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.

When we last wrote about Knight's Library Initiative, it was a $3.3 million effort to empower libraries in 12 communities to become true information centers for their communities, with expanded wifi access, mobile computing labs, job-hunting assistance, digital literacy training and more. Today, Knight's announcing an expansion of that effort - the Foundation will distribute $5.5 million to  20 communities around the country:

Strengthening residents’ ability to use the Internet to improve their lives, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will help libraries in 20 U.S. communities enhance digital access and training.

The effort is part of the foundation’s $5.5 million Library Initiative.  Launched in October, Knight is expanding it to eight additional communities, the foundation announced today.

In October, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy released its report, finding that libraries are critical to a community's information infrastructure. Today's grant announcement signals Knight's commitment to helping usher these institutions into the digital era.

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

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.

The Federal Trade Commission released the agenda and speakers for its Dec. 1-2 workshop, “From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”

Up for discussion: how news economics are playing out on the Internet and in print; the wide variety of new business and non-profit models for journalism online; behavioral and other targeted online advertising, online news aggregators, and bloggers; and the variety of governmental policies – including antitrust, copyright, and tax policy.

Panelists at the workshop will include leaders from Google, Yahoo!, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post and News Corp. Eric Newton, VP of Journalism Program at the Knight Foundation, will also join the workshop. For more, visit the FTC  Web site.

2007 Knight News Challenge winner, Citizen Media Law Project, announced today the public launch of its Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help.

OMLN is accepting applications for legal assistance from online publishers and media creators who meet the network's criteria of viability, adherence to journalistic standards, innovation, independence, original reporting, and public interest. For details on these criteria, see the OMLN FAQ.

You can also read a post about the new network at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

 The center has released a 22-page report. “Accountability through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism” will go out to 800 opinion leaders, editors, scholars, deans, officials and software developers. Not to mention the journalists who mine today’s data for tomorrow’s news. The bottom line: Using computers for journalism is not an arcane specialty. It’s something all journalists, including nonprofit and citizen journalists, should know how to do.  Comments are welcome at jayth@duke.edu.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

The first Knight funded Drupal project to release its open-source code, Managing News, launched last week. You can read about it here: Media Innovation with Drupal.

This week, on the fifth day of being publicly available, the project has been downloaded more than 1,000 times.

Here are 50 examples of what people are doing with it.

* rowingnews.org.uk
* pulse.buzzr.us United Nations World Food Programme
* climap.net
* news.freejacksonvillenews.com
* news.1qk.com
* mn.newslogs.com
* managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk
* catholicnewslive.com
* noticies.consultes.cat
* mn.forest.linnovate.net
* www.cafepresse.ch
* mn.mwu.dk
* news.kultur-online.net
* beta.metaboone.com
* news.twodogsdigital.com
* mnews.webandfinearts.com
* augmentions5.omega8.us
* http://planete.magento.fr
* news.nguyentiensi.com
* zensci.com
* earthfeeds.com
* managingnews.peopleatwork.fr
* news.positivechoices.com
* managingnews.rhizom.nl
* news.krongnang.com
* news.fen.net
* news.freejacksonvillenews.com
* managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk
* skateboarding.com
* earthfeeds.com
* jaunum.iem.lv
* news.soniccat.com
* news.investic.net
* pg.galaxy.esn.org
* www.wotcher.co.uk
* rowing.magnity.co.uk
* www.freshfail.com
* gamemakerstream.com
* news.sotak.cz
* menanews.org
* managingnews.aegir.erdfisch.de

How are you using it? Please let us know or send us your ideas on how it could be used to inform local communities.

Cross-posted from the Knight News Challenge Blog

and the Sunlight Labs Blog

The reason why we extended the Knight News Challenge deadline is because we want to invite and partner with organizations that share our mission, values and goals, and that have networks of software developers and entrepreneurs. Our first partner is the Sunlight Foundation and its Sunlight Labs.

You're part of a community doing amazing work on some hugely important issues of government transparency, especially at the state and national level. We're partnering with the Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs in hopes of engaging you in a complementary challenge: bringing your great ideas to cities and other local communities.

The Knight News Challenge is an annual $5-million contest to fund the best ideas for reinventing local news. The contest deadline for 2010 was originally set for October 15, but we extended it to December 15 in large part because we saw an opportunity to partner with more folks like you all. The Knight News Challenge projects meet three criteria: 1) use digital, open-source technology to 2) distribute news and information in the public interest to 3) to a local, geographic community.

In past years, we've already funded projects that are terrific complements to the work done by Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs. For example, take a look at one of our 2009 winners, DocumentCloud (which recently announced a partnership with the Sunlight Foundation). DocumentCloud will allow some of the most robust investigative journalism outfits in the country - organizations like the New York Times, ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, the ACLU, and Talking Points Memo - to share, publicize, collaborate on, and crowdsource the documents they're uncovering every day in Freedom of Information Act battles. Or check out the Transparency Initiative we funded in 2008, creating a microformat - hNews - to mark up news stories with metadata about sourcing, geo-location, and more.

Becoming a Knight News Challenge grantee would put you in the company of some of the leading innovators at the intersection of technology and information - folks like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, and Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of the Django programming framework and originator of one of the first Google Maps mashups, which evolved into his 2007 Knight News Challenge award.

We've got the money and the mission. You've got the ideas we'd like to fund. If you're interested, check out our website (the FAQ is a great place to start), and feel free to send any questions to newschallenge@knightfoundation.org.

Here's evidence that the Knight News Challenge projects, experiments we hoped will speed media innovation, are having impact: The Transparency Initiative announced this week that AOL and TownNews have adopted the Knight funded microformat - hNews - to mark up their news stories. They also announced that the Associated Press will start publicly using it by the end of the year.

Background: In 2008 Martin Moore from the Media Standards Trust and Tim Berners-Lee from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) received a Knight News Challenge grant to develop a project to help news providers "mark up" their news stories by providing additional information about the sources of the facts in their stories.

To do that they designed hNews, a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Additional information could describe the credentials of the reporter or the ethics of the news organization.

Search engines would then use this additional data -- the “story behind the story” -- to help people find news that is higher quality as they define it. A reader searching the phrase “balloon boy” for example, might find 12,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Or filtering by the type of news provider.

Moore and Berners-Lee have been working with media organizations on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow. You can read more about the project and the adoption of hNews by AOL and TownNews on Martin Moore's recent post on the MediaShift Idea Lab blog.