Claire Austin is a Journalism intern at Knight Foundation.

Freedom House released its annual survey of press freedom showing the unfortunate post 9-11 trend of decreasing press freedom around the world.

The latest: only 17 percent of people live in a country where they can express themselves freely.

Click “play”. Green countries are free, yellow are partly free, and red aren’t at all free. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the world starts to turn yellow and green. But then, after 9-11, it turns back to red.

To get involved in freedom of expression issues, pick a project to help out with by visiting the sites of Knight grantees working in this field. These include the International Center for Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Inter-American Press Association’s Impunity Project, and the University of Miami’s Knight Center for International Media.

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.

——

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.”

——

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.

——

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.