Other information is available on the conference's wiki.

2009 marks the 12th year the Knight International Journalism Awards have been given to "media professionals worldwide who have taken bold steps to keep citizens informed despite great obstacles." This year's winners -- Cao Junwu of China and Chouchou Namegabe Nabintu of the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- "were selected for their ability to tell important stories that others have shied away from despite the risks."

Read more about the award, which was presented at the Knight Foundation Conference Center at the Newseum.

This week, ValleyIndependentSentinel.org - a site covering Connecticut's Lower Naugatuck Valley - launched with funding from the Knight Community Information Challenge. Here, Editor Paul Bass talks about how he applied for the challenge through the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.

The Knight Community Information Challenge helps U.S. communities meet their information needs by offering matching grants to community foundations to fund news and information projects.  If you're a community foundation, or someone looking to start a news and information project, you may be eligible for funding through the challenge. Applications will be accepted beginning Aug. 10. Find out more at informationneeds.org.