Congratulations to all the winners of this year’s Knight News Challenge that were announced this afternoon.

You can read the press release, great coverage from Nieman Lab, and follow the tweets on hashtags #knc09, #fncm09, #kncmit (all of them are aggregated in this CoverItLive that Greg Linch posted on his personal site.

Marc Fest is Vice President of Communications at Knight Foundation.

An article in today’s New York Times talks about some of Knight Foundation’s experiments in hyperlocal journalism. Specifically, it mentions Knight projects Everyblock.com and Placeblogger.com.

One of the questions in the article is what will happen to local news, as cities’ newspapers keep failing? That question has prompted Knight Foundation’s local news experiments for the past three years. In particular, we recognize that information is a core need of communities in a democracy. That’s why Knight Foundation funds community experiments through the Knight News Challenge; community information sites through the Community Information Challenge; an examination of policy through the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy; and studies ways to bring about universal access in local communities through a digital access project.

In the article, Journalism Program director Gary Kebbel says the news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be.” And that’s why Knight Foundation funds community news experiments.

From more than 1,500 ideas, 45 finalists will move on to the next round of the 2009 Knight Arts Challenge!

The Knight Arts Challenge is an experimental contest that aspires to bring together South Florida’s diverse community through the arts. Great arts ideas poured in from the community during the month of February, and the 45 finalists include galleries, an opera company, and an independent music store along with many more smart, funky, and meaningful ideas. Projects stand to receive a total of $4 million in matching arts grants, and the winners will be announced next fall.

The finalists are as follows:

VISUAL ARTS

3D Miami/Frederic Snitzer
To further position South Florida as a cultural destination by exhibiting the contemporary sculpture of 90 artists throughout Miami-Dade County.
Available Space
To enrich community life by creating temporary, interactive public art displays in empty storefronts and vacant lots in underserved neighborhoods.
BELIART/Bernice Steinbaum
To spark interest in the arts among school children by producing an interactive, educational DVD set that focuses on great works.
Christy Gast
To provide free materials for nonprofits, schools and artists by creating a clearinghouse for donated art supplies and surplus goods.
CIFO
To cultivate progressive architecture by commissioning young, local architects to create an outdoor urban refuge using green materials.
COOPER
To provide access to expensive tools by creating a communal facility where artists can use heavy machinery and metal-casting equipment to produce their art.
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden
To expose new audiences to contemporary art by exhibiting the sculpture of Barry Flanagan and Tom Otterness on Fairchild’s grounds.
Friends of the Bass Museum
To promote imaginative thinking among school children through a curriculum-based art program.
Girls’ Club
To nurture the career of a South Florida artist by supporting an exhibit at an alternative gallery space dedicated to contemporary female artists.
Goldman Properties
To create a hub for creative activity in Wynwood by opening a multi-disciplinary office, performance and gallery space for a diverse group of arts organizations.
Greater Miami Convention and Visitor’s Bureau
To raise museums’ profiles by designating May as Miami Museum Month, when residents can join one of 18 museums and visit another for free.
Jerome Soimaud
To artistically explore Miami’s African-American neighborhoods by producing a free art exhibition entitled “Black in Miami.”
Locust Projects
To promote experimental art by commissioning three site-specific projects to be exhibited outside the traditional gallery setting.
Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs
To facilitate the exchange of ideas and goods by creating a ÒCultural CraigslistÓ where artists and groups can post openings and workshops, and can buy, sell or donate materials.
The Nature Conservancy
To highlight the importance of conservation by funding the Miami exhibition of “Design for a Living World,” a series of works by leading artists using sustainable materials.
Sculpture Key West
To promote contemporary art in a unique, historic setting by producing and documenting an annual sculpture exhibition at Key West’s two Civil War-era forts.
Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
To highlight Vizcaya’s historic and artistic importance by commissioning site-specific artworks inspired by this National Historic Landmark.
Eli Weberman
To provide a cultural destination in Wynwood where artists can live, exhibit their work and mingle with potential customers, tourists and other artists.
Wolfsonian-FIU
To expand the reach of the museum by turning its exterior walls into a public art display.

PERFORMING ARTS

Actors’ Playhouse Productions
To celebrate South Florida’s diversity by producing the first-ever musical in Spanglish on the Cuban migration to the United States.
City of Miami Mayor’s Office of Film & Cultural Affairs
To enrich Downtown Miami by presenting weekly performances during lunchtime.
Florida Grand Opera
To attract a younger audience to opera with a student matinee performance that features sets using projected and animated images.
Florida Grand Opera
To cultivate a new audience for opera by giving away 2,000 tickets to a performance of Carmen through a drawing.
Miami City Ballet
To celebrate the ballet’s 25th anniversary by producing five company premieres by choreographers who have shaped the group’s artistic identity.
Miami-Dade Parks
To increase community cultural offerings by expanding a free concert series at neighborhood parks to include both traditional American and Latin music.
The Olympia Theater at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts
To expand the offerings at the historic theater — and ensure its sustainability Ð by creating an endowment fund.
Performing Arts Center Trust
To foster an understanding of the performing arts by bringing every Miami-Dade fifth grader to a production at the Arsht Center.
Mario Ernesto Sanchez/Teatro Avante
To support and enhance an award-winning Hispanic theater festival by adding a comprehensive Latin American theater conference.

MUSIC

Alliance for Musical Arts, Theater and Tutoring
To cultivate community pride by creating a Drum Line for 50 elementary school kids who will learn percussion skills and perform at local events.
Amy Rosenberg
To explore and celebrate Overtown’s rich music history by presenting an outdoor event featuring local musicians while historic neighborhood images are projected.
Chopin Foundation
To increase access to free performances by expanding the ÒChopin for AllÓ concert series, adding events in Palm Beach County and engaging local schools.
Miami-Dade Public Schools
To further develop local musicians by creating a mentoring program where professionals give guidance through master classes and collaborative performances.
Miami Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Inc.
To increase opportunities for blind and sighted artists by expanding the center’s unique music inclusion program.
New World Symphony
To attract new and younger audiences by commissioning local artists to produce videos to accompany the music during select performances.
Performing Arts Center Trust
To broaden appreciation for South Florida’s gospel tradition by expanding Free Gospel Sundays at the Arsht Center.
Sweat Records
To strengthen a local resource by expanding community programming and creating an online site exclusively for buying local music and art.
UNCF/United Negro College Fund
To expand knowledge of a culturally significant musical instrument by supporting the Florida Memorial University Steelband Program.

FILM

Broward County Film Society
To celebrate cultures from around the world through a free film and community discussion series.
Miami International Film Festival
To strengthen the reputation of South Florida’s film industry by launching a marketplace where filmmakers and industry professionals can buy and sell film rights.
Plum TV
To increase the visibility of the visual arts community by producing a documentary TV series that follows key players as they prepare for Art Basel Miami Beach.

LITERARY ARTS

Hannah Kahn Foundation
To foster a dialogue through an author reading series.
Kathleen Hudspeth
To promote traditional print media and artists’ books by creating a communal print shop serving the arts community.

OTHER

BankAtlantic Foundation
To increase exposure to the arts by expanding a program that partners arts nonprofits with local elementary schools.
Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs
To ensure a thriving future for the arts by developing a plan to secure dedicated public funding sources for the arts in Miami-Dade County.
WPBT
To help local artists gain exposure by creating a regional arts news service that would provide free stories and electronic press kits for broadcast.

For more details, see the Knight Arts site.

Reposted from Knight Pulse:

Tony Shawcross of Denver Open Media, a Knight News Challenge winner, talks about the suite of open source Drupal tools his team has developed for public access stations to automate tasks and let viewers determine the broadcast schedule.

How could you use these Drupal tools? Other thoughts on the role of public access stations in local communities?

Last week at the Knight Information Needs of Communities media learning seminar, Roberta King of the Grand Rapids Community Foundation (one of the winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge–here’s the full list of winners, and Grand Rapids will establish four neighborhood news bureaus as part of their winning grant–interviewed Knight President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen.

You can follow Grand Rapids Community Foundation on their @GRCitizenNews Twitter account.

This entry was originally posted on the infoneeds.org site along with other posts about the event that concluded yesterday.

At the closing session, Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen asked three of the Community Information Challenge winners (see the full list) to speak about their grants.

Minneapolis Community Foundation:

San Antonio Area Foundation:

Community Foundation of Greater South Wood:

Congratulations to all the winners.

On Friday, this year’s Knight News Challenge review team met in Miami to review the finalists. The esteemed group spent the entire day in heated discussions, debating the merits of the vetted proposals (this is a different group than the News Challenge screeners that met twice earlier in the contest cycle).

Look for more news on this blog, in the @knightfdn and @knc08 Twitter streams, and on the News Challenge site. Exciting details to come–

Opening February 1st, the Knight Arts Challenge is a community-wide contest to fund the best art ideas in South Florida.

The deadline for applications is 9 a.m. March 2, 2009.

The video below is the first in a series for the Knight Arts Challenge from Miami World Cinema Center (directed by Josh Miller and Sam Rega).

From the press release:

Last year, Knight Foundation awarded $8 million to 31 groups – such as sculptors, musicians, prominent institutions and recently formed galleries. The winning ideas included creating a two-year, fellow residency for up-and-coming artists run by the University of Miami and housed in the Design District; a Haitian jazz series; and little league-like network of children’s choirs serving disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Find out more about the Challenge on the site.

More: video from the event with winners of the first round.

Today, Knight News Challenge (the ~$5 million yearly contest to find innovative ideas for news delivery) winner Everyblock announced a partnership with the New York Times to add political news items to the NYC block pages.

When an elected official representing your neighborhood is mentioned in the NYT, you’ll find the mention on Everyblock as well.

Congrats to the Everyblock team on the new feature, and please leave comments and feedback for them on their announcement post.

Today, Knight announced the twenty-one winning projects for the first year of the Community Information Challenge, a five-year, $24 million initiative for help community foundation find creative ways to better inform their communities.

The full list of winners is in the press release, and you can learn what a community foundation is as well as the Park City Foundation’s climate change project in the below Knight Pulse conversation: (transcript is below video)

Hi! I’m Kristen Taylor, and this is a Knight Pulse video conversation. Today we’re talking with Katie Wright, and Katie is the Programs Manager for the Park City Foundation. Katie, thanks so much for being with us.

Katie: Thank you.

Kristen: So tell us more about the Park City Foundation and your role there.

Katie: Okay. Well, we are a pretty new community foundation. We’re actually the first one in the state of Utah. And it was started about four years ago and came under professional management only about a year and a half ago. And we’re located in a small ski resort town, and our focus is just promoting philanthropy throughout Summit County.

Kristen: And tell me what a community foundation is.

Katie: A community foundation is an organization, a public institution, a non-profit, that manages and invests people’s philanthropic funds. So in a way it’s an alternative to a private foundation, where people of lesser means can fully participate in philanthropy. And on the other side of services, they provide things to non-profit organizations. The first and most important is grants and funding, but also services and support such as volunteer recruitment and professional development and anything that can help the nonprofit sector thrive and do their job better.

Kristen: I see. How is it different, being a community foundation in a ski resort town?

Katie: We live in a pretty small town, and we have a lot of transient population, so the people who live here permanently all know each other well and form a really tight-knit community. But there are also a lot of part-time residents who come from a lot of wealth, might give philanthropically and be very involved philanthropically in their home town but don’t think about participating necessarily where they vacation. So that’s one of the things we’re trying to do is to pull them into the community and help them see that there’s need even where they are vacationing and just enjoying life.

Kristen: I see. And we’re going to be working with you—the Knight Foundation—on a project through the Community Information Challenge, so tell me a little bit about the project we’re going to be working on.

Katie: Okay. Well, we’re really excited about it, and what it is is we’re working in partnership with our local city government to create a website that is sort of a Facebook-style profile, but it measures a person’s carbon footprint and also water footprint. And the idea is that a household, an organization, a business can create a profile and measure what footprint they are affecting on our community and on the earth in general and then access information on how to reduce this footprint. And the real innovation is that we’re working with utility companies to have real data, so that every month someone can log in and see how the changes they made in the previous month have affected their footprint.

Kristen: That’s really exciting. What are the ways you’re going to be able to tell the community about this, and how will they be involved?

Katie: We are very lucky. As a ski town, we are sort of on the forefront of climate change; we’re the canary in the coal mine, because our culture, our economy, everything is based on snow pack and ski resorts. And so our city government and our local resort mountains are very involved in climate change and committed to innovation. And so we have support from the city, who is doing a community-wide footprint assessment that provides a baseline that we as a community can measure in upcoming years.

Are our reduction strategies actually affecting change? And we also have support from some of the local mountain resorts. And so we’re planning later this spring a big Save Our Snow event where we launch the website and also talk about how snow pack projections are for our town in particular. So in the year 2075, will there be skiing at the base of our resort at all, or will we have to shuttle people up the mountain to ski and things like that.

Kristen: I see. So where can people go if they’d like to find out more information?

Katie: Well, the best place to start is on our city government website, which is parkcity.org, or you can visit our website, the foundation’s, which is theparkcityfoundation.org.

Kristen: Great! Well, thanks so much, Katie. We’ll be checking back in with you to see how it goes.

Comments? Thoughts on other ways community foundations might reach their communities?