STL Social Media Guy

The Knight News Challenge grant winners have been announced, with 16 winning projects totaling $5.5 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. I know from the Twitterfeed that several of the winners are people I follow — and they’re pretty stoked about it. Congrats to them all.

From the foundation’s news release: “The prizes ranged from $15,000 to $876,000, and were given to individuals, philanthropic organizations and for-profit businesses, including the Bakersfield Californian newspaper. Ten winners were from the United States, and six were from Canada, England, Lithuania, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Russia.”

Here’s some of my favorites from the full list.

News on Cell Phones: “This project will make it easy for significantly cheaper models to select and receive news feeds, expanding the news universe for those whose only digital device is a cell phone.” (From DataDyne) Love this. Why should smart phone owners have all the fun?

Video Volunteers, a New York-based nonprofit, “will train 100 people in rural India as Community Video Producers. These citizen journalists will produce magazine-style video news reports, typically on local social issues, and show them on widescreen projectors in poor communities. The idea is to distribute public interest information to the poor - without having to provide the entire population with digital tools.” That’s cool.

Reporting On: Social networking tools for journalists to share information across geographies and hook up with journalists working on similar topics. “Journalists in small newsrooms often feel isolated. Given the opportunity to communicate with others, a reporter can add context to articles and, perhaps most importantly, know when a seemingly small local story is part of a larger regional, or national, trend.” (From Ryan Sholin) I can’t add to what Ryan wrote. I’ve been in those small newsrooms and I totally get it.

Transparent Journalism: “With the copious amounts of information – and misinformation – on the Internet, the public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of ’source tagging.’” (From Media Standards Trust) If anything, don’t we need more transparency in the way we do what we do?

Signcasts: “Brein McNamara will blog about ways to empower deaf people to become citizen journalists. He will write about the digital information needs of deaf people, including his own proposal to integrate a web-based video capture system with the videophones popular among the hearing-impaired. The blog also will highlight the gaps not being filled by current technology.” (From the Signcasts Sign Language Community). Another very interesting socially conscious idea.

Congrats to all.

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