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.

Marc Fest is Vice President of Communications at Knight Foundation.

Robert W. Briggs

Knight Foundation vice chairman Robert W. Briggs today received the 2009 Sir Thomas More Award. The Catholic Diocese and St. Bernard Church in Akron sponsor this award each year to recognize a member of the legal profession who is concerned for the community and has provided outstanding service in furtherance of justice and humanity.

Find out more about the award here.

Please join us at Knight in welcoming a new colleague and congratulating two of our own for a lifetime achievement award and a new elected position.

Welcome to Dennis Scholl, the new Miami Program Director for Knight.

From the press release,

Scholl will work with local leaders to identify opportunities for investing in innovative ideas and programs. His efforts will include leading the Knight Arts Challenge, a $40 million initiative to unite South Florida through the arts.

An art collector for more than 30 years, Scholl has lead local and national philanthropic efforts in the visual arts. He served as founding chair of the Guggenheim Photography Committee, of the Tate Modern American Acquisitions Committee and of the Miami Art Museum Collectors Council. He has also served on the boards of the Aspen Art Museum, the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art and the alternative art space Locust Projects, of which he was chair.

Congratulations to Damian Thorman, National Program Director for Knight Foundation on his election as Vice Chair of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

Congratulations to Susan Patterson, Charlotte Program Director for Knight Foundation, on receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Hornets Nest Girl Scout Council’s 4th annual Women of Distinction Award Luncheon. Here she is with her mother, who was her first Girl Scout leader.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Last week Development Seed released new open-source code in preparation for part of their Knight funded mapping project. This piece of software allows anyone to switch between mapping providers without writing any code.

Development Seed received a $195,000 grant to add a mapping tool to Drupal. With it, people will be able to geo-tag stories and see their location on a map. The developers are also creating a news monitor that allows people to aggregate multiple local news sources based on topic or issue to the open and free Drupal platform.

Knight Foundation’s grant to Development Seed is one of a package of six grants that made up the Knight Drupal Initiative, a contest that tapped into a massive network of computer programmers to get their recommendations for speeding media innovation. In separate posts I will talk about each of the grants.

The Drupal community is a group of more than 350,000 members, mostly computer programmers who write free software together, collaboratively, on the web and the individuals and organizations that use the software to publish content online. You can learn more about Drupal at: www.Drupal.org.

A video on how this new piece of software works is available on Planet Drupal TV.

Do you have innovative ideas on how to use this mapping tool to improve the way you receive, share and understand news about your community?

Reposted from Knight Pulse:

Knight Pulse has partnered with GOOD Magazine to tap six community leaders in L.A. who are building community through five different projects (a recent LAist post on these projects gives more details).

The six community leaders, who will host events later this year (more information on Pulse and the GOOD blog soon) are:

Alissa Walker, Design LA (Pulse project page)

Eric Steuer, Communicating Creative Commons (Pulse project page)

Sonja Rasula, Community Service Fair (Pulse project page)

Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, Local Living Workshop Series (Pulse project page)

Edgar Arceneaux, Watts House Project (Pulse project page)

Thoughts on these projects and other ways to engage the L.A. community?

Judges have recommended at least eight innovative community news projects, for a five-year total of 48, in the New Voices program. New Voices is a Knight Foundation-sponsored incubator for such ventures. Each project will receive a $17,000 start-up grant and may qualify for an $8,000 matching grant in the second year. Run by J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, New Voices “spotlights independent, citizens media initiatives.  And it provides technical support with online training in creating, developing and sustaining web sites grounded in journalism ethics.”

Three hundred and four projects were reviewed. Discussion focused on the fact that four years ago, these local news projects were started by civic-minded people, often with no journalism experience, who thought their communities needed more information about community life, laws and problems. These early grantees often had no idea how to publish information on the web. But they were dedicated, so they taught themselves. Often, to great success. For example, The Forum, in Deerfield, N.H., noticed that after they started publishing in 2005, and became the only public source of local news, voter turnout rose, more people were challenging incumbents in elections and there were fewer uncontested political races.

Now, however, sites like voiceofsandiego.org, MinnPost.com, St. Louis Beacon, Chi-Town Daily News and the New Haven Independent are staffed with professionally trained journalists, so the quality bar has been raised significantly. Local news sites staffed by professional journalists are showing more and more users what kind of sophistication to expect on local news sites. Judges discussed the need to better inform New Voices winners about training modules at J-Learning, Knight Citizen News Network, Knight Digital Media Center and NewsU.

The New Voices program has reached a critical mass where the concern no longer is finding good applicants – there are plenty – but, instead, is the sustainability of the projects, and learning what models work best. Some of the key models in the program now are projects 1) affiliated with university journalism schools, 2) from concerned citizens, 3) associated with libraries, library associations or community non-profits, 4) working with community cable access television, 5) working with local radio stations and 6) that are niche sites.

Lessons learned so far are that 1) frequent content updates are vital, 2) projects built on the backs of students don’t work when the semester ends, 3) projects that outsource web development aren’t sustainable because none of the principles knows how to fix things and 4) if the founder of the project for some reason has to stop working on it, that missing vision and drive often dooms the project.

Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab, will announce the new winners.

– Gary Kebbel, Journalism Program Director

Entrepreneur Susan Mernit attended last week’s media learning seminar on information needs of communities, leading a breakout session, and has graciously written a white paper called “The Social Media ToolBox” for all community foundations thinking about the best ways to include social media.

You can find “The Social Media Toolbox” white paper (pdf) in the resources on the infoneeds.org site; more video from the gathering in the event blog.

Last night, Knight Foundation sponsored the Shorty Awards (#shorty), which recognized notable users of the popular micro-blogging service Twitter at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, New York. (Knight press release)

Some of the highlights in the video below:

Congratulations to the winners.

How do you do think Twitter and other micro-content services could be used for innovative projects delivering news and information?

You can leave a comment below or tweet @knightfdn.

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?