Idea Lab

A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A. Adam Glenn is an Internet news veteran now working as an independent online consultant in New York. He specializes in environment, science, technology, health and business. He has held posts with a wide variety of news media, most recently as senior producer at ABCNews.com. He co-founded I, Reporter with Amy Gahran in 2005. Glenn is an active member of the Online News Association and the Society of Environmental Journalists, where he serves on the editorial advisory board. He was awarded a 2002 Ford Environmental Journalism Fellowship to teach in India and a 2005 Environmental Media Fellowship at Vermont Law School. He trained at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Glenn previously earned a mid-career Masters of International Affairs (environmental policy) at Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy in Boston.

Project: Create a citizen/professional journalism project using innovative web tools and citizen journalism practices to track Boulder, Colo.'s implementation of a carbon tax.

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Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Aaditeshwar Seth is a Ph.D. candidate with the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo (Canada). His research is focused on low-cost wireless communication infrastructures for rural areas, including developing hardware and software for starting radio stations in rural areas. He earned his BTech degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, India, in 2002. Prior to his Ph.D. work, Seth founded Kalzoom Technologies, an Indian software company. He also co-founded a student organization at the University of Waterloo that gives technical support to nonprofit organizations in India.

Project: This project will connect rural radio stations to the Internet by using new software and computer-based FM transmitters. The innovations will significantly reduce the cost of creating the stations in India -- from an estimated $50,000 to $2,500. India is issuing a new round of community radio station licenses, so the proposal is timely. The effort will start by helping nonprofits already operating in India launch radio stations.

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Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Adrian Holovaty is a journalist and web developer in Chicago. He has developed innovative, award-winning web applications for washingtonpost.com, Lawrence.com and LJWorld.com. One of his projects, chicagocrime.org, an innovative overlay of the city's reported crimes using Google's online mapping technology, won the $10,000 Grand Prize in the 2005 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. He also co-created Django, an open-source web development framework. He graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 2001 and was named one of Crain's "40 Under 40" in 2005.

Project: To create, test and release open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block.

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Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Alexander Zolotarev was a Fulbright Scholar at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where he conducted research for his Ph.D. in citizen journalism and online communities. He is just back to Moscow where he will soon defend his dissertation at the Moscow State University Faculty of Journalism. After writing a Russian travel guide to Norway at 21, Zolotarev worked as an editor at several magazines, including Harper's Bazaar and National Geographic Traveler. He has consistently been involved in projects on pop culture and entertainment, including the launch of the IMAX Theatre in Moscow.

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Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amanda Atwood has worked as an information activist in several Zimbabwean organizations, from the Movement for Democratic Change through to the country's major labor union. Amanda brings with her several years of experience in publishing civic and human rights information in a repressive media environment. Amanda is currently Zimbabwe's key resource person assisting SANGONeT, a South African based NGO, in the strengthening of citizen journalism. Amanda injects an extraordinary energy and enthusiasm into the Freedom Fone project and believes that "Freedom Fone is gonna Fly!"

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Amanda Hickman
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amanda Hickman is the Director of Technology at Gotham Gazette and Citizens Union Foundation. She is particularly interested in the role of free and open source software in organizing work, and sits on the steering committee of the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI). She has worked as a Circuit Rider, provided technology assistance and training to low-income grassroots groups in the U.S. working on anti-poverty issues and as a consultant to foundations and other organizations that want to support their grantees' use of technology in organizing work. She taught an undergraduate course on using the Internet as an organizing tool through NYU's Gallatin School. An active local organizer, she helped start one of the largest community gardens in Brooklyn and helps run a public compost drop-off at the local greenmarket.

Project: Gotham Gazette will develop games to inform and engage players about key issues confronting New York City. Gotham Gazette will hold forums on the games' issues, report on what solutions the players developed and relay those ideas to city officials.

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Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amy Gahran is a media consultant and journalist based in Boulder, Colorado. Working closely with the Society of Environmental Journalists, she covered energy and environmental issues for more than 15 years. She authors several blogs such as Contentious.com, one of the earliest leading voices on online content and communication, and Right Conversation, which focuses on conversational and social media. Gahran edits the Poynter Institute's group blog E-Media Tidbits, and she's created e-learning modules for News University. Two years ago she and business partner Adam Glenn launched I, Reporter, a guide for citizen journalists and news professionals who work with them. Their projects include an interactive database of nearly 500 citizen journalism projects throughout North America and helping launch the online side of a weekly community paper in NY state.

Project: Create a citizen/professional journalism project using innovative web tools and citizen journalism practices to track Boulder, Colo.'s implementation of a carbon tax.

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Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Andrius Kulikauskas is a dual citizen of Lithuania and the United States. In 1998, he founded Minciu Sodas, an online laboratory for serving independent thinkers around the world. He wants to organize 100,000 of them, enough for a vibrant culture. He organizes them by asking: What is your deepest value in life? What is a question that you don't know the answer to, but wish to answer? What would you like to achieve? His own deepest value is "living by truth."

Blogging About: Different methods of getting digital information to rural areas that don't have Internet access. He will discuss using a "reader," or a device for writing and reviewing text files stored on any USB flash drive. The device is meant for people in rural areas with marginal online access so that messages can be physically transported to and from places connected to the Internet. In this system, an individual would load a USB drive at an Internet café, then travel to a village where the information could be read with another device. This method will be discussed in contrast to the pros and cons of using the $100 wireless laptop.

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Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Angela Antony is a senior at Harvard College and co-founder of The Beanstockd Project. She also founded the Harvard Presidents Forum, the first formal network of the leaders of all Harvard student organizations, and served on the founding board of the Leadership Institute at Harvard College.

Project: Beanstockd is a developing idea to encourage green living through an interactive game. Using social networking tools and real-time news and information, players would be able to track their environmental impact, discover how they stack up against neighbors and team up in a friendly competition to leave the smallest imprint on their community. The game revolves around a virtual stock market, where each player receives an amount of personal stock based on their environmental footprint. Players can increase their stock value by reducing their footprint, or invest in other teams who are predicted to do the same. The project is tailored for a small community, such as a university campus, and aims to unite its members around reducing the area's demand on natural resources.

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Angela Powers
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Angela Powers is director and a professor of the Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State. In addition to teaching, she has worked as a reporter for NBC and CBS affiliates, been a Senior Fulbright Specialist, Fulbright Scholar and Poynter fellow; written for journals and books and remained active in organizations such as the World Media Economics organization and AEJMC. Her research interests include influences on news content and media convergence. Powers received her Ph.D. from Michigan State.

Project: Create "incubator" at Kansas State (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Anthony Pesce is a senior at UCLA in geography/environmental studies, and the Editor in Chief of the UCLA Daily Bruin. He wants to become a professional journalist, focusing on new media. Pesce enjoys thinking about creative ways to localize news coverage and build local communities around information. He won a Society of Professional Journalists Regional Mark of Excellence Award for general reporting, a first-place California College Media Association award for series writing and awards from both groups for editorial writing.

Project: Student editors at the UCLA Daily Bruin will create online publishing software geared to mobile editing. College journalists then will be able to use the content management system to remotely assign and edit stories, videos and photos for online college sites. Readers will use it to submit their own content and communicate with one another.

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Ardyth Broadrick Sohn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ardyth Broadrick Sohn is director of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine and is serving as outside evaluator for the University of Belgrade Journalism Department through the University of Georgia Cox Center. With Sohn's expertise in media management, she has led work with Poynter and AEJMC. Sohn is the author or co-author of 15 books, book chapters or monographs and over a dozen scholarly articles. She was a newspaper reporter and assistant editor before returning to graduate school where she earned her master's and Ph.D. degrees in Journalism.

Project: Create "incubator" at University of Nevada (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Benjamin Melancon is co-founder of Agaric Design Collective, developing and maintaining websites for companies, organizations, and individuals, using open source free software. He also promotes and supports several non-profit organizations, especially public interest news sources, including the Fund for Authentic Journalism, Art For Change in Spanish Harlem New York, Gringoyo Productions, and The NewStandard. He helped found and was elected to the board of directors of the Amazing Things Arts Center and is helping to form a non-profit called People Who Give a Damn. He has worked in media, retail and consulting. He attended the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on a Commonwealth Scholarship and studied journalism, economics, political science and information technology.

Blogging About: "Related Items," a module for the community-oriented and open-source content management system, Drupal, which enables people to quickly and easily connect any item (news, idea, group, event) to any other content they consider related.

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Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Bev Clark co-founded Kubatana.net, Zimbabwe's civic and information portal. Bev has assisted a variety of civil society organizations with their media and communications strategies focusing on the need for non-profit organizations to engage marketing and vibrant publicity in their social justice work. Keenly interested in the intersection between art, communication and technology Bev has broken new ground in Zimbabwe by encouraging an alternative approach to citizen outreach. Bev is Kubatana's key blogger and has written for OpenDemocracy and Slate.

Project: Freedom Fone will provide a voice database where users can access news and public-interest information via land, mobile or Internet phones. In a concept similar to a telephone tree employed by many private companies, users will call in and then dial specific numbers to find the information they need. Independent radio station content will be broadcast, along with frequently updated audio reports created specifically for Freedom Fone. Users will be able to pose questions and leave answers on a voicemail system. The concept, which employs both new and old technologies, will allow the poor to receive and contribute information in a practical and economical way. It will be tested in Zimbabwe.

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Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brein McNamara is the technology coordinator at the Minnesota North Star Academy, a bilingual charter school for the deaf in the Twin Cities. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota in communication studies with an emphasis in new media. Deaf himself, McNamara is heavily involved in the deaf community and is driven to provide this minority group with equitable access to the tools of citizen journalism in American Sign Language.

Blogging About: Ways to empower deaf people to become citizen journalists. He will write about the digital information needs of deaf people, including his own proposal to integrate a web-based video capture system with the videophones popular among the hearing-impaired. The blog also will highlight the gaps not being filled by current technology.

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Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Chris O'Brien is a business reporter at the San Jose Mercury News where he has covered Silicon Valley since 1999. Previously, he was a staff writer at The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., for seven years. He graduated from Duke University in 1991, and was an editor at the student-run, independent daily newspaper, The Chronicle.

Project: To plan an "ideal newsroom" for the digital news era and create an online resource for student newspapers and other news organizations looking to bring their facilities up to date with new media trends.

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Christopher Callahan

Christopher Callahan became the founding dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in August 2005. In his first 18 months, Callahan added seven award-winning journalists to the Cronkite School's full-time faculty. He also brought to ASU the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism and created the New Media Innovation Lab and Cronkite News Service. Prior to joining the Cronkite School, Callahan served as the associate dean at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Before entering a career in journalism education, Callahan was a Washington correspondent for The Associated Press.

Project: To support the development of media entrepreneurship and the creation of new digital media products through the establishment of the Knight-Kauffman Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.

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Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Chris Csikszentmihályi (pronounced Cheek-sent-me-hi) is the Muriel Cooper Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and directs the Computing Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab. A 2007 Radcliffe Institute Fellow, he has worked in the intersection of new technologies, politics, media and the arts for 15 years, lecturing, showing new media work and presenting installations in four continents and one subcontinent. His work aims to create a new technology to embody a particular social agenda. For example, he designed his piece "Afghan Explorer" to defend the First Amendment by creating a tele-operated robot reporter to bypass American military censorship. Csikszentmihályi has lectured and presented to government agencies and arts, humanities and science and engineering departments across the globe. He served on the National Academies' "Information Technology and Creativity" panel, and has recently won fellowships from the Langlois and Rockefeller Foundations. (MFA, UC San Diego; BFA, Art Institute of Chicago).

Project: To create the Center for Future Civic Media, a leadership project designed to encourage community news experiments and new technologies and practices.

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Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The program, which is just being launched, aims to help students appreciate the startup culture of risk-taking, and to foster new media projects. Dan remains director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enhance and expand grassroots media and its reach. He is also author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People" (O'Reilly Media, 2004), a book that explains the rise of citizens' media and why it matters. From 1994 until early 2005 Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.

Project: To support the development of media entrepreneurship and the creation of new digital media products through the establishment of the Knight-Kauffman Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.

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Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dan Pacheco is a product manager who specializes in social media -- the idea that average people can and should be active participants in the media they consume. He has 14 years of experience in this area at The Washington Post, Knight Ridder Tribune, America Online and The Bakersfield Californian.

Pacheco is managing The Bakersfield Californian's Printcasting initiative, a two-year, $837,000 Knight News Challenge project that will democratize print publishing and create self-serve advertising tools for local businesses. They plan to go into beta in December, and launch in March of 2009.

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Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dan Schultz is a junior at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he is studying Information Systems. His professional experience has been limited to technically oriented internships, but he is known among friends for his independent work on dynamic web systems. Schultz began exploring the potential of the Internet as a community facilitator during his freshman year of high school. He built a forum and polling system from scratch, which he has used as an outlet for his talents in Information Systems. In pursuing his undergraduate degree from CMU, he is considering minors in Computer Science, Mathematical Sciences, and Policy and Management. He plans to improve his abilities as a programmer and a thinker and looks forward to taking on some of the creative challenges that lie ahead for this field.

Blogging About: Giving all individuals a voice within their local and global communities through a centralized, user-maintained news system. The idea currently combines geotagging, user-driven aggregation, and community-oriented design to allow news media consumers to see the information that matters most to them.

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Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Daniel X. O'Neil is a co-founder of and the People Person at EveryBlock, the Web site that filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what's happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city. His main responsibility is to work with local governments to uncover new data sets.

Prior to EveryBlock, he spent ten years working as an Internet strategist and Web developer. He's developed a special focus on helping organizations use emerging tools like wikis, weblogs, and social networks to get things done quickly and cheaply. Over the last few years, his focus has turned to bringing these tools to government, especially at the municipal level in his hometown of Chicago.

Project: To create, test and release open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block.

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David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

David Ardia is director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Citizen Media. David received his J.D. degree, summa cum laude, from Syracuse University College of Law and received an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. Prior to founding the CMLP at Harvard, he was assistant counsel at the Washington Post where he provided pre-publication review and legal advice on First Amendment, newsgathering, intellectual property, and general business issues. Before joining the Post, David was an associate at Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC, where he handled a range of intellectual property and media litigation. David is a former member of the Newspaper Association of America's Legal Affairs Committee and is a current member of the First Amendment and Media Litigation Committee of the American Bar Association, the Media Law Committee of the District of Columbia Bar, and the New England Media Lawyers Group.

Project: The Citizen Media Law Project, a joint venture between Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Citizen Media, provides legal assistance, education, and resources for individuals and organizations involved in online and citizen media. The CMLP also provides research and advocacy on free speech, newsgathering, intellectual property, and other legal issues related to online speech.

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David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

David Cohn has written for Wired, Seed, Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times. While working toward his master's degree at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Cohn worked as the editor at newassignment.net, which focused on citizen journalism and ways news organizations could explore the social web. Cohn also worked with Jeff Jarvis from Buzzmachine.com to organize the first Networked Journalism Summit, which brought together the best practices of collaborative journalism. He recently became a contributing editor at NewsTrust.net, a non-profit media literacy tool and news filter. Cohn also is the editor-in-chief at Broowaha, an expanding citizen journalism network.

Project: Spot Journalism will provide a new way to pay for local investigative reporting by soliciting financial support from the public. Through this project, independent journalists and residents will propose stories, while Spot Journalism uses the Web to seek "micro-payments" to cover the costs. If enough donors contribute the amount needed, a journalist will be hired to do the reporting. The money has to come from a variety of sources, though. Each project will need many small contributions before being approved in order to avoid personal crusades. In addition to offering a new model for investigative work, Spot Journalism will provide a way to discover the issues important to a community while giving a voice to those who wonder why a given problem is not being investigated.

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David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

David Sasaki is the Director of Rising Voices, a global citizen media outreach initiative of Global Voices Online. He manages a portfolio of small-scale projects around the developing world that use citizen media to effect social change. Prior to his current focus on outreach he served as Global Voices' Latin America Regional Editor, monitoring the Latin American blogosphere, highlighting key content and translating select posts from Spanish to English. Sasaki transitioned into online journalism after working as a freelance web developer and English instructor in Monterrey, Mexico. He now splits his time and residence between North and Latin America and writes frequently at Rising Voices, Global Voices, and on his personal weblog.

Project: Over the past two years, Global Voices has introduced readers around the world to the brilliant, funny, insightful and touching voices of bloggers from developing nations. Rising Voices is our new effort to introduce thousands of new developing world bloggers to the world, helping students, journalists, activists and people from rural areas join the blogosphere.

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Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dianne Lynch is dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. The school is launching an endowed Center for Independent Media to explore new journalistic forms. As the founding executive director of the national Online News Association, she was the editorial director of the first national study of the credibility of online news, and co-producer of a series of digital training modules for online newsrooms on the Poynter Institute's News University. Lynch is a Fulbright Senior Specialist in new media technologies and learning; a member of the national Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications; and a member of the inaugural class of the ASJMC Leadership Institute. Lynch earned her master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Ph.D. in Art History and Communications from McGill University in Montreal.

Project: Create an "incubator" at Ithaca College (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dori J. Maynard is president and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the nation's leading trainer of journalists of color. She is the co-author of "Letters to My Children," a compilation of nationally syndicated columns by her late father, Bob Maynard, the first African-American to own a major metropolitan newspaper. Maynard was a reporter at The Bakersfield Californian, The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., and the Detroit Free Press. In 1993, she and her father became the first father-daughter duo to be appointed Nieman Fellows at Harvard University.

Blogging About: Creating and maintaining diversity in digital media.

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Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ellen Hume became the research director of the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT in January 2008. She also is publisher of the New England Ethnic Newswire, which she founded in 2007 at UMass Boston while teaching there. Hume was a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, executive director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, executive director of PBS's Democracy Project, senior fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program, and an international media analyst and trainer. You can learn more about her at this personal website.

Project: To create the Center for Future Civic Media, a leadership project designed to encourage community news experiments and new technologies and practices.

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Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Fabio Berzaghi is a second year Computer Science Master's student at the University of Minnesota. Besides being a research assistant for the Knight News Challenge he is also a teacher assistant at the Carlson School of Management. His focuses are game and sound design. He has previous experience in the videogame realm working in quality assurance for Milestone. He also has a rock band in Minneapolis.

Project: Playing the News is a news simulation environment which lets citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers.

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G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

G. Patton "Pat" Hughes has worked in a wide variety of media jobs, including community journalism, advertising, online hosting, clerking, TV reporting, sports reporting, and marketing. As the population of Paulding County, Ga., began to boom, Hughes saw the opportunity for a hyper-local news site and obtained the Paulding.com domain in 1997 as editor of a local weekly newspaper. Monthly reach in the community is about 30 percent of households. Hughes has a B.A. degree from Hendrix College and is married with two children.

Blogging About: Making Paulding.com a financial success, from discussing practical aspects of building its revenue base from advertising and paid subscriptions, to sharing prior (and future) technical and strategic successes, failures, objections and issues.

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Gabriel Berrios
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gabriel Berrios is a journalist and currently works as co-developer and project coordinator of "Our City, Our Voices: Immigrant Voices" for JUNTOS, a community-organizing and leadership development non-profit in Philadelphia. He also serves as a consultant for non-profit organizations focusing on the development of micro-media communications in Chile and Mexico. From 2001 to 2004 he was a member of the coordinating committee of the Mexico-based global program "Make a Connection," creating networks of youth documentary makers who promoted their rights through informative video production. He was the creator of the project "See and Participate for Democracy," where a team of youth videographers promoted a culture of transparency for public funding in Mexican municipalities by monitoring the activities of local authorities. Gabriel received his BA in Communications, BA in Philosophy of Art in Chile, lived and worked for 7 years in Mexico City, and presently resides in Philadelphia.

Project: To develop online digital newscasts for Philadelphia's immigrant community and to distribute them via the new citywide wireless platform.

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Gail Robinson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gail Robinson is editor-in-chief of GothamGazette.com, an award-winning publication on New York City policy and politics. Founded in 1999, GothamGazette has pioneered the use of online media to cover local issues, from arts to environment to technology, and political campaigns. It offers original reporting, summaries of and links to other journalism, commentaries by prominent New Yorkers and a wealth of links to reports, organizations and city offices. Robinson has 25 years of experience as a political journalist. In 2000, she joined Gotham Gazette where she has written extensively about the upheaval in the New York City school system, covered local political contests and reported on issues from parades to pollution. She also worked on Gotham Gazette's early forays into games. A resident of Brooklyn and loyal (if not native) New Yorker, Robinson became editor-in-chief of Gotham Gazette in 2007.

Project: Gotham Gazette will develop games to inform and engage players about key issues confronting New York City. Gotham Gazette will hold forums on the games' issues, report on what solutions the players developed and relay those ideas to city officials.

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Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Geoff Dougherty is the founding editor of ChiTownDailyNews.org and the CEO of its parent company, PublicMedia, Inc. He was an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune, and served in similar roles at the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times. He has 14 years of journalism experience and has won numerous awards for his work. While at the Miami Herald, Dougherty played a key role in the newspaper's effort to review, count and analyze discarded ballots from the 2000 presidential election. He is a graduate of Colorado College.

Project: The Chi-Town Daily News will recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists -- one in each Chicago neighborhood. The journalists will work with editors to produce a professional, comprehensive daily local news report.

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Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Guy Berger heads the School of Journalism & Media Studies at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. He has worked in print media and television. He was deputy chair of the South African National Editors' Forum from 2003 to 2004 and remains an active member. Berger also writes "Converse," a column for the Mail & Guardian online. He has a Ph.D. from Rhodes University.

Project: Local news reports disseminated through cell phones will help connect an all-black township in South Africa with the white population living in the urban center -- giving everyone in Grahamstown equal access to news and information. Articles from the community newspaper, Grocott's Mail, will be delivered to mobile phones, the only modern communications system available in the rural township. In a partnership with a local university, journalism students will create audio and video feeds for distribution. Meanwhile, masters-level students will study the project's design and impact, while post-graduate students develop a sustainable business model for the technology. The project will create open-source software so that small town newspapers around the globe will be able to send mobile reports.

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Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Henry Jenkins is the director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, the newest books of which include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. Jenkins recently developed a white paper on the future of media literacy education for the MacArthur Foundation, which is leading to a three year project to develop curricular materials to help teachers and parents better prepare young people for full participation in contemporary culture. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. He is one of the leaders of the Convergence Culture Consortium, which consults with leading players in the branded entertainment sector in hopes of helping them adjust to shifts in the media environment.

Project: To create the Center for Future Civic Media, a leadership project designed to encourage community news experiments and new technologies and practices.

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Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ian V. Rowe is the vice president of Strategic Partnerships and Public Affairs for MTV. His department oversees MTV's campaigns that build awareness of issues important to MTV's audience. He now oversees MTV's new pro-social platform, Think MTV, which informs and engages viewers to take action on the domestic and global issues that matter most and affect their lives. Prior to MTV, Rowe was the director of Strategy and Performance Measurement for USA Freedom Corps at the White House, the president's initiative on volunteer service. He is an Echoing Green Fellow and was also founder and president of Third Millennium Media, a media consulting business. Rowe spent two years with Teach for America, holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science Engineering from Cornell University.

Project: MTV will cover the 2008 presidential election with a Knight Mobile Youth Journalist in every state and the District of Columbia who will create video news reports specifically for distribution on cell phones. The weekly reports will be voted on by the public, and the best will be rebroadcast on the MTV television network. By enabling young adults to report on issues that interest them and distribute those reports on their most commonly used digital medium, the cell phone, MTV hopes to compel leading presidential candidates to address issues important to this demographic and to mobilize young adults to register and vote.

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J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

J.D. Lasica is an independent strategist, journalist, author and social media pioneer. He is president of the Social Media Group, a company that offers consulting in social media, video and podcasting services to companies and organizations. He is also co-founder and president of Ourmedia, a free community site and learning center for user-created video and audio. His book, "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation," explores the personal media revolution and the emerging media landscape. He was the first new media columnist for both the American Journalism Review and Online Journalism Review. He writes about citizen media and social networks at Socialmedia.biz. CNET named him one of the 100 top media bloggers in the world.

Blogging About: A Community Media Toolset that will provide publishers, editors and developers at citizen media sites with easy-to-use social media tools -- plug-ins, scripts, guides and tutorials -- to expand public participation.

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Jane Briggs-Bunting
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jane Briggs-Bunting is director of the Michigan State University School of Journalism. She joined the MSU faculty in August 2003 after 24 years in journalism education at another university. In April 2003, she was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame. Before joining the faculty, she worked as a Detroit Free Press reporter covering breaking and hard news. She earned her law degree at night. While at the university, she reported for the Free Press, People and LIFE magazines. Since her arrival at MSU she has been transitioning the curriculum to address the revolutionary changes in the media industry.

Project: Create "incubator" at Michigan State (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. From 1999 to 2005 he was department chair. Rosen is the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism issues that launched in September 2003. In June 2005, PressThink won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award for outstanding defense of free expression. He also blogs at the Huffington Post. In July 2006 he announced the debut of NewAssignment.net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. His book about the rise of the civic journalism movement, "What Are Journalists For?" was published in 1999 by Yale University Press. He lives in New York City.

Blogging About: How beat reporters can work with social networks to improve their reporting.

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Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jessica Mayberry founded Video Volunteers in September 2003 after spending a year training rural Indian women in filmmaking as a fellow of the American India Foundation. Video Volunteers is working to create a media industry at the base of the social pyramid by training local people to run their own "Community Video Units" in partnership with NGOs. Prior to that, Mayberry worked at Court TV, the Fox News Channel and CNN. She is a fellow of Echoing Green, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs. She also serves on the board of Free the Children, the world's largest organization of "Children Helping Children" and on the Advisory Council of Counterpart International. She holds a degree in modern history and modern languages from Oxford University.

Project: Video Volunteers, a New York-based nonprofit, will train 100 people in rural India as Community Video Producers. These citizen journalists will produce magazine- style video news reports, typically on local social issues, and show them on widescreen projectors in poor communities. The idea is to distribute public interest information to the poor - without having to provide the entire population with digital tools. To date, Video Volunteers' screenings in India have reached 140,000 people in 150 communities. The video technology is not new. The innovation is to do citizen journalism on a significant scale in a poor, rural area.

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Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Kathleen A. Hansen is a professor in the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center (MJC) and supervisor of the school’s Digital Information Resource Center. She is a co-author (with Nora Paul) of “Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators.” Playing the News is a news simulation environment which lets citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers.

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Kimberly Sultze
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Kimberly Sultze is chair of the department of journalism and mass communication at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vt. After 13 years of teaching, she is an expert in curriculum development in journalism, mass communication and media studies. Her research interests include the history and cultural interpretation of visual communication. From 2003-2004, she was Head of the Visual Communication division of the AEJMC. She received her B.A. from Carleton College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University's Department of Culture and Communication, Program in Media Ecology. Prior to earning her academic credentials, she worked in print journalism in Sydney, Australia, in television production in the Twin Cities, Minn., and as an editor with FIS-New York.

Project: Create "incubator" at St. Michael's College (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Leslie Rule is director of the newly created Center for Locative Media. She also runs KQED's Digital Storytelling Initiative and Digital Media Center, working in the fields of Community Education and Outreach. She is an acknowledged expert on using digital storytelling as a communication strategy, sat on the Executive Board of the Digital Storytelling Association, is a founding member of the Society of M-Learning and is on the advisory board of ourmedia.org. Currently she is using mobile devices and emerging technologies to create location-specific, community-based narrative projects, including "Scape the Hood," a neighborhood narrative; "Re-storying," a creek restoration project; "100 Years Later," a community walk through San Francisco's 1906 earthquake; and a social justice project inspired by "Eyes on the Prize." Ms. Rule has undergraduate degrees in rhetoric and linguistics from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in Education with an emphasis in instructional technology. She lives high atop the hills of San Francisco with her beloved son Thom and her beastly border collie, Bella.

Blogging About: The Interactive Community Spaces project, the use of GPS tracking to inform people through mobile media.

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Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Lisa Williams is the founder of Placeblogger, the largest live site of local weblogs and of H2Otown, a nationally recognized citizen journalism site and online community for Watertown, Mass. After attending Emerson College, she worked briefly at a regional daily newspaper. Later, as an analyst at Daratech she wrote about computer-aided design technology. Williams moved from Daratech to Yankee Group, where she became the director of their enterprise software research group. Williams is an active member of the regular bloggers' meeting at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society in Cambridge, Mass. She was recently named a fellow of Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution at the National Constitution Center.

Project: To make it easier for people to find hyperlocal news and information about their city or neighborhood through promotion of "universal geotagging" in blogs.

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Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Liz Nord is a producer and documentary filmmaker. She currently runs MTV/Knight Street Team '08, a team of 51 state-based citizen journalists who are covering the presidential election. In 2006, she toured the world with her film about rebellious young Israelis, "Jericho's Echo: Punk Rock in the Holy Land." She is also a media educator, lecturer, and columnist. She recently relocated to New York from the Bay Area, where she ran a media education non-profit and served on the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Women in Film and TV.

Project: MTV will cover the 2008 presidential election with a Knight Mobile Youth Journalist in every state and the District of Columbia who will create video news reports specifically for distribution on cell phones. The weekly reports will be voted on by the public, and the best will be rebroadcast on the MTV television network. By enabling young adults to report on issues that interest them and distribute those reports on their most commonly used digital medium, the cell phone, MTV hopes to compel leading presidential candidates to address issues important to this demographic and to mobilize you adults to register and vote.

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Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Margaret Rosas is founder and chief strategist of Quiddities, Dev Inc., a web development agency in Santa Cruz, Calif. Quiddities specializes in web application projects using the open source social publishing system, Drupal. These projects include work for the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Santa Cruz; leaders in the sustainability movement; and large e-commerce companies. Rosas began her career building data networks and supporting their users, in large corporations and small businesses. As the internet emerged, Rosas immersed herself in web application design, where she could focus her technical skills on creating user experiences.

Project: Drupal, one of the popular open-source software platforms that publish web sites, will be used to create a turnkey web site for radio news organizations. This content management and publishing system will address the needs of radio news sites, such as creating and archiving audio and text, producing podcasts and playlists and streaming live audio and video. KUSP, a public radio station on California's Central Coast, will test the project.

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Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mark Glaser is the editor of Idea Lab and PBS MediaShift. He is a longtime freelance journalist whose long and winding career include columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. Most recently, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review, and he still writes the OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. In past lives, Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column.

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Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Martin Moore is the director of the Media Standards Trust, a nonprofit organization that aims to foster high quality journalism. He has been working in news and media for more than a decade, including for the BBC, Channel 4, NTL, IPC Media, Trinity Mirror and others. Moore studied history at Cambridge and holds a doctorate from the London School of Economics, where he was teaching and researching until summer 2006.

Project: With the copious amounts of information -- and misinformation -- on the Internet, the public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of "source tagging." For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data -- the "story behind the story" -- to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase "Pakistan riots" for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by "eyewitness accounts" would yield a more selective list. Moore, Berners-Lee and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists' normal workflow.

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Mary Lou Fulton
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

strong>Mary Lou Fulton is Vice President of Audience Development at The Bakersfield Californian, where she leads the company's new product development and market research teams. Fulton is the founder of The Northwest Voice, one of the first citizen journalism publications in the newspaper industry, and The Californian's new product development work has been widely recognized as a positive example of innovation in the newspaper business. Fulton's background spans both newspapers and technology. She started out in the newsroom, working for the AP and later as a reporter and editor for the Los Angeles Times. Fulton moved to the online world in 1995 when she joined The Washington Post's new media division and later became Managing Editor of washingtonpost.com. Fulton also held senior management positions at a number of online companies, including America Online, GeoCities and HomePage.com, before returning to the newspaper business in 2003 when she joined The Californian.

Project: Printcasting will allow individuals to easily create ad-supported, customized publications with a mix of local news and information. The software will help aggregate feeds from news organizations, bloggers or newsletters, for example, so that would-be publishers can pick and choose among them to create a niche publication. The Printcasting model then will guide users through placing articles, photos and ads onto a template that either could be delivered by e-mail or printed at home and distributed. For example, a publication for reef-diving photographers could include ads for nearby dive shops or underwater cameras. The idea is to pair localized ads and content to create targeted publications.

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Mitchel Resnick
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, explores how new technologies can help people (especially children) learn new things in new ways. His Lifelong Kindergarten research group developed the "programmable bricks" that were the basis for the LEGO MindStorms and PicoCricket construction kits. Resnick co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of after-school learning centers for youth from low-income communities. Resnick's group recently developed a new programming language, called Scratch, which makes it easier for kids to create their own interactive stories, games, music, and animations — and share their creations on the web. Resnick earned a BS in physics from Princeton, and an MS and PhD in computer science from MIT. Before pursuing his graduate degrees, he worked for five years as a science and technology journalist for Business Week magazine. He is the author or co-author of several books, including Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams.

Project: To create the Center for Future Civic Media, a leadership project designed to encourage community news experiments and new technologies and practices.

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Nora Paul
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Nora Paul is director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota. She previously taught at the Poynter Institute teaching news library management, computer-assisted research, and new media leadership from 1991 to 2000. She was editor for information services at the Miami Herald from 1979 to 1991. Paul (and Kathleen Hansen) are co-authors of "Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators." She is a member of the board of the World Press Institute, and has traveled worldwide presenting seminars and lectures on research methods and on innovation in online news. Her work at the University of Minnesota focuses on evolving digital storytelling forms.

Project: Playing the News is a news simulation environment which lets citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers.

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Pam McAllister-Johnson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Pam McAllister-Johnson, Ph.D. is director of the Center for 21st Century Media, and School of Journalism & Broadcasting at Western Kentucky University. She has worked as both a print and broadcast reporter. During her 13-year term as president and publisher of the Ithaca (NY) Journal, a Gannett newspaper, McAllister-Johnson was the first black female publisher of a general circulation newspaper in the United States. McAllister-Johnson has a joint Ph.D. in Mass Communication and Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin where she also did her undergraduate and master's work.

Project: Create "incubator" at Western Kentucky University (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Paul Grabowicz is Associate Dean, Senior Lecturer and Director of the New Media Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism where he teaches classes in multimedia reporting, new media publishing and video game storytelling. He is co-author of “California Inc.,” a book about how the entrepreneurial spirit shaped the politics, culture and economy of California. He spent most of his career as the investigative reporter at The Oakland Tribune, where he also served as night city editor and acting city editor and developed an early prototype of a web site for the paper. (It was rejected). He began his journalism career in 1973 working for local papers in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Bay Guardian and has written for publications such as The Washington Post, Esquire magazine, The Village Voice and Newsday.

The Knight News Challenge project is a re-creation of Oakland’s once vibrant blues and jazz club scene as an online video game and virtual world. The game allows players to experience the club scene as it was in its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, before it fell victim to redevelopment schemes and urban decay.

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Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Paul Lamb is a consultant and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in business, nonprofit management, technology and public policy. He is currently the Principal of Man on a Mission Consulting, a management consulting firm dedicated to leveraging technology for the social good. Paul is a founder and former Executive Director of The Stride Center, an award-winning program providing computer training and job placement for low-income and underserved youth in San Francisco’s East Bay. He has developed several other successful nonprofit programs and social enterprises in the areas of youth, workforce development, and technology.
Paul is also a frequent radio commentator and OpEd contributor on technology and social issues in a variety of publications. Paul is the co-author of the Be A Better Partner Handbook for Couples. He is also the founder of the Cool ‘n Conscientious blog, and is a contributing blogger on SmartMobs.com. He is a former Fellow with the ZeroDivide Foundation and is currently a Next Generation Fellow with the American Assembly at Columbia University.

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Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rich Gordon is an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Before coming to Medill, he served as the first new media director for The Miami Herald. He worked as a reporter and editor for newspapers in Virginia and Florida.

Project: Create an academic program blending computer science and journalism, designed to fill a staffing void at many digital news sites. By offering scholarships to Medill's graduate journalism program to people with education and/or expertise in computer programming, the goal is to turn out students who understand both journalism and technology, connect one to another in ways that build audiences and also enhance and protect the civic functions of journalism in a democratic society.

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Richard Anderson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Richard Anderson is president and owner of VillageSoup Inc., a company that provides places for residents to learn, share and shop in the neighborhoods, villages or towns in which they reside.
Before establishing VillageSoup, he spent five years teaching and 29 years developing and publishing elementary and high school textbooks. He was co-founder and eventual sole owner of Ligature Inc., a textbook production company. Anderson is an active community member who chairs and serves on various non-profit organization boards. He lives in Camden, Maine, as do he and his deceased wife's three children and families. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the University of Northern Iowa and a Ph.D. in educational administration from the University of Iowa.

Project: To create an open-source version of VillageSoup's successful community news software, combining professional journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, online advertising and "reverse publishing" from online to print.

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Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan Sholin is the director of community site publishing at GateHouse Media, where he is responsible for web strategy, support and training for small town and suburban newspapers across the U.S. He also writes about the future of news and journalism education at his blog, Invisible Inkling.

ReportingOn is a backchannel for beat reporters to connect with colleagues, peers, and mentors working on similar stories in different towns.

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Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sandra Ekong is a senior at Harvard College and co-founder of The Beanstockd Project. She is majoring in political science and hopes to pursue a career in social entrepreneurship and marketing. She previously founded the CityStep Community Outreach Program, a branch of Harvard's largest student-run volunteer organization, and has built professional experience in marketing and the beauty industry through working at the corporate headquarters of Estee Lauder, Coty and L'Oreal.

Project: Beanstockd is a developing idea to encourage green living through an interactive game. Using social networking tools and real-time news and information, players would be able to track their environmental impact, discover how they stack up against neighbors and team up in a friendly competition to leave the smallest imprint on their community. The game revolves around a virtual stock market, where each player receives an amount of personal stock based on their environmental footprint. Players can increase their stock value by reducing their footprint, or invest in other teams who are predicted to do the same. The project is tailored for a small community, such as a university campus, and aims to unite its members around reducing the area's demand on natural resources.

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Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Steven Clift is a public speaker and consultant who has worked across 25 countries, tapping the extremely small market of governments willing to pay for advice on how to listen to people online. A one time Visiting Fellow at the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, he is a new Ashoka Fellow now focused full-time on expanding non-profit E-Democracy.org's local network of volunteer-based forums on public issues. Through E-Democracy.Org, Clift fosters conversations that create news in local communities in Minnesota, England, and New Zealand. In 1994, with the launch of the world's first election information website, he coined the term "e-democracy." He coordinated Minnesota's early e-government efforts through 1997 while volunteering with E-Democracy.Org. Democracies Online, Clift's blog/wiki/online community of practice opened in 1998 at DoWire.Org and his past speeches and articles are available at Publicus.Net.

Blogging About: The Ideas Factory, which will generate and share big ideas from the world of citizen engagement online.

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Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Todd Wolfson is finishing a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the role of new information and communication technologies on social movement building. Correspondingly he is one of the founders of the Media Mobilizing Project, which attempts to take advantage of new technologies as a way to give voice to those left out of mainstream media.

Project: To develop online digital newscasts for Philadelphia's immigrant community and to distribute them via the new citywide wireless platform.

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Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tony Shawcross is the founder and executive director of Deproduction, a nonprofit media production organization. After graduating magna cum laude with a degree in marketing and business administration from the University of Colorado, he worked briefly in marketing and advertising for the IT industry before leaving to focus entirely on socially relevant film and video production, working with Little Voice Productions, the Colorado State House of Representatives, the Pan African Arts Society and Free Speech TV. Shawcross has presented more than 100 media education courses with Indymedia, Denver Open Media, the Alliance for Community Media, and at various conferences, schools and universities. He has produced hundreds of films and videos produced for local and national television, film festivals and community screenings.

Project: The idea is to enable public access TV stations and community technology centers to use common tools to create websites that enable the transfer of video between the website and the TV station. Together, public access TV and community technology centers can engage disadvantaged communities in new media platforms. While there are thousands of public access stations and community technology centers country-wide that provide media education and equipment, they don't share a tool-set enabling them to become part of a collective, user-driven, online media network.

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