Last night, Knight Foundation sponsored the Shorty Awards (#shorty), which recognized notable users of the popular micro-blogging service Twitter at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, New York. (Knight press release)
Some of the highlights in the video below:
Congratulations to the winners.
How do you do think Twitter and other micro-content services could be used for innovative projects delivering news and information?
You can leave a comment below or tweet @knightfdn.
The New York Times writes about Knight News Challenge (the ~$5 million yearly contest to fund innovative news delivery ideas) winner David Cohn's Spot.Us project today:
“Spot Us would give a new sense of editorial power to the public,” said David Cohn, a 26-year-old Web journalist who received a $340,000, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to test his idea. “I’m not Bill and Melinda Gates, but I can give $10. This is the Obama model. This is the Howard Dean model.”
You can contribute to (help "crowdfund") the Spot.Us campaign the article mentions that will check political advertisements in San Francisco for accuracy here (campaign is 89% funded as of this morning). More details about that project are on the Spot.Us wiki.
The article also mentions Knight Foundation Trustee Paul Steiger's new ProPublica organization, which produces "journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them." An interesting ProPublica site feature is the "Scandal Watch" sidebar, where progress on highlighted stories is charted throughout the week; read Friday's summary by Alexandra Andrews.
The NYT article lets another News Challenge winner, Jay Rosen, (who blogs along with Cohn and the other News Challenge winners on the IdeaLab group blog; you can read his entries here) have the last words about alternative reporting models:
“The [traditional] business model is broken,” [Rosen] said. “We’re at a point now where nobody actually knows where the money is going to come from for editorial goods in the future. My own feeling is that we need to try lots of things. Most of them won’t work. You’ll have a lot of failure. But we need to launch a lot of boats.”
Below, links to projects and news around some of the Knight News Challenge winners, their local news delivery projects, and other journalism items from this week:
News Challenge winner Dan Pacheco asks for feedback on the Printcasting (a project to “make it possible for anyone to create a local print newspaper, magazine or newsletter with local ads”) interface:
Does the drag-and-drop interface work for you? Let Dan know here.
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Fellow News Challenge winner Ryan Sholin (whose project Reporting On is “the backchannel for your beat”) reports that WiredJournalists.com and BeatBlogging.org are merging now exploring "cross-promotion" (per Ryan's comment below).
Pat Thorton is taking BeatBlogging editorial reins from David Cohn, who has started working on his News Challenge project, Spot.us; find out how Cohn addresses his early Spot.us critics in this IdeaLab blog post.
BeatBlogging.org is part of News Challenge winner Jay Rosen’s distributed reporting project NewAssignment.net, and he talks about Beatblogging progress here.
(Recent buzz on Rosen has been around an OffTheBus experiment with Huffington Post; you can join the OffTheBus Special Ops team.)
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Earlier this week, New York Times writer Lawrences Downes bemoaned the lack of copy editor presence at the Newseum; journalist David Sullivan offered an answer.
And this list of current newspaper jobs was posted (and pointed to from Ryan Sholin’s Twitter (a microblogging service) stream).
