From our new community site Knight Pulse, a conversation with Stanford Knight Fellows Director Jim Bettinger on the program changes ahead:

Do you have a particular journalistic challenge, problem, or issue that you would like to spend a year working through to benefit everyone?

For more information and how to apply, read this post on Jim’s new Knightline blog.

Questions on the new program direction or thoughts on other ways journalism fellowships could adapt to the new media landscape?

More video conversations on the Knight Pulse blog.

David Sasaki of Rising Voices, a Knight News Challenge 2007 winner, has posted a new video with bloggers Thandanani, Sinempilo, and Zwelithini from the Rising Voices project in Kwa Mashu, the largest of Durban, South Africa’s three townships.

David writes:

Much of the conversation [is] Thandanani explaining why he didn’t want to know his HIV status and Sinempilo and Zwelithini trying to convince him that he should get tested. Enjoy the conversation:

Rising Voices is part of Global Voices, a global network of bloggers, and the larger site has a special coverage page and the below Global Voices Google map of HIV-positive bloggers from GV staff Juhie and Solana.

View Larger Map

Also, David also points us to this Wednesday’s live chat with Serina and Daudi “about how citizen media can be used to supplement and improve the mainstream media’s coverage of the AIDS epidemic. Details on how to participate in the chat are on Serina’s blog.”

Congratulations to Lisa Williams and her team on the relaunched Placeblogger site:

Placeblogger is a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovative ideas in local news delivery).

The 2008 Knight News Challenge Screening Team is in Miami today to work through all of your great applications. Here’s some of the energy in the room today:

Just some of our incredible team of screeners led by Susan Mernit: Debi Jones, Brian Oberkirch, Andrew Hyde, George Kelly, Chris Messina, Beth Kanter, Rosental Alves, Dianne Lynch, Joyce Barnathan…

MTV Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 (a Knight News Challenge—the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovative ideas about local news delivery—project) member Alex Parker wrote this review of his year covering the election for Kansas:

I posted my final video for MTV News’ (EMMY AWARD-WINNING!) Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08, a Knight Foundation initiative that used 51 citizen journalists (hate that term) to cover the youth movement during the election.

This project was rewarding, though sometimes frustrating. But looking back on it, it provided me with skills, insight and ideas that I never had before. I can edit a video like a whiz, our Election Day-tweets were posted on Times’ Square HD board and I interviewed Ralph Nader. Pretty cool.

He details other highlights of his year, including embedding with the 1st Infantry Division’s Dagger Brigade as they trained for Iraq at Fort Irwin, California, and being linked to by Daily Kos for a story on State Sen. Donald Betts, who “got smoked in the general election.”

You can read more of his favorite moments on his blog post.

Knight News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovation ideas in local news delivery) winner David Cohn’s project, Spot.Us launched yesterday.

An overview of the project:

As David posted on his blog:

The problem: Revenue.

Journalism is a process not a product, but that process takes time and people who do it professionally need to be compensated.

The Solution: Community Funding.

The process of journalism should be participatory - and perhaps one way it can be made participatory is if the public has the opportunity to commission the journalism they want to see.

Traditionally .001% of the public has a freelance budget to hire a journalist. We call those people “editors.” Spot.Us is an attempt to increase the percentage of people that can have an editorial influence.

Congratulations to David and the Spot.Us team; we look forward to watching this project continue to develop–

Knight News Challenge (the yearly $5 M contest for innovative local news delivery ideas that has just closed for this year’s cycle) 2007 winner Rising Voices has been nominated for World’s Best Blog in the Deutsche Welle awards.

From the Global Voices site:

Global Voices’ citizen media outreach project, Rising Voices has been nominated for a “Best of the Blogs Award” (B.O.B.) in the category “Best Weblog”. More than 8,500 weblogs were suggested for nomination and a jury selected the final 11 in each of 16 categories. Anyone can cast their votes online for their favorite blogs until November 26, 2008.

Deutsche Welle wish to give special attention to the promotion of freedom of information and expression around the world.

Rising Voices is a project that has provided micro-grant funding for more than a dozen community blogging projects in some of the most under-represented parts of the world (thanks to a grant from the Knight News Challenge).

Through the people in this amazing community, we’ve learned about social unrest in Bolivia through Voces Bolivianas‘ bloggers, we’ve gotten to know the new bloggers in Nakuru, Kenya from the REPACTED project, and in Romania from the Blogging the Dream project.

(Watch this video, and you’ll know who to vote for…)

Congratulations to the Rising Voices team of David Sasaki, Rezwan, and Julia Bhatia. Read all the Rising Voices news on the site or the feed, and remember to cast your vote here.

Don’t forget to get your application into the Knight News Challenge site by November 1st at midnight, Pacific Time if you’re planning to be part of this year’s contest. (Of course, if you’re like Lisa Williams, a 2007 winner, you can apply at the last minute–who knows, you might win!)

For more info on the contest, check newschallenge.org; if you have a good idea that fits our focus–APPLY.

Miro Local TV is a new project from the Participatory Culture Foundation, creators of the popular Internet TV application Miro, to help people find and discuss local online video. The project is funded by a $589,000 grant from Knight.

PCF Founder Holmes Wilson talks about the project:

From the press release:

“Budgets or local TV and print journalism are declining, threatening the vitality of cities and towns,” said Nicholas Reville, the foundation’s executive director. “But the explosion of viewer-created web video gives us a powerful new way to do local journalism.”

Each site will bring together relevant video from local videobloggers and sites like YouTube, using a combination of automation and expertise from staff at partnering private or public access stations. Curators at the partner station will develop a set of keywords that identify neighborhoods, local landmarks or venues.

Do you want this new local video hub in your town? Tell us in the comments.

Congratulations to the MIT Center for Future Civic Media team, a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner (remember, only two days left to apply for this year’s contest), on their relaunched Web site.

From the site’s about page:

The Center for Future Civic Media is working to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

Sorted by topic in the site’s left sidebar, the featured tools from the Center include:

extrACT, an action map of Colorado that “may amplify the effectiveness with which landowners and industry workers can collectively influence gas development policies through negotiation, regulation, legislation, or litigation.”

Comm.unity, “a new platform implementing a wireless, device-to-device information system that bypasses the need for centralized servers, coordination, or administration.”

Selectricity, “Web-based voting machinery for the masses takes some of the best and most exciting election technology developed for government elections and deploys it in service of everything else. A tool for communities to make better decisions in better ways.”

You can also find blog entries and watch the 2007 video or podcast of speakers Chris Csikszentmihályi, Henry Jenkins, Beth Noveck, and Ethan Zuckerman on how to define civic media; the Center describes their efforts as “developing the emerging ‘Fifth Estate’ of participatory news, media, and civic change.”

Thoughts on the new Drupal site? Use the Center’s contact page or the comments below.

Director of the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland Carol Horner died last week in the District of Columbia.

The Washington Post quotes Knight Foundation Journalism Vice President Eric Newton:

“Under Carol Horner’s leadership, the Knight Center in Specialized Journalism became the gold standard for training journalists to cover complex topics,” said Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “Because of Carol’s work, journalists all over America know how to cover difficult-to-handle topics — everything from nuclear power to the military to the economy.”

View a photo slideshow and find out how to share your memories here.