Juan J. Martinez, Knight Foundation's Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, is the winner of South Florida Business Journal's 2010 CFO Awards in the non-profit category.

Martinez believes an effective CFO is only as good as his team. To that end, he has a very strong finance team ... Martinez has empowered them to solve problems and communicate freely so he can concentrate on adding value to management decisions "as opposed to being drawn constantly intro transactions."

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

Vivian Celeste Neal, Knight Communities Program Director to Akron and Northeast Ohio, was featured in the Akron Beacon Journal today. She will be retiring Feb. 26.

When Neal came to the foundation, ''she not only brought a lifetime of insight and experience, but a love for Akron, her community,'' said Alberto Ibarügen, president and chief executive of the Knight Foundation. ''She has been a player in Knight's involvement in Team NEO, the University Park Alliance, the Austen BioInnovation Institute, education projects with Akron's school board and superintendent and countless other small and big projects around town. She understands Akron, she loves Akron, she wants Akron to succeed. And her work always showed it.''

You can read the entire story at Ohio.com

As the popularity of social media and short-form messages grow, it's only appropriate that awards season includes what is being dubbed the 'Oscars of Twitter.' The second annual Shorty Awards will be held March 3 at TheTimesCenter in The New York Times Building. The awards are sponsored by the Knight Foundation.

The Shorty Awards honor the best producers of short real-time content on Twitter, who are nominated by users in 27 official categories and new crowd-sourced ones. The newly created Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences help select winners from groups of finalists. The academy is comprised of leaders in technology, journalism, business and culture and actress Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), New York Times technology columnist David Pogue (@pogue), entertainer MC Hammer (@mchammer) and Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibarügen (@Ibarügen), among others.

Here's a peek at some of the front-runners in a finance, food and government categories:

Nominations began earlier this month and end Friday, January 29, 2010 at 11:59:59 pm Pacific time. If you're already on Twitter, you can nominate and vote for your favorite users by using the voting box at http://shortyawards.com/.

Knight Foundation CEO and Chairman of the Newseum Board of Trustees Alberto Ibarügen introduced Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to an audience at the Newseum today in Washington, D.C.. Secretary Clinton stated that Internet freedom should be a right for everyone, and that the United States has a responsibility in helping protect the free exchange of ideas on the world's information infrastructure.

[caption id="attachment_2333" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibarügen introduces U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Newseum Thursday in Washington, D.C. (Image via CSpan.org)"]

Secretary Clinton mentioned the launch of a competition to improve information exchanges:

"... There are companies, individuals, and institutions working on ideas and applications that could already advance our diplomatic and development objectives. The State Department will be launching an innovation competition to give this work an immediate boost. We'll be asking Americans to send us their best ideas for applications and technologies that help break down language barriers, overcome illiteracy, connect people to the services and information they need. Microsoft, for example, has already developed a prototype for a digital doctor that could help provide medical care in isolated rural communities. We want to see more ideas like that. And we'll work with the winners of the competition and provide grants to help build their ideas to scale."

You can watch video of the speech at C-SPAN. A full transcript of the speech is available at the U.S. Department of State.

Back when we launched the Knight News Challenge in 2006, using contests to spur innovation was a relatively new concept. But in just four years, the number of similar competitions in the media, information and communication field has doubled.

So we decided to take a closer look at the contests globally, to see if we could adapt any lessons to improve the News Challenge.' We reviewed all 29 contests, including the Stockholm Challenge, NetSquared' N2Y4 Challenge, We Media Pitch It and Sunlight Lab Apps for America contests, and explored their judging criteria, outreach and marketing plans, application and selection processes. Along the way, we also interviewed former News Challenge judges and entrepreneurs for their insights too.

Today, we want to share the resulting study, conducted by Arabella Advisors, with the greater community. We hope anyone running or hoping to launch a contest ' or innovators searching for funding ' will find it as useful as we did.

You can access the PDF of this study here.

- Mayur Patel, Gary Kebbel and Jose Zamora

Note: This post is cross-posted at the News Challenge blog.

Cross-posted from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

[In October, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy issued its report on how our media need to evolve to serve the public interest in the digital age. The effort included some big names: Google's Marissa Mayer, former solicitor general Ted Olson, ex-L.A. Times editor John Carroll, former FCC chairman Reed Hundt, and new media researcher danah boyd among them. Here our friend Eric Newton of the Knight Foundation explains how the report fits in a tradition of media self-examination and issues a call to action. —Josh]

Way back in the age of paper, in 1986, professor James Beniger, then at Harvard, produced a useful chart on the civilian labor force of the United States. It showed how the bulk of American workers had moved during the past two centuries from working in agriculture to industry to service, and now, to information. Point being: the digital age didn’t just sneak up on us. 

Knight Foundation CEO and President Alberto Ibargüen has long said that information is a core community need, as vital to a society's health as jobs, roads and electricity. And in the wake of a crisis like the devastating earthquake in Haiti, a community's information infrastructure can fail just like its power grid and transportation network.

So Knight is giving $200,000 to an international media development group called Internews to keep the country's radio stations broadcasting during the disaster:

Knight Foundation officials said they fear broken communication systems could prevent aid from being distributed efficiently, and the grant is meant to help retain the country's battered information infrastructure.

 

Without that system in place, Internews officials warned, survivors might not know where to go for food, medicine, or how to find missing friends and family.

Internews plans to ship a 300-watt transmitter from Paris to Port-au-Prince, where it is expected to broadcast messages that can be picked up by radios up to 30 miles outside of the demolished city.

The Knight Foundation reported that Internews estimated at least 12 of the city's radio stations and one national broadcaster got back on the air Saturday.

For more information about the grant, read the story from the Miami Herald. Knight grantee Ushahidi has compiled a list of ways you can help survivors in Haiti.

When tragedy struck in Haiti last week, the folks at Ushahidi, a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, leapt into action. By Tuesday evening, they were hard at work, collecting and mapping eyewitness reports from the area devastated by a catastrophic earthquake.

A story in today's Washington Post highlights their work:

The site is www.Ushahidi.com, and it allows users to submit eyewitness accounts or other relevant information for disaster zones via e-mail, text or Twitter -- and then visualize the frequency of these events on a map. By Friday, Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, had received nearly 33,000 unique visitors, and several hundred personal reports that mainstream news organizations might not hear about. [...]

 

Taken individually, these bits of data might not be terribly useful. The goal is that by aggregating the incidents in a visual format, people and organizations using the site will be able to see patterns of destruction, to determine where services should be concentrated. A red dot on the map, for example, signifies that looting is happening near a town called P'tionville; another shows that Hotel Villa Creole has become a site of medical triage.

On the Ushahidi blog, founder Ory Okolloh and director of strategic operations Patrick Meier have been sharing insights on the organzation's response to the crisis and how it will develop over the coming days. Okolloh writes:

Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google's). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.

Ushahidi is also aggregating resources for information about the crisis and how you can help. Look here for instructions on embedding Ushahidi's crisis map on your own site.

The latest round of winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge were announced today. The Challenge - a five-year, $24 million initiative that helps community and place-based foundations find and support local news and information projects - is part of a growing movement to help make sure residents are informed and engaged. According to the news release, "J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, recently found that more than 207 foundations have funded $135.86 million in grants to 128 projects since 2005."

Included in this round of KCIC winners are a diverse range of projects - from'raising public awareness on vital local issues to creating online community forums to stimulate dialogue among residents to conducting an online cultural treasure hunt. The list of winners also includes the Challenge's first collaboration among several local foundations seeking to make a regional impact. From the news release:

'Information is as important to a thriving democracy as clean air, jobs and schools. As leaders, local foundations are taking the initiative to meet those information needs,' said Trabian Shorters , Knight Foundation's vice president for communities, who leads the Challenge. 'These projects help ensure that everyone has the information necessary to make decisions about their governments and their lives.'

You can read details about all of the winning projects at InformationNeeds.org.

Speaking of InformationNeeds.org, the site has been redesigned in conjunction with today's announcement. There, you'll not only find more information about the Challenge, but also information on the upcoming Media Learning Seminar, as well as plenty of archived video resources from past seminars.

It's been a while and progress is still slow after'the Global Day of Solidarity' called'upon President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to ensure justice for the victims of the Maguindanao massacre in the Philippines, where at least 30 journalists and support staff were among the 57 people brutally killed.

CPJ joined in on the protest and also traveled to Mindanao's General Santos City to meet with local journalists, the relatives of victims, and local prosecutors responsible for building a case against the suspects.

Here is what CPJ had to say:

An assembly of local journalists situated in the towns near the site of the massacre underlined the trauma felt by many survivors. When we spoke with them, some noted that the security protocols they implemented for reporting in dangerous areas'had failed to save their friends and colleagues.

 

Many more feared for their safety in reporting on the massacre's aftermath, explaining why several reports on the massacre have run without bylines or datelines in both national and local newspapers. One reporter told the assembly that unidentified men had photographed journalists when they reported on the arrests of Ampatuan clan members and the military's discovery of their underground private armory.

CPJ ranks the Philippines as the sixth worst country in which journalists' killers are brought to justice.

For'the full story on'CPJ's findings from the Philippines, read this article.

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''' --'Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

How great would it be for web sites to'let us know when'news'stories we've been following have been updated or corrected? How about also seeing'a box of information explaining the type of sourcing used within the story, as well as a link to the organization's'editorial'standards?

According to an article released by the Columbia Journalism Review, hNews is trying to make all of these features possible.

hNews is a microformat for news being developed by the Media Standards Trust and the Web Science Research Initiative. It is also a winner of last year's Knight News Challenge grant.

For an example of how this would work, take a look at this article. Scroll down to the bottom of the text and place the cursor over the blue box labeled 'Value Added.' A small box of text will pop up that lists the article title, author, date, published and the last date the article was updated. This information is automatically generated, thanks to hNews.'

The goal of hNews is to:

Design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of 'source tagging.' For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interview with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data ' the 'story behind the story' ' to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase 'Pakistan riots' for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by 'eyewitness accounts' would yield a more selective list.

Currently, the Associated Press and AOL are encoding articles using hNews.

hNews is hoping to bring more transparency to news. Its features will provide people with the back story of an article they're reading.

Visit the CJR Web site to read the complete story on hNews.

--'Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Oklahoma Watch is a Knight Community Information Challenge winner that aims to bring attention and action on issues such as the incarceration of women through independent journalism in partnership with established news organizations around the state.

It officially launches Jan. 30 but is already publishing via a new website and its partner publications. We checked in this week for a status report from editor Tom Lindley.

Q. When did the site launch?

A. While our official “Women in Prison” project launch date has been set for Jan. 30, we unofficially launched Oklahomawatch.org  Dec. 2 to coincide with the publication of a three-part newspaper print/online series that was produced in conjunction with Oklahoma’s two major daily newspapers and distributed to the rest of the state’s newspapers.

The series focused on the state’s prison overcrowding and budgetary crisis and was meant to give lawmakers something to think about as they neared the deadline for filing bills for the 2011 legislative session. We felt it was important to

Over the next seven years, the Knight Foundation will give $70 million to community foundations in the 26 Knight communities where the Knight brothers once owned newspapers. The effort will help the Foundation focus on its ideal of fostering informed, engaged communities.

Since 1988, Knight has worked closely with community foundations in these cities, and believes they offer an important grassroots grasp of the issues that can help guide funding. From the release:

'Information is an essential community need and community foundations were established to meet core needs,' said Alberto Ibarügen, Knight Foundation's president and CEO. 'They also only exist and thrive because of community engagement and contributions. That makes them ideal partners to help us understand and advance local community engagement, focused on ensuring that these communities have the information they need to mange their affairs in our democracy.'

 

A new position will be created at Knight Foundation's Miami headquarters to direct the initiative.

"Our goal is to better coordinate and focus our initiatives in the Knight communities and use our resources in the most effective way possible,' said Trabian Shorters, Knight Foundation's vice president for communities. 'The new director will work together with foundation staff and advisory committees in each Knight community to guide the local foundations on use of the funds.'

Read the full news release for more details on the initiative.

The Center for International Media Assistance has released an interesting new report examining recent trends in private U.S. funding of media development projects around the world.

U.S. foundations have funded programs in 'media development' (independent news and information in general) and media for development (coverage of particular'issues).

The report recommends donors keep consulting and continue to attract new foundations into the field. For more, read the report.

--'Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

This essay has been cross-posted from the Nieman Journalism Lab. 

Way back in the age of paper, in 1986, professor James Beniger, then at Harvard, produced a useful chart on the civilian labor force of the United States. It showed how the bulk of American workers had moved during the past two centuries from working in agriculture to industry to service, and now, to information. Point being: the digital age didn't just sneak up on us. It's been a long, slow evolution. So shame on us for not changing our rules and laws and institutions for this new age.

We were well warned. Just after World War II, the Hutchins Commission said that traditional media could do much better: they should take on the social responsibility of providing the news 'in a context that gives it meaning.' In the 1960s, the Kerner Commission said mainstream media wasn't diverse enough to properly tell the story of this changing nation. Same decade: the Carnegie Commission said the status quo was simply not working, that public broadcasting must be created to fill the gap.

After that, a stream of reports ' from the University of Pennsylvania, from Columbia University and others ' agreed and repeated the same three fundamental findings:

• Hutchins: Our news systems are not good enough,
• Kerner: They don't engage everyone,
• Carnegie: We need alternatives.

Here comes digital media, and ' boom! ' an explosion of alternatives. And we're all ' shocked? Apparently. So let's try it again. This time, the big report comes from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, prepared by the Aspen Institute with a grant from Knight Foundation, where I work. 

A new examination of a familiar problem

Why a new commission? We are...

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation celebrate the receipt of two boxes full of government documents. Courtesy of hughelectronic on Flickr.

Last summer, the National Freedom of Information Coalition conducted an online survey to test whether the economic crisis and changes in the media industry had affected efforts to push for more open government. The results were conclusive: 60 percent of the respondents said that traditional media support for open government lawsuits in their states had fallen dramatically. Eighty-five percent of the respondents said they expected these lawsuits to become even rarer in the next three years.

Meanwhile, more than half of the respondents to a follow-up study said that open government violations had gone up in the past few years. And the NFOIC found that many media organizations were too under-resourced to even get their lawyers to contact government officials in protest.

Today, Knight Foundation announced a $2 million grant to the NFOIC to create the Knight FOI Fund:

The Knight FOI Fund will provide up-front costs such as court costs, filing and deposition fees, if attorneys are willing to take on a pro-bono basis cases that otherwise would go unfiled.

'Media companies have for generations taken on the lion's share of the legal work surrounding freedom of information,' said Eric Newton, Knight Foundation Vice President for Journalism Programs. 'But as media economics restructure, new approaches are needed. The National Freedom of Information Coalition is in a position to seed and lead new approaches.'

The Knight FOI Fund will be one of several NFOIC initiatives to address the fall-off in open government litigation, including a round of challenge grants to raise more local money for state Freedom of Information coalitions and a new website to help support the state FOI movement. You can read more about the Knight grant in our press release, and learn more about the NFOIC at the organization's website.