I’m in Akron today, announcing more than $700,000 for arts projects that enrich and engage the community, as part of our national arts program. The largest grant – for $200,000 – is to renovate and expand the Summit Artspace, in order to strengthen it as a headquarters for arts and culture.

I love the idea and the space, but there is also an interesting Knight Foundation connection. The Summit Artspace is located in a 1927 Art Deco building once home to the Akron Beacon Journal, a Knight newspaper. On the day the offices opened, President Calvin Coolidge actually pushed a button in the White House, sending pulses across hundreds of miles of telegraph wires to start the presses churning in Akron.

We announced the funding in that very space – a great convergence.

Here’s a look at the other projects we funded in Akron, as part of Knight’s new national Arts Program:

• Greater Akron Musical Association: $150,000 to produce and present a semi-staged performance of Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess by the Akron Symphony, along with community engagement activities, in conjunction with the University of Akron and the Gospel Meets Symphony Chorus.
• Akron Art Museum: $107,500 to digitize the museum’s art collection in online archives that will be accessible via the Internet for a wide range of educational purposes.
• YEPAW – Youth Excellence Performing Arts Workshop: $100,000 to expand the group’s summer programming by creating the YEPAW Institute, a yearlong arts education program for urban high school students.
• Akron Civic Theatre: $50,000 to enable the theater, founded in 1929, to expand programming opportunities for community-based arts and non-arts groups who otherwise could not afford to use the venue.
• Cleveland International Film Festival: $30,000 to bring underserved Akron high school students to FilmSlam, the annual student film festival presented as part of the Cleveland International Film Festival.
• City of Akron: $30,000 to bring entertainment to Akron area residents through Lock 3 Live and to support the Lock 3 Summer Arts Experience for high school students who display an aptitude in the arts.
• Tuesday Musical Association: $50,000 to support educational outreach that matches the classically trained young musicians and composers of the FUZE! series with school-age and college students to inspire interest in the arts. Clara Knight, mother of Jack and Jim Knight and a Knight Foundation founding donor, was an enthusiastic supporter of the association.

How did this story on a group of atheists putting up a billboard in Charlotte - along Billy Graham Parkway no less - end up on the front page of the Charlotte Observer?

The controversy was first publicized through a post on the Observer's new Facebook application, Insight from the Charlotte Observer, which uses technology developed through a Knight Foundation grant.  Charlotte Insight allows residents to not only comment on the news but also post original stories and blogs. The issue then became a giant local debate with full bore coverage on the Observer's front page and main website, and on local television stations.

While there are more than 400 million Facebook users worldwide, most news organizations lack the knowledge, technical capacity - and often funds - to engage them directly on one of the largest social networks in the world. Jeff Reifman and NewsCloud developed the application to help engage readers in the news. They are now working with 12 outlets to implement it.

Previously, NewsCloud used a Knight grant to test ways to engage youth in news and information through Facebook applications for a student newspaper and an environmental newsmagazine.

We caught up with Reifman at the Future of News and Civic Media conference last week, where he talked about how the application works.

Shubhranshu Choudhary

As a Knight International Journalism fellow, I am working on a project that uses mobile technology to enable citizens in India’s most isolated regions to produce and deliver news. I am sending along a video from a Citizen Journalism Training Workshop we organized in February 2010 in Kunkuri Chhattisgarh. We trained 33 tribal citizens on basics of journalism and on how to report using mobile phones. Elisa Tinsley, Director, Knight International journalism Program in ICFJ and Bill Thies of Microsoft Research Lab in India also took part in the training.

In Chhattisgarh there are no tribal journalists or journalists who understand the tribal languages in the state. A survey showed that mainstream newspapers in the state gave only 2% of their space to news related to stories on tribal communities.

After three days of training, supported in part by UNICEF, these new citizen journalists have started reporting about important events and happenings in their villages. They are recording two- minute audio reports on their mobile phones. Once their stories get vetted, anyone from the community can simply call a number and get the latest.

A story about our new network ran in prime time on one of the top TV stations in India, so the mainstream press is beginning to notice.

www.openstreetmap.org

In the last few years, mapping has become an increasingly important element among the winners of the Knight News Challenge. Five of the 12 projects which won grants in 2010 involved mapping in some form: TileMapping by DevelopmentSeed of Washington DC; CitySeed by Arizona State University’s New Media Innovation Lab in Phoenix; CityTracking by Stamen Design out of San Francisco; GoMap Riga by two Latvians; and LocalWiki by the founders of Davis Wiki of Davis, California. In addition, a 2009 grantee,Ushahidi also made its reputation through crowd-sourced crisis mapping. Many of the projects out of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, a 2007 grantee, involve mapping, including Sourcemap and Grassroots Mapping

As such, Knight Foundation will be a sponsor at the State of the Map conference in Girona, Spain, which is taking place from July 9 to 11, 2010. Jennifer 8. Lee, the lead Knight News Challenge reviewer, will be available at the conference to explain how to craft an effective proposal and to field questions. The News Challenge is interested in all layers of the map stack, including data gathering, tile rendering and interactive consumer-facing applications.

State of the Map is the largest annual event for Open Street Map, a collaborative project to create an open-source, editable map of the world. The data from Open Street Map is used in Flickr and other commercial applications. In addition, Open Street Map volunteers helped generate maps used by many response and relief organizations in the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Knight Foundation has a new Philadelphia program director:  Donna Frisby-Greenwood, a social entrepreneur who most recently led Philadelphia Schools' Office of College and Career Awareness.

She also helped create the country's first online voter registration drive as executive director of Rock the Vote, Los Angeles.

Benoit Wirz, who has helped take companies from start-up to profitability, is also joining Knight in a newly created position: director of business consulting. He'll work with Knight staff to develop programs based on realistic business plans. Wirz, who recently finished his MBA at INSEAD in France,  will also consult with select Knight grantees.

The most recent issue of Nieman Foundation’s quarterly publication talked about news and neurology, the future of news, journalism education and news literacy, and bringing journalists and technologists together.

Brant Houston wrote about getting people to analyze and share public data for local reporting. Houston holds the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois, and said that digital tools can make both journalists and citizens into better community watchdogs.

Michelle McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center wrote about finding 100 news sites that are creating content and revenue as a fellow at the University of Missouri. She saw that media such as niche and community sites are filling the gaps in the news ecosystem, as described by Knight’s V.P. for Journalism Program Eric Newton, and predicted greater partnerships between journalists and community members but fewer sites that charge for access to news.

Burt Herman, a former John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford, talked about launching Hacks and Hackers with the New York Times’ Aron Pilhofer and Northwestern professor Richard Gordon. The group is experimenting with ways to connect journalists and technologists around their strong beliefs in the need for freedom of information.

Krissy Clark, a former Knight fellow at Stanford, wrote that good journalism is like a map because it can inform people about where a story is and the best way forward. She said that journalists can filter through the information from sites like EveryBlock and use technology to “reconnect people to place.”

Andrew Finlayson, another former fellow, talked about the semantic web. The semantic web is a system of linked data in development that are readable to computers, not just humans. An example of this is the WolframAlpha search engine that generates an answer instead of links to pages. Journalists will be able to use this system to organize data and find connections for investigative reporting.

V. Michael Bove, Jr. leads the Center for Future Storytelling at MIT’s Media Lab. He studies the combination of shared experiences with media, like watching TV with friends, and personalized experiences, like watching it on an iPhone. He thinks that mobile technology will change the definition of successful media from whether it has a wide reach to whether it reaches a targeted audience. Also at MIT, Sherry Turkle, professor of technology and society,  explained her views on young people, connectivity and deep thought in interviews with PBS Frontline’s “Digital Nation” and the BBC.  (Knight funds the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. )

James Paul Gee, professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, said that in games we learn by being guided whereas with content-driven media we learn by reflecting on what we are told. He said using games in journalism can help if the games’ creators focus on what problems the player has to solve rather than what material the player has to read. Knight funds an entrepreneurial journalism center at ASU.

Nora Paul and Kathleen A. Hansen wrote about their research project called Playing the News. They studied how games could be used to tell “boring but important” news and found that people wanted to be guided through ongoing stories. Sites with lots of contextual material helped people both see the big picture and get in-depth information. They used their findings in the Convergence Journalism class they teach at the University of Minnesota.  Nora and Kathleen won a Knight News Challenge grant to create the game.

Esther Wojcicki is the current Chair of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons and teaches high school journalism. She thinks all students need journalism skills, and received a Knight Foundation grant to develop a curriculum for high school English classes. Esther says it is important to give teenagers both freedom and recognition.

Alan C. Miller wrote about launching the News Literacy Project, which teaches high school students about the importance of First Amendment and finding valid information. Journalists visit classes to talk about their work and the lessons focus on critical thinking and recognizing quality information. Alan's start-up funds came from Knight Foundation.

Bob Giles, Curator of the Nieman Foundation, said that fairness in journalism is as important as ever. Reporting fairly, like respecting the wishes of the story subjects or looking at a controversial issue from different angles, makes stories more credible and makes them have a greater impact. Knight funds Latin American journalism fellows at Harvard.

Photograph by Rachel Gadson

Five students and one recent graduate from the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) School of Journalism and Graphic Communication are in Johannesburg this summer reporting on the World Cup and life in South Africa with six students from Shantou University in Guangdong Province, China.

The students will be in South Africa until July 11. FAMU students will produce the English content on the group’s web site, and Shantou students will produce the Chinese content.

Professor Joe Ritchie, Knight Chair for Journalism Student Enhancement, is leading the FAMU students in South Africa. Listen to Ritchie and student journalist Anamarie Shreeves discuss the project on NPR.

Over 40 media outlets published original stories about the new report from the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, released Thursday at the Freedom Forum in Washington, D.C. "Restoring the Balance: Dollars, Values, and the Future of College Sports" warns of accelerating spending on college sports and potential threats to college and university finances. The Commission calls for greater transparency on spending in college sports; new policies for distributing television revenue that value academic performance; and ensuring that college athletes are treated as students, not as professional athletes.

According to The New York Times, "The recommendation... provided a kind of counterpoint to the seismic tremors that have shaken the college sports landscape in recent weeks, moves prompted largely by debates over who should get what share of millions of dollars in television revenue, and why.  As Nebraska, Colorado and Utah have announced plans to switch conferences — and as others have contemplated following suit — the discussion has centered on wins and losses, television markets and brand image.

"Placing a larger emphasis on academic performance was one of several ideas proposed by the commission in a report aimed at encouraging colleges and universities to take a collective deep breath and slow the rate of spending on athletics."

From the Los Angeles Times: "There must be a bright line between college and professional sports," said Len Elmore, a commission member and former pro basketball player. "We're not saying that there cannot be an investment in sports, we're saying the investment needs to be put in perspective."

From the Louisville Courier-Journal: "It's an important message. At least someone is issuing the warning, and clearly. But when the organization overseeing the whole thing, the NCAA, is as rabid in its pursuit of revenue as any Fortune 500 company, this escalation isn't going to stop.

"I applaud the Knight Commission for trying to inject a note of sanity into this. But I'm afraid they're trying to close the barn door after Bevo is already out grazing in the field. And that green in his mouth isn't grass. And he's not alone."