$11m aims to foster a new digital 'fifth estate'
Handful in region get grants for proposals in citizen journalism
The future of journalism is in your hands.
That was the message yesterday as the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation handed out more than $11 million in prize money to various bloggers and computer programmers, and organizations ranging from MIT to MTV, for proposals that will empower ordinary people to participate in digital media.
A handful of New England winners selected from 1,600 applicants took home over half the money from the first Knight News Challenge, with proposals ranging from an online legal resource for citizen journalists to a new MIT Center for Future Civic Media that will develop better ways to connect digital and real-world communities.
"We talk about the fifth estate -- the fourth estate is traditionally newspapers, but the fifth estate might be an army of citizens that uses new media to keep an eye both on government officials and on professional journalists," said Henry Jenkins , director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Comparative Media Studies Program, which shared the top $5 million prize with the MIT Media Lab to create the new media center.
Alberto Ibargüen , chief executive and president of the Knight Foundation, said that the idea behind the awards was to seek new ways to reinforce the mission of journalism at a time when traditional news media are facing tough financial circumstances.
"We still elect people by geography -- to educate our kids, to fix the potholes, to decide environmental policy," said Ibargüen. But as newspapers cut jobs and news holes shrink, "that means more and more we are having people govern us about whom we know less and less. That is intolerable."
Richard Anderson , owner of VillageSoup Inc. a Maine company developing an open-source community news software platform, won $885,000.
In 1997, Anderson started VillageSoup -- an online daily news site that employs professional journalists and competes with weekly newspapers in several Maine communities.
Today, the operation is growing, with a staff of a dozen professional journalists, while the legacy newspapers have continued to suffer, he said.
"We feel we're starting a new business model, and we call it the community hosting business -- advancing beyond the community newspaper business," Anderson said in an interview. "We've created a place for neighbors to grow together."
While a portion of the grant money went to universities, to foster digital projects in traditional journalism incubators, much of it ended up funding projects that blur the line between professional journalism and other sources of community news.
Lisa Williams , founder of Placeblogger, won $222,000 towards further developing the website -- basically "the blogosphere's answer to the AP." Placeblogger runs a streaming digest from blogs across the world, and ultimately Watertown resident Williams would like to be able to create feeds of local information for cellphones, blogs, and e-mail.
"Everyone's initial excitement about the Internet was the death of distance," she said. "Placeblogger is my attempt to let people know about them, know how to find them, and also to really encourage their work."
Williams is a consultant for Boston.com, which is the Globe's online affiliate.
Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School created a website in 2004 that aggregates blogs from across the world. Yesterday, he won $244,000 to help train bloggers in developing countries and rural areas.
David Ardia , also of the Berkman Center, won $250,000 to support the Citizen Media Law Project , an online legal resource for citizen journalists.
The project helps ordinary people use legal tools to get information from local and federal government and provides guidelines about the rights of citizen journalists.
"I think that this is a very critical, a very important time for online media. We're in the early stages of realizing the potential, and typically the law tends to lag technological change," Ardia said. "We feel like we're getting out ahead of the wave that's undoubtedly coming."
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com. 