Rising: Journalism from everywhere, funded by nonprofits

Two related announcements today from a U.S. journalism institute reflect the changing nature of how journalism is produced, distributed and experienced globally – and also the expanding role for non-profits and philanthropy in paying for U.S. journalism.

J-Lab, which just left the University of Maryland and moved down the road to American University in Washington, DC, has received $2.4 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to support a variety of journalism-related projects, including continuation of an annual awards program for innovative journalism and distribution of microgrants to launch citizen-media projects. J-Lab is also starting three new projects, all of which sound precisely tuned to the Knight Foundation’s interest in local communities. J-lab will be helping to match five newspapers with citizen media outlets in those communities, creating a Community Media Toolkit to help foundations fund, vet, support and measure local media projects, and launching a Re-imagining Journalism project.

J-lab also announced today the finalists and honorable mentions for its 2008 Knight-Batten Awards, which honor “creative uses of new technologies to engage citizens in public issues and showcase compelling models for the future of news.” You can view this year’s finalists here, and 24 other entires here. This year’s finalists are:

Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information – Modeling urgent grassroots information-sharing in a time of crisis, Kenyan techies launched a site where bloggers and citizen journalists could text eyewitness accounts and map incidents of political violence in the wake of a corrupted presidential election.

Wired.com’s WikiScanner Coverage – Using Virgil Griffith’s Wikipedia Scanner, WIRED magazine’s blog engaged readers in crowdsourced exposés revealing PR spinmeisters’ editing of Wikipedia entries not favorable to a company’s reputation.

JDLand.com – A one-woman citizen media project documents and visualizes real estate development, construction and community concerns in Washington D.C.’s rapidly changing Southeast neighborhood.

PolitiFact.com – A collaboration between the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly features a rich database for the 2008 presidential election allowing users to sort news items by candidate, issue or ruling. The site’s “Truth-o-Meter” rates the accuracy of campaign messages and statements; its “Pants on Fire” feature calls false statements to account.

These projects reflect the expanding range of sources for activities that might be thought of as journalism, or journalistic. One comes from an old-line newspaper. Two involve ambitious tech developers who spotted technical and crowd-sourced solutions to information problems; and one is produced by an independent journalist covering a specialized topic with an intensity rarely seen in general-interest mass media.

The other trend to note here is the funding.

The Knight Foundation is one of just a handful of U.S. philanthropies that make grants focused on journalism, with most of the money going to projects in the U.S. It has been on an innovation tear since Alberto Ibarguen took over as president in 2005. Knight, which in years past channeled the bulk of its journalism funding to training and trade-related projects for professional mainstream newspaper and broadcast journalists, has pledged $25 million to its News Challenge, which provides grants to a variety of experimental and disruptive innovation projects in journalism. The foundation has also committed $24 million to entice other foundations serving local communities to spend some of their money on media projects. Another $3 million has gone to fund social entrepreneurs in journalism in affiliation with Ashoka, a non-profit social entrepreneur incubator.

This week Knight released the online version of its “progress” report, which showcases the foundation’s investments, successes and transformation into an organization that is “of the web rather than simply on the web.”

Also this weekend, in Aspen, Colorado, the foundation is conducting the second meeting of its Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, a group of 15 muckety-mucks (with a strong skew toward current and former newspaper executives) and co-chaired by Marissa Mayer, VP of technology at Google, and Theodore Olsen, former U.S. Solicitor General. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and SecondLife founder Philip Rosedale will be among the participants.

Knight’s investments may not transform communities, journalism or a U.S. culture that, as our research has found, is massively dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in its local communities. But it has undoubtedly raised the profile of journalism’s role in the culture and seeded a variety of experiments that may contribute to new visions, metaphors or genuine services for an informed, connected culture. That seems like money well spent.