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.

Alberto told the crowd that Knight sponsors this summit because of the foundation’s key beliefs – that information is a core need in a democracy, which thrives on “informed and engaged communities,” and that every American needs universal broadband access as a matter of basic equality.

He also referred to the universal access recommendations in a report by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. “The central goal is for a broadband plan. Our attention and energy must turn to the structure, laws and incentives to achieve that goal.”

Rather than focus on the policy controversies, Alberto said, everyone must work together in an open debate and be guided by three principles: (1) Competition and innovation must be encouraged; (2) The Internet must remain open and neutral and; (3) Broadband access must be universal and affordable.

Alberto shared a hopeful sign – that other foundations across America are beginning to understand the crucial role broadband plays in the nation’s vitality and are turning their resources toward this issue. He applauded Ford Foundation for committing $50 million over the next few years to support broadband access.

He concluded his talk by highlighting Knight Foundation’s partnership with community foundations across the country, which also are coming to understand the necessity of promoting informed, engaged communities through the free flow of information. Knight awards matching grants to community foundations through its Community Information Challenge, now in its third year. The goal, Alberto explained, is to fund creative projects that inform and engage residents about important issues in their community.

He urged summit participants to seek out support and input from all people – because everyone is part of this information challenge in the digital age. “Don’t just look at people interested in media and information to find allies in this fight.”

You can follow Alberto Ibargüen on twitter at @ibarguen, and the live conversation at the Free Press Summit at #fpsummit.

In opening remarks at today's America's Digital Inclusion Summit, Knight Foundation's President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen said:

"The FCC believes, as we at Knight Foundation do, that you cannot have a healthy American democracy with only 60% of Americans having access to modern means of commercial, civil and social communication. And that's the actual figure we live with today. That means that almost 40% of Americans are on the other side of the digital divide."

There is an increasing need for access to information via broadband. According to Pew Internet and American Life Project, the Internet has now surpassed newspapers as a primary way that American get news making it the third most popular news platform. Something must be done to narrow the digital divide.

To that end, the FCC is previewing it's recommendations for the National Broadband Plan today at the Newseum, in Washington, D.C., in preparation for delivery of the plan to Congress on March 17. The plan aims to have broadband in the homes of 90% of Americans by 2020.

Julius Genachowski, FCC Chairman, said:

"In order to ensure long term American competitiveness and prosperity, we must not leave one-third of the nation behind. The National Broadband Plan provides a vision for federal, state, and local leadership and partnerships with private and non-profit communities that will bridge the digital divide and transform America into a nation where broadband expands opportunities for all."

We'll post more about America's Digital Inclusion Summit as it happens.

Waldman is charged with creating a report on the current state of the media and the information needs of communities.  The report will include recommendations for FCC and government policies.

Journalism is one part of it, but it is broader than that. We have been using the phrase "information needs of communities," which is borrowed from the Knight Commission [which produced a report on the future of journalism]. The reason we did that is because when you are looking at the future of media now, you need to look not only at traditional journalistic enterprises, but things like whether the government is providing information in ways that make it easier for journalists doing accountability journalism or make it easier for citizens to hold institutions accountable. That is why we are using lingo that is a little bit broader than just local news.

Waldman is quick to point out that the FCC will not be offering a bailout for either traditional or new media, but that it has a responsibility to figure out what the government should do to preserve the public-service and democratic functions that the media provides.

You can read the entire Broadcast & Cable interview here. The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy report is available at http://report.knightcomm.org/.

The FCC has launched a website for The Future of Media and the Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Age at http://reboot.fcc.gov/futureofmedia. Americans are encouraged to offer their comments and opinions on the site.

So Knight is giving $200,000 to an international media development group called Internews to keep the country's radio stations broadcasting during the disaster:

Knight Foundation officials said they fear broken communication systems could prevent aid from being distributed efficiently, and the grant is meant to help retain the country's battered information infrastructure.

Without that system in place, Internews officials warned, survivors might not know where to go for food, medicine, or how to find missing friends and family.

Internews plans to ship a 300-watt transmitter from Paris to Port-au-Prince, where it is expected to broadcast messages that can be picked up by radios up to 30 miles outside of the demolished city.

The Knight Foundation reported that Internews estimated at least 12 of the city's radio stations and one national broadcaster got back on the air Saturday.

For more information about the grant, read the story from the Miami Herald. Knight grantee Ushahidi has compiled a list of ways you can help survivors in Haiti.

Way back in the age of paper, in 1986, professor James Beniger, then at Harvard, produced a useful chart on the civilian labor force of the United States. It showed how the bulk of American workers had moved during the past two centuries from working in agriculture to industry to service, and now, to information. Point being: the digital age didn’t just sneak up on us. It’s been a long, slow evolution. So shame on us for not changing our rules and laws and institutions for this new age.

We were well warned. Just after World War II, the Hutchins Commission said that traditional media could do much better: they should take on the social responsibility of providing the news “in a context that gives it meaning.” In the 1960s, the Kerner Commission said mainstream media wasn’t diverse enough to properly tell the story of this changing nation. Same decade: the Carnegie Commission said the status quo was simply not working, that public broadcasting must be created to fill the gap.

After that, a stream of reports — from the University of Pennsylvania, from Columbia University and others — agreed and repeated the same three fundamental findings:

• Hutchins: Our news systems are not good enough,
• Kerner: They don’t engage everyone,
• Carnegie: We need alternatives.

Here comes digital media, and — boom! — an explosion of alternatives. And we’re all — shocked? Apparently. So let’s try it again. This time, the big report comes from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, prepared by the Aspen Institute with a grant from Knight Foundation, where I work.

A new examination of a familiar problem

Why a new commission? We are now deep into the second decade of the World Wide Web. It was our hope that when our leaders were finally ready to change things, they would consider a new perspective. Hutchins, Kerner and Carnegie and the others focused on what should be done to improve, diversify, add to — and nowadays the talk is to save — traditional media.

The Knight Commission started with communities, by visiting them and hearing from their residents. News and information, the commission says, are as important to communities as good schools, safe streets or clean air. Journalism, it says, does not need saving so much as it needs creating.

As a former newspaper editor, that last point seems pretty important to me. Of the nation’s 30,000 burgs, towns, suburbs and cities, how many are thoroughly covered by the current news system? Ten percent? Five? Less? We’re talking about knowing how to get, sometimes for the first time, the news and information we need to run our communities and live our lives.

Is the Knight Commission making a difference? We hope so. The Federal Communications Commission has hired Internet expert Steve Waldman to study the agency, top to bottom, thinking of reforms with Knight’s 15 recommendations in mind. Free Press, the nation’s largest grassroots media policy group, embraced the report, especially its call for universal affordable broadband. Ernie Wilson, dean of USC’s Annenberg School and chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, announced he is boosting innovation in public media. CPB backed NPR’s Project Argo in a partnership with Knight Foundation.

Community lawmakers are agreeing with commissioner and former FCC chair Michael Powell’s points about “information healthy communities,” about the role of open government and public web sites in local information flow. Commissioner Reed Hundt, also a former FCC chair, presented the Knight findings to the Federal Trade Commission.

Librarians across the country are pushing the role they can play as digital training and access centers. In addition to its dozens of media innovation grants, Knight Foundation itself took the commission’s advice: it has made more than $5 million in grants to libraries.

Taking the next steps

Now what? The policy work needs to come down to the detail level. Steve Coll and New America Foundation are among those thinking about that. How can we really spur more marketplace innovation? How can government rules and laws make it easier for newspapers to be nonprofits, treat student and nonprofit journalists equally, require the teaching of news literacy?

The hard part is ahead of us: that is, involving every aspect of our communities in this issue, governments, nonprofits, traditional media, schools, universities, libraries, churches, social groups — and, especially, citizens themselves. How do you do that? How do you make “news and information” everyone’s issue? It’s a tall order, perhaps the most difficult thing of all.

Universities could help here. Nearly two thirds of the nation’s high school graduates at least start out in a college or university of some kind. These institutions could make news literacy courses mandatory for incoming students. Understanding and being able to navigate the exploding world of news and information is as fundamental to the college students of our nation as knowing English. Stony Brook has already been paving that path. There, nearly 5,000 students have taken news literacy under the first university-wide course of its kind.

Colleges could set an example for the rest of our institutions. We are, after all, at the dawn of a new age. Who a journalist is, what a story is, what medium works, and how to manage the new interactive relationship with the people formerly known as the audience — all of these are changing as we speak. The complete metamorphosis of how a society connects the data and events of daily life to the issues and ideas that can better its life — would seem to be something colleges should want all of its students to think about.

This is hardly a short-term project. It took more than 200 years for America to change from a country where most people work growing food to one where most people work growing information. It will take time for the wholesale rewriting of America’s media policies, not to mention getting up the guts to spend the trillion dollars or more needed to remake our access to high speed digital systems and ability to use them.

Yet all of this is needed for America to become an information-healthy nation. A nation without universal, affordable broadband is like a nation without highways and railroads. We would be stuck on the surface streets of the new economy, tracing our fall from a global force to a secondary society.

More than 70 years after Hutchins, the basic story is still the same. The country’s news and information systems still aren’t good enough, still don’t engage everyone and still invite alternatives. It’s time to start doing something about this issue. Our rules, the laws, the policies — even the high school and college classes we teach — these things matter to how the news ecosystem in any given community is shaped. They can speed innovation or stunt it. So pick a recommendation — the Knight Commission lists 15 — and have at it.