On Wednesday June 10, Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen gave a keynote speech at the League of American Orchestras National Conference held in Orchestra Hall, Chicago. 

The audience was encouraged to adapt music performance so that indeed the art form does not die, but instead persists in a digital medium enhanced by greater communal accessibility. Find his speech here.

I’m here in New York City for the 6th Annual Games for Change Festival. This festival brings together nonprofits, game designers, academics, journalists and foundations who believe in the power and potential of using digital games for social change.  

Last night Knight Foundation and Games for Change  honored the best News Games of the field at the Knight News Game Awards.

The winner of the award was Play the News by Impact Games.

September 12th — A Toy World received a lifetime achievement award.

Budget Maze and Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City received honorable mentions.

Congratulations to the winners!

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

“In the future there will be a new breed of journalists who can do all this (multimedia journalism) and it’s second nature to them,” said Travis Fox last Friday at this year’s International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

Fox is the Emmy Award-winning video producer for WashingtonPost.com. He was explaining that in contrast to the past, when online news sites used video to generate interest in their sites and to get extra revenue from video ads, in the future, video will be used to generate multiple revenue streams, because video/multimedia material can be used for any medium.

Fox explained how the script and stills from his video can be used for an article in the newspaper and the online edition of the daily, while the sound file can supply radio content, and the video itself can be used for a television story.

This was part of the discussion at a panel I moderated about multimedia storytelling and the future of online journalism at this year’s symposium, which gathered 298 journalists and new media experts from around the world.

The other presentations for this panel were made by María Teresa Ronderos, Editor, Semana.com (Colombia); Fred Ritchin, Director, PixelPress; David LaFontaine, Partner, Artesian Media and Managing Editor, Newspaper Association of America’s Audience Planbook; Bill Gentile, Journalist-in-Residence, American University; and Travis Fox, Video Producer, WashingtonPost.com.

We are interested in your thoughts. Please comment below.

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.

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.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, gave the opening remarks at the SWSW Interactive Festival at the Austin Convention Center.

Hsieh talked about how a genuine customer service culture and setting core values extended the reach and strengthened their brand.

How can Knight Foundation translate this into better grantmaking? Would our grantees improve the self-sustainability of their projects by developing a set of core values and focusing on customer service? We expect these two elements from every grantee and we ask questions that cover these elements in general, but are they something that we should specifically ask for in our application process?

The craft of journalism is all about core values and public service. How can core values and public/customer service improve the flow of news and information in communities and increase readership and civic engagement?

Please share your thoughts with us.

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

Editor’s note: Lee Oglesby has been interning with the Knight Communications department this summer. Today is her last day. This post concerns the UNITY Convention, which was held last week in Chicago. Knight is a sponsor of the event.

The four days of workshops at UNITY 2008 Convention may have changed my mind a bit about new tools for journalism. The theme of the conference this year was “A new journalism for a changing world” so, naturally, everyone was anxious to discuss their ideas for the future of journalism in ways that would actually work right now.

I went to two sessions that were particularly influential for me. The first was hosted by Knight’s own J-Lab and brought together a panel of people who had worked with citizen journalism projects and knew the ins and outs.

Citizen media, for them, could mean a woman in Somalia sending a news lead to a BBC correspondent in London. It could also mean a student journalist gaining real-world experience by reporting on an event in a neighborhood near his school. But all forms of participatory media are ways of connecting professional journalists with citizens who could help them build a better story. Framing the concept for me that way (instead of theorizing about questionable people off the street writing stories for the paper) made it easier to understand.

The other session I attended was hosted by KYW NewsRadio and was designed to teach newspaper journalists how to write for radio. On the outside, it was just a workshop, but I got more from it.

The session reminded me that, although newspapers may be doing badly, media in the form of radio and television is doing just fine. Inevitably, during the question and answer portion of the session, a member of the audience brought up the growing field of online media and how radio was handling it. Their answer was typical of those I had heard from other Unity attendees: their hearts are still in radio (or television, or print media), but the Web site provides information that they can’t include in the limited space for each story.

So I leave Unity with a positive outlook towards my (possible) future in journalism. The journalism world won’t be completely detached from the one I grew up with, but it will be enhanced by digital media. The people behind the innovations know what they’re doing and know how to maintain integrity, even if the experiments fail.

Editor’s note: Lee Oglesby interns with the Knight Communications department this summer. This post is from the day before the UNITY Conference, which goes all this week in Chicago. Knight is a sponsor of the conference, and convened all journalism grantees on Tuesday to discuss media innovation.

A few of the presentations at Knight’s Journalism Grantee Meeting here in Chicago Tuesday gave me some interesting ways to think about journalism in the digital era and the role I play as a reader.

Knight Chair Rosental Alves talked about the deconstruction of the print newspaper, and stressed that this was not synonymous with the decline of journalism. That theme presented itself throughout the room yesterday. I’m certain I’ll see it several times during the Unity Conference this week. I almost expect to see T-shirts that read “Journalism is Not Dead!”

Dianne Lynch, 2007 News Challenge winner, also used her presentation to stress the need to focus on the goal and not the medium, but she brought up some crucial points. One of these was that new media is not always journalism. Most times, it’s people using their Facebook to tell friends that The Dark Knight was awesome.

Dianne also mentioned that the audience of innovators and journalists present in the meeting Tuesday (and at Unity for the rest of the week) are the “early adopters” of this new media. They’re ahead of the curve, but their readers are still behind and are likely to be a little more skeptical.

I’m not (yet) a digital innovator and I’m not a professional journalist. I’m a reader, and I have my doubts. For me, the most reliable news source is a print newspaper or an NPR station, This week, as I explore Unity, I’ll look for things that will encourage me to embrace the digital age and accept it as journalism.

If you can change my mind about digital journalism, I’d like to hear from you. Leave a comment.

This week, USC’s Knight Digital Media Center convenes their annual leadership conference in Los Angeles. Michele McLellen is liveblogging the week’s events; to begin, start with her initial explanatory post:

The top editor and the top online editor from each of 12 traditionally print organizations get together Tuesday-Friday with experts in digital journalism, technology and innovation. We hope each team will leave with a plan of next steps to take their organizations forward online.

In other posts:

Michele’s thoughts about recent trends in newsroom reorganization, culture, systems and processes, staff cuts, and technology,

Amy Mitchell’s (Deputy Director for the Project of Excellence in Journalism) overview of news audiences, including her point that “The user is NOT becoming the reporter,”

Krisztine “Z” Holly’s (Vice Provost for Innovation and Executive Director of the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation) seven myths of innovation,

Jeffrey Cole (USC Center for the Digital Future) on television and the importance of video,

Dana Chinn (USC Annenberg School for Communication) on web metrics (hint: move beyond “time spent” by site visitors and spikes),

and Nora Paul (Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota) on the importance of good design.

The conference blog feed is here, and the event continues through Friday.

The 2007 and 2008 winners of the News Challenge (the Knight contest to fund projects about the future of local news delivery) are gathered this week at MIT to hear about each other’s work, including the many projects at MIT.

Last night, there were twenty or so demonstrations of current work from MIT students. Below, video from Benjamin Mako Hill on Selectricity and Christina of the extrACT project.

This afternoon there were multiple options for locative gaming in Cambridge, a game workshop at MIT, and sessions around issues like finding technical developers for projects.

To follow along, MediaShift blogger Mark Glaser is liveblogging the conference.

More conference blog posts are on Idea Lab, the group blog for all News Challenge winners that began last year and is updated with entries daily.

Persephone Miel also liveblogged today’s sessions here.

You can also join the Facebook group, look for images on Flickr (a popular online photo-sharing site) and Twitter (a microblogging site) with the tag #futurecivic (for Twitter #futurecivic tagging, try Summize). The Flickr pool of photos is here.

And, there’s the conference wiki, site, and the back channel from last night’s panel session.