The Huffington Post Investigative Fund has been busy since its launch earlier this year. It's produced more than 50 stories, including an investigation of fraud in the subprime lending industry, a helpful guide to financial regulatory reform proposals, and a look at the challenges of implementing electronic records in the health-care system. It's partnered up with investigative journalism heavyweights such as the Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica, and American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop.

And now Knight Foundation is a partner as well. Today, we announced a $200,000 grant to support the Fund's operations, joining an illustrious crew of partners that includes the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, Atlantic Philanthropies, the Markle Foundation and of course, the The Huffington Post.

"The Huffington Post is an ideal partner for Knight Foundation," said Knight's President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen. "They are entrepreneurial and care passionately about meeting the information needs of communities." He added: "As a media leader, few are as innovative as Arianna Huffington. She believes in freedom and practices it. She believes in journalism and has hired outstanding investigative reporters and editors. And she believes in the power of technology to change the world for the better."

The grant is a part of Knight's $15 million Investigative Reporting Initiative, announced this year at the annual convention of the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization. You can read more about that Initiative here, and read more about today's grant in the news release.

When the Berlin Wall fell, optimists happily predicted “the end of history.” The post-Cold War world would see unparalleled freedom, with a wave of media development unrivaled in human history. Well, it didn’t happen that way. The world remains an erratic, unsure place, by both press freedom and media development measures. 2009 sometimes looks suspiciously like 1989.

 The world needs new media development leaders. Knight Foundation’s biggest international grantee, the International Center for Journalists, is becoming just that. ICFJ’s president, Joyce Barnathan, is the chair of the Global Forum for Media Development, with 500 members in 100 countries.

ICFJ runs the Knight Journalism Fellows Program. Its tightly target approach is attracting many new partners. Gates Foundation funds Knight fellows, $4 million so far. Other funders support $3 million in Knight fellows.

What makes the Knight Fellows so important? They do more than just train journalists. They accomplish specific things: producing high-impact stories, or new investigative reporting organizations, or new journalism schools or new freedom of information centers.

How does ICFJ know where to work? An international group of advisors identifies the world’s best media projects, ones that will create lasting, visible change, and matches fellows from anywhere in the world to those specific opportunities.

A little money can go a long way. $200,000 for a training fellow for one year in Kenya equaled $7.5 million in new government spending on health care because the stories done moved the community to action. In Indonesia, great reporting helped stop the dumping of medical waste. In Uganda, it saved lives with better vaccinations, in Bangladesh, it helped save more lives with cleaner water.

Why care about all this outside America? Because the modern world is turning into one very big city. Bad health reporting on one side of the planet can lead to a killer flu coming right into this room. Journalism in a connected world matters. Here’s the press release announcing $6 million over three years to extend the Knight International Journalism Fellows. And here’s where you can suggest a project or apply for a fellowship.

-- Eric Newton is the vice president of the journalism program at Knight Foundation.

From Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation:

Big news day: The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy has released its report. National coverage from the AP, Washington Post and many others.  Friday's launch featured pledges from the leaders of the Federal Communication Commission and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as the nation's chief technology officer, to use the report to advance universal broadband access, public media innovation and open government. CPB announced its committment to innovation in a partnership with Knight Foundation on National Public Radio's  Argo Project, to bring online reporting to a dozen cities. In all, Knight Foundation's new grants advancing the report amounted to more than seven million dollars, including more than a dozen in public libraries in places such as Charlotte and Tallahassee, and new nonprofit reporting projects like the Texas Tribune.

Aspen Institute is hosting a forum to discuss the commission report here. The grassroots group Free Press wants to push ahead with the recommendations.  New America Foundation is launching new media policy fellowships to track and critique responses to the report.  Interesting also that Google's new project (to spend millions on top ideas that people vote for), contain three that are totally in line with the Knight Commission's recommendations.  You can vote for news, data and open government here.

Back in August, Wired contributor Evan Ratliff vanished. Before disappearing, he issued a challenge: whoever found him would win $5,000. He purposely left a few obscure digital breadcrumbs to make the challenge winnable within five weeks, and then got lost.

Yesterday, the challenge was won by the makers of Knight-funded software NewsCloud, a Facebook application for creating social engagement around news. Using a mix of high-tech digital forensics and old-fashioned footwork, Jeff Reifman located Ratliff in New Orleans and conspired with the proprietors of a joint called Naked Pizza to catch him there.

You can read the full account of the sting operation at the NewsCloud blog, and more about the contest on Wired's Vanish blog.

Update - More on NewsCloud: A Slashdot post and hundreds of tweets later, I asked Jeff Reifman a little bit more about NewsCloud, the software he put to unconventional use to help locate Evan Ratliff. NewsCloud's potential as a way to engage younger folks with the news was recently studied in two pilot projects targeting 16-to-25-year-olds, in partnership with Grist.org and the University of Minnesota.

"What we found," Jeff said, "was that the design of the Facebook news application was great at improving daily news habits of young people in the 16-to-25 age range. We found that people started returning every day to get a sense of what's going on."

You can explore the NewsCloud app on Facebook at NewsCloud.com. And you can read more detailed findings from the study on the NewsCloud blog.

News21 has pulled together more 90 students from university newsrooms across the country to produce a number of deep multimedia reports, freely available to newsrooms everywhere. Funded by the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, the initiative expanded significantly over the last year, now including students from 12 different newsrooms who have produced more than 60 in-depth projects to be syndicated across the country.

From the release:

"Our strategy with the News21 students is to task them to tell complex stories in ways other young people might find interesting and relevant," said Jody Brannon, News21 national director and a Cronkite School professor of practice. "This summer, in a short 10-week period, their experiments produced some approaches that do just that."

Photojournalist Jose Castillo, an associate fellow from Texas who joined the University of Maryland’s summer program, studied voter data to see what it reveals about race and identity in America.

"In 2008, we elected a black president, and I was intrigued by how this speaks to who we are and how we’ve changed over the last 100 years," he said.

Castillo settled on telling the story Allensworth, Calif., a community founded in 1908 by a black man seeking his fortune, which has evolved into a town with a majority Latino population. To tell the story over time, he used an experimental interface that lets the user to “step to the side of the story” while providing a biographical sketch of the video subject.

You can check out the students' work at News21.com. More work will be added as the summer winds down.

Funded in part by a grant from the Knight Foundation, the Center for Investigative Reporting recently announced the hiring of 11 reporters, multimedia producers and editors for the creation of a new watchdog initiative called California Watch:

“This dynamic and accomplished group of journalists will drive our latest entrepreneurial venture and focus on solutions to improve the quality of life in the state,” said CIR Executive Director Robert J. Rosenthal.

California Watch is being launched at a time when the state is confronting one of the worst budget crises in its history, the recession is inflicting pain and hardship on millions of Californians, and the need for oversight is greater than ever. ...

California Watch is a response to the diminished capacity of newsrooms in the state to cover critically important issues affecting all Californians. These include the state of our public schools and community colleges, the impact of budget cuts on the health and welfare of individuals and communities, and the influence of money on politics. Other beats will be added within the coming year.

“Working collaboratively with news organizations around the state, our reporting team will help Californians become engaged and participate more fully in the democratic process,” said California Watch Director Louis Freedberg.

Take a look at the team CIR has assembled. It's a very impressive group.

Knight Foundation grantee ProPublica has been watching closely how money from the federal government's stimulus package is being disbursed to communities all across the US. And now, they've made it easier for non-journalists to track this data as well.

Yesterday, the team at ProPublica unveiled the Stimulus Progress Bar, a user-friendly, at-a-glance look at how much of the stimulus money has been spent, how much is left, and where it's going. They plan to update the progress bar every week.

This is part of a suite of tools ProPublica's released that have made it extremely easy to track stimulus spending down to the county level. Here's what's been committed so far in my home county in Minnesota.

This week, they used these databases to unearth two key findings in assessing the progress of the stimulus:

• Only 12 percent of the stimulus money has made it out so far.
• That money hasn't necessarily been spent in the communities that are suffering the worst from unemployment and poverty. (Their analysis found that stimulus spending so far has no relationship to either unemployment or poverty.)

ProPublica targets these tools not just to everyday citizens, but also to other journalists, whether in established news organizations or in emerging ones. At the top of every page is an injunction to "Steal our stories." (All of ProPublica's work is licensed under Creative Commons.)

Take a look. You might just get inspired to do some investigative reporting.

Eric Newton is the V.P. of the Jouranlism Program at Knight Foundation.

Jeff Jarvis  and crew at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism have launched a web site devoted to new business models for news. It features business-side information and profiles of the new "plants and animals" in the evolving news ecosystem. MinnPost, Voice of San Diego and more. Will continue to get richer and richer over the coming months as new business models are added. Worth a look.

The New York Times is partnering with Knight grantees recognized as innovators in developing new economic models for journalism.

In Sunday’s Public Editor Column, Clark Hoyt said The Times is working with Spot.Us to pay for Lindsey Hoshaw’s proposed report on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The NYT mention has gotten Lindsey, Spot.Us, and crowdfunded journalism attention from all over the web, including the Huffington Post, Poynter Online’s NewsPay blog, and Econsultancy’s blog. The percentage of visitors to the site who became donors increased to 10 percent from 1 percent. New contributors to the Garbage Patch pitch include Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, and Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen.

Hoyt also said The Times works with ProPublica on some investigative stories, and that editors and executives at the paper were in discussions about seeking out foundations to underwrite news sections or categories like the Science Times.

For more on new economic models, check out the City University of New York’s New Business Models for News Project.

Investigative journalism site ProPublica, a Knight grantee, is seeing the impact of its work. 

A joint investigation with the Los Angeles Times found that the California Nursing Board took more than three years to punish nurses for abusing or neglecting patients. On Monday, the day after the expose was published, Governor Schwarzenegger fired three of the six members of the board, including President Susanne Phillips. The board’s chief executive, Ruth Ann Terry, resigned on Tuesday.

Another series of reports by ProPublica exposed the environmental damage from hydraulic fracturing, or “hydrofracking,” injecting toxic fluids underground to break rocks and reach deep natural gas reserves. In most states, the process is exempt from government regulation. The expose found that the cost of controlling the water table pollution is not as great as estimated by some industry executives. Congress is discussing removing hydrofracking’s exemption from the Safe Water Drinking Act’s rules.
 
Another important story: On July 1^st, the Washington Post’s Binyamin Applebaum and ProPublica’s Paul Kiel reported that the Treasury Department steered $135 million in TARP funds to a bank in Hawaii, at which Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI) was a founder.

ProPublica is a nonprofit investigative journalism organization that reports and publishes news in the public interest. Last month, Knight Foundation gave a grant to them, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Sunlight Foundation as part of our new Investigative Reporting Initiative.