Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, recently explained that the newspaper is now as much a technology company as a journalism company.

This year’s South by South West Interactive (SxSWi) indicates he’s not the only one thinking that way. When the conference started 16 years ago, it was strictly tech, a convening of engineers, software developers and coders. But this year, everywhere you turned, it seemed, there was another journalist and or media organizations. And there were many panels about technology and the future of news.

It demonstrates how far media organizations have come in embracing technology and using it in “digitally native” ways to inform and engage their communities.

-- By Jose Zamora, Journalism Program Associate, Knight Foundation

FCC/Knight America's Digital Inclusion-Mignon Clyburn from The Newseum on Vimeo.

The Shorties honor the best in real-time short form content, and in keeping with this theme, acceptance speeches were limited to 140 characters. William Shatner congratulated winners via video and read some of his favorite tweets from @shitmydadsays (the popular Twitter account which is being turned into a TV pilot by CBS with Shatner in the lead role).

This year's winners demonstrated the varied uses of Twitter: Newark Mayor Cory Booker (@CoryBooker), who won a Shorty Award in the government category, used his account to help constituents with timely snow removal. Brazilian pop superstar Ivete Sangalo (@ivetesangalo), a winner in the music category, stays connected to her fans through Twitter. Writer Arjun Basu (@arjunbasu) won in literature for his self-contained stories on Twitter, and travel category winner Paul Miller (@twitchhitcher) was able to make his way around the world through his followers' generosity.

Nominations were open in January, and all Twitter users were invited to cast their vote in 27 official categories. The Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences selected winners from the top five finalists in each category. The academy included leaders in technology, journalism, business and culture, including Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen.

The awards were created by Sawhorse Media and made possible with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

"The Shorty Award winners show that you can make a big impact with few characters," said Gregory Galant, the CEO of Sawhorse Media, which created the Shorty Awards. "We're thrilled to see so many concise communicators fly in from around the world to accept their awards."

For a full listing of winners, visit ShortyAwards.com.

Annette Fuentes is Managing Editor at New American Media, a news service in collaboration with over 2,000 ethnic and immigrant news media organizations and is partially funded by the Knight Foundation.

In a historic first, New America Media (NAM) has partnered with The Field Poll, a nonpartisan, media-sponsored public opinion news service, to produce the first-ever voter survey in English and five other languages.

The survey focuses on voter opinions on California and the national economy; the Schwarzenegger and Obama administrations; and their views on race relations in California, whose population is now majority Latino, Asian and African American.

Reaching those diverse groups, especially Asian Americans, demanded a new, multilingual approach to polling. So after many years of discussion, NAM Executive Director Sandy Close and The Field Poll vice president Mark DiCamillo launched the ground-breaking voter survey, which polled voters in Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Spanish and English. They both anticipate this will be the first of many multilingual polls to come.

“By conducting additional interviews among [California's] ethnic voters in many of our 2010 statewide surveys, The Field Poll hopes to provide policy makers and the public with a more complete picture of the state's changing electorate," DiCamillo said.

NAM Executive Director Sandy Close agreed: “In a state where 40 percent of residents speak languages other than English, public opinion isn't measurable or truly "public" unless you poll in languages other than English.”

NAM has commissioned multilingual polls since 2002, including another historic first — a poll of immigrant women from Latin America (including Haiti), Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

On Jan. 27, NAM was back in Miami to release the findings of its most recent poll of Haitian Americans in the wake of the tragic earthquake that devastated their homeland. That poll, conducted by Bendixen Associates, interviewed 400 respondents in English or in Creole, depending on their language of preference. Its findings, including the fact that a large majority of Haitian Americans distrust the government of Pres. Rene Preval, prompted the Haitian president to respond to the allegations.

You can read more about NAM's polls at NewAmericaMedia.org.

The Shorty Awards honor the best producers of short real-time content on Twitter, who are nominated by users in 27 official categories and new crowd-sourced ones. The newly created Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences help select winners from groups of finalists. The academy is comprised of leaders in technology, journalism, business and culture and actress Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), New York Times technology columnist David Pogue (@pogue), entertainer MC Hammer (@mchammer) and Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen (@ibarguen), among others.

Here's a peek at some of the front-runners in a finance, food and government categories:

Nominations began earlier this month and end Friday, January 29, 2010 at 11:59:59 pm Pacific time. If you're already on Twitter, you can nominate and vote for your favorite users by using the voting box at http://shortyawards.com/.

New kind of video? Reporters at the Knight investigative reporting grantee  "mark up" the speech by fact-checking what's being said. You need to see it to understand. Click play.

Stump Interrupted: Bill White

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

According to the investigation, “those who do come forward can encounter mysterious disciplinary proceedings, closed-mouth school administrations, and off-the-record negotiations.”  CPI is launching a series of pieces on how sexual complaint cases are handled on college campuses. It is also trying to raise awareness and draw attention to this dilemma by encouraging student journalists to report on how their school deals with sexual assault allegations.

The Center estimates as many as 15 million Americans have heard about this investigation through its many media partners. The Center provides this guide for students interested in running their own campus investigation.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Communities with high populations of African-Americans or with socially conservative counties saw fewer benefits.

This chart shows the total each community type received from the program.

Chart taken from US government data.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Visualization of results from the recent Afghan election

This morning AfghanistanElectionData.com launched, providing an open data and open government vantage point into a controversial election.

The site is a data browser that shows the raw results from the August 20th presidential election in Afghanistan, using the data released in mid-September that gave Karzai a 54% lead.

It was first used internally by the National Democratic Institute to help their team plan for a runoff election, which was called off, and make assessments about voting patterns. With planning already beginning for a new round of Afghan elections for the provincial council (Wolesi Jirga ) this coming year, NDI decided to open up this application to the public to allow everyone to see the problem areas in the country and to start a dialog around how to reduce fraud and increase participation the next time around.

The main underlying tool that powers this site is ManagingNews.com, which was funded by the Knight Foundation this summer and just released in September. This is a great example of why we invest in open source applications - we never know who is going to build off them to make the next great site.

Check the site out in detail.

A NewsCloud experiment proves young people will participate in and contribute to a news and information community that goes where they live and share.

Jeff Reifman, founder of NewsCloud, created a Facebook site to distribute environment news from Grist, a site that provides environmental content daily, and another to distribute daily campus news from the University of Minnesota’s newspaper, The Daily. .

The environmental news site, Hot Dish, allows users to read, rank, annotate, post, create, share and discuss climate change topics.

The application also includes an Action Team feature where users can earn points for prizes by meeting specific challenges. For example, users can earn points by sharing a story, posting a blog entry, being active in their community through volunteering, recycling, taking part in an environmental event, etc.

The grand prize winner won a trip to Greenland by persuading their gym to start recycling plastic bottles, having three letters to the editor published, and recycling an old washing machine.

The Hot Dish site had about 2,000 registered users and 346 agreed to be part of the research project.

Nearly three-quarters of the group surveyed said they used the Hot Dish site to interact with like-minded people. According to a NewsCloud report, users saw the site as a place where their views and contributions were more welcomed than in other Web sites.

According to Reifman, more than two-thirds of the content was contributed by users of the site during the two month period.  More than 2,300 comments were written, 1,500 stories were written, 4,500 stories were shared and about 1,200 eco-challenges were submitted.

This study indicates that social networks are a good way of getting young people involved with current events and community issues. Not only did the study inspire users to post articles and write comments on environmental issues, but also to actually do something about those issues.

This could definitely be a stepping stone for publications and other media that want to increase user engagement and interest.

The study also tested the distribution of news using University of Minnesota’s student newspaper, The Daily. Although the outcomes were not as successful as Hot Dish’s, the lesson learned is that timing and good marketing for a campus audience are essential for obtaining enough data for a study.

Follow the link to learn more.