Zimbabwe novelist Chengerai 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

Vince Stehle, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

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.

Sunshine Week is honoring local heroes. Mark Mahoney is one of them. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his open government coverage and ASNE’s editorial award in 2004.

Mahoney is an editorial page editor at the Post Star in Glens Falls, N.Y. His editorials focus on the dangers of government secrecy.

Here are a few samples of his work.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

SochiReporter, a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, was presented in 240 McDonald’s restaurants throughout Russia.

The fast-food chain placed hundreds of thousands of leaflets on every food tray of every patron over the course of 14 days.

The leaflets, which included SochiReporter’s logo and URL, informed customers of SochiReporter’s support of McDonald’s World Children’s Day, and also thanked its other media partners.

The partnership brought 35 percent more visitors to SochiReporter.com and 30 percent more content uploads by citizen journalists.

SochiReporter launched in October 2009, allowing the people of Sochi, the Russian resort city hosting the 2014 Olympics, to use the latest online tools to discuss and influence the impact of the Games.

--Marly Falcon, contributing blogger of Knight Foundation

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

Two Knight Foundation grantees have made MIT Technology Review’s list of 10 technologies to watch.

Printcasting, a project of Participata, which is currently testing a service that allows amateur publishers to create newsletters and magazines, is supported by an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge.

The second Knight Foundation project on the list is the Ushahidi Engine, which is developing an open-source platform that allows amateur and professional journalists to respond rapidly to regional crises through mobile phone, e-mail or Web interface.

For the remaining eight technologies to watch, follow the link.

-- 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 Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

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.

Never mind the big words. “Computational journalism” is all about using modern tools to do news in the public interest. The “computation” part refers to the use of computers to create, understand and display the news. Sarah Cohen is a Knight journalism chair focused on this new form of watchdog reporting. The “computational journalism” initiative is organized by Duke’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy.

 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.