Claire Austin is a Journalism intern at Knight Foundation.

Freedom House released its annual survey of press freedom showing the unfortunate post 9-11 trend of decreasing press freedom around the world.

The latest: only 17 percent of people live in a country where they can express themselves freely.

Click "play". Green countries are free, yellow are partly free, and red aren't at all free. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the world starts to turn yellow and green. But then, after 9-11, it turns back to red.

To get involved in freedom of expression issues, pick a project to help out with by visiting the sites of Knight grantees working in this field. These include the International Center for Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Inter-American Press Association's Impunity Project, and the University of Miami's Knight Center for International Media.

From Rising Voices Director David Sasaki's post on Idea Lab, the group blog for all Knight News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest about innovative news delivery ideas) winners:

In January we received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGO's all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities - long ignored by both traditional and new media - to the conversational web. It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects. The growing interest in citizen media from civil society shows that we truly are undergoing a major transformation in how we inform ourselves about the rest of the world and who is able to contribute that information.

Of the 270 project proposals, the following five are most representative of the innovation, purpose and goodwill that Rising Voices aims to support...

Congratulations to the new Rising Voices projects; find out more about these five projects on the original post.

Today, the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), funded in part by Knight, begins four days of meetings in Athens with 400 representatives from 100 countries to discuss the importance of media development to economic prosperity.

"The GFMD aims to promote co-operation within the media development sector, to strengthen the quality of planning, evaluation and work carried out, and to enhance the impact of media development." (link)

You can watch the live webcast during sessions, read the live blog posts like this one from Persephone Miel, and follow the #GFMD08 tweets on Twitter, a micro-blogging service.

Knight News Challenge winner Guy Berger (project: The News is Coming) is attending the conference, and a few hours ago he Twittered a resource (the mediaME wiki) for sharing tools:

What would you like to see the GFMD discuss?

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.