Stony Brook’s News Literacy essay competition found its winner for the fall semester.

Sergey Moyseyenko, a business student who supports himself as an oil painter, won a semester tuition.

The Roslyn Savings Foundation News Literacy Scholarship is opened to all News Literacy students.

Students who receive an “A” in the essay portion of their final exam are entered into the competition.

Moyseyenko’s essay was judged the most persuasive and elegantly written summarization of the lessons learned in the news literacy course.

The essay, titled “A Letter to Uncle Vanya,” used the metaphor of a journey in which Moyseyenko guided his uncle through the steps he needed to take when seeking trustworthy information.

Here is a piece of the essay:

“When lost, ask for directions. Hey, it happens to the best of us. When evaluating a news report we can also get lost. Who should we trust? You know, Uncle, how some people when asked for directions would tell you “I think it is this way”, and others will actually show you on the map where you are and where you need to go? In a news report some people may also say, “I think that is why it happened”, and others will actually provide evidence for what they say. You should always differentiate between sources that assert and sources that are more authoritative and provide reliable and verified information.”

The Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University receives funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

To read the rest of Moyseyenko’s essay, visit here.

— Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

News21 has pulled together more 90 students from university newsrooms across the country to produce a number of deep multimedia reports, freely available to newsrooms everywhere. Funded by the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, the initiative expanded significantly over the last year, now including students from 12 different newsrooms who have produced more than 60 in-depth projects to be syndicated across the country.

From the release:

"Our strategy with the News21 students is to task them to tell complex stories in ways other young people might find interesting and relevant," said Jody Brannon, News21 national director and a Cronkite School professor of practice. "This summer, in a short 10-week period, their experiments produced some approaches that do just that."

Photojournalist Jose Castillo, an associate fellow from Texas who joined the University of Maryland’s summer program, studied voter data to see what it reveals about race and identity in America.

"In 2008, we elected a black president, and I was intrigued by how this speaks to who we are and how we’ve changed over the last 100 years," he said.

Castillo settled on telling the story Allensworth, Calif., a community founded in 1908 by a black man seeking his fortune, which has evolved into a town with a majority Latino population. To tell the story over time, he used an experimental interface that lets the user to “step to the side of the story” while providing a biographical sketch of the video subject.

You can check out the students' work at News21.com. More work will be added as the summer winds down.

Eric Newton is the V.P. of the Jouranlism Program at Knight Foundation.

Jeff Jarvis  and crew at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism have launched a web site devoted to new business models for news. It features business-side information and profiles of the new "plants and animals" in the evolving news ecosystem. MinnPost, Voice of San Diego and more. Will continue to get richer and richer over the coming months as new business models are added. Worth a look.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

“In the future there will be a new breed of journalists who can do all this (multimedia journalism) and it’s second nature to them,” said Travis Fox last Friday at this year’s International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

Fox is the Emmy Award-winning video producer for WashingtonPost.com. He was explaining that in contrast to the past, when online news sites used video to generate interest in their sites and to get extra revenue from video ads, in the future, video will be used to generate multiple revenue streams, because video/multimedia material can be used for any medium.

Fox explained how the script and stills from his video can be used for an article in the newspaper and the online edition of the daily, while the sound file can supply radio content, and the video itself can be used for a television story.

This was part of the discussion at a panel I moderated about multimedia storytelling and the future of online journalism at this year’s symposium, which gathered 298 journalists and new media experts from around the world.

The other presentations for this panel were made by María Teresa Ronderos, Editor, Semana.com (Colombia); Fred Ritchin, Director, PixelPress; David LaFontaine, Partner, Artesian Media and Managing Editor, Newspaper Association of America’s Audience Planbook; Bill Gentile, Journalist-in-Residence, American University; and Travis Fox, Video Producer, WashingtonPost.com.

We are interested in your thoughts. Please comment below.

Last week, the University of Miami School of Communication held two sessions of Beyond Bootcamp multimedia workshops that ran for three days with training on the specific tracks of audio narratives, video narratives, online infographics, multimedia production, multimedia programming, and teaching multimedia.

UM Knight Chair in Visual Journalism Rich Beckman facilitated Friday's discussion between the workshop faculty, toward the end bringing up questions of internationalization and audience (NYT Multimedia Editor Andrew DeVigal (@drewvigal) speaks about Mandarin translations):

A timely discussion given the recent launch of Global Post? What do you think?

Also, Alberto Cairo, a visual journalism professor at UNC Chapel Hill, talked about making information graphics easier to understand:

MSNBC.com Senior Multimedia Producer Jim Seida spoke strongly about the importance of ethics in journalism:

Washington Post Visual Journalist Travis Fox detailed the ethics of creating an accurate panorama:

and former Miami Herald General Counsel and UM Assistant Professor of Journalism Sam Terilli spoke on legal implications for journalists and newsrooms:

Comments? Thoughts? UM Senior Greg Linch's personal blog has more detailed posts from the sessions.

From the press release:

J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism has moved to American University’s School of Communication, where it will expand its operations with the help of a $2.4 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to American University.

J-Lab helps journalists and citizens use digital technologies to develop new ways of participating in public life. J-Lab provides award and seed money to professional journalists, citizens, and new media entrepreneurs for innovations in journalism and community news startups; builds e-learning Web sites for interactive and citizen journalism; and engages in training and research.

“I am excited that we have the opportunity to expand our programs in a place as full of energy and focus on innovation as AU’s School of Communication,” said Jan Schaffer, J-Lab’s executive director and one of the nation’s leading journalism reform thinkers. “Our new affiliation is a good fit for J-Lab’s mission, which is to help transform journalism for today and reinvent it for tomorrow.”

At its new home, J-Lab will use the Knight grant to:

* Renew the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism.
* Fund 16 additional New Voices citizen-media projects.
* Create eight to 10 Knight Citizen News Network learning modules and update J-Learning, J-Lab, and J-New Voices Web sites.
* Launch five Networked Community News pilot projects, teaming five newspapers with citizen media outlets in each of their communities.
* Build a Community Media Toolkit to help foundations fund, vet, support, and measure local media projects.
* Ramp up knowledge sharing with a Re-imagining Journalism project.

J-Lab’s J-Learning and the Knight Citizen News Network are Web-based, comprehensive community journalism instruction programs; its McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs project provides seed funding and support for original news ideas proposed by women; and the New Voices project provides start-up funding and instruction for pioneering community news ventures in the United States. The Knight-Batten Awards recognize innovations in journalism and are one of the profession’s most prestigious honors.

What do you think J-Lab should prioritize?

Knight Foundation supports Miami's Wolfsonian-Florida International University's new poster exhibition "Thoughts on Democracy" through the Knight New Work Award. A video about the exhibit, which opened July 3rd, is below, followed by details on included artists and the inspiration for the exhibit.

"The Thoughts on Democracy exhibition is comprised of posters created by fifty-five leading contemporary artists and designers, invited by The Wolfsonian to create a new graphic design inspired by American illustrator Norman Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" posters of 1943, which were recently gifted to the museum by Leonard A. Lauder.

Some of the participating artists involved in the project are Neville Brody, Seymour Chwast, Wim Crouwel, Elliott Earls, Richard Tuttle, Lawrence Weiner, Paula Scher, Francesco Vezzoli, Chip Kidd, and Italo Lupi, among others.

Rockwell's images, reproduced by the U.S. Office of War Information for mass dissemination, communicated FDR's vision of 'a world founded upon four essential human freedoms'—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. The exhibition will be on view and free to the public in the museum's lobby."

At the July 3rd exhibit opening, visitors were asked for their thoughts on democracy. You can watch their responses on the Thoughts on Democracy blog.

What are your thoughts on democracy and this exhibit?

Editor's note: Knight Foundation V.P. of Finance Juan Martinez is attending Wharton's Advanced Management Program at the University of Pennsylvania for the next five weeks. He will be sharing some of his experiences learning more about social entrepreneurship and emerging economies in future posts.

Though today was my first full day at the Wharton Advanced Management Program, we actually began yesterday at 3:30pm until 9:30pm. The faculty didn’t waste any time trying to create a learning community among the 54 participants.

There’s a huge amount of diversity in the class, geographically (only 25% from the US and representation from Europe, India, Nigeria, the Mid-East, China and SE Asia) and industry (manufacturing, telecom, entrepreneurs, finance). I’m really looking forward to not only learning from the faculty but from my classmates.

Yesterday I was explaining what Knight Foundation does to a classmate, Juliet Anammah (an exec at Accenture in Nigeria). I told her that we try to find opportunities for investments within our communities that will positively affect and change systems.

Before I could finish, she said, “oh, you’re trying to create transformation.”

Smart lady.

Vice president of communications Marc Fest relates the state of journalism to the new Star Trek movie, Under Construction, at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Knight Hall journalism building at the University of Maryland on May 21, 2008.

What do you think the current state of journalism is like?

Professor Rich Gordon blogged yesterday on IdeaLab (the group blog of Knight News Challenge winners), about six open full scholarships for programmers to study journalism at Medill School at Northwestern University.

The entire post is here, and Gordon asks for thoughts about the scholarship pitch and the concept in general. Commenters are weighing in about how to increase applicants and how to promote the opportunity.

What do you think? How could we increase applications for these full scholarships for programmers and developers to study journalism at Northwestern?

Share your thoughts by commenting on the original post (comments have been turned off below).