At the beginning of October, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy made headlines with its report "Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age." Today, the FCC announced it would act on that report by hiring journalist and entrepreneur Steven Waldman to "lead an agency-wide initiative to assess the state of media in these challenging economic times and make recommendations designed to ensure a vibrant media landscape."

From the press release:

Earlier this month, the bipartisan Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy called for “new thinking” to “ensure the information opportunities of America’s people and the information vitality of our democracy” and proposed FCC action. The Pew  Project for Excellence in Journalism has highlighted the dire circumstances for newspapers, and  both the Knight report and a recent study from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism called  for a full reassessment of the media marketplace both inside and outside of government,  including at the FCC. [...]

“A strong consensus has developed that we’re at a pivotal moment in the history of the media and communications, because of game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn,” said [FCC Chairman Julius] Genachowski. “Highly respected entities have called on the FCC to assess these issues. At such a moment, it is important to ensure that our polities promote a vibrant media landscape that furthers long-standing goals of serving the information needs of communities."

In response to the announcement, Knight Foundation CEO and President Alberto Ibargüen said, "Now comes the hard work of building a national, digital grid and ensuring that every American has digital broadband access. We have formed an outstanding partnership with Aspen Institute on this and expect our ongoing work together to continue to yield results."

Read more coverage of the announcement from USA Today and elsewhere.

In USA TODAY, Don Campbell writes that media executives are the ones responsible for the future of news. "Publishers and news executives face perilous challenges, but they don't need, nor should they accept, help from government at any level," he says. " They have to save themselves."

Campbell wants to squash a controversial idea by former Washington Post Editor Len Downie that government give local news grants to private news organizations. And sure, that's a debateable idea.

But it is really true that news executives do not need any help from government at any level?

Consider the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. It says we need plenty of intelligent help from government. We need government to provide good schools to teach news literacy. We need government to be serious about freedom of information. We need government to provide great public libraries. We need government to push public broadcasting into local innovation. We need government's help with our biggest need of all --  to build a society with universal digital access.

Downie, Knight Commission and others who have thought about this, including Geneva Overholser in her "manifesto," agree on much. We should focus on those points of agreement. Because the big picture is that free societies get the news that they deserve. All of us (not just media executives) are responsible for the future of our media ecosystem.

Eric Newton is vice president/journalism at the Knight Foundation.

From Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

The International Women’s Media Foundation, IWMF, selected Firle Davies, a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation, as the 2009-2010 recipient of the Knight Foundation-funded Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship.

During her fellowship, Davies will be a research associate in residence at MIT’s Center for International Studies and will also have access to The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

Each year, one woman in print journalism, broadcast or online media is selected to become an Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship recipient. The recipient then works on human rights journalism and social justice issues.

The fellowship is named after a Boston Globe reporter and winner of the 1998 IWMF Courage in Journalism Award who was killed while on assignment in Iraq in 2003.

 From Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

People are easily lured in by the sweetness, beauty, smell and sometimes even intoxication of certain plants. What if plants have their own hidden agenda that we didn’t know about?

            Michael Pollan, Knight Chair in Science and Technology Reporting, is featured in a two-hour long documentary based on his best selling book The Botany of Desire. Pollan explores the natural history of four plants: the potato, the apple, the tulip and marijuana. The well-reviewed film examines the mystery between humans and plants and how they each use each other to get what they want.

            The documentary, which  airs Wednesday at 8 p.m. on PBS, begins in Pollan’s garden and then travels to the potato fields of Peru and Idaho, the apple orchards of Kazakhstan, the tulip markets of Amsterdam and finally, medical marijuana grow rooms of the United States. See a clip here.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

The first Knight funded Drupal project to release its open-source code, Managing News, launched last week. You can read about it here: Media Innovation with Drupal.

This week, on the fifth day of being publicly available, the project has been downloaded more than 1,000 times.

Here are 50 examples of what people are doing with it.

* rowingnews.org.uk
* pulse.buzzr.us United Nations World Food Programme
* climap.net
* news.freejacksonvillenews.com
* news.1qk.com
* mn.newslogs.com
* managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk
* catholicnewslive.com
* noticies.consultes.cat
* mn.forest.linnovate.net
* www.cafepresse.ch
* mn.mwu.dk
* news.kultur-online.net
* beta.metaboone.com
* news.twodogsdigital.com
* mnews.webandfinearts.com
* augmentions5.omega8.us
* http://planete.magento.fr
* news.nguyentiensi.com
* zensci.com
* earthfeeds.com
* managingnews.peopleatwork.fr
* news.positivechoices.com
* managingnews.rhizom.nl
* news.krongnang.com
* news.fen.net
* news.freejacksonvillenews.com
* managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk
* skateboarding.com
* earthfeeds.com
* jaunum.iem.lv
* news.soniccat.com
* news.investic.net
* pg.galaxy.esn.org
* www.wotcher.co.uk
* rowing.magnity.co.uk
* www.freshfail.com
* gamemakerstream.com
* news.sotak.cz
* menanews.org
* managingnews.aegir.erdfisch.de

How are you using it? Please let us know or send us your ideas on how it could be used to inform local communities.

By Meredith Hector, program director for Bradenton

Residents of Manatee and Sarasota counties feel the painful effects of the recession daily. It won't surprise many to know that according to the Brookings Institution's Metro Monitor, of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country, Bradenton-Sarasota is the second-worst-performing in terms of employment, wages, economic output, home prices, and foreclosures (neighboring Tampa is the third worst).

While the current economic situation is bleak, many believe it is cyclical and will stabilize. But what about the region's ongoing workforce challenges? This area faces a dual dilemma - businesses with long-term shortages of skilled workers and low-skilled individuals who lack the necessary training to secure jobs with family-sustaining wages.

A new collaborative of public and private funders has emerged over the past year to confront those challenges head on. The Manatee Sarasota Workforce Funders Collaborative, or MSWFC as it is currently known, is an entrepreneurial alliance composed of businesses, city and county governments, educational institutions, foundations and community organizations that will strengthen and accelerate regional workforce development. It is pooling nearly $2.5 million of local, state and national funds. Those monies will be a source of flexible capital, in the form of targeted grants, for innovative projects that:

• Provide basic skills courses and occupational training to workers in health-care, manufacturing, technology and transportation careers;
• Develop employer-based career pathways and
• Help partner organizations implement career-coaching programs.

MSWFC aims to:

• Support the movement of at least 300 people into promising, career-oriented jobs
• Support at least 10 area employers in their efforts to train and advance employees into mid-skill-level jobs
• Serve as a regional knowledge resource - conducting research and impact assessments and publishing findings that inform regional workforce strategies
• Stimulate greater regional planning and cooperation

MSWFC is not simply a job placement program. This is an opportunity to move low-wage individuals into careers with a living wage. It is a long-term, industry-specific intervention strategy. The role of this collaborative is to serve as a workforce intermediary - organizing key stakeholders and local resources to help workers gain the skills they need and to give employers access to the skilled labor they need. There is evidence from an existing funders collaborative in Boston (the SkillWorks partnership) that program participants there earn an average $4 an hour more than their pre-enrollment wages.

For more details about the collaborative, please check out these resources:

• MSFWC_Primer-10-24.ppt- PowerPoint
• National Fund for Workforce Solutions - PDF
• MSWFC Planning Retreat - PDF
• Service Providers Meeting Session Notes - PDF

Cross-posted from the Knight News Challenge Blog

and the Sunlight Labs Blog

The reason why we extended the Knight News Challenge deadline is because we want to invite and partner with organizations that share our mission, values and goals, and that have networks of software developers and entrepreneurs. Our first partner is the Sunlight Foundation and its Sunlight Labs.

You're part of a community doing amazing work on some hugely important issues of government transparency, especially at the state and national level. We're partnering with the Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs in hopes of engaging you in a complementary challenge: bringing your great ideas to cities and other local communities.

The Knight News Challenge is an annual $5-million contest to fund the best ideas for reinventing local news. The contest deadline for 2010 was originally set for October 15, but we extended it to December 15 in large part because we saw an opportunity to partner with more folks like you all. The Knight News Challenge projects meet three criteria: 1) use digital, open-source technology to 2) distribute news and information in the public interest to 3) to a local, geographic community.

In past years, we've already funded projects that are terrific complements to the work done by Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs. For example, take a look at one of our 2009 winners, DocumentCloud (which recently announced a partnership with the Sunlight Foundation). DocumentCloud will allow some of the most robust investigative journalism outfits in the country - organizations like the New York Times, ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, the ACLU, and Talking Points Memo - to share, publicize, collaborate on, and crowdsource the documents they're uncovering every day in Freedom of Information Act battles. Or check out the Transparency Initiative we funded in 2008, creating a microformat - hNews - to mark up news stories with metadata about sourcing, geo-location, and more.

Becoming a Knight News Challenge grantee would put you in the company of some of the leading innovators at the intersection of technology and information - folks like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, and Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of the Django programming framework and originator of one of the first Google Maps mashups, which evolved into his 2007 Knight News Challenge award.

We've got the money and the mission. You've got the ideas we'd like to fund. If you're interested, check out our website (the FAQ is a great place to start), and feel free to send any questions to newschallenge@knightfoundation.org.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Here's evidence that the Knight News Challenge projects, experiments we hoped will speed media innovation, are having impact: The Transparency Initiative announced this week that AOL and TownNews have adopted the Knight funded microformat - hNews - to mark up their news stories. They also announced that the Associated Press will start publicly using it by the end of the year.

Background: In 2008 Martin Moore from the Media Standards Trust and Tim Berners-Lee from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) received a Knight News Challenge grant to develop a project to help news providers "mark up" their news stories by providing additional information about the sources of the facts in their stories.

To do that they designed hNews, a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Additional information could describe the credentials of the reporter or the ethics of the news organization.

Search engines would then use this additional data -- the “story behind the story” -- to help people find news that is higher quality as they define it. A reader searching the phrase “balloon boy” for example, might find 12,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Or filtering by the type of news provider.

Moore and Berners-Lee have been working with media organizations on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow. You can read more about the project and the adoption of hNews by AOL and TownNews on Martin Moore's recent post on the MediaShift Idea Lab blog.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Managing News released its open-source code. It is the first out of six Drupal projects funded through the Knight Drupal Initiative to do so.

Managing News is a news and data aggregator that also maps and charts the information it collects to let users visualize the news. It can help teams scattered across cities, communities or people around the world share news and information. It can also be used as a news hub to show news on a given topic (think Google News, but focused on a topic or local community and with stories shown on a map). It has been packaged as a "product" so that any person or organization can quickly set it up on a web server.

It is also built to be fully extensible and used for other data aggregation and visualization purposes.  For instance, it has been extended by one group and is currently being used to visualize voting data for every province and district in Afghanistan as part of that country's runoff presidential election.

Below are examples of projects that could now be more easily done using Managing News:

D.C. bikes Map

Stumble Safely

Food Security Portal

Knight Journalism Tracker

H1N1 News Tracking

To download the code visit: http://managingnews.com/download or Drupal.org.

We thank the Drupal community for partnering with us to speed media innovation through the creative use of the free, open-source technology in communications.

Bill Fitzgerald, Knight Foundation grantee and alpha tester of Managing News, wrote a post about the project, "An Early Look At Managing News", where you can see step by step how the application works.

From Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation:

CPJ's Global Campaign Against Impunity -- the legal impunity too often enjoyed by those who would murder journalists -- has produced a bright red infographic detailing the cases of 758 journalists killed since 1992.  The graphic leads a new section of the CPJ web site launched this week. Here's how you can get involved in the Knight Foundation-underwritten Campaign Against Impunity.

The CPJ campaign follows up on the Impunity Project launched in 1995 by the InterAmerican Press Association.  In addition to investigating the cases of  journalists murdered in the Americas, the project reached out to government leaders to better investigate the cases. A public advertising campaign in print and online media included more than 400 news organizations. The decreases in the impunity rate have reached as high as 50 percent.