PBS and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced te launch of MediaShift Idea Lab Blog, a group blog featuring 36 wide-ranging innovators reinventing community news for the digital age.
Each Idea Lab blogger won a grant in the Knight News Challenge to help fund a startup idea or to blog on a topic related to reshaping community news. The writers will use the Idea Lab to explain their projects, share intelligence and interact with the online community. Knight Foundation’s News Challenge contest awards up to $5 million annually to individuals who innovate community news using digital technology.
Among Knight Foundation projects to be featured on Idea Lab:
– From MIT, an endeavor to create the “Center for Future Civic Media,” designed to build stronger communities through innovation in digital media applied to journalism.
– MTV will be putting a ‘Knight Mobile Youth Journalist’ in every state. These young people will create video news reports for distribution on cell phones. Viewers will rate the videos and those with the highest ratings will be broadcast on MTV.
– In New York, the “Gotham Gazette” will develop games to inform and engage players about key issues confronting New York City. The games report what solutions the players developed and relay those ideas to city officials.
– The “Playing the News” project is a news simulation environment letting citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through
interaction with the newsmakers.
– Seven academic ‘incubators’ will foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems. The schools are: Michigan State,
University of Kansas, Kansas State, Western Kentucky University, Ithaca College, University of Nevada-Las Vegas and St. Michael’s College.
Knight Foundation provided a grant to MediaShift to produce Idea Lab and to enhance the original MediaShift blog with audio, video and citizen
journalism projects. Idea Lab is produced by MediaShift and hosted by PBS.
