Mike Fancher, former executive editor of the Seattle Times, is optimistic about the future of news. In this interview with Leonard Witt of the Center for Sustainable Journalism, Fancher says that in a democracy, the public understands the need for investigative journalism.

Fancher says that in order to survive, news media must engage the public. They must think of the public not as a passive audience but as a community. He mentions Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism, The Seattle Times, and the UK’s Guardian as examples of media that partner with their communities to tell stories.

Fancher helped write “Informing Communities,” the report issued by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. He is writing a white paper for the Commission and the Aspen Institute on the report's recommendations.

Eric Newton is vice president of the journalism program for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

It’s good that the FCC has put forward the nation’s first real broadband plan. Having a good plan is an essential first step in bringing high-speed Internet access to all Americans — and that is an essential first step in achieving the recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, which argued that people must have digital access to be first-class citizens.

The commission’s report, done with the Aspen Institute, is titled “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age." (You can access it at http://knightcomm.org/)

It found that in our democratic republic, information is essential to the civic health of communities as good streets or clean water. People need (1) the information itself, (2) access to it and the ability to use it, and (3) ways as communities to engage with the facts we need to improve our collective lives.

The FCC’s plan is a start to the nation taking the issue seriously. Why is it so important? Let’s consider what’s at stake:

In the digital age, countries without high-speed broadband will be left behind, their citizens able to vote but not knowing why they should; able to work but not knowing how to find a job online.

In the past, we grew because we built the railroads and highways we needed to haul people and their physical things across this vast continent. Today, we will not grow unless we build the technology we need to haul our ideas and innovations around the world. Nearly two dozen other nations now rank ahead of the United States in high-speed broadband. That just won't do.

That’s why Knight Foundation’s President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen says: “Broadband access for all is essential to meeting the information needs of communities in a democracy. Without it, we’ll end up with a new category of second-class citizens. With it, everyone will be able to harness the social and economic opportunities of the digital age.”

Digital cities, the connected ones, will be the best environment for local news products, the most interesting laboratories for new ideas, the perfect places to chase the American Dream.

This year’s Sunshine Week contest, which will be announced March 14-20, will honor local heroes of open government.

The efforts of these local heroes, whose work has made their communities a better place to live, will be recognized among media organizations and other groups throughout the nation.

Since 2005, Sunshine Week has been held annually to discuss the importance of open government and freedom of information.

The American Society of News Editors will conduct a contest to identify the top three Local Heroes of 2010.

For those interested in nominating a local hero, please fill out a nomination form. The deadline is Feb. 26.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

It's been a while and progress is still slow after the Global Day of Solidarity  called upon President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to ensure justice for the victims of the Maguindanao massacre in the Philippines, where at least 30 journalists and support staff were among the 57 people brutally killed.

CPJ joined in on the protest and also traveled to Mindanao’s General Santos City to meet with local journalists, the relatives of victims, and local prosecutors responsible for building a case against the suspects.

Here is what CPJ had to say:

An assembly of local journalists situated in the towns near the site of the massacre underlined the trauma felt by many survivors. When we spoke with them, some noted that the security protocols they implemented for reporting in dangerous areas…had failed to save their friends and colleagues.

Many more feared for their safety in reporting on the massacre’s aftermath, explaining why several reports on the massacre have run without bylines or datelines in both national and local newspapers. One reporter told the assembly that unidentified men had photographed journalists when they reported on the arrests of Ampatuan clan members and the military’s discovery of their underground private armory.

CPJ ranks the Philippines as the sixth worst country in which journalists’ killers are brought to justice.

For the full story on CPJ’s findings from the Philippines, read this article.

                             -- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

The Center for International Media Assistance has released an interesting new report examining recent trends in private U.S. funding of media development projects around the world.

U.S. foundations have funded programs in “media development” (independent news and information in general) and “media for development” (coverage of particular issues).

The report recommends donors keep consulting and continue to attract new foundations into the field.  For more, read the report.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

With an election year coming up, The Texas Tribune is targeting candidates for governor in a new kind of political video series, “Stump Interrupted."

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

Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

Peter M. Shane, Executive Director of the Knight Commission, gave a talk on the Knight Commission and its work on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, which was organized to recommend policy reforms and other public initiatives to help American communities better meet their information needs.

Here is a sample of what he had to say:

“Journalistic institutions do not need saving so much as they need creating. The 2007 Newspaper Association of America of daily newspapers in the United States was 1,422. At the same time, there are 3,248 counties, encompassing over 19,000 incorporated places and over 30,000 “minor civil divisions” having legal status, such as towns and villages. It follows that hundreds, if not thousands of American communities receive only scant journalistic attention on a daily basis, and many have none. Even accounting for community weeklies—a 2004 survey identified 6,704 such papers nationwide—it is likely that many American communities get no attention from print journalism at all.”

“The key thought here is that we need not just to preserve journalism where it exists; we need to create it where it does not.  This is all the more important because, without some remedial action, there is going to be less and less local news in the years ahead as newspapers cut staff, which seems inevitable as things are going.”

You can read the rest here.

From Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation:

CPJ's Global Campaign Against Impunity -- the legal impunity too often enjoyed by those who would murder journalists -- has produced a bright red infographic detailing the cases of 758 journalists killed since 1992.  The graphic leads a new section of the CPJ web site launched this week. Here's how you can get involved in the Knight Foundation-underwritten Campaign Against Impunity.

The CPJ campaign follows up on the Impunity Project launched in 1995 by the InterAmerican Press Association.  In addition to investigating the cases of  journalists murdered in the Americas, the project reached out to government leaders to better investigate the cases. A public advertising campaign in print and online media included more than 400 news organizations. The decreases in the impunity rate have reached as high as 50 percent.

From Eric Newton, VP of Journalism, Knight Foundation:

At Harvard, Shorenstein Center's Alex Jones gets attention for his latest book, Losing the News. The Pulitzer winner and Harvard prof describes the "erosion" of traditional news media. (See too President Obama's remarks at the Walter Cronkite memorial.) Shorenstein is trying to improve the future of news as part of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education.

At Yale, the "creative" side of the story of the "creative destruction" of news media is explored by Richard Foster, past McKinsey exec, in books like   Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage . Foster has been talking for decades about how some companies are destroyed by new competitors but how others survive. 

In his book, Jones writes:   "The Knight Foundation, which is dedicated to journalistic priorities, is helping uncover all kinds of new models for news that will engage and also stay true to the essentials. The most encouraging aspect of Knight's enterprise is that new ideas poured in when they offered funding for pilot projects,  which is a demonstration that news remains exciting as an ideal and a vocation. People want to do news, and this time of transition has been a catalyst for creativity after far too long when the traditional media were too comfortable. Being terrified as prompted more energy and innovation in the news business than ever."

Knight is funding the pilot projects Jones talks about under our Knight News Challenge. Apply here.

Look for more on the state of the nation's information health in the upcoming report of the Knight Commission of the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

Ian Bogost (3:05) on news games at last week's Games For Change conference:

"Journalism is hardly dying; in fact, it's possible that it couldn't be killed. The idea of informing and educating a public, such that they can make independent decisions, is something that is so endemic of a democracy, that we would have to take down the democracy to kill it. Instead, what's changing is the way that we communicate with one another."