Knight funded the Lex Mundi Foundation to create a web site that provides free legal support and resources to non-profit organizations.

Lex Mundi is dedicated to linking social entrepreneurs to pro bono legal services from law firms across the country and abroad.

If you are a social entrepreneur, or your organization is working on social innovation, we hope you take advantage of the Lex Mundi network and their new site.

Jose Zamora is a journalism program associate at Knight Foundation.

Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril, a documentary that traces the early history of the American newspaper, outlines what’s at stake in the current crisis and peeks into the future of in-depth and investigative reporting.

The documentary includes several interviews from people from the news industry, including Eric Newton, vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation.

The documentary recently aired on PBS and is available on DVD .

            --Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Stanford University has announced the newest group of John S. Knight Journalism Fellows and only the second class chosen under the program’s new emphasis on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership.

Knight Foundation spoke with Program Director Jim Bettinger about how the changes to the program, announced in 2008, have impacted the fellows and their work.

The 2010-11 John S. Knight fellows will study a range of topics facing the future of news, civic engagement, developing new multimedia storytelling approaches, as well as creating tools to broaden information about immigrant populations and promote freedom of speech. The twenty journalists in this year’s program will include, for the first time, professionals from Cuba and Armenia.

You can find a complete list of the 2010-11 fellows and more about the Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at knight.stanford.edu.

Stanford’s Knight Fellowship program is funded by the Knight Foundation.

--Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

The Society of Professional Journalists announced its national finalists for the 2009 Mark of Excellence awards competition. Among the winners are two entries from students at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

One of the entries won in the category of online in-depth reporting for its project “Cleaning Coal.”

The other entry won in the category of television in-dept reporting for its project “The Night Shift.”

This year alone, Knight Center students have won 11 regional and national journalism awards.

The Knight Center was founded in 1999 with a grant from the Knight Foundation. The center is the nation’s leading center for educating students and professional journalists to report and write about environmental issues.

    --Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Congratulations to David Kempa, a Carnegie-Knight News21 reporter from Arizona State University who won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in the college print category.

Kempa’s story “Crossing Lines,” illustrates one man’s goal to help impoverished Mexican farmers.

This is the second consecutive year a student at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism wins the award.

The RFK Journalism Awards program honors outstanding reporting on issues that mattered to Robert F. Kennedy, such as human rights, social justice and the power of individual action in the United States and around the world.

Kempa was part of a team of Cronkite students who participated last summer in News21, a national journalism education initiative funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.

To read more about Kempa, visit here.

For more awards received by News21, follow the link.

NPR.org recently won a Peabody Award for general excellence.

“I can tell you unequivocally that this would not have happened without the Knight digital training,” said Vivian Schiller, President and CEO of NPR.

NPR’s Afghanistan reporter, Soraya Nelson, also won a Peabody Award, along with Diane Rehm, who won an individual excellence award.

Here’s a link showcasing the work of NPR’s Knight trainees.

      --Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Four journalists from the University of Maryland completed a month long study of racial and ethnic trends. The study was done by interviewing multiracial Americans who shared stories on what it means to identify as a mixed race in America.

These four reporters were part of News21, a national journalism program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corp.

See the interviews here.

--Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

California Watch, a reporting initiative from the Center for Investigative Reporting, proved that its distribution model is working.  

Recently, California Watch released a report on California’s public universities’ slow approach to fixing buildings deemed a significant seismic hazard. Just a few days after the release, California Watch had added four new distribution partners to its list of more than 50 news outlets that have published or broadcast their content.

 Knight grantee Robert Rosenthal blogs about it here.

--Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

With political leaders pledging great transparency, do we still need Sunshine Week to promote open government?

Absolutely.

This year's Knight Open Government Survey, done by George Washington University's  National Security Archive,  found that only 13 of 90 surveyed federal agencies have made any concrete changes to their Freedom of Information practices even though the president directed them to do so a year ago.

The day after the survey story appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere, the White House chief of staff and the counsel to the president wrote a memo to the agency heads noting "more work remains" and asking them to "take action" to ensure "full implementation" of President Obama's Jan. 21 2009 memo.

Other highlights:

• This year's presidential statement marking Sunshine Week, citing the progress since last year.
• The Scripps Poll, showing that 70 percent of U.S. adults believe the federal government is secretive.
• Headlines from around the country marking the week.

Sunshine Week started in 2005 as a project of the American Society of News Editors along with dozens of other groups, with funding from Knight Foundation. The foundation later endowed the annual event, which promotes the importance of open government and freedom of information.

— By Eric Newton, Knight Foundation Vice President

Zimbabwe novelist Chenjerai Hove will be calling Miami home for at least the next two years. As a guest of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Hove will give guest lectures to Miami Dade students, and also interact with the general public by attending a variety of community events. His stay was coordinated by the Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College.

This is the first time the city of Miami takes part in the International Cities of Refuge Network—an organization that provides a safe haven to writers who are persecuted in their home countries.

In Zimbabwe, Hove is ranked No. 17 on the government’s Enemies of the State list and his life has also been threatened several times.

Hove is working on a memoir examining how violence came to be such a regular part of Zimbabwe’s political system.

He is best known for his 1989 novel, Bones, which tells the story of a poor farm mother who loses her son in the Zimbabwean war of liberation.

--Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger