From today’s press release:

Leaders of the Washington, DC Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, Inc., announced today that former President Bill Clinton will receive the Foundation’s “Humanitarian Award” and serve as the keynote speaker at a January 8, 2009 Miami Dream Dinner to raise funds for Memorial to be built on the National Mall. The dinner will take place at Fontainebleau Hotel and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which donated $1 million to the Memorial Foundation, will serve as the lead dinner sponsor.

…

President Clinton played a key role in the Memorial’s inception and has remained an active supporter. On July 16, 1998, Clinton signed a Joint Congressional Resolution authorizing the building of a memorial and on November 13, 2006 he participated in the Ceremonial Groundbreaking. He has served on the Memorial Foundation’s President’s Council for several years.

An expected 22 million people a year will visit the tribute to King’s transformational impact on the country, and the world.

How would you commemorate King?

Knight Commission member danah boyd posted to Twitter from the Chicago Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy meeting:

You can watch the live webcast by clicking the top link on today’s Commission agenda page.

Do you have thoughts to share with the Commission? Leave a comment below or Twitter @knightfdn.

If you’re debating applying for the Knight News Challenge this year, but haven’t done anything yet AND you live in the Chicago area, you might want to come to the meet up on Thursday of this week. We’ll have two KNC team members and a local winner there to share info about the program, the mentoring program and peer review in the Garage and what kinds of projects KNC08 supports.
Check out the Facebook event invite for KNC’s Chicago meetup!

Thursday, September 25th, 6:30-9:30 p.m.
Columbia College, Room 219
33 E. Congress, Chicago, IL

Here’s what the notice says:

The Knight News Challenge is in the third year of a program that gives away $5MM a year to digital innovations. Do you have a big idea for informing and inspiring a geographic community using social media, Web 2.0 tools or OpenID? How about exchanging information via video, photos or text messaging? A way to integrate game theory with web browsing to support local community engagement? Come on, push the edge - we’re seeking true innovation!

Come to this meet up to find out how to apply, share ideas, and get a chance to talk to KNC evangelists to find out how to apply and improve your chances of winning funding for your great open source idea.

Check out www.newschallenge.org for more information or http://garage.newschallenge.org to start your application now.

Note: You need to RSVP to be able to attend, via Facebook, phone (847-942-6732) or email (miller@knightfdn.org).

This is a truly innovative program to push the edge of what digital democracy and discourse can look like and I hope to see online journalists, media folks, technologists, activists, educators and others I’m not naming here all apply.

(Cross posted to Susan Mernit’ Blog)

On Wednesday, J-Lab (the Institute for Interactive Journalism) announced the winner of this year’s Knight-Batten Innovation Award: Wired.com’s Wikiscanner coverage “which helped readers investigate and expose ego-editing and corporate whitewashing of Wikipedia entries.”

PolitiFact.com, with its “Truth-o-Meter” for 2008 presidential campaign statements, and Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information, a site to report incidents of political violence from mobile devices, email, and the Web, won Special Distinction Awards.

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Yesterday, Patricia Martin of the Culture Scout Blog posted about teens and the Knight Future of the First Amendment survey and research.

“It seems that when First Amendment rights are made relevant through self-expressive technologies, kids grasp it. It makes the case for why information privacy needs to become part of the First Amendment freedoms.”

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At the 2008 Online News Association Conference (follow the conference Twitter updates) that continues until Saturday, sessions and pre-conference workshops on media included a workshop on news games; Kurt Greenbaum of STL Social Media Guy blogged about how journalists are embracing news games. The Knight News Challenge winner Gotham Gazette is mentioned.

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And Heidi Williamson, who helps promote the Knight News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovative digital news delivery), has posted a new Seesmic video “What are the obstacles for innovation?” More than two dozen video responses have been posted, and you can join the discussion with your response here.

As acronyms go, ALF is pretty good, and it denotes (an alien life form that landed on an NBC sitcom a few decades ago and) the American Leadership Forum, a national organization with local chapters, including an active one in Silicon Valley.

On Wednesday, Knight Foundation announced a partnership with the Silicon Valley ALF chapter and a new $1.5 million grant to begin a new initiative called the Common Good Collaborative.

Dave Mills, the Knight Foundation Program Director of San Jose, talks about what we’ll see in the coming year (speaker series, forums, matching scholarship funds) of this three-year grant:

What do you think should be part of this new initiative?

On June 6th, Akron, Ohio was officially tapped as an All-American City for the third time.

As Glorio Rubio-Cortes, president of the National Civic League says, “the All-America City Award is the ‘Oscar’ for communities of all sizes.”

Mayor Don Plusquellic (second from right) accepted the award on behalf of Akron.

“This award confirms what the citizens in Akron already know about their city,” Knight Foundation Program Director Vivian Neal says. “Akron is an outstanding city to live, work and raise a family.”

Congratulations to Vivian and the Akron community.

Are you using new technologies on public issues?

The application deadline for the Knight-Batten award (given by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism) is next Wednesday, June 11th.

There is a $10,000 grand prize, up to $5,000 in special distinction awards (including a wild card award), a $1,000 citizen media award.

The Knight-Batten awards are given for: online news experiences, news games, mobile news ideas, citizen media, creative use of cell phones, Webcams, vlogging, podcasting, social networks, computer kiosks, new applications of software, content management systems and other advances in interactive or participatory journalism.

Last year’s winners included techPresident.com, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR.org) crisis guides, the Reuters Second Life Virtual News bureau, and the Washington Post’s citizen narration series On Being.

From the J-Lab site:

Honored are pioneering approaches to journalism that:

* Encourage new forms of information sharing.
* Spur non-traditional interactions that have an impact on community.
* Enable new and better two-way conversations between audiences and news providers.
* Foster new ways of imparting useful information.
* Create new definitions of news.

Entries from all news producers are eligible. Encouraged are both top-down and bottom-up innovations, those driven by news creators and those driven by news consumers.

The online application is here. Winners will be announced in the summer of 2008.

E-mail news {at} j-lab {dot} org with questions.