Each time we launch the News Challenge, we get asked again and again: “How can I make my News Challenge application stand out? What kinds of things do reviewers look for in my proposal?” Considering we receive thousands of applications a year, those are both good things to think about.

So we thought we’d ask one of our News Challenge reviewers Kio Stark, a published author and current teacher at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Stark brings more than 15 years of experience in the field of interactive marketing.

Below, Stark gives us an inside look as to how reviewers assess proposals and what they’re looking for in each application. She gives suggestions of things to keep in mind when writing and submitting a project, including specifics like what can turn reviewers on or off to ideas.

What advice would you give to applicants for this round of the News Challenge on mobile?

Kio Stark: Think about this as telling a story. You want the reviewers to be able to really imagine and understand what you’re doing. Clarity is your primary directive—and clarity isn’t easy. Try to use really concrete examples of how people will use what you’re making, how you know they need it and why you think it’s a great idea.

How can interested applicants make their submissions stand out?

K.S.: The first thing that always jumps out at me is when the applicants are passionate about what they’re doing, so try to make sure that comes through. Showing reviewers that you’re very clear about what you’re doing and how you’re going to do it is critical. Even if what you’re doing is an experiment! We want to see that you’re really serving a need you know exists.

What was it like to be an adviser for the most recent round of the News Challenge on data? What surprised you?

K.S.: I love seeing how creative people are thinking about things that can be done now that couldn’t be done before. I was surprised by how generous the review process was. Our goal was to find great projects and think about how we might be able to help them succeed.

Are there specific things that draw advisers to certain projects? Or shy away from them?

Dr. Neil Schneiderman, the University of Miami’s James L. Knight Professor of Psychology, Medicine, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award recognizes Dr. Schneiderman’s significant and lifelong contributions to the field of behaviorial medicine.

Dr. Schneiderman has led major studies on how cognitive behavioral stress management affects patients with HIV/AIDS and cardiovascular diseases.

He has also done extensive research into the health of the Hispanic and Latino population, including serving as the principal investigator of the largest long-term study of Hispanic/Latino health in the United States. His full biography and groundbreaking research efforts are available online.

The International Society of Behavioral Medicine is the leading scientific society focused on the development and integration of sociocultural, psychosocial, behavioral and biomedical knowledge relevant to health and illness.

Dr. Schneiderman accepted the award earlier this week in Budapest, Hungary, where he also gave a keynote speech on the foundations of cardiovascular behavioral medicine during the 12th International Congress of Behavioral Medicine. The award was presented by the International Society of Behavioral Medicine.

Barry’s Blog, a leading arts blog published as a “service of the Western States Arts Federation,” has honored several Knight Arts leaders in its fifth annual listing of the 50 most powerful and influential people in the nonprofit arts. Each year, national leaders anonymously submit nominations for influential and powerful leaders in arts administration and organizational leadership. This year four Knight Arts leaders were named to the list: Knight Foundation VP/Arts Dennis Scholl and Knight Arts national advisory council members Aaron Dworkin, Scott Provancher and Gary Steuer.

Click here to read the entire list and read below for excerpts highlighting Knight Arts leaders…

Dennis Scholl, Vice President/Arts at Knight Foundation

Collector, Philanthropist, Emmy winning documentarian, Harvard fellow, Scholl is responsible for some of the funding world’s best known and loved out-of-the-box projects including Random Acts of Culture.  He is comfortable with risk taking to a degree most are not and he understands the importance of moving towards new ways of addressing old problems.   His eight city core funding community gives him local clout and national perspective, and his close working ties with Rocco at the Endowment have increased his visibility beyond the arts.

Scott Provancher, President, Arts & Science Council
“Scott Provancher is a path maker and front-runner.  In 2009 when Scott arrived in Charlotte, arts giving patterns had already started to shift away from united appeals.  Then came the economic downturn… Undaunted, Scott focused energy on creating innovative giving systems that would lure back previous donors and attract new ones.  He has challenged the cultural sector to think differently about sustainability while also ensuring offerings remain accessible to the community.  Power2Give (an online giving platform already adopted by other cities and states) and a new 100+million recapitalization fund are just two examples – among many – of Provancher/ASC  ingenuity that are making Charlotte one of the growing arts and culture cities in America.  Scott thrives on finding the innovative, long-term solution, AND he is a wonderful combination of brilliant, hard-driving, and kind.” 

Photo Credit: Flickr user girl_onthe_les

The Knight News Challenge on mobile is now open for your applications.  

We’re asking eight questions. We’re asking you to make the case for your idea on using mobile to improve news, information, democracy and communities, and your ability to execute on it. We also encourage you to link to anything that helps you to make that case.

We’re giving you just three weeks to submit your ideas-- the deadline to apply is noon EDT on Sept. 10. For just 10-12 sentences, you have a shot at a share of $5 million, and advice from Knight’s network of media entrepreneurs to help accelerate your idea. All applications are open and will be posted to our Tumblr site. If you don’t want yours to be public, you can send it to us by e-mail at kncclosed@knightfoundation.org

Two days after we announced the News Challenge on mobile, Time Magazine released its “Wireless Issue.” Time’s Richard Stengel argued that “the mobile phone has ­become a kind of super­extension of ourselves — faster, brainier, more reliable and always on.” “It is hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones,” wrote his colleague Nancy Gibbs. Earlier this week, the mobile analytics company Flurry announced a finding that the adoption of the smart phone “has surpassed that of any consumer technology in history...10X faster than that of the 80s PC revolution, 2X faster than that of 90s Internet Boom and 3X faster than that of recent social network adoption.”

Knight Foundation supports Mobilize.org to help bring community-based, millennial-led engagement efforts to five communities. Over the weekend, participants gathered in Charlotte for Mobilize.org's Millennial Civic Engagement Summit to discuss the challenges young people face in engaging in civic issues. As part of the summit's award competition, participants proposed solutions to those challenges. The following was written by Mobilize.org staff.

There’s only one word to describe the energy in the room during the project presentations at the Millennial Civic Engagement Summit this weekend: Electric. Presenters made impassioned pitches for their ideas, eliciting enthusiastic applause, laughter, shouts of encouragement and, in some cases, tears, from the summit audience.

“Feel like I’m in a room full of super heroes!!!” tweeted participant @Tice1Mic.

The top five project ideas, proposed and voted on via by summit participants, won a share of $25,000 and a year of expert support from Mobilize.org to implement the projects on campus, in communities, or online. Ideas were judged on potential social impact, creativity and innovation, sustainability, and the use of new and social media.

Project proposals ranged from a national initiative to have trains filled with civic-minded millennials travel across America, holding whistle-stop trainings in communities along the way, to a center in Raleigh that activates volunteers to help causes in the local community.

The project with the highest score at the summit was The Artist Spring, which aims to use the arts as a means of activating people in their communities. Hannah Hasan, one of the project co-creators, began her proposal with an impassioned spoken word poem.

“Moved to tears listening to my peers share their ideas at #MCESummit,” tweeted @Hmass12, another summit participant, during Hasan’s performance.

The five winning projects, in order of highest scores received, are:

·     The Artist Spring (North Carolina): This project will encourage all types of performance artists to utilize their medium to make a difference. First, we will a have website that would allow artists to upload videos, submit blogs and discuss the arts and civic engagement. This will be a social network that encourages peaceful, meaningful change. Locally, we will plan a fun stage show where various artists will perform for their family, friends, and neighbors about topics that encourage voting and civic engagement. We  also will have canvassers there to register voters, and  provide information about voting and future programs and opportunities to stay involved.

TurboVote announced a new partnership today with Google to help make voting easier for its users.

As part of Google’s Politics and Elections portal, people can use the TurboVote platform to begin the process of registering to vote, vote by mail and also sign-up for reminders to vote by SMS or e-mail. As visitors to the site, users select their state to find relevant voter registration information and election dates and deadlines.

If users can't find a stamp to mail in ballots, TurboVote now offers individual accounts to anyone who wants their forms delivered with a stamped, addressed envelope for their local election office.

TurboVote, which is rolling out a new site design, also announced that the nonprofit Fight for the Future will add several of its activities to its site.

Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement at City Hall Presents; photo by Josh Pelta-Heller

Now in its third year, the Knight Arts Challenge Philadelphia will call for your best ideas for the arts in Philadelphia Sept. 17. - Oct. 15. The $9 million initiative seeks the most innovative cultural ideas to engage and enrich Philadelphia’s neighborhoods.

Launched in 2010, the challenge has awarded $5.4 million to 71 ideas to date. Winners, selected from more than 3,000 applications, represent a broad spectrum of the community — from individual artists and artist-driven organizations to some of the city’s premier cultural institutions.

“We’ve received an overwhelming response from the city’s creative community over the past two years,” says Donna Frisby-Greenwood, Philadelphia program director for Knight Foundation. “We’re looking for arts ideas that inspire the community to build a better future together and make Philadelphia a more vibrant place to live.”

Make this your year. No idea is too large or too small, as long as it follows three basic rules:

1.  Your idea is about the arts.
2.  Your project takes place in or benefits Philadelphia.
3.  You find other funding to match Knight Foundation’s grant (within a year).

Applications will be accepted from Sept. 17 – Oct. 15.  All is takes is 150 words.

This week, with Knight Foundation's backing, we launched the Super PAC App for your iPhone. It's a free and fun way to find out more about the presidential election ads coming out of your TV. Download the app, load it up any time you're watching a presidential commercial (whether on TV, YouTube, or elsewhere) and explore who and what is behind the ad.

I want to mention three big reasons why we’re so excited about Super PAC App.

Even as the presidential race dominates the news, and we’re asked to vote on everything from mayor to mosquito control board, keeping up with the issues can be difficult.  Even those keeping track are left to sort through the noise, sift fact from fiction (or determine who has “Pants on Fire” as Politifact says) and identify the new influencers in the post-Citizens United world.

Last fall, Knight Foundation gathered a group of media thought leaders for a discussion and brainstorm on ways for people to engage in the democratic process through digital tools and content.

So far this year, Knight has invested over $1.2 million in a series of projects that help Americans become more informed and engaged.

Today, we’re announcing the latest project, the SuperPAC App, where users can simply hold up their iPhone to any presidential ad, and using sound fingerprint technology the app determines who funded it. Also, today in the iTunes store is Politifact’s Settle It! app. And later this month, MTV will launch a new game that aims to get younger Americans hooked on the electoral process.

Here’s a look at all the projects:

SuperPac App

SuperPAC App, an easy way to find out what people and groups are behind presidential election TV ads, is now available for free through the App Store. Users simply run the iPhone app whenever an ad is playing. Audio fingerprinting  technology identifies the ad and the exploration begins.  Users can share, comment on and interact with news about the ad.

By Amber Robertson

Would it be safe to assume that a survey of recent journalism and mass communication graduates would overflow with data of how they are seizing ever-growing new media opportunities? Apparently not.

The Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates seems to ask the wrong questions year after year. The 2011 survey was released on Aug 9 during the AEJMC conference in Chicago. Designed to monitor employment rates and salaries of U.S. journalism and mass comm graduates, it leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Photo: Hundreds of thousands of voters took part in the June 5, 2012, Gov. Scott Walker recall election in Wisconsin. Many of them, including these voters at Rufus King High School in north Milwaukee, faced long lines. Photo by AJ Vicens/News21

By AJ Vicens

Standing in an elementary school hallway in June in a north Milwaukee neighborhood, the importance of in-person reporting hit home.

“Why do they have to watch us vote?” said Jamila Gatlin, a woman who I was talking to about a group of poll watchers for my News21 story. Gatlin, an African American, was upset that three white poll watchers had each traveled hundreds of miles to sit in her neighborhood-polling place watching for fraud or other possible problems.

My story, about a poll watching training group from Texas that has spread nationwide in just three years, just got its opening scene.

By Amy Schmitz Weiss and Amy Starlight Lawrence

In 2011 journalism educators talked about using – on campus – some of the free, open-source software that was starting to be released from Knight’s News Challenge projects.  The idea was that the latest technology could be easily adopted in ways that would be useful at the university or local community level and would help students and faculties learn to create digital projects.

With Knight Foundation support, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication launched a contest of mini-grants, available to the students and faculties of any journalism and mass communication school.  The intent was to reward innovative uses of the available software.

The call for proposals is already out for the second round of the competition:  The deadline is Sept. 10 – and there will be 10 mini-grants available for as much as $8,000 each.  The grants give students and faculty hands-on experience with digital software.

The first round of the competition is complete, and there are 10 projects off the ground.  

TurboVote helps young people register to vote on the Miami Dade College campus

When my colleague John Bracken, director of journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation, told me about TurboVote in January, I knew immediately that this exciting, new platform would resonate in Detroit.

What better way to advance Detroit’s civic entrepreneurial momentum than to empower thousands of people with an easy, seamless way to register, engage, and vote?

The TurboVote concept is simple: (1) via TurboVote.org, voters check their registration status; (2) via the web, voters request pre-filled registration/absentee forms by mail; (3) local election authorities send mail-in ballots to voters; and (4) the TurboVote system sends text/e-mail reminders to voters about important local, state, and federal elections.

We knew we couldn’t do it alone so, along with the TurboVote team, we pounded the pavement this past spring and met with area universities who could promote the service to their students. In the end, four area universities signed up as launch partners for TurboVote Detroit: Wayne State University, the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Marygrove College, and Eastern Michigan University. Check out the press release to learn more.

We should all applaud the leadership of TurboVote and these universities who are advancing a more informed and engaged Detroit.

As with all of our other Detroit grants and initiatives, I’m especially excited that TurboVote meets Detroiters where they are to offer easy opportunities to connect, support, and participate in all of our city’s civic energy.   

Above: Richard Gingras, head of Google News, speaks at TechRanking 2012. Photo Credit: Flickr user California Watch.

At last week’s Chicago convention of journalism and “mass communication” educators, a letter from foundation representatives got a lot of attention. In my opinion, given the digital revolution, it was a rather tame observation. Funders said journalism education should 1. Speed up the pace of change and 2. Get better by using a more effective “teaching hospital” model. (A great example is this week’s News21 series on how voter fraud is not a real issue.)

My big takeaway from Chicago was the keynote by Richard Gingras, head of Google News. He went beyond the funders’ modest requests to speed up and get better. Gingras, who has talked about these things before, called upon educators to take bigger risks, experiment more and partner with computer science departments. We should call it the “lost keynote” because even though the educators invited him, his talk got relatively little tweeting and only one good story, in PBS Media Shift.

That’s too bad, because Gingras is absolutely right, and what he’s talking about is what we are looking for in the Knight News Challenge.  We also think that getting more modern professionals  into journalism education is a good thing because it will get bureaucracies moving.

Photo Credit: Flickr user girl_onthe_les

Update: News Challenge Office Hours: Get your questions answered at 1 p.m. ET on Friday, Sept. 7.

Related: A deeper look at the News Challenge application questions and How to make your News Challenge: Mobile application stand out

We’re excited to announce the theme for the third Knight News Challenge of 2012: mobile. We hope to learn about new approaches for using mobile to inform and engage communities, and build the foundation for others to do more in the future.

We will open the contest on Aug. 29 and will close at noon EDT Sept. 10, on newschallenge.org. We plan to announce the winners early next year. As with the two prior News Challenge contests this year, on networks and data, we will keep the application light, limited to 500 words and a few questions.

Why mobile? With 6 billion devices worldwide, according to the World Bank, the world will soon have more mobile phones than people.  The mobile device is so much more than a “phone”-- Jeff  Jarvis, among others, has argued that we need a better term for the device. “Mobile is my personal bubble. It is enhanced convenience, putting the device and the world in my hand,” he says. We saw this personal tinge to tech last week in the NASA Curiosity Command Center where staff, while landing a robot on Mars, were updating their friends and family via their phones (according to an interview with Bobak Ferdowsi.)  

Despite these trends, and the presence of several mobile projects in our own portfolio  (including winners from Knight News Challenge on Networks PeepolTV, Behavio and Watchup), we realized how much we have to learn about this fundamental shift.  For many of us around the world, mobile has become an important tool for learning what’s going on around us, and for sharing details about our lives with friends, neighbors and strangers. We know that we (and our kids) have grown attached to our mobile devices, but we have less clarity about the ways people are using them, or might use them, as citizens, content producers and consumers to tell, share and receive stories.

We’ve focused the News Challenge this year on big opportunities in news and information - networks, data and now mobile. In some ways, mobile represents both the greatest need and greatest potential for individual citizens and news organizations.

Knight Foundation is celebrating its 1,000+ Random Acts of Culture™ with four big, blow-out performances in San Jose, Detroit, Miami and Philadelphia. The fun kicked off Sunday, Aug. 5 with a 250-person surprise performance in San Jose and continued Friday, Aug. 10 with a 150-person performance of “Ode to Joy” at Compuware World Headquarters. Child and adult choristers, musicians and dancers staged an unforgettable surprise performance – enjoy the video above.

Looking for more Random Acts of Culture™ fun? Read an interview with Dennis Scholl, Knight Foundation’s VP/Arts, about the program, see a TV interview about it with the Symphony Silicon Valley,  relive our past performances through video highlights and see a master list of our 1,000+ Random Acts of Culture™.

Jason Randall, 26, places his mail-in ballot in a drop box outside the Lane County Elections Office in Eugene, Ore. Photo Credit: Michael Ciaglo/News21

A national, student-led investigative reporting project launched this week with an in depth look at voting rights across the country. Among its major findings: in-person voter impersonation on Election Day - which in part drove state legislatures to enact tougher, controversial voter I.D. laws - is virtually non-existent.

“Who Can Vote?” is the 2012 project of News21, a program designed to produce in-depth, innovative and interactive investigative journalism on issues of national importance. The site, which went live over the weekend, includes more than 20 reports, interactive databases, data visualizations and more. The program is headquartered at  the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Two dozen students from 11 universities conducted the research, reporting and writing under the direction of journalism professionals, which included investigating all reported cases of election fraud in the U.S. since 2000.

Major media partners have already started to publish parts of their research. The Washington Post highlighted the findings Sunday in an article, “Election Day impersonation, an impetus for voter ID laws, a rarity, data show.” The article cites the research methods:

“The News21 report is based on a national public-records search in which reporters sent thousands of requests to elections officers in all 50 states, asking for every case of alleged fraudulent activity — including registration fraud; absentee-ballot fraud; vote buying; false election counts; campaign fraud; the casting of ballots by ineligible voters, such as felons and non-citizens; double voting; and voter impersonation.”

A new interactive app, available now in iTunes, celebrates the life of renowned choreographer, dancer and artist Merce Cunningham (1919-2009).

The app, designed to make Cunningham’s work accessible to more people, was released today by the Aperture Foundation. It is a new iteration of the 1997 book “Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years,” authored by the Cunningham Dance Company’s archivist David Vaughan.

The book chronicled Cunningham’s work through words, photographs, designs for sets and costumes, musical scores and choreographic notes. The app, which makes the text available digitally for the first time, is also updated to include the final years of Cunningham’s life and features new multimedia content like video excerpts and interviews.

Merce Cunningham: 65 Years, supported by Knight Foundation and developed in collaboration with the Cunningham Dance Foundation, also includes a selection of Cunningham’s drawings, journal pages as well as all of his known essays. Its release was covered in the New York Times article “Even in Death a Choreographer is Mixing Art and Technology”:

Throughout his life Merce Cunningham came up with new ways to blend art and technology. He changed the way we think about space and time onstage, he explored dance on film before just about anyone else, and long before James Cameron and Hollywood made motion-capture cool, he was using three-dimensional computer animation to choreograph. Now, three years after his death in 2009, Cunningham is again at the vanguard. On Friday the Aperture Foundation is to introduce its first interactive application for the iPad, “Merce Cunningham: 65 Years.”

Cunningham’s own experience with technology was a driving force behind the app’s development   and is chronicled in it. In 1989, As part of his choreographic process, Cunningham began to use a computer program designed specifically for him called LifeForms. His 1991 piece “Trackers” (a title inspired by the “tracking” function on the computer) was his first work made using the technology.

About the apps' release, Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen said, “Merce Cunningham’s career cannot be captured by words alone, no matter how eloquent. Knight Foundation was delighted to have the opportunity to support a multimedia publication that will allow so many more people to engage with his work.”

Can journalism schools expand their impact and reach by offering more distance e-learning? That was the question posed today to a gathering of Knight Chairs in journalism in Chicago at the Association for Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication convention.

The question was prompted by the release of “Digital Training Comes of Age,” a new Knight Foundation report showing soaring demand for training in digital tools and techniques. Increasingly, journalists are willing to get the training for those and other skills online.

The Knight Chairs noted that some journalism schools do offer master’s degrees and other on-line courses. They said schools should do more e-learning, but that universities are not doing enough to define best e-learning practices. Many educators have an old idea of e-learning, they said, thinking it is nothing more than lecturing on-line. Howard Finberg of the Poynter Institute had a good idea: Create e-learning modules for teachers and trainers who want to learn how to create good e-learning.

Knight Chair in International Journalism Rosental Alves pioneered e-learning at Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, which has trained more than 6,000 journalists in Spanish and Portuguese. He said e-learning has two great advantages: it’s low cost and self-directed courses can be taken at any time.

“Digital Training Comes of Age” was a survey of 660 journalists trained in Knight-supported training programs. The survey showed that online classes are gaining popularity as a cost-effective way to reach more trainees. A third of U.S. journalists and eight in 10 international journalists say the online classes they took were as good as, or better than, conventional training in the classroom.

Demand for training has grown and journalists want more training in digital tools such as multimedia, data analysis and technology. Most give their news organizations low marks for providing training opportunities.

Random Acts of Culture™ - San Jose, California from JD Andrews on Vimeo.

Knight Foundation is celebrating its 1,000+ Random Acts of Culture™ with four big, blow-out performances in San Jose, Detroit, Miami and Philadelphia. The fun kicked off Sunday, Aug 5 with a 250-person surprise performance at the Target Pops Summer Festival at San Jose State University. There were French horns, there was Wagner and there were Viking-horned roller skaters – enjoy the video above.

Looking for more Random Acts of Culture™ fun? Read an interview with Dennis Scholl, Knight Foundation’s VP/Arts, about the program, see a TV interview about it with the Symphony Silicon Valley,  relive our past performances through video highlights and see a master list of our 1,000+ Random Acts of Culture™.

Watch out Detroit, you’re next!

Social innovation by definition is dynamic, as projects hoping to catalyze large-scale change don’t often have a clear beginning, middle or end. For foundations and non-profits interested in making a demonstrated impact, this fact necessitates that they constantly evaluate their efforts and adjust strategies based on what they’re learning.

And yet many traditional approaches to evaluation aren’t effective when it comes to understanding what drives social innovation. A new report, released today by FSG and the Center for Evaluation Innovation, explores the ways many common evaluation approaches constrain innovation, for example, by trying to test a model too early in its development, and fixating on predetermined plans and original metrics that don’t evolve in response to the dynamic context.

Perhaps most importantly, the authors offer lessons about an emerging approach called “developmental evaluation,” which provides insights throughout the life of the program, allowing for adjustments in real time.

The report, “Evaluating social innovation” highlights several case studies of evaluation efforts done by foundations, including an in-depth look at Knight Foundation’s five-year, $24 million Knight Community Information Challenge. Responding to the rapid disruptions in journalism and the decline of community news and information, the challenge encourages community and place-based foundations to focus on supporting local news and information projects.

The profile summarizes how Knight’s strategy and assessment team and the communities program designed the evaluation to help provide ongoing learning, allowing for real-time changes to the initiative and helping inform the next iteration of Knight’s work  with community and place-based foundations to promote informed and engaged communities. A full evaluation of Knight’s Community Information Challenge is available online.

A new proposed degree structure for journalism education

This week, journalism educators meet in Chicago. I hope they think about how far reform should go to catch up with digital age realities and how funders see their progress so far.

We’ve been talking about defining “better” universities not as the biggest but as those able to do certain things better than most. Things like treating top professionals and scholars equally. Or whether they are part of these transformational trends: 1. connect with the whole university, 2. innovate using digital tools and techniques, 3. teach open collaborative methods and, 4. through the “teaching hospital” method, become or increase their role as content providers who not only inform but engage communities.

To say journalism education reform is controversial would be an understatement. Bob Stepno, assistant professor at Radford University in Virginia, kept track of the debate this summer by reposting the “Newspaper & Online News Division” listserv. He says comments amounted to more than 600 pages of text, the largest discussion since 2008, when educators argued about adding “and online” to the listserv name. Poynter’s Howard Finberg, who presented an excellent speech of his own this summer on the future of journalism education, summed things up. Jeff Jarvis jumped in from CUNY, where they have the nation’s first entrepreneurial journalism degree.

Building playgrounds is not child's play. More than 600 Akron residents came out on Saturday Aug. 4 in three locations across the city to pour concrete, maneuver metal equipment and haul mulch.

The result for children: three beautiful playgrounds in neighborhoods where they were

desperately needed.

The result for the adult residents: a proud accomplishment after weeks of designing, planning, organizing and then engaging hundreds of neighbors in a physically grueling but rewarding day.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Jade Elam

A new local news app developed by San Diego State University students recently hit the iTunes store. The surrounding community - both on and off campus - can use the mobile app to view, post and share local news and events.

Named after the San Diego State mascot, AzteCast emerged from a contest where schools had to develop an app using code or a platform developed by Knight News Challenge winners. Amy Schmitz Weiss, assistant professor of journalism, chose to use the technology of 2009 winner Ushahidi, which crowdsources, visualizes and maps information.

The San Diego project began with a desire for partnership. Schmitz Weiss said she had always wanted the journalism and media studies and computer science departments to work together. The contest criteria gave a reason to collaborate with computer science professor Joseph Lewis, who co-taught the mobile technology course.

She connected her students with Ushahidi and hosted video conference calls with the Kenyan-based entrepreneurs. Schmitz Weiss also sought mentorship from the 2011 Knight News Challenge winner PANDA Project , which helps news organizations use better public information by cleaning up and analyzing data. PANDA developer Brian Boyer, now of NPR, also visited the campus in April to help students with app design.

“[Boyer] was a powerful influence to students who had all of these ideas, but did not know where to begin. What we learned is that an app should do one thing really well—‘do it great, make it simple,’ that was his advice to us,” Schmitz Weiss said.

Starting tomorrow, participants will gather in Aspen to discuss the best strategies for using information and technology to encourage more open and innovative governance.

The Forum on Communications and Society, sponsored by Knight and hosted by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, will also explore how specific innovations that governments are using can open up more information to the public so that they can better engage in civic life.

The forum, which is being livestreamed, begins at 8:45 a.m. MST Monday Aug. 8 with discussion on how open and innovative government might solve problems like political polarization, corruption and the influence of money in politics.

The discussion will be followed by an exploration of how are governments are currently trying to work more efficiently. Despite examples of successful and innovative apps and practices at the state and local level, many governments are behind the curve.

Participants will explore a variety of topics, including what innovation might offer communities and their residents five years from now.

Mark Boas, Cole Gillespie, Nicola Hughes, Dan Schultz, and Laurian Gridinoc on the deck of the MIT Media Lab, June 2012

This week, each of the 2012 Knight-Mozilla Fellows told stories of what they’ve been up to during their time as Fellows. Each story captures both the unique experiences of each Fellow, but also captures their singular personality. And each story is a captivating reason for why you, with just a week to apply, should join their ranks as a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow.

For Mark Boas, who has been working with Al Jazeera English, he writes that his time as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow has meant getting his work in front of new audiences and for leaning the discipline that comes with deadline-based development:

There is great opportunity to innovate and see your experiments incarnate on websites that get very many eye-balls and of course get all that lovely feedback. And when I say lovely I don’t mean complimentary I just mean that all feedback is lovely even when it is negative and the more you get – the better. In fact, I think one of the most important things you can do when publishing to a site like AlJazeera.com is measure the usage in as much detail as possible. Certainly for me it’s not often that I will be able to collect so many stats on things that I have had a hand in making.

The unpredictable and somewhat transient nature of current affairs also presents tremendous opportunities. One of the projects I’m working on is an interactive slide-show that displays a series of slowly zoomed images to a YouTube soundtrack. I had just got a rough proof of concept together when my colleague mentioned they had some fresh photos and an audio soundtrack from Syria and that they wanted to create an audio-slide show from it to go live the next day. Frantic hacking of code and content ensued but we got it out in time. I wrote in my last post that situations like these are an opportunity to hone your shipping skills and a good exercise in delivering the minimum viable product.

Nicola Hughes, who has been embedded with the Guardian’s Interactive News team, writes of the boundaries she’s pushed and the distance she’s come as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow:

So what have I got to say? A young woman of colour, trained in broadcast journalism, who had never used the command line until this year. From the very beginning I felt I had the least to offer the OpenNews programme. I never thought I would get it. I was enticed to participate by the various rounds in the competition. As a fledgling programmer, I loved hackdays. Being able to connect with those at the edge of digital journalism and those interested in the field was reward enough.

But I did win and here I am. So what have I done? I have advanced my skills beyond what I could have done on my own. I am more comfortable with the strategies of data digging and programming. I know what skills I want to add. But most of all I know I should be here and I deserve to be here. Not as Nicola Hughes or DataMinerUK but as an OpenNews fellow. And by ‘here’ I don’t mean The Guardian or the OpenNews programme. ‘Here’ is web-making, data-digging and story-building in the open.

A big part of this resolution to create, innovate and take news beyond the written word is my fellow fellows. I feel truly blessed to know such creative, talented and forward-thinking individuals. This has been a big benefit to me and one I will take beyond the fellowship.

Cole Gillespie, who moved to Berlin from North Carolina to be a fellow at Zeit Online, punctuates his reflection with photos from “the best year of my life,” as he writes:

In coming weeks, hundreds of singers, dancers - even roller skaters in Viking helmets - will surprise crowds in four cities across the United States. The pop up performances are all part of celebrating the 1,000th (yep, 1,000th!) Random Act of Culture™, where Knight Foundation brings classical performers out of the symphony halls and into the streets and our everyday lives.

Knight’s program will culminate in these four special events across the country, taking place now through mid-September.

We talked with Dennis Scholl, VP/Arts and creator of Knight Foundation’s Random Acts of Culture™, about what’s in store.

KF: Tell us a little about these upcoming celebration performances.
DS: I can’t! Seriously, we want to surprise everybody. But here’s what I can say: If you’re in San Jose, Detroit, Philadelphia or Miami, be on the look out over the next six weeks for a special surprise. Each of these performances is very unique to the city where it will take place.  And we’re filming, so you’ll be able to see the performances at randomactsofculture.org. What’s so great about this program is that the experience lives on through the videos.

KF: Where did you come up with the ideas for the four performances?
DS: We’ve been working with cultural organizations in eight cities where Knight invests to produce the Random Acts over the past two years. Since they know their communities best, we asked them for their ideas for doing a blowout spectacle to celebrate the 1,000^th Random Act. Ideas from these four cultural groups – Symphony Silicon Valley, the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, Sphinx in Detroit and the Opera Company of Philadelphia -  rose to the top.

KF: Why did Knight create this program?
DS: Knight Foundation’s mission is to create informed and engaged communities, and we do that in part by weaving the arts into people’s everyday lives, seeking to make art general in communities. Seeing the tango at the airport, or opera at the farmers market strikes a deep chord in people. It reminds them of the important role that the classics and culture play in our lives. The crowd takes pictures and videos, shares them, and for just a few minutes, they are part of an exciting, collective experience that makes their community a more vibrant place to live.

News21 fellow Joe Henke spends an afternoon reading through voting rights material. Photo by Lizzie Chen/News21.

Journalism and communications schools need to recreate themselves if they are to succeed in playing their vital role as news creators and innovators, a group of foundations said in an open letter to university presidents.

The foundations, all of which make grants to journalism education and innovation, urged more universities to adopt a model that blends practice with scholarship, with more top professionals in residence at universities and a focus on applied research.

“In this new digital age, we believe the ‘teaching hospital’ model offers great potential,” as scholars help practitioners invent viable forms of digital news that communities need, said the letter, signed by top representatives of Knight Foundation, McCormick Foundation, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Scripps-Howard Foundation, Brett Family Foundation, and Wyncotte Foundation.

The model was described in the 2011 "Carnegie Knight Initiative for the Future of Journalism Education" and is practiced at the Arizona State University, where student-powered News21 has become a major national news source. But it is by no means widespread.

Today marks the launch of The I Files, a new news channel that aims to be the hub of investigative reporting. A partnership between the Center for Investigative Reporting and YouTube, working with the Investigative News Network and funded by Knight Foundation, the channel will select and showcase videos from other national and local media partners. David Gehring, news content partnerships manager at YouTube, writes about the launch. The following is crossposted from YouTube's blog.

Some of the biggest news stories of recent times have played out on YouTube—we’ve been transfixed by citizen-uploaded footage coming out of the Middle East, gained unique perspectives on natural disasters thanks to on-the-spot reporting and security cameras, and seen citizens document elections via video to ensure fair process. This growing volume of news-related video has contributed to the now 72 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. 

In this age of abundant content and short attention spans, thoughtful analysis and rigorous reporting is more important than ever before. That’s why we’re so pleased that investigative reporting now has a new home on YouTube—The I Files. Curated by the Center for Investigative Reporting with funding from the Knight Foundation, The I Files will be a hub and community for investigative journalism on the web, showcasing reporting that digs deep into stories, gives background to complex issues, and reveals details that help us make better sense of our world.

Contributors to The I Files include such luminary media outlets as The New York Times, BBC, ABC News and Al Jazeera, and organizations like the Investigative News Network and their member non-profit news organizations like the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Investigative Workshop at American University.

The Community News Commons, a citizen reporting news site in Winnipeg, is now live online with a formal launch planned for the fall.

Noah Erenberg, its community news commons convenor, said 80 people have registered to become contributors. Many have posted stories, some on a regular basis, Erenberg said.

The Commons is a project of The Winnipeg Foundation, a 2011 Knight Community Information Challenge winner, and the first Canadian project to win the competition. Partners are the Free Press Cafe, Millennium Library and Red River College.

So far, community response is encouraging.  “As we are building interest and momentum around the citizen journalism project, we are also very encouraged by the opportunities for collaboration with other communities partners such as our local libraries and the local college journalism program,” said LuAnn Lovlin, director of communications at the foundation. “When we put those organizations into the mix, along with Canada’s first news café, we believe it will make for a more informed and engaged community, which The Winnipeg Foundation believes, ultimately, will be a more caring and giving community.”

The Commons provides training on these topics: