Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism

Citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, interactive news, etc. You hear the buzz-words, but very few mainstream organizations, are experimenting with these new forms of journalism.

The Knight Foundation is out to change all of that. They are giving monetary awards to people who are stepping up to the digital plate.

Happily, I noticed that my pal Andrew Rasiej‘s venture techPresident was the recipient of a big ole award ($10,000!).

techPresident is a group blog that is breaking investigative stories, collecting voter generated content, and charting the metrics of a net-centric presidential campaign — they are tracking candidate video views on YouTube, the number of their “friends” on MySpace and Facebook, voter demands for appearances on Eventful, blog mentions on Technorati and voter-generated photos on Flickr.

Here’s their press release.

Another associate (Jay Rosen) got an honorable mention for NewAssignment.net, an open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users dedicated to producing high-quality work that serves the public interest. They are looking for collaborators and contributors.

Just wanted to give a shout out to Andrew, Jay and all the other worthies who are creating innovative new journalistic models.

RELATED: Those Knight folks must be paying attention. They wrote me this upon seeing the post:

The Knight News Challenge contest awards $5 million for innovative media ideas; however the October 15 application deadline is quickly approaching. The streamlined application takes less than 20 minutes.
Anybody worldwide has a chance to win. For more information and to apply visit www.newschallenge.org.

Please pass this along to anyone with transformational ideas.

Cheers,

Danielle Villoch
Communications Assistant
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
200 South Biscayne Blvd., Ste. 3300
Miami, FL 33131-2349

Tel: (305) 908-2630
Fax: (786) 924-2930
e-mail: villoch@knightfdn.org

Check out all the winners at:
J-Lab.org

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