College
Park, Md – J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive
Journalism will launch a pioneering program to seed community
news ventures around
the country with a new $1 million grant from the John S. and
James L. Knight Foundation.
Over the next two years, the “New Voices” project will
help fund the start-up of 20 micro-local, news projects; support them
with an educational Web site, in collaboration with the Poynter Institute’s
News University; and help foster their sustainability through
small second-year grants.
Under the grant, J-Lab, a center of the Philip Merrill College of
Journalism at the University of Maryland, will call for proposals
from nonprofit and education institutions with new ideas for distributing
news and information. A national Advisory Board will award seed grants
of $12,000 to $17,000 to help create new types of self-sustaining
community media projects.
The Web site will provide training in online content creation, production
and revenue generation and help spread core journalism values to the
new efforts.
“Daily, we see citizens contributing in significant ways to
news in the public interest,’’ said Jan Schaffer, J-Lab
executive director. “They are keeping mainstream journalists
and public officials honest, as well as reporting community news that
falls below the radar of daily news outlets. The New Voices project
will enhance this capacity and help create exciting new opportunities
for participating in civic life.’’
The grant also continues the two-year-old Batten Awards and Symposium
for Innovations in Journalism, which reward creative news practices
that engage people in public issues with a $10,000 Grand Prize and
$5,000 in other prizes.
“The newest forms of news serve us best when they honor the
oldest values of good journalism,” said Eric Newton, Knight
Foundation director of journalism initiatives. “We hope
this experiment helps us find new ways for people to engage in
an accurate,
fair, contextual search for the truth.”
“The Internet has created the opportunity for alternatives to
mainstream journalism,” said Dean Tom Kunkel of the Merrill
College of Journalism. “New Voices will be an exciting
effort to incubate a new kind of community news, and in the process
encourage
greater civic engagement.”
To receive information about New Voices, e-mail contact information
and a request to subscribe to the J-Flash newsletter to Julie
Strobel.
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes excellence in
journalism worldwide and invests in the vitality of 26 U.S. communities.
J-Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park, helps news organizations
use new media technologies to create fresh ways for people to participate
in public life. It is a spin-off of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism,
which helped support 120 pilot projects that fostered civic engagement
since 1993.
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