I remember reading, back a few months, comments from someone with the Knight Foundation. It was a tease, that sometime this fall there would be a significant announcement about a great new project offering significant funding. More info just came in from the digital divide mailing list:

The Knight Foundation has unveiled its plan to spend up to $25 million
over the next 5 years to develop innovations in journalism, uses of new
technology, and community building.

The first round of ideas is due by Dec. 31 for funding next year.

Here is a link to the news release and one to the site for the competition.

The press release didn’t specify geographic restrictions for applicants, and the FAQ just mentioned that it was not restricted to US citizens only, but I emailed to make certain that worldwide applicants can be candidates. Email response I received said “International, Lisa. Intergalactic.” !

BBC’s Robin Hamman has been exploring and experimenting with ideas for the broadcaster to better engage with communities. The folks at the Beeb are aware that they are missing out somewhat in all the social networking / social media that’s just booming – folks engaging in their own blogs, in FlickR, in YouTube and the like.

But their main motivator for exploring new ideas has been budget – or as he puts it,

• Old way: build technology, manage community = expensive stickyness, keep audience
• New way: start discussion, link out to wherever it is = inexpensive stickyness, gain new audience

Their previous experiments included asking for heaps of submissions and comments, building message boards and community platforms. Staff had to review and approve ‘millions upon millions of messages’ – pricey stuff.

So, just launched is a BBC Manchester blog, which is their new initiative aiming to improve community engagement (while cutting costs).

The idea is that they get a couple of people in each of the city’s boroughs to launch independent blogs, covering local-local issues and stories. BBC journalists track the blogs, follow up on interesting leads found there, and get better community-level content on the BBC, radio, TV and online. The local bloggers are unpaid (hmm…) but BBC drives traffic to their sites.

Does this mean that the BBC’s actual online community engagement will go down? By using others’ blogs for neighbourhood story leads, it seems that they want more real-life community engagement, and less (as a result of less money spent on) online community engagement. If the initiative expands beyond Manchester, will online readers see fewer comments, forums, media submissions, less all-around user-generated content?

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of feedback they get about the initiative. Will others, particularly other media, see this as a positive step, taking BBC more grassroots? Or will it be seen as lazy journalism, expecting others – for free – to find the journalists’ community stories for them?

–
One of Hamman’s inspirations for the Manchester experiment was an online newspaper written by and for Chicago residents, Chi-Town Daily News. It’s a nonprofit, driven by a philosophy that news ought to be created to serve its public interest function.

–

Unconnected to the new Manchester launch, Hamman has also been running workshops for BBC journalists on blogging. In an Online Journalism News piece, he’s quoted as telling a group of them,

“Everyone who works in industry, journalism or academia needs to blog to stay relevant and informed”

Hamman refers to ‘open source journalism’. This is how Wikipedia tries to explain how that, ‘citizen journalism’ and ‘participatory journalism’ are distinct.

More about blogging experts’ workshops for BBC journalists, at Dayorama.

–

It seems to me that the emergence of audiences for theatrical documentaries and the interest in online citizen media could be linked.

The Nieman Foundation of Journalism at Harvard University puts out a journal called Nieman Reports. In the Spring 2005 issue, William Marsden says that investigative reporting has gradually receded from journalism. Phillip Knightly of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists said that the total output of factual programs on developing countries dropped by 50% in the past ten years.

If traditional media have cut back their investigative journalist positions (because digging into these stories takes time, and this doesn’t mesh easily with daily deadlines, and there’s less budget committed to journalists who aren’t producing copy / airtime each day), perhaps it’s created a void where readers and viewers no longer feel convinced that their media is representative of news and what is really going on.

The number of people who watch TV news is steadily declining, and in the US, the median age of nightly news TV viewers is now 59 and up (State of the News Media 2006). Perhaps our (viewers and readers) need for in-depth journalism, investigation, and global context has grown to a point that we are now willing to pay for it.

I could be wrong, after all one of the successful theatrical documentaries was March of the Penguins, so that doesn’t support my little theory.

This thought spun off from an entry today on the Center for Citizen Media blog. If we are collectively yearning for the hidden stories behind the spokespeople, it’ll be interesting to see if the launch of NewAssignment.net will reflect that. It looks like Jay Rosen’s new collaborative journalism concept may be visible online by September.

It may be an interesting outlet to pitch stories that just don’t seem to get picked up by media elsewhere.

globe-hand image by s e l v i n. Rights