Knight Foundation Unity 2008 Blog

The day finished with a closing reception and mingling. Thanks to everyone for attending and to the Knight Journalism staff for planning the event–

Thoughts on the day? Next steps? Please leave a comment below–

You can follow the Twitter conversation (even if you’re not on Twitter) here at the conference on Summize, a Twitter aggregation service.

Here’s the link to those “tweets” that mention ‘Knight’ and ‘Unity’ today.

And Amy Gahran is livetwittering (very difficult, thanks Amy) here.

Consultant Amy Webb presented ten emerging technologies and you can find her presentation here.

Great examples of why to use these new tools in, among other topics, aggregation, the semantic web, and ubiquitous video.

Chris O’Brien presented on Newsroom, a plan for an ideal newsroom and create an online resource for this, and how a Ning has worked better than the original Drupal site for this project. More of Chris’s thoughts on his IdeaLab blog posts.

Geoff Dougherty presented on Chi-Town Daily Town, a network of Chicago citizen journalists, and talked about recruiting with Craigslist, Facebook, and how a formalized application process works wonders.

Richard Anderson presented on his passion for the Village Soup project; “every 30,000 people have traditionally had a weekly newspaper, and that’s the market Village Soup is concentrating on.”

Dante Chinni presented on Patchwork Nation and how election information lines up with what is happening in a voter’s life. You can follow the candidate’s travels through an interactive timeline.

You can find out more about these projects by visiting their sites.

Chris Callahan presented on the Carnegie-Knight Initiative, which he says is “to change the way journalism is taught.”

First three years: 44 fellows each year at four incubators: Berkeley, Columbia, Northwestern, University of Southern California

This will grow in later years with the recent investment (more below).

Part of this initiative is News 21 that you can see on their site, newsinitiative.org/.

The initiative was recently expanded with an $11 million investment; you can read the details in the press release.

What questions do you have about the initiative?

Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation president and CEO, on where Knight is going and the media innovations to come.

What do you think the difference is between information, news, and journalism? Please leave a comment below.

Michele led a discussion on what the Knight Alumni Network might be.

Let’s keep a running list in the comments below–

Peter Shane presented on the new Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

The Commission will work to answer these three questions:

-What are the information needs of communities in a democracy?

-Are they being met? (why or why not?)

-What can be done to improve things?

Two critical features of the Commission:

open-ended
focus = information,” not just “media”

The next meeting is September 9th, and you can watch the webcast from the inaugural June 24, 2008 meeting here.

See the members of the Commission and the staff list here.

The site for this initiative, knightcomm.org has more details.