Brant Houston wrote about getting people to analyze and share public data for local reporting. Houston holds the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois, and said that digital tools can make both journalists and citizens into better community watchdogs.

Michelle McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center wrote about finding 100 news sites that are creating content and revenue as a fellow at the University of Missouri. She saw that media such as niche and community sites are filling the gaps in the news ecosystem, as described by Knight’s V.P. for Journalism Program Eric Newton, and predicted greater partnerships between journalists and community members but fewer sites that charge for access to news.

Burt Herman, a former John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford, talked about launching Hacks and Hackers with the New York Times’ Aron Pilhofer and Northwestern professor Richard Gordon. The group is experimenting with ways to connect journalists and technologists around their strong beliefs in the need for freedom of information.

Krissy Clark, a former Knight fellow at Stanford, wrote that good journalism is like a map because it can inform people about where a story is and the best way forward. She said that journalists can filter through the information from sites like EveryBlock and use technology to “reconnect people to place.”

Andrew Finlayson, another former fellow, talked about the semantic web. The semantic web is a system of linked data in development that are readable to computers, not just humans. An example of this is the WolframAlpha search engine that generates an answer instead of links to pages. Journalists will be able to use this system to organize data and find connections for investigative reporting.

V. Michael Bove, Jr. leads the Center for Future Storytelling at MIT’s Media Lab. He studies the combination of shared experiences with media, like watching TV with friends, and personalized experiences, like watching it on an iPhone. He thinks that mobile technology will change the definition of successful media from whether it has a wide reach to whether it reaches a targeted audience. Also at MIT, Sherry Turkle, professor of technology and society,  explained her views on young people, connectivity and deep thought in interviews with PBS Frontline’s “Digital Nation” and the BBC.  (Knight funds the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. )

James Paul Gee, professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, said that in games we learn by being guided whereas with content-driven media we learn by reflecting on what we are told. He said using games in journalism can help if the games’ creators focus on what problems the player has to solve rather than what material the player has to read. Knight funds an entrepreneurial journalism center at ASU.

Nora Paul and Kathleen A. Hansen wrote about their research project called Playing the News. They studied how games could be used to tell “boring but important” news and found that people wanted to be guided through ongoing stories. Sites with lots of contextual material helped people both see the big picture and get in-depth information. They used their findings in the Convergence Journalism class they teach at the University of Minnesota.  Nora and Kathleen won a Knight News Challenge grant to create the game.

Esther Wojcicki is the current Chair of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons and teaches high school journalism. She thinks all students need journalism skills, and received a Knight Foundation grant to develop a curriculum for high school English classes. Esther says it is important to give teenagers both freedom and recognition.

Alan C. Miller wrote about launching the News Literacy Project, which teaches high school students about the importance of First Amendment and finding valid information. Journalists visit classes to talk about their work and the lessons focus on critical thinking and recognizing quality information. Alan's start-up funds came from Knight Foundation.

Bob Giles, Curator of the Nieman Foundation, said that fairness in journalism is as important as ever. Reporting fairly, like respecting the wishes of the story subjects or looking at a controversial issue from different angles, makes stories more credible and makes them have a greater impact. Knight funds Latin American journalism fellows at Harvard.

Photograph by Rachel Gadson

Five students and one recent graduate from the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) School of Journalism and Graphic Communication are in Johannesburg this summer reporting on the World Cup and life in South Africa with six students from Shantou University in Guangdong Province, China.

The students will be in South Africa until July 11. FAMU students will produce the English content on the group’s web site, and Shantou students will produce the Chinese content.

Professor Joe Ritchie, Knight Chair for Journalism Student Enhancement, is leading the FAMU students in South Africa. Listen to Ritchie and student journalist Anamarie Shreeves discuss the project on NPR.

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

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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?