|
Transcript for
2005 Batten Symposium
and
Awards for Innovations in Journalism
Sept.
12, 2005
National
Press Club, Washington, D.C.
Jan Schaffer
J-Lab Executive Director
Hello and welcome. This is the third annual Batten Awards
and Symposium for Innovations in Journalism. My name is Jan Schaffer
and I’m
the director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the
University of Maryland.
J-Lab
is a three-year-old center that helps news organizations and citizens
use new information technologies to develop new ways for people to engage
in public issues. It focuses, at the moment, on three things. One is
interactive journalism. Those are news games, news exercises and searchable
databases that allow people to participate in learning about public
affairs.
One is innovations in journalism, which we reward today with the Batten
Awards, and we also spotlight the innovations online.
The
third thing is participatory journalism, particularly hyper-local citizen
media sites. J-Lab will be helping to fund the startup of 20
citizen media sites over the next two years with a New Voices grant from
the Knight Foundation.
We
also have provided tech support for these initiatives with a new site
that just launched last week called J-Learning.org,
which is very
granular and how-to-do-it — how to do HTML, how to do Flash, how
to upload audio and video to the Web. And I will tell you, because I
edited
it, I now know how to do a lot of these things.
Guidelines are available for those awards at J-NewVoices.org. Our next
deadline, by the way, is February 8, 2006, if any of you are thinking
of putting in a proposal.
As many of you know, J-Lab is a spin-off of the Pew Center
for Civic Journalism, which I also directed. We’re very grounded
in the thinking of trying to engage citizens in public issues.
Today’s awards and symposium were funded by the John S. and James
L. Knight Foundation. We’re very grateful for their support, and
I will share with you the fact that we have been invited to put in a
proposal to renew it for another three years. So stay tuned on that.
The
awards are named for Jim Batten. Jim was a former CEO of Knight Ridder — very
beloved, died too young, very known for caring about how news organizations
connect with citizens in his
community, and also
on the very early edge of trying to figure out how technology and journalism
could work together to do these missions.
There
are many journalism awards – many awards for online journalism – but
I will tell you that the Batten Awards reaches to reward more than just
bells and whistles and pretty packages. We really try to reward ideas
that can be replicated by other news organizations and ideas that try
to engage citizens in important issues.
In addition to the winners and some notable entries that
you’ll
hear from today, I want to let you know that one thing we do is spotlight
about two dozen other really good ideas from the award contest on our
Web site. So we’re not just about handing checks out to journalists,
we’re really about trying to put as many good ideas as we can out
there for others to replicate.
We have a stunning lineup of speakers for you today — I
think some of the most creative people in the business, really. We hope
you’ll stay with us through our luncheon dialogue with Jimmy Wales,
the founder of Wikipedia, and Michael Kinsley, the editorial page editor
of the Los Angeles Times.
Our
first panelists will show you some of the most engaging entries in
this awards contest — news packages that are as informative
as they are highly produced. And introducing our first speaker is one
of our Batten Awards judges. Mark Hinojosa is associate managing editor
of electronic news at The Chicago Tribune, he’s a very active member
of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and he’s a
man who’s never at a loss for words. So let me turn it over to
Mark.
• Continue
to Mark Hinojosa's panel introduction
• Return
to transcript menu
|
