Many of journalism's innovators and big-thinkers will be speaking at the conference this year, including Jeff Jarvis, Ana Marie Cox, Adrian Holovaty, David Cohn, and Jay Rosen. We scoured the schedule and compiled a list of journalism-related presentations, to help those of you who may be attending:

Saturday, Mar. 13

9:30 a.m. Community Funded Reporting

The news industry is dying but in its wake are new business models to support investigative journalism. One of these is "community funded reporting" which is being pioneered by Spot.us but is happening around the country by various individuals. What is it? How does it work? What are its pitfalls? Where does it surpass the traditional advertising model? This will be a conversation that explores the changing media landscape and how the web can rise to the challenge of supporting our communities and their information needs.

Presenters: David Cohn, Spot.Us. Lyn Headly, Rapid News Awards.

11 a.m. Citizen Journalism Brigade - Making Your Voice Matter

The future of Journalism lies in your hands. Citizen journalists from coast to coast are launching websites so THEY can write about their interests. But does it work? Can you make money? Where is it going and will it be around in a few years?

Presenters: Colin Alsheimer, LevelTen Interactive. Rondo Estrello, In-This-Economy.com.

11 a.m. Are Content Farms Good or Evil? Yes.

Our multiple choice quiz for today: Demand Media, AOL's Seed.com and other "content farms" are: (a) a natural and essential outgrowth of our new media ecosystem. (b) a fine way for new writers to actually get paid (if not very well) for their work instead of providing for free to others who make all the money. (c) worrisome given that the content the create is often mediocre, and therefore can semi-pollute search results. (d) cynical verging on evil. The answer is all of the above, in varying degrees.

Presenter: Dan Gillmor, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University

11 a.m. iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators

With the launch of the iPad, Apple is creating a third category of mobile devices positioned between smartphones and laptop computers. Utilizing the successful iPhone operating system coupled with a tablet form factor, the iPad has the ability to deliver content in a variety of formats - from native apps to web sites to eBooks and more. Hear from experts in the interactive, book publishing, periodicals, and video gaming industries about the impact of the iPad in regards to content packaging and distribution.

Presenters: Raven Zachary, small society. Bill Jensen, Village Voice Media. Shervin Pishevar, SGN. Jason Grigsby, Cloud Four.

3:30 p.m. Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies

We've entered The Last Days of Media. Traditional publishers' economics can't stand up against the overwhelming volume of new content and ad inventory being manufactured by the likes of blogs, Facebook, Myspace, Craigslist et al. What will New York City and the nation look like without the New York Times?

Presenters: Greg Beato, Reason Magazine. Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos. Amy Langfield, NewYorkology LLC. David Carr, New York Times. Henry Copeland, Blogads.com.

Sunday, Mar. 14

9:30 a.m. Process Journalism: Getting it First, While Getting it Right

Iterative journalism, process journalism, wiki journalism -- call it what you want -- the 'first draft' of history is rapidly changing with digital reporting and immediate delivery. In this panel, we'll investigate technological tools, best practices from bloggers to NYTimes.com, transparency and ethical challenges faced report accurate news in the social media age.

Presenters: Moka Pantages, Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Monica Guzman, Seattlepi.com. Robert Mackey, The New York Times. Will Sullivan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Charles Latibeaudiere, TMZ. Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo.

11 a.m. Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data

Presenter: Clay Shirky, ITP/NYU.

11 a.m. Influence and Innovate: Transforming Media Education

The future of media relies heavily on the mindset of those willing to study and enter the field. Professionals, professors and students will discuss transforming the goals of communication education to develop graduates, not only comfortable and fluent with online media, but who can also innovate and influence the profession.

Presenters: Cindy Royal, Texas State University. Tyson Evans, New York Times.

11 a.m. Online News of Tomorrow

Whether newspapers are dead or not, the media is innovating online. Rather than debate journalism's future, let's look at where we're headed, and what the online news sources of tomorrow might look like. This panel will survey some of the most exciting experiments and propose some interesting new directions.

Presenters: Adrian Holovaty, EveryBlock. Andrew Huff, Gapers Block. Brad Flora, Windy Citizen. Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine/CUNY. Jeremy Zilar, New York Times

Monday, Mar. 15

9:30 a.m. Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online

Conventional wisdom calls us attention-deprived, constantly seeking the next scrap of info. But Google reveals our true desire: Context. (Wikipedia entries, This American Life's financial crisis explainer, Gizmodo's definitive guide to smartphones, etc.) We'll explore how journalism and media must adapt to meet our insatiable hunger for the bigger picture.

Presenters: Jay Rosen, New York University. Matt Thompson, NPR. Staci D Kramer, ContentNext Media /paidContent. Tristan Harris, Apture.

1:10 p.m. Hyperlocal Focus: Growing A Vibrant Community Media Ecosystem

Filmmakers, videobloggers, podcasters, pirate & low-power radio jocks and public access TV producers are all creating content in your local community, but they often don't collaborate or even talk to each other, despite using the same tools and sometimes even seeking the same audiences. A 15 year-old videoblogger and a 50 year-old technical director at a local network TV affiliate may have a lot to learn from each other, but in what context would they ever meet? How can you engage local content creators and build a vibrant media community? This session is about how to create (and utilize) healthy, sustainable user-generated media scenes in local communities, using community media centers, creative salons, non-profit media arts foundations, citizen journalism organizations and grass roots organizing principals.

Presenter: Bill Simmon, VCAM.

Tuesday, Mar. 16

3:30 p.m. How to Save Journalism

Much has been said about the death of journalism, but little has been offered in way of solutions. This panel will focus on solutions instead of problems, consensus viewpoints from both old and new media, and offer new insights into the operational structure of journalism and media for the 21st century.

Presenters: Drew Curtis, Fark.com. Jeff Webber, USAToday.com. Kelly McBride, The Poynter Institute. Matthew Palevsky, The Huffington Post.

5:40 p.m. The Effects of Twitter on News

Presenters: James Cox, Smokeclouds. Brian Stelter, New York Times. Ana Marie Cox, GQ Magazine.

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.

Local media is the focus of the journalism conference circuit. Estimates claim $100 billion in local-ad revenue could support local news and information projects, if it could only be successfully tapped. This follows the Knight Commission for the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy recommendation for innovation: its report says journalism does not need saving so much as it needs creating.

So what’s an entrepreneur to do? First, you need a business model. Looking for just such a holy grail, the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism created the New Business Models for News Project. The project researched the best practices in the business of online journalism and released four business models that can be used by anyone in any community.

The four business models were presented and discussed last Wednesday at the New Business Models for (Local) News Conference and Hypercamp at CUNY. You can download the models at newsinnovation.com.

Ideas and experiments are springing up weekly. If you are interested in learning more about new business models for news you might also want to take a loot at:

Ideas for Micropayments

Journalism Online, LLC.

Village Soup.com an internet-age business model to transform the
traditional community newspaper business.

Printcasting, a new revenue model for "people-powered magazines."

Spot.us,  a new crowd-funding model for paying for investigative reporting.

Minnpost, is a new hybrid non-profit model  that is supported by ads, memberships and foundation support. You can also look at the Voice of San Diego.

Other non-profit experiments include St. Louis Beacon and Gotham Gazette (in NY).

News 21 and the Chauncey Bailey project pioneered public-private experiments in investigative reporting.

Other university-based news models include the investigative reporting projects at Boston University, UC Berkeley, Brandeis and Northeastern.

Other nonprofits that are doing well include Pro Publica in NY,
Center for Investigative Reporting in SF, Center for Public Integrity in DC.

These are only a few of the models that individuals, organizations and universities have been using to figure out a new way to sustain journalism.

If you think none of these projects are the right digital innovations to provide quality news and information to communities, come up with one of your own, and enter the Knight News Challenge at newschallenge.org

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.

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!

“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.

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.

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.