One Water Trailer from KnightCenter on Vimeo.

On August 2, “One Water,” a documentary narrated by Martin Sheen about the world’s  freshwater crisis, will make its cable television debut. The film, which was completed in 2008 by University of Miami professors Sanjeev Chatterjee and Ali Habashi, aims to raise awareness about the precarious state of potable water and how people around the world interact with it. Chatterjee is also the executive director of the University's Knight Center for International Media.

So far, the Knight Foundation-funded film has won numerous awards from various film festivals and has been screened at the United Nations’ Commission on Sustainable Development. The documentary, showing on the Discovery Channel Networks Planet Green at 12 a.m. and 9 p.m. on Aug. 2 and again Aug. 3 and 7, also has helped spark further media reports about the globe’s water crisis. To learn more, visit onewaterthemovie.org.

Knight gantee, The Participatory Culture Foundation, launched Miro Community 1.0 today. Miro Community provides a platform  people can use to build community-centered video web sites. The newest version lets users aggregate videos from designated video sources into one central video hub and easily customize the look and feel of your hub.

Key features from the mirocommunity.org site:

• Run a beautiful video presentation website on your own domain, without having to maintain the software.
• Works with your existing video hosting setup and workflow - no need to re-post videos.
• Works with free video hosting services, if you don't already have videos online.
• Lets you bring together videos from a wide-variety of hosts and sources, into one curated experience.
• Automatically import and publish RSS feeds of videos from any source.
• Create a discussion space for video about your community; strengthen your relationships with your community.
• Runs on open-source software.

Media in Knight Communities, including WDET Detroit and Bay Area Video Coalition, use Miro Community as a platform for their video sharing sites. Knight Foundation awarded a grant to the Participatory Culture Foundation to develop the Miro platform in October 2008.

Miro says they are always looking for local partners like nonprofits, universities, and other groups that want to run a site in their community. Anyone interested should email Anne Jonas.

Could you last a week without touching a computer? How about longer? 'Disconnected' is a documentary by film students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., in which three of the film students attempt life without a computer for a month.

The documentary, released in 2008, illustrates how connected our lives have become and how access to the Internet is no longer a luxury, but a requirement for college students.

Would you be willing to try this yourself? What would you miss most?

Over the next five years, Teach for America will more than triple its number of teachers in Miami-Dade county with the help of a $6 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. By 2014, some 350 Teach for America educators will reach more than 25,000 students in Miami-Dade public schools.

Teach For America is the national corps of recent college graduates who commit to teaching at public schools for two years and become livelong leaders in education. Today, 7,300 corps members and 17,000 alumni are working for fundamental change to ensure educational excellence and equity.

Kimberly Williams, a Teach For America corps educator at Miami Central Senior High School, and her 11th grade student Kettysha Collydmore shared their stories Thursday night to an audience of Miami-Dade corps educators:

Dennis Scholl, Miami Program Director for Knight Foundation, believes that Teach for America is the right program to create systemic change in Miami's education system.

"The achievement gap in this community's schools is a massive gap. But the good news is it's fixable – and Teach for America knows how to do it," Scholl said Thursday night. "Today, [Teach For America educators] are changing the culture of our schools, classroom by classroom. Tomorrow, we expect [them] to stick around as alumni and be the educators and advocates Miami-Dade needs to continue to move this community forward."

A feeder pattern for teacher placement has been developed to help ensure students success is maintained over time. Teachers will move from elementary schools to middle schools and from middle schools to high schools so that students have the opportunity to be a part of Teach For America for more than one year.

Read the Miami Herald for a story and an editorial on Teach For America. To learn more and donate, visit http://teachforamerica.org/.

With many of Haiti's news outlets out of commission, the international media organization Internews is stepping in to produce daily broadcasts that provide vital information for earthquake survivors. The News You Can Use segment is airing on 25 local radio stations in Haiti.

"We are supplying information because information saves lives," says Yves Colon, a Haitian journalist and Internews team member.

Time.com sheds light on the work that Internews is doing in Haiti:

To help spread Haitians who no longer had access to radios, Internews distributed 9,000 wind-up radios in January.

Shortly after the earthquake, the Knight Foundation provided $200,000 to help Internews get up and running in Haiti.

Knight Foundation CEO and Chairman of the Newseum Board of Trustees Alberto Ibargüen introduced Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to an audience at the Newseum today in Washington, D.C.. Secretary Clinton stated that Internet freedom should be a right for everyone, and that the United States has a responsibility in helping protect the free exchange of ideas on the world's information infrastructure.

Secretary Clinton mentioned the launch of a competition to improve information exchanges:

"... There are companies, individuals, and institutions working on ideas and applications that could already advance our diplomatic and development objectives. The State Department will be launching an innovation competition to give this work an immediate boost. We’ll be asking Americans to send us their best ideas for applications and technologies that help break down language barriers, overcome illiteracy, connect people to the services and information they need. Microsoft, for example, has already developed a prototype for a digital doctor that could help provide medical care in isolated rural communities. We want to see more ideas like that. And we’ll work with the winners of the competition and provide grants to help build their ideas to scale."

You can watch video of the speech at C-SPAN. A full transcript of the speech is available at the U.S. Department of State.

SnagFilms.com kicks off its SummerFest on Friday to celebrate its first year online. The web site will show one unreleased documentary film opening in the fall each week for a month. The first of these will be a Morgan Spurlock (of “Super Size Me”) film called “The Entrepreneur,” about an automobile entrepreneur’s failed attempt to bring a Chinese car line to the U.S.

Snag Films, a Knight grantee, launched last summer as a platform for independent documentary filmmakers and “filmlanthropists” to reach a wider audience. Anyone can watch the site’s more than 840 films for free, then "snag" the films and put them anywhere on the web.

As another part of its first birthday celebration, the site has launched a “Top Ten Film of Year One” widget, and “Movie Matcher,” which provides much-needed exposure to independent filmmakers. Users click on such tags as heavy, quirky, human rights and student filmmakers, and are presented with films that match these descriptions.

This week, ValleyIndependentSentinel.org - a site covering Connecticut's Lower Naugatuck Valley - launched with funding from the Knight Community Information Challenge. Here, Editor Paul Bass talks about how he applied for the challenge through the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.

The Knight Community Information Challenge helps U.S. communities meet their information needs by offering matching grants to community foundations to fund news and information projects.  If you're a community foundation, or someone looking to start a news and information project, you may be eligible for funding through the challenge. Applications will be accepted beginning Aug. 10. Find out more at informationneeds.org.

On Monday night, ICFJ (International Center for Journalists) hosted an event at Hearst Tower on the future of news. Below, video from the panel discussion moderated by Harry Smith, who anchors "The Early Show" on CBS News.

Editor of Time International Michael Elliott feels that we are "in the middle of a revolution" in news; "some of it will be paid for in ways that we haven't yet figured out."

Dean of the LSU Manship School of Mass Communications John Hamilton reminded the room the idea of professional journalists is about a century old; "what we're moving into now...is a world in which we have multiple models of what constitutes reporting."

Founder and Editor-at-Large of Public Affairs Peter Osnos argued that "there will be newspapers because communities will figure out a way to support them...traditional media will have a place--humbler, smaller. It's painful, it's not over, but somehow it will endure."

Webbmedia Group Digital Media Consultant Amy Webb feels the current situation is not a revolution, but "an inevitable continuation of the way that we interact with each other...much more dependent on platform."

(At the end of this clip, Smith asks who is going to report and who will hire the reporters; Osnos responds by citing the "new models" of Politico, ProPublica, and MinnPost.)

Thoughts on the panelists' arguments? Do you think the current state of journalism is part of a revolution? A "natural continuation"?