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7100 Baltimore Ave. • Suite
101
College Park, MD 20740-3637
P: 301-985-4020
F: 301-985-4021
E: news@j-lab.org
www.j-lab.org |
For
Immediate Release
April 18, 2006
|
Contact:
Jan Schaffer, (301) 985-4020 |
New Voices: New Funding
for
10 Innovative Citizen Media Projects |
COLLEGE
PARK, Md. – Environmental
news in the Great Lakes, communities in rural Alaska and inner-city neighborhoods
in Philadelphia will be covered in 10 innovative community news experiments
to receive 2006 New Voices funding, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive
Journalism announced today.
This
year's award winners not only
signaled a deep desire for better hyperlocal information, they also exhibited
an appetite for using
cutting-edge technologies, including wikis, datacasting and Skype Internet
telephone service to cover their subjects.
"New
Voices has found another batch of winners: scrappy, innovative, diverse
citizen journalists who are inventing new ways to generate information
and ideas for their communities," said New Voices Advisory Board
member Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE at the University of Maryland. “The
techniques and models they are creating will help to renew American
democracy."
This
year's winners, selected from 185 applicants, will each receive
up to $17,000 for their projects. Overall, New Voices has received
428 proposals from around the United States in the program's
first 15 months, said Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, which
administers the New Voices program.
New
guidelines will be issued for next year. The 2007 deadline will be
Feb. 12.
"I
am most struck by the widespread feeling among these communities – whether
they are geographic communities or interest communities – that
they are being ignored by mainstream media," said Thomas Kunkel, dean
of UMD's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where J-Lab is
based. "I am equally struck by their determination to rectify that
themselves, and the creative ways they are doing that. The great democratizing
of media
is under way, and there is no turning back."
"We're
pleased to see people turning to journalism as a solution to their
problems and a way to improve community ties," said Gary Kebbel,
journalism initiatives program officer for the John S. and James L.
Knight Foundation,
which funds the New Voices program.
The
grant recipients will receive $12,000 in the first year to start
up their projects. They will be
eligible for $5,000 follow-up grants
next year if they
successfully launch their projects and supply matching funding.
Of
particular note this year, Schaffer said, was the number of journalism
schools that applied. Forty-six expressed interest in launching
community news ventures — not
only as laboratories for their students but also as training grounds
for citizens.
"It
was gratifying to see proposals that brought mainstream and student
journalists and local communities together," said Advisory Board member
Bruce Koon of Knight Ridder Digital.
The
2006 New Voices grant recipients are:
- Western
Breeze: Montana's Rural News Network, from the University of
Montana School of Journalism in Missoula. The network will recruit
and train residents of three rural Montana towns to report on news
and information for rural Web sites and plans to locate a computer
kiosk in each community to ensure access and the ability to contribute
to the news.
- Great
Lakes Wiki, from Michigan State University's Knight Center
for Environmental Journalism in East Lansing. The center will create
collaborative wiki entries that describe the problems, cleanup strategies,
contaminants, industries, people, health impacts and other issues
related to the 43 toxic hot spots in the Great Lakes region. Student
reports and research will initially populate the wiki and then community
members will be solicited to add input.
- Monroe
County Radio Project, from West Virginia University in Morgantown.
The project will create a news operation at WHFI-FM, a radio station
licensed to the Monroe County School Board. Journalism students and
faculty will train student and adult volunteer reporters to report
and produce local news stories for a 15-minute daily newscast, regular
monthly public affairs programming and a Web site with news and streaming
audio.
- Route
7 Report, from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Ohio
University in Athens. The school will recruit and train citizens
in three rural
villages in Southeastern Ohio to create a monthly newsletter and
a Web site to be updated weekly on local government, schools, business
and organizations.
- Learning
to Finish: Solution that Leads to Graduation, from the Pew
Partnership for Civic Change in Charlottesville, Va. The partnership
will launch
and maintain a wiki dedicated to sharing information and ideas for
countering the nationwide high school drop-out crisis. Currently
one-third of U.S. high school seniors, or about 500,000 students,
don't graduate on time. Initial content will come from the
Pew Partnership then from civic and religious groups, parents, teachers,
citizens and policy makers solicited to join a dialogue about reversing
the drop-out rate.
- MURL
Building Blocks, from Temple University in Philadelphia.
To partner Temple journalism students with public broadcaster, WHYY-TV,
to push
hyperlocal newcasts to the city's largely Hispanic 5th Street
Corridor between Lehigh and Hunting Park Avenues via WHYY's
experimental datacasting technology. The datacasts will use a discrete
portion of WHYY's digital broadcast signal to transmit information
to desktop computers using small rooftop antennas. Neighborhood residents
will also receive disposable digital still and video cameras and
low-end audio recorders to produce multimedia content and service
news. All the content will also appear on the Web sites of Temple’s
Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab (MURL) and WHYY.
- Creating
Community Conversations, from Columbia College Chicago.
This project plans to recruit and train neighborhood journalists
to cover five
ZIP codes in central Chicago. Columbia journalism students and citizen
journalists will cover the local police district, school council,
neighborhood groups, church events and businesses. Content will be
edited by staff at a new citizen media start-up, Chi-town Daily News,
and published on chitowndailynews.org.
- One
Sky Radio South Central Magazine, from Alaska Educational Radio System
in Girdwood, Alaska. The system plans to launch live regional call-in
and news magazine programs with caller participation via phone and
Voice Over Internet telephony (VOIP) using Skype software. The news
magazine will be a one to two-hour weekly program with a round-up
of key regional issues. Volunteers and paid stringers will be encouraged
to produce news and feature segments for the show. The program will
be distributed via streaming audio to other stations in the state.
- Ethnic
News Service, from the Center for Integration and Improvement
of Journalism (CIIJ) of San Francisco State. The center plans to
create
a new student-run Ethnic News Service to help provide better coverage
of public affairs for the state's 700 ethnic media outlets.
CIIJ will "embed" SFSU students within community organizations
to develop a series of multimedia stories on the impact of policy
decisions on ethnic communities. Stories will be posted on the CIIJ
Web site, and CIIJ will work with New American Media to help distribute
them.
- Federation
of Community Correspondents, from WMMT, the community radio station
of Appalshop, a media arts and education center in Whitesburg, Ky.
This project plans to train citizens from central Appalachia in radio
news production and story gathering for broadcast on radio and the
Web. Appalshop will develop the project with a basic curriculum and
workshop model that will cover production technology and techniques
and provide instruction in basic community journalism.
The
winners demonstrated both the goal of doing fact-based journalism
and a realistic plan to find a way to keep the operation going after
its launch.
Participating
in the selection process were the New Voices Advisory Board:
- Charles
B. Fancher, president, Fancher Associates Inc., Annapolis, MD.
- Jane
Brown, executive director, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.
- Bruce
Koon, executive news editor, Knight Ridder Digital.
- Peggy
Kuhr, Knight Chair on the Press, Leadership and Community, University
of Kansas, Lawrence.
- Peter
Levine, director of CIRCLE. (Center for Information & Research
on Civic Learning & Engagement), University of Maryland,
College Park.
- Donna
M. Reed, vice president of news, Media General.
- Gary
Kebbel, journalism initiatives program officer, Knight Foundation.
- Thomas
Kunkel, dean, Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
- Jan
Schaffer, executive director, J-Lab.
Project
updates will be posted at www.J-NewVoices.org. For more information,
subscribe to J-Lab's
newsletter online or by emailing news@j-lab.org.
The
John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation promotes excellence in journalism
worldwide and invests in the vitality of 26 U.S. communities where the
Knight brothers owned newspapers.
J-Lab
helps news organizations and citizens use new media technologies
to create fresh ways for people to participate
in public life. It also
administers the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism
and the J-Learning.org Web site.
#####
J-Lab
is a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College
of Journalism. It is a spin-off of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism
(www.pewcenter.org). © 2004
University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism
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