Posts Tagged ‘John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a $975,000 grant to be used by The Texas Tribune and The Bay Citizen to develop an open-source publishing platform for online news organizations to use free-of-charge.

The two nonprofit online news sources said the goals of the platform they will develop are to enable other online news organizations to engage with readers, manage content, and raise revenue, and the platform should be inexpensive to implement, yet flexible enough to keep up the pace with innovations in the industry.

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The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the hiring of Michael Maness (pictured) as vice president of its journalism and media innovation program and the promotion of journalism program VP Eric Newton to the new post of senior advisor to the president.

Maness had been VP of innovation and design at Gannett, and he will succeed Newton. He has been a member of the Knight Foundation’s journalism advisory committee for the past four years.

Newton has been VP of the journalism program since 2006. In his new role, he will help pursue strategic partnerships and new ideas.

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Dec. 1 is the deadline to apply for the Knight News Challenge, a grant competition in which the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awards up to $5 million annually “for innovative projects that use digital technology to transform the way communities send, receive, and make use of news and information,”

Applications are being accepted in four categories: mobile, authenticity, sustainability, and community. All projects must make use of digital technology to distribute news in the public interest.

The Knight Foundation also provide an FAQ page and an archived chat transcript to help answer potential entrants’ questions.

The Center for Public Integrity is refocusing on digital, announcing that it will aim to generate more accountability reporting, new audiences, and earned revenues in the digital marketplace, as well as revamping its Web site, expanding its newsroom, and launching a new digital delivery system.

Two grants totaling $1.95 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation were credited with the strategy shift.

The news follows an announcement earlier this month that the Huffington Post Investigative Fund will become part of the Center for Public Integrity.

The Center for Public Integrity promised more details within the next 60 days.

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The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has 2 million reasons to be happy Tuesday courtesy of Google, which provided it with a $2 million grant to support its media-innovation work.

The Knight Foundation said it has invested more than $100 million over the past five years in a multifaceted media-innovation initiative covering national media policy, technology innovation, public media transformation, and the evolution of the Web.

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The Huffington Post Investigative Fund will become part of the Center for Public Integrity, bringing the combined editorial team to more than 50 journalists, reporting experts, and digital-media producers by Jan. 1 and creating one of the largest investigative newsrooms in the country, the two parties announced Tuesday.

Under terms of the agreement, The Huffington Post also committed to publish up to three stories per day from the Center for Public Integrity as part of a new investigative-reporting section.

Huffington Post Investigative Fund staff who will join the Center for Public Integrity are: executive director Nick Penniman; editor Keith Epstein; reporters Ben Protess, three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist David Heath, Pulitzer nominee Fred Schulte, and Emma Schwartz; and health-care analyst Wendell Potter.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which awarded a $1.7 million grant to the Center for Public Integrity earlier this month, also promised an additional $250,000 to support the newly combined news operation.

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The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced that it will begin accepting entries Oct. 25 for its fifth annual Knight News Challenge, which added four experimental categories: mobile, authenticity, sustainability, and community.

The deadline for entries is Dec. 1, and the contest is open to individuals, schools, nonprofits, governments, and businesses. Winners will be announced in June at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Knight Foundation said in a release:

The Knight News Challenge seeks innovative techniques and technologies that advance the foundation’s goal of informing and engaging communities. In its first four years, $23 million has been awarded to 56 media innovators chosen from more than 10,000 entries.

Director of digital media John S. Bracken added:

The use of new categories is an effort to harness and accelerate the entrepreneurial energy we are seeing in the field. We have incorporated what we have learned over the first four years of the News Challenge to focus this year on four key issues.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded a $1.7 million grant to The Center for Public Integrity.

The Center for Public Integrity said it will use the funds from the grant to hire chief digital officer John Solomon, who led investigative teams at the Associated Press and The Washington Post; develop new ways to select, produce, and deliver stories; redesign its Web site; launch the Ujima Project, an open-source computer-assisted reporting tool for investigative reporters internationally; help produce at least 30 new major reporting projects over the next two years; and experiment with new fundraising models and for-profit revenue streams.

Center for Public Integrity executive director Bill Buzenberg said, “The Center is now poised to deliver its brand of investigative journalism faster and better than ever before while creating new revenue streams for additional investigative staffing and sustainability.”

Knight Foundation vice president for journalism Eric Newton added, “America needs investigative journalism, and investigative journalism needs new funding sources. The Center for Public Integrity will use digital technology to turn those needs into an opportunity to show what can be done.”

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will fund up to 10 nonprofit grantees that test out the Press+ e-commerce platform from Journalism Online, the startup founded by Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz, paidContent reported.

The first 10 news organizations to sign up for and launch Press+ in the next six months will not have to share revenue with Journalism Online for one year, according to paidContent, which added that the first site to go public was the hyperlocal New Haven Independent.

Brill told paidContent the Knight Foundation is paying Journalism Online upfront, adding, “It gets us guaranteed cash in the door. It spurs these guys to launch.”

msnbc.com and The Washington Post will publish a 23-story multimedia package this week from News21, a journalism initiative funded by the Carnegie Corp. of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami, in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.

Breakdown: Traveling Dangerously in America investigated transportation safety in America and the National Transportation Safety Board, with some startling results:

• The NTSB has essentially given up on 1,952 of its safety recommendations, or one of every six it has made since 1967.

• Federal agencies, states, and transportation industries are taking longer to act on NTSB recommendations, with the average number of years to implement them rising from 3.4 to 5.4 over the past decade.

• More than 2,300 lives have been lost to ice buildup on aircraft, problems on runways, faulty aircraft maintenance and repairs, and overtired pilots, despite dozens of NTSB recommendations aimed at combating those problems. More than 320 fatigue-related accidents and incidents have taken nearly 750 lives in airplane crashes alone over the past four decades and, while the NTSB has issued 138 fatigue-related safety recommendations since 1967, only 68 have been implemented.

The News21 students were based at Arizona State University for 10 weeks this summer under the direction of faculty from ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and CPI data researchers.

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