Tool Kit

Table of Contents

Greetings, seminar attendee! Welcome to the Media Learning Seminar Tool Kit, where you will have a chance to learn more about the information needs of communities in a democracy and what you might do to get involved in this work.

Here are the files distributed to attendees on a handy USB 'flash drive.'

MEDIA TRENDS – This is the presentation you saw by Eric Newton, vice president of Knight Foundation’s journalism program, explaining how the media ecosystem is changing with the digital revolution’s impact on traditional media.

NEW FORMS – This presentation, by Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab, explains the new forms of news that are emerging: citizen journalism, student journalism, nonprofit journalism and other forms of public media experimentation. This comes with a page of URLs (also here in Word format), which explains all the web sites Jan mentioned.

CITIZEN – This new report on citizenship explains how the information flow in a community is tied into all the other elements of a community’s success.

SURVEY – This is the survey that all of you took before coming to this conference. Find out what community foundation leaders, as a group, know and don’t know about community information needs. The bottom line: 70 percent of you said the news and information needs of your communities are not being met, and 75 percent of you said you are not doing any funding in that area.

CHECKLIST(Word format) – This document, prepared by researchers at the University of Missouri, gives you an idea of how you might delve deeper into your community information needs.

READINGS -- These articles were compiled by the Missouri researchers to give you more to go on.

One final note: Knight Foundation has 200 active grantees in the area of journalism, and we’ve been funding in the field for more than 50 years. We would like to be helpful to you as you consider the information needs of your communities and how community foundations might work to help those needs. Please feel free to read about our Journalism program and then contact our staff with questions.