Recent Articles
Media Learning Seminar 2011: Register Now
Registration is now open for the 2011 Media Learning Seminar, taking place Feb. 28 - March 1 in Miami. The seminar brings together tech experts and community and place-based foundations to discuss how they can - and are - helping residents be informed about the issues that shape their communities. Speakers include Huffington Post Editor [...]
Boulder is Closer to Strengthening Early Childhood Education - Thanks to Information Campaign
The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County is on the cusp of hopefully realizing a very big dream, thanks in large part to a Knight Community Information Challenge grant for our ReadySetLearn awareness campaign that we launched this past spring. Knight funded our ReadySetLearn campaign during the second year of its challenge grant program. The idea [...]
Guest Post: How Foundations Can Support Local News Coverage
This entry is crossposted from the blog of Mary Lou Fulton, program officer at the California Endowment. People who tune in to NPR or PBS news programs are familiar with sponsorship messages such as “coverage made possible by support from the such-and-such foundation.” The way this works in practice is that foundations give money to [...]
How could your community use $15,000 to help people be healthy?
Implicit in many news stories about local problems is the need for someone to address them, leaders of the Minnesota Community Foundation thought. So they create a way to encourage the public to do just that. With funding from the Knight Community Information Challenge, the foundation created a statewide contest to bring the state’s residents together [...]
Beyond Bullets: Knight grantee deploys young filmmakers to help quell gun violence
In her graduation picture, Samantha Guzman is wearing a purple feathered dress clutching a diploma. Her mom picked up the framed portrait the day after she was shot and killed on a Bronx street corner while walking to catch a bus. “I lost my child on Mother’s Day,” her mom Diana Rodriguez said in a [...]
Community and Place-based Foundations Prioritize News and Information Projects
What role do funders play in the future of community news and information? It's a question the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy asked in its big national report last year, and one the Knight Foundation has been posing annually to community and place-based foundations, the local funders with the pulse [...]
NJ Spotlight is Off to a Remarkable, Muckraking Start
Here’s some impressive journalism – and proof of the potential for hard-hitting public service reporting in new media ventures. During its first week of operation, NJ Spotlight – a grant winner in the second year of the Knight Community Information Challenge – published a report revealing that PSE&G Power, an unregulated affiliate of Power Service Electric & Gas, [...]
Chicago Community Trust: Mapping the new local news ecosystem
A new report underscores the broad diversity of emerging news sources in Chicago, where the Chicago Community Trust and the Knight Community Information Challenge have teamed up to produce Community News Matters, an ongoing study of the city’s news ecosystem. theNEWnews 2010, commissioned by the Trust and produced by the nonprofit Community Media Workshop, surveyed [...]