Today, the Knight Foundation announced the second-year winners of its Knight Arts Challenge, a five-year, $40 million initiative to strengthen the South Florida arts community. This year, $3.7 million in matching grants will go to organizations around the region for a wide variety of arts-related programs.

Winning projects this year include:

• Bringing back a live orchestra for the Miami City Ballet's 2010-2013 seasons.
• Creating an arts incubator in the Wynwood Arts District, allowing nonprofit arts programs to collaborate and share resources.
• Building new spaces for the arts at existing institutions such as the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and the Wolfsonian.
• Launching an e-commerce site for locally-produced music and funding new community programming at Sweat Records, an independent music store in Little Haiti.
• Cultivating a new audience for opera with a 2,200-ticket giveaway.

Knight President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen said, "When art hits home, it needs no explanation. Art can move the individual and, when it's a shared experience, can make the whole community better than it was, together."

The 20 winners were chosen out of a slate of more than 1,500 applications.

You can read more about the contest - including the full list of winning projects - in the press release. For more information on the Knight Arts Challenge, check out KnightArts.org.

Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

Peter M. Shane, Executive Director of the Knight Commission, gave a talk on the Knight Commission and its work on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, which was organized to recommend policy reforms and other public initiatives to help American communities better meet their information needs.

Here is a sample of what he had to say:

“Journalistic institutions do not need saving so much as they need creating. The 2007 Newspaper Association of America of daily newspapers in the United States was 1,422. At the same time, there are 3,248 counties, encompassing over 19,000 incorporated places and over 30,000 “minor civil divisions” having legal status, such as towns and villages. It follows that hundreds, if not thousands of American communities receive only scant journalistic attention on a daily basis, and many have none. Even accounting for community weeklies—a 2004 survey identified 6,704 such papers nationwide—it is likely that many American communities get no attention from print journalism at all.”

“The key thought here is that we need not just to preserve journalism where it exists; we need to create it where it does not.  This is all the more important because, without some remedial action, there is going to be less and less local news in the years ahead as newspapers cut staff, which seems inevitable as things are going.”

You can read the rest here.

From Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

The Federal Trade Commission released the agenda and speakers for its Dec. 1-2 workshop, “From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”

Up for discussion: how news economics are playing out on the Internet and in print; the wide variety of new business and non-profit models for journalism online; behavioral and other targeted online advertising, online news aggregators, and bloggers; and the variety of governmental policies – including antitrust, copyright, and tax policy.

Panelists at the workshop will include leaders from Google, Yahoo!, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post and News Corp. Eric Newton, VP of Journalism Program at the Knight Foundation, will also join the workshop. For more, visit the FTC  Web site.

Photo of Wired writer Evan Ratliff courtesy of oxmour on Flickr.

The November issue of Wired Magazine contains a fascinating narrative account of how writer Evan Ratliff disappeared and created a new identity for himself, and how Knight grantee Jeff Reifman and a community of dogged Web pursuers found him, using Knight-funded software. (Previously on KnightBlog.)

Ratliff's evasion was nothing if not thorough:

I began my planning months in advance. I let my hair and beard grow out, got a motorcycle license, and siphoned off extra cash whenever I visited an ATM, storing it in a hollowed-out book. One day over lunch, a friend from Google suggested software to hide my Internet address — “but all of these things can be broken,” he warned — and how best to employ prepaid phones. I learned how to use Visa and American Express gift cards, bought with cash, to make untraceable purchases online. I installed software to mask my Web searches and generated a small notebook’s worth of fake email addresses.

I shared my plans with no one, not my girlfriend, not my parents, not my closest friends. Nobody knew the route I was taking out of town, where I was going, or my new name. Not even a hint. If I got caught, it would be by my own mistakes.

But when he opened an account for his new identity on Facebook, it was the beginning of his undoing:

On August 24, a former Microsoft group program manager in Seattle named Jeff Reifman read about the hunt in Wired. Reifman, self-employed these days, had recently launched a series of grant-funded Facebook applications to study the engagement of young people with the news. From a technical standpoint, the contest seemed intriguing.

On August 27, working on a desktop in his living room, he created Vanish Team, a Facebook app dedicated to information and discussion about Ratliff. He announced it on Twitter, and people began clicking over to check it out.

Read the full story for the details on how Reifman's efforts sealed Ratliff's fate.

In other news about Newscloud - the application Reifman modified to locate the Wired writer - University of Minnesota researcher Christine Greenhow has published the results of her study showing how this Facebook app increased engagement with the news among a group of 16-to-25-year-olds. Listen to Greenhow discuss that study on American Public Media's Future Tense.

A new report takes on the question of the winners and losers in media economics during the dawn of the digital age.

The study, “The News Landscape in 2014: Transformed or Diminished? Formulating a Game Plan for Survival in the Digital Age,” is co-authored by Penelope Muse Abernathy, UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication Knight Chair in Digital Media Economics and Journalism, and Richard Foster, Senior Faculty Fellow with Yale University’s School of Management.

Just one chart from the work, below, calculates total shareholder return, taking into account share price and dividends. Traditional news companies, those falling lowest, are companies like Tribune or The New York Times. Conglomerates would be companies like AOL Time Warner. Niche providers are companies like McGraw Hill.

To sustain itself in the digital age, the report says, companies must 1. Shed legacy costs as quickly as possible; 2. re-create community online in an attempt to regain pricing leverage, and 3. build new online advertising revenue streams to replace the loss of traditional print categories.

From Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

The Giving USA Foundation, which publishes data and trends about charitable giving, released its annual report on philanthropy for 2008. The report shows that in 2008, contributions of $307.65 billion were given. Only 14 percent of the contributions were from foundations, which totaled to $41.21 billion.

See the chart below for the complete breakdown of charitable giving in the U.S. during 2008.

The preceding graph is from the GivingUSA Foundation's 2009 annual report: Giving USA 2009 The Annual Report for Philanthropy for year 2008, released this year.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

2007 Knight News Challenge winner, Citizen Media Law Project, announced today the public launch of its Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help.

OMLN is accepting applications for legal assistance from online publishers and media creators who meet the network's criteria of viability, adherence to journalistic standards, innovation, independence, original reporting, and public interest. For details on these criteria, see the OMLN FAQ.

You can also read a post about the new network at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

From Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

The World Press Freedom Committee points out that only 21 percent of the world’s people live in countries with a fully free press.

Cuba is on the list of countries without a free press. The Cuban government has restrained press freedom, the right to free expression of ideas and citizens’ access to information without government censorship, according to the Inter American Press Association’s report from the Resolution of the 65th General Assembly.

There have been at least 102 cases of repression against independent journalists reported throughout the country since April.  The number of journalists in Cuban jails increased to 27 with sentences ranging from one to 28 years. Several of the imprisoned journalists are suffering from serious health problems, but the government refuses to allow a special release for those prisoners.

There is currently a growing movement of bloggers going against state control on information and use of the Internet, which is still restricted for the Cuban people.

About 30 personal blogs with information about the situation in Cuba are being produced. However, almost none can be viewed from Cuba because of increased government surveillance and the blocking of those pages. The content is updated by collaborators in the United States, Latin America, and Europe.

It’s been reported that the government is attacking independent journalists and bloggers. On Nov. 6, police captured and beat blogger Yoani Sanchez and other independent bloggers in the street while they were trying to attend a peaceful demonstration in Havana.

The IAPA, according to the General Assembly report, demands the unconditional release of jailed journalists and government respect for the work of independent journalists.

It demands the suspension of repression against independent bloggers.

It condemns the intensification of government control of the Internet and the deliberate blocking of Web sites that disseminate information and ideas that do not conform to the line of the government media.

It condemns the recent detention and violent beating by officers of Yoani Sanchez and a group of independent bloggers.

Let it be known that these occurrences are not just happening in Cuba. Impunity is a worldwide issue. Click here to learn more.

In 2000, Knight Foundation began investing $19 million towards revitalizing Overtown, a once-vibrant area in Miami that had been hit hard in recent decades. Seven years later, the Foundation took an unusual step. As well as conducting its own grant impact assessments, Knight hired a reporter to investigate how the Foundation's investments performed and produce a public report, without pulling any punches.

The resulting report by Andre Oliver is a sobering picture of the challenges met in trying to transform the community. And the report itself is still making an impact. Most recently, a column in the Miami Herald this week about the continued setbacks in Overtown cited the report in its analysis:

In 2000, the Miami-based Knight Foundation made a major effort to transform Overtown with a $19 million commitment to 32 national and community organizations.

Two years ago, the foundation published an analysis of its effort, showing mixed results.

Among the main obstacles, according to the report: a lack of a common vision in the community and a void in community leadership and collaboration.

"The role of the city and the county in Overtown's development remains critical, but has been challenging,'' the report stated.

The Overtown report is part of a series of reporter's analyses funded by Knight. Each of them encapsulates valuable lessons about how our grants play out in the communities they affect. And they offer a candid picture of both our setbacks and our successes. If you want to get a sense of what Knight considers when making a grant, this might be a good place to start.

Cross-posted from the Soul of the Community blog.

Meredith Hector, Knight's program director in Bradenton, wrote an op-ed about the Soul of the Community study that was published in the Bradenton Herald this morning. Here's a taste:

Soul of the Community is a study of perceptions. Unlike the latest unemployment figures, we can change what people think and how they feel. That is why we can be experiencing one of the worst economic declines in recent memory, and still have a large percentage of residents who love where they live.

The economy is bad everywhere. Folks don’t appear to be blaming their financial troubles on where they live. Instead, there are other community features that drive people’s perception that the Bradenton area is a place they enjoy and recommend to others.

Luckily for us, these features also happen to be ones we can influence.

Two key features are perceived as community strengths in Bradenton: our social offerings (fun places to gather and meet people) and our aesthetics (the region’s physical beauty and green spaces).

But a third feature, openness — or how welcoming a place is perceived to be for different demographic groups — merits extra attention and work.

You can read the rest at Bradenton.com. Then come back and give us your thoughts.