From today’s press release:

Leaders of the Washington, DC Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, Inc., announced today that former President Bill Clinton will receive the Foundation’s “Humanitarian Award” and serve as the keynote speaker at a January 8, 2009 Miami Dream Dinner to raise funds for Memorial to be built on the National Mall. The dinner will take place at Fontainebleau Hotel and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which donated $1 million to the Memorial Foundation, will serve as the lead dinner sponsor.

…

President Clinton played a key role in the Memorial’s inception and has remained an active supporter. On July 16, 1998, Clinton signed a Joint Congressional Resolution authorizing the building of a memorial and on November 13, 2006 he participated in the Ceremonial Groundbreaking. He has served on the Memorial Foundation’s President’s Council for several years.

An expected 22 million people a year will visit the tribute to King’s transformational impact on the country, and the world.

How would you commemorate King?

Knight has just launched a new site, News Release Workshop to help you write a strong press release.

On the site, you will find example press releases (here’s another), a structural worksheet, and why the Flesch Score matters.

All site content is under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works license, so we hope you will share it (with attribution, please).

Thoughts? How can we improve the site to make it a better resource for you?

MTV Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 (a Knight News Challenge—the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovative ideas about local news delivery—project) member Alex Parker wrote this review of his year covering the election for Kansas:

I posted my final video for MTV News’ (EMMY AWARD-WINNING!) Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08, a Knight Foundation initiative that used 51 citizen journalists (hate that term) to cover the youth movement during the election.

This project was rewarding, though sometimes frustrating. But looking back on it, it provided me with skills, insight and ideas that I never had before. I can edit a video like a whiz, our Election Day-tweets were posted on Times’ Square HD board and I interviewed Ralph Nader. Pretty cool.

He details other highlights of his year, including embedding with the 1st Infantry Division’s Dagger Brigade as they trained for Iraq at Fort Irwin, California, and being linked to by Daily Kos for a story on State Sen. Donald Betts, who “got smoked in the general election.”

You can read more of his favorite moments on his blog post.

Knight News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovation ideas in local news delivery) winner David Cohn’s project, Spot.Us launched yesterday.

An overview of the project:

As David posted on his blog:

The problem: Revenue.

Journalism is a process not a product, but that process takes time and people who do it professionally need to be compensated.

The Solution: Community Funding.

The process of journalism should be participatory - and perhaps one way it can be made participatory is if the public has the opportunity to commission the journalism they want to see.

Traditionally .001% of the public has a freelance budget to hire a journalist. We call those people “editors.” Spot.Us is an attempt to increase the percentage of people that can have an editorial influence.

Congratulations to David and the Spot.Us team; we look forward to watching this project continue to develop–

Today, Knight is launching a new community site called Knight Pulse, a place to discuss the future of information.

Updated: Here’s a video introducing the site:

Despite the current explosion of information, we are less informed. And in a world defined by information exchange, we need new ways to give, share, find, and receive information in our communities.

The goal of the Pulse site is to start conversations with a video post and listen as you debate ideas in the comments (and in other places, linking back). The site gives you a chance to develop collaborative projects about information that Knight Foundation may consider funding.

On the site, you’ll find information projects that the Knight Foundation is funding, events that foundation staff and Pulse users are attending, opportunities to volunteer, and blog posts about information needs from feeds across the Web.

And you’ll find profiles of people like you, who are also interested in improving information delivery–from details about local restaurant inspections (Everyblock) to discovering perspectives from bloggers around the world (Rising Voices).

Join the conversation and let us know what you think of the site–we’re using Get Satisfaction and UserVoice for feedback, both on the Pulse ‘Widgets‘ page, or leave a comment below–

The site is built in Drupal, and we are very pleased with the team at Development Seed and their great work on this project.

Knight News Challenge (the yearly $5 M contest for innovative local news delivery ideas that has just closed for this year’s cycle) 2007 winner Rising Voices has been nominated for World’s Best Blog in the Deutsche Welle awards.

From the Global Voices site:

Global Voices’ citizen media outreach project, Rising Voices has been nominated for a “Best of the Blogs Award” (B.O.B.) in the category “Best Weblog”. More than 8,500 weblogs were suggested for nomination and a jury selected the final 11 in each of 16 categories. Anyone can cast their votes online for their favorite blogs until November 26, 2008.

Deutsche Welle wish to give special attention to the promotion of freedom of information and expression around the world.

Rising Voices is a project that has provided micro-grant funding for more than a dozen community blogging projects in some of the most under-represented parts of the world (thanks to a grant from the Knight News Challenge).

Through the people in this amazing community, we’ve learned about social unrest in Bolivia through Voces Bolivianas‘ bloggers, we’ve gotten to know the new bloggers in Nakuru, Kenya from the REPACTED project, and in Romania from the Blogging the Dream project.

(Watch this video, and you’ll know who to vote for…)

Congratulations to the Rising Voices team of David Sasaki, Rezwan, and Julia Bhatia. Read all the Rising Voices news on the site or the feed, and remember to cast your vote here.

Don’t forget to get your application into the Knight News Challenge site by November 1st at midnight, Pacific Time if you’re planning to be part of this year’s contest. (Of course, if you’re like Lisa Williams, a 2007 winner, you can apply at the last minute–who knows, you might win!)

For more info on the contest, check newschallenge.org; if you have a good idea that fits our focus–APPLY.

Miro Local TV is a new project from the Participatory Culture Foundation, creators of the popular Internet TV application Miro, to help people find and discuss local online video. The project is funded by a $589,000 grant from Knight.

PCF Founder Holmes Wilson talks about the project:

From the press release:

“Budgets or local TV and print journalism are declining, threatening the vitality of cities and towns,” said Nicholas Reville, the foundation’s executive director. “But the explosion of viewer-created web video gives us a powerful new way to do local journalism.”

Each site will bring together relevant video from local videobloggers and sites like YouTube, using a combination of automation and expertise from staff at partnering private or public access stations. Curators at the partner station will develop a set of keywords that identify neighborhoods, local landmarks or venues.

Do you want this new local video hub in your town? Tell us in the comments.

Congratulations to the MIT Center for Future Civic Media team, a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner (remember, only two days left to apply for this year’s contest), on their relaunched Web site.

From the site’s about page:

The Center for Future Civic Media is working to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

Sorted by topic in the site’s left sidebar, the featured tools from the Center include:

extrACT, an action map of Colorado that “may amplify the effectiveness with which landowners and industry workers can collectively influence gas development policies through negotiation, regulation, legislation, or litigation.”

Comm.unity, “a new platform implementing a wireless, device-to-device information system that bypasses the need for centralized servers, coordination, or administration.”

Selectricity, “Web-based voting machinery for the masses takes some of the best and most exciting election technology developed for government elections and deploys it in service of everything else. A tool for communities to make better decisions in better ways.”

You can also find blog entries and watch the 2007 video or podcast of speakers Chris Csikszentmihályi, Henry Jenkins, Beth Noveck, and Ethan Zuckerman on how to define civic media; the Center describes their efforts as “developing the emerging ‘Fifth Estate’ of participatory news, media, and civic change.”

Thoughts on the new Drupal site? Use the Center’s contact page or the comments below.

Director of the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland Carol Horner died last week in the District of Columbia.

The Washington Post quotes Knight Foundation Journalism Vice President Eric Newton:

“Under Carol Horner’s leadership, the Knight Center in Specialized Journalism became the gold standard for training journalists to cover complex topics,” said Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “Because of Carol’s work, journalists all over America know how to cover difficult-to-handle topics — everything from nuclear power to the military to the economy.”

View a photo slideshow and find out how to share your memories here.