Mark Glaser of MediaShift blogged yesterday on the response so far to the Knight Commission (on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy)’s questions.

You can answer the questions here.

Below, an excerpt from the post:

Problem: Where can people find the local information they need, whether it’s about a school board meeting, a new construction project or a nearby robbery? Solution: A community hub, with all the information aggregated in one online source and pushed out via libraries, in-person meetings, community radio, small run print publications and cable access TV.

That’s my conclusion after studying all the input received by PBS Engage when it passed on the questions from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. Those questions all sought to get to the heart of one issue: What are the information needs of people in local communities, and what can we do as a society to serve those needs? I also asked that question on a post at Idea Lab, which David Sasaki answered with an excellent view of how mapping applications can boost community involvement.

Read the rest of the post with his eight steps, and please leave comments on the MediaShift post.

From our Knight Pulse community site:

Founding Editor of Chi-Town Daily News (a Chicago non-profit online newspaper and Knight News Challenge winner) Geoff Dougherty talks with Daniel Honigman, Social Media Strategist at Tribune Interactive about building community with Chicago news.

Find out who Colonel Tribune is, how Chi-Town does outreach on public housing, an idea about associating actions with a story, the importance of SEO (search engine optimization), and why to organize offline events for online readership.

Other ways to encourage community around local news? How is the online news community different in Chicago?

Last month, Knight Pulse, the community site on the future of news for Knight Foundation, held an event in Los Angeles with GOOD Magazine, tapping six community leaders.

More in coming weeks on these projects in design, urban homesteading, neighborhood installations, community service, and storytelling on Pulse and on the GOOD site.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Last week Development Seed released new open-source code in preparation for part of their Knight funded mapping project. This piece of software allows anyone to switch between mapping providers without writing any code.

Development Seed received a $195,000 grant to add a mapping tool to Drupal. With it, people will be able to geo-tag stories and see their location on a map. The developers are also creating a news monitor that allows people to aggregate multiple local news sources based on topic or issue to the open and free Drupal platform.

Knight Foundation’s grant to Development Seed is one of a package of six grants that made up the Knight Drupal Initiative, a contest that tapped into a massive network of computer programmers to get their recommendations for speeding media innovation. In separate posts I will talk about each of the grants.

The Drupal community is a group of more than 350,000 members, mostly computer programmers who write free software together, collaboratively, on the web and the individuals and organizations that use the software to publish content online. You can learn more about Drupal at: www.Drupal.org.

A video on how this new piece of software works is available on Planet Drupal TV.

Do you have innovative ideas on how to use this mapping tool to improve the way you receive, share and understand news about your community?

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.

Posted by Eric Newton, VP, Journalism Program:

150 enterprising Washington DC news people talked about using social media to connect with citizens and work with former rivals … this from the day-long NewsVision symposium March 30, Knight Conference Center, Newseum … in this video, innovators from the Orlando Sentinel, USA TODAY, Publish 2 and the University of Maryland looked at new ways networking can improve journalism … panel slides here (the first and last are the funniest).

The Newspaper Guild , the Knight Foundation , and the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism , sponsored NewsVision in partnership with ONA and the Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Good quote: “This is a crisis we will not waste. The answer for us is not to retrench and just to go back to what we do best … we have to innovate.” — NPR CEO Vivian Schiller … NPR is retraining in partnership with the Knight Digital Media Center . Videos of Politico’s John Harris , others are at the NewsVision site… also a new survey of online journalists.

Reposted from Knight Pulse:

Knight Pulse has partnered with GOOD Magazine to tap six community leaders in L.A. who are building community through five different projects (a recent LAist post on these projects gives more details).

The six community leaders, who will host events later this year (more information on Pulse and the GOOD blog soon) are:

Alissa Walker, Design LA (Pulse project page)

Eric Steuer, Communicating Creative Commons (Pulse project page)

Sonja Rasula, Community Service Fair (Pulse project page)

Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, Local Living Workshop Series (Pulse project page)

Edgar Arceneaux, Watts House Project (Pulse project page)

Thoughts on these projects and other ways to engage the L.A. community?

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Knight News Challenge winner, Tony Shawcross and the staff of Denver Open Media, had a session titled “NonProfit & Your Startup” at the SWSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX.

The main focus of the session was to discuss why they thought structuring projects as a 501(c)(3) was the best choice for anyone doing online publishing. The main reason for DOM was that a nonprofit organization is organized to achieve a purpose other than generating profit.

That is one good reason for structuring your enterprise as a nonprofit, but there are many more considerations that have to be made when deciding how to incorporate your online publishing project. The legal structure chosen will have an impact on the organization’s liability for defamation and other legal claims. It will also have an impact on the organization’s tax obligations, its assets and its management.

Many of today’s digital journalism sites have structured their operation as a nonprofit. Examples of this are ProPublica, MinnPost.com, Voice of San Diego, St. Louis Beacon and Chi-Town Daily News.

Choosing a legal structure for your online publishing site is important. You can learn more about how to set-up the legal framework for your organization on the Creating a Business page on the Citizen Media Law Project Web site.

If you prefer one business structure over another, please tell us why and comment below.

The graphic below is a visualization of this post. It was created using a program called many eyes.

From Rising Voices Director David Sasaki’s post on Idea Lab, the group blog for all Knight News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest about innovative news delivery ideas) winners:

In January we received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGO’s all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities – long ignored by both traditional and new media – to the conversational web. It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects. The growing interest in citizen media from civil society shows that we truly are undergoing a major transformation in how we inform ourselves about the rest of the world and who is able to contribute that information.

Of the 270 project proposals, the following five are most representative of the innovation, purpose and goodwill that Rising Voices aims to support…

Congratulations to the new Rising Voices projects; find out more about these five projects on the original post.

From the Knight Foundation community site Knight Pulse:

At last week’s DrupalCon in Washington, D.C., Pulse talked with Nick Aster about how the new Mother Jones site encourages reader action and support.

Find out what “reader-supported journalism” means to Mother Jones, and what they hope to do in future iterations of the site.

How do you think a journalism site can best encourage reader actions?