From successful small-town citizen journalism, to crowdsourcing, wikis, and virtual journalists, this year’s finalists for the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism certainly represent the leading edge — and most edgy — experiments in journalism today.
Among the finalists are:
- Council on Foreign Relations Crisis Guides
- Reuters’ virtual news bureau in Second Life
- The Deerfield, N.H. Forum — an all-volunteer online newspaper covering three rural communities previously lacking sufficient news coverage
- TechPresident, a group blog breaking investigative stories and tracking the 2008 presidential candidates on social media sites such as YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook
“The depth and breadth of the work we examined were amazing,” said Jody Brannon, Advisory Board member and senior editor at MSN.com, in this J-Lab press release.
Since the projects considered this year represent a wide diversity of creative ideas, the awards judges for the first time have cited four projects for Honorable Mention. These are:
- Reader-driven investigative journalism from the Fort Meyers, Fla. News-Press
- NewAssignment.net/Assignment Zero‘s open-source experiment with WiredNews
- GreatLakesWiki.org, a wiki-based model for collecting environmental information on the Great Lakes
- Lake Tahoe Explorations, Nevada Matters, and Our Tahoe: collected entries from the University of Nevada-Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism. This student project centered on how students might reinvent election coverage and engage the community in issues concerning Lake Tahoe.
Knight Foundation Journalism officer Gary Kebbel found the range of this year’s winners encouraging. “It shows creativity and innovation throughout the news and information field from daily newspapers to virtual worlds.”
Some of the projects, including The Forum and GreatLakesWiki.org had in the past received start-up grant money from the Knight-funded New Voices program administered by the J-Lab.
The top winner will be announced at the Knight-Batten Symposium and luncheon, September 17 at the National Press Club.
