Philanthropy New York recently convened a debate and discussion about the future of journalism and the vital role of news and information in healthy communities. Columbia J School professor Michael Schudson, co-author with Leonard Downie of the The Reconstruction of American Journalism, elaborated on the controversial report’s call for increased government support for news gathering activities, pointing out that there has long been public support of publishing activities through postal subsidies and many other streams of support. Besides which, he argued, many liberal democracies – United Kingdom, Sweden and France among them – have shown that robust public media can flourish without political pressure and influence.

Ford Foundation Program Officer Calvin Sims acknowledged some appropriate roles for government support of media, but cautioned against rash reactions. Sims, a longtime reporter with The New York Times, with significant experience in multimedia production, agreed that journalism is a field in transition, but did not concede that we have reached a crisis point demanding dramatic federal intervention. Despite some differences in emphasis, Schudson and Sims agreed that there is a role for some government support of media.

Although the Downie-Schudson report has gained most notoriety for its recommendations regarding government support for journalism, the report also calls on philanthropy to increase its support for news organizations and accountability reporting. In addition, it urges academic institutions and public broadcasters to step up their local news reporting activities. And perhaps its least controversial suggestion is that journalists, nonprofit organizations and governments should all do more to increase the accessibility and usefulness of government information – a recommendation that echoes in large measure the findings of the Knight Commission report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.

So far, the Challenge has awarded $7.3 million for 45 ideas in communities large and small. The projects include funding public interest online news sites; creating online hubs to engage communities around specific issues and examining a region's changing media landscape in order to help fill the voids, among many others. Click here to read about past KCIC winners.

Live chats will take place at noon EDT Feb. 16 and 22 at www.informationneeds.org to help answer questions about the challenge. Visit the site sign up for a reminder.

To help educate leaders of community and place-based foundations about media trends and information needs, Knight will host the third Media Learning Seminar March 1 and 2 in Miami. To find out more about the seminar and to register, click here.

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

As local news coverage shrinks, bloggers are bringing communities the news and information they need.

But what are the needs of bloggers covering local communities?

• Sustainability models
• Content
• Digital training
• A blogger network
• Designing skills
• Legal support

These were the most common answers to that question at a meeting organized last week by UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and its Knight Digital Media Center.  The goal of the meeting was to share ideas, discuss common problems and opportunities, and explore ways to collaborate.

By the end of the meeting a blogger network was formed. Everyone agreed to share content, cross-link to each other and start meeting once a month. A Google group was also created to keep the conversation going.

The Knight Digital Media Center started thinking of different ways to support local community bloggers.

If you are a hyper-local blogger you can find useful resources here:

J-Lab

Citizen Media Law Project

Knight Digital Media Center

Knight Center for Specialized Journalism

And don't forget to join Placeblogger

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.

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?

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

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?

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.

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.