Gordon Brown (Photo: World Economic Forum)

The World Wide Web Foundation (Web Foundation) today announced that it appointed former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to serve on its Board of Directors. Throughout the world, the Web Foundation leads programs that empower people to use the Web to nurture local economies and improve access to education and information. As a Board member, Brown will primarily advise the Web Foundation on ways to involve African communities and leaders in the development of sustainable programs that connect humanity and affect positive change.

The World Wide Web Foundation was created by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. In June 2008 Berners-Lee discussed the concept of the foundation with Gary Kebbel, then Knight Foundation's Journalism Program Director. On September 14, 2008, Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation President and CEO, announced a decision to award a grant of $5 million over 5 years to seed the creation of the World Wide Web Foundation.

Knight CEO Alberto Ibargüen serves as the Web Foundation's chairman of the board.

For more, visit the Web Foundation's Web site.

This week at the Aspen Institute, there is a robust discussion exploring recommendations of the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities. The 2010 FOCAS, News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities forum, will take place through August 18 and aims to arrive at specific action steps to help communities "improve their information health." The livestream is broadcasting now and the twitter stream, #FOCAS10, has been a great reflection of the discussion. Be sure to follow this important debate and join in the conversation.

Complete agenda:

Monday, August 16, 2010
(all times Mountain Standard Time)
8:30 a.m. – 8:45 a.m.           Opening of Forum – Introductory Remarks
8:45 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.         Plenary Roundtable I:  Local Journalism 2010
10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.       Plenary Roundtable II:  Public Media Reform

Tuesday, August 17, 2010
8:45 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.           Plenary Roundtable III:  Universal Broadband Access
9:45 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.         Plenary Roundtable IV:  The New Literacies
11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.       Plenary Roundtable V:  Public Engagement

Wednesday, August 18, 2010
8:45 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.         Plenary Roundtable VI.  Recommendations from the
Working Groups
10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.       Plenary Roundtable VII.  Moving Forward: Synthesis
of Action Steps

View the opening remarks of Knight Foundaiton CEO, Alberto Ibargüen below.

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s 94th annual conference (AEJMC) is taking place August 4-7 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel in Denver, Colorado.

Eric Newton, Vice President for Journalism at Knight Foundation, gave the opening remarks to journalism educators in Denver at the Aug. 3, 2010 pre-conference workshop, “Journalism Schools as News Providers: Challenges and Opportunities.”

Here’s what he said:

“In journalism school they taught me the story was the only thing that mattered.

Make a story good enough, it will change the world.

Well…

A great story can change the world, under the right circumstances.

But an equally great story will change absolutely nothing, if conditions aren’t right.

Why?

Because the stories we love so much are not the only things that matter.

Not just reaching but engaging communities matters.

Portable, personal, participatory technology matters.

Business models that support quality journalism matter.

The whole media ecosystem matters.

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities warns us that news and information are so essential to democratic life that we need get over the impulse to save yesterday’s journalism and get on with the business of creating today’s and tomorrow’s.

That’s why an expanded role for journalism schools in creating content is a timely topic.

I see this topic as one of four transformational trends emerging in journalism education.

Alas, and this is a bad group to confess this to, I have brought with me not a scintilla of data to back up this contention that these are emerging trends.

My defense is that it is all your fault. Years of working closely with you, people who hope to lead journalism to a better, 21^st century future have put me on to these ideas of trends.

I think these meta-trends are crystallizing around the four basic components of traditional journalism -- the journalist, the story, the medium and the audience – all of which are changing fast.

So here they are:

• Transformational Trend Number One: Journalism and communication schools better connecting to the intellectual life of the entire university.

When you teach students to produce professional quality work while in school, when you teach entrepreneurial journalism, when you teach the specialties of health, business, environmental or other advanced forms of journalism, when you teach it to computer programmers or citizen journalists, you are expanding the definition of who a journalist is and what a journalist can do. This is too big a job for journalism schools to do by themselves. So we see the best of you connecting with other parts of your universities.

• Transformational Trend Number Two: Journalism and communication schools as content and technology innovators.

Since even our top industry leaders admit no one knows what the future of news will be, you have just as good a chance of inventing it as anyone. We see the early adopters among you experimenting with new story forms, teaching everything from data visualization, web scraping and computational journalism, even developing new software. Some are experimenting with new tools as fast as they come out. You aspire to be not the caboose of the news community but its engine of change. To do this, more of you are learning how to innovate.

• Transformational Trend Number Three: Journalism and communication schools as the master teachers of open, collaborative approaches.

We see stories done by multiple newsrooms in partnership, different campuses working together, campuses working with news outlets, pro-am work with bloggers. We see the sharing of teaching methods and tools and more e-learning. An increasing use of open source software as a teaching tool. We see the teaching of students to work harmoniously in teams and small groups. When a story can be told in 30 different ways in 30 different technological forms, we need new ways of seeing the essence of the message and hooking it up with the right media. The leaders among you are showing how open, collaborative approaches make these choices easier.

• Transformational Trend Number Four: Journalism and communication schools as digital news providers who understand the media ecosystems of their communities.

Teaching journalism without producing real news is about as useful as holding target practice without real bullets. That’s why many of you do it already. But in the digital age we are seeing trend-setting universities going further. We see them trying to more deeply understand and engage with the people we once called the audience. We see engagement metrics, not just usage metrics. We see news organizations hoping to increase story impact by trying to figure out why some stories change the world and others don’t. This places them in the role not only of news providers, but of those who hope to understand the media ecosystems of their communities.

So there you have them:

-- Connecting with the whole university

-- Innovating content and technology

-- Teaching open, collaborative models

-- Providing digital news in new engaging ways

My hypothesis is that these transformational trends are keys to the success of journalism schools from this day forward.

My assumption here is that these new approaches are built on top of your existing programs to teach quality journalism, the fair, accurate, contextual search for truth, the idea being that how we do journalism is changing, but why we do it is not.

Now, are these emerging meta-trends, the very best practices of a few or just wishful thinking? You tell me.

If you don’t like these trends, go out and make up some of your own.

But while you are at it, let’s get the scholars in our field to do a lot better job in studying journalism education itself so we can understand if and how it’s actually changing.

If you agree these are indeed emerging trends, what should we do next?

Exactly what you are doing today.

Talk about and hopefully change your rules and tools, standards and practices, laws and statutes – the institutional things, accreditation requirements, make shield laws that protect students, all of those other things the Knight Commission and other reports have called for.

Change it all until the day comes when these are no longer emerging trends but the new traditions.

As in-depth investigative reporting from daily newspapers has fallen, not-for-profit news models providing that coverage are rising.

This week on The Diane Rehm Show, “Not-for-profit Journalism” looked at how non-traditional news creators are becoming the new news providers. Rehm’s guests were Bill Buzenberg, Executive Director of the Center for Public Integrity; Stephen Engelberg, Managing Editor of ProPublica; Evan Smith, CEO and Editor in Chief of The Texas Tribune; and Ken Doctor, author of 'Newsonomics' who spent 21 years with Knight Ridder.

All three news organizations are supported by Knight Foundation. The Texas Tribune is rapidly gaining audience for its statewide model. The Center for Public Integrity is transforming digitally to better serve new audiences. And Pro Publica is the winner of a 2010 Pulitzer Prize.

Knight Foundation’s $15 million Investigative Reporting Initiative demonstrates the foundation’s commitment to developing new economic models for investigative reporting. See the grants from the initiative here.  In 2009, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities highlighted the need to maximize “the availability of relevant and credible information. Its second recommendation is to “Increase support for public service media aimed at meeting community information needs.

The Knight Foundation’s Journalism Program funds a range of projects and ideas to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide.

The recent Sourcing through Texting Summit at the WLRN Public Radio and Television Studios in Miami, brought  journalists together to explore new ways for community members with limited Web access to inform local news and voice their concerns through the Public Insight Network.

The Public Insight Network allows newsrooms to better connect to citizens, and use their expertise and experiences to produce stories that are more insightful and bring public concerns to light. In 2008,  Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media expanded the platform to news organizations across the country with a Knight Foundation grant.

The easier it is for community members to reach professional journalists, the more they can contribute their knowledge and experiences to make stories richer. Perhaps few people in lower-income communities have personal computers with easy access to the Internet, but many have mobile access.

Jed Alpert of Mobile Commons explained that people with mobile devices text more than they do anything else, including make phone calls. The platform Mobile Commons developed with Public Insight Network makes it possible for citizens to report on a local concern using texting.

Using the platform, journalists can search through a database of text messages and filter them by topic and location to map trends and find story ledes. In Detroit, WDET is investigating how oversize trucks taking illegal routes through residential areas affects quality of life using Public Insight Journalism. Anyone can report on the trucks by texting “truck” to a local phone number, which prompts an automatic text asking for their location and the truck’s license plate number.

One of the brainstorming teams at the summit considers ways Miami media can connect to the Little Haiti community

At the Miami summit, participants from WLRN and The Miami Herald, WNYC’s The Takeaway, Public Radio International, and American Public Media’s Public Insight Journalism network spent a day in the Little Haiti neighborhood talking to residents about improvements they’d like to see in their community.

The next day, they brainstormed ways that residents could use text messaging so that local media and tell the story behind the news. John Keefe of WNYC led the brainstorm, which used a format developed by Stanford Institute of Design.

People without a personal computer or a cell phone can  access the Internet to contribute to news stories at the library. Linda Fantin, the Director of Public Insight Journalism at Minnesota Public Radio, has talked about the project with such groups as the American Librarian Association. Knight Foundation’s Library Initiative helps libraries become information centers for their communities.

The Miami team came up with prototypes for connecting Little Haiti residents to local media after their brainstorming session. They are available on PRI’s YouTube channel. For more on the summit, see PRI's Michael Skoler's post on the Knight Digital Media Center blog.

This entry was originally posted on the Council of Foundation's blog.

What role do funders play in the future of community news and information?

It's a question the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy asked in its big national report last year, and one the Knight Foundation has been posing annually to community and place-based foundations, the local funders with the pulse of their neighborhoods and cities.

This year, more than half of the 135 foundations that responded to our survey said they were funding news and information projects - for a total of $165 million. Interestingly, more than a third said they had increased their funding in the area in last three years - and expected it to increase in the future.

Foundations also viewed this funding as a critical ingredient to effecting meaningful social change, the survey, conducted by FSG Social Impact Advisors in conjunction with the Council on Foundations, found.

The portfolio helped foundations reach their objectives in areas like health, education and economic development.

We'd heard similar perspectives from winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge, a matching grant program to encourage community and place-based foundations to invest in news and information projects.

The views of the wider field suggest that local foundations are an increasingly important component in helping communities meet their information needs.

Mike Fancher, former executive editor of the Seattle Times, is optimistic about the future of news. In this interview with Leonard Witt of the Center for Sustainable Journalism, Fancher says that in a democracy, the public understands the need for investigative journalism.

Fancher says that in order to survive, news media must engage the public. They must think of the public not as a passive audience but as a community. He mentions Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism, The Seattle Times, and the UK’s Guardian as examples of media that partner with their communities to tell stories.

Fancher helped write “Informing Communities,” the report issued by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. He is writing a white paper for the Commission and the Aspen Institute on the report's recommendations.

Yesterday I attended the most recent of a lunch series organized by the Public Policy Communicators of NYC (PPC-NYC). The luncheon was focused on “Navigating the Shifting Media Landscape” and its aim was to discuss several major recent developments that are contributing to the fractured media landscape and how media policy affects these issues. The group of approximately 30 or so experts discussed several topics including the importance of preserving network neutrality, how major media corporations are attempting to dominate public discourse, and how to best focus the efforts of all our organizations in light of current and future media policy.

The discussion started off with Knight Foundation consultant Vince Stehle highlighting some of the key elements from the Knight Commission report “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.” He talked briefly about the specific recommendations to maximize the availability of relevant and credible information to all Americans and their communities, the importance of strengthening the capacity of individuals to engage with information, and the necessity to promote individual engagement with information and the public life of the community.

Because PPC-NYC’s members consist primarily of foundation communication professionals and leaders from progressive non-profit organizations, there is an inherent understanding about the importance of having free and open information in a society. And as Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen remarked earlier this week to a group at the 2010 Free Press Summit in Washington DC, "Information is at the heart of democracy."

Because of that inherent understanding, it was hardly surprising that the recommendations of the Knight Commission seemed to strongly resonate with the goals and efforts of this group. In fact, the group proved to be natural audience for this kind of thinking. Furthermore, there was also understanding and appreciation that without sound media policies that speak to the need for a clear and open flow of information, the basic tenets of not just the Internet are at risk, but so are the tenets of a democracy.

What I found most encouraging is that there seemed to be an agreement that no matter what area foundations and non-profit organizations are engaged in, whether it is health, environment, or other social justice issues, that the importance of sound media policy resonates with everyone. Without access to a free and open Internet, there are invariable restrictions on the capacity of individuals to engage with information. Without an open Internet, the ability to promote individual engagement with information becomes limited, threatening the work that is the heart of all of what we do. The need for an open Internet and access to technology is an issue that people can engage with, coalesce around and begin to integrate it into their everyday thinking and work. The importance of having information and strengthening the capacity of people to engage with information cuts across sectors.

We know the challenges we face, the digital divide, a lack of media literacy in certain communities, and an uphill battle against corporate interests. But more importantly we know what is as stake. Together we can figure out how to best implement the recommendations of the Knight Commission. It is up to each of us to do what we can in our own ways to make these tenets a reality.

-- Elizabeth Miller is a Senior Program Associate with The Overbrook Foundation.

Eric Newton is vice president of the journalism program for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

It’s good that the FCC has put forward the nation’s first real broadband plan. Having a good plan is an essential first step in bringing high-speed Internet access to all Americans — and that is an essential first step in achieving the recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, which argued that people must have digital access to be first-class citizens.

The commission’s report, done with the Aspen Institute, is titled “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age." (You can access it at http://knightcomm.org/)

It found that in our democratic republic, information is essential to the civic health of communities as good streets or clean water. People need (1) the information itself, (2) access to it and the ability to use it, and (3) ways as communities to engage with the facts we need to improve our collective lives.

The FCC’s plan is a start to the nation taking the issue seriously. Why is it so important? Let’s consider what’s at stake:

In the digital age, countries without high-speed broadband will be left behind, their citizens able to vote but not knowing why they should; able to work but not knowing how to find a job online.

In the past, we grew because we built the railroads and highways we needed to haul people and their physical things across this vast continent. Today, we will not grow unless we build the technology we need to haul our ideas and innovations around the world. Nearly two dozen other nations now rank ahead of the United States in high-speed broadband. That just won't do.

That’s why Knight Foundation’s President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen says: “Broadband access for all is essential to meeting the information needs of communities in a democracy. Without it, we’ll end up with a new category of second-class citizens. With it, everyone will be able to harness the social and economic opportunities of the digital age.”

Digital cities, the connected ones, will be the best environment for local news products, the most interesting laboratories for new ideas, the perfect places to chase the American Dream.

Knight Foundation has awarded a two-year, $800,000 grant to the Aspen Institute to commission policy papers and follow-up activities to make Knight Commission recommendations actionable. (Read those recommendations here.)

Earlier this week, the FCC presented the National Broadband Plan to Congress. Both the National Broadband Plan and the Aspen Institute's new project echo the findings and goals of the Knight Commission.

“With the release of the National Broadband Plan, the national conversation on the information needs of Americans in the 21st Century takes a giant step forward. It is gratifying to see that the Knight Commission’s efforts to foster a nationwide dialogue have had such a significant impact already,” said Charles M. Firestone, executive director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program.

The new policy papers will focus on local journalism, public media, government transparency and information portals, digital and media literacy, open networks, civic engagement, community self-assessment and universal broadband.

“This grant helps move to the question of exactly how public policy can bring about more informed, engaged communities,” said Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of Knight Foundation and a member of the Knight Commission.