Call: National Summit on Arts Journalismsummitinfo@najp.org (2): October 2.

       A prize of $7,500 will be for a winning project to provide a “cool, relevant and functional” alternative to diminishing arts coverage in the traditional news media.   The USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP) are sponsoring the search, to culminate at the first-of-its kind live and virtual all-day National Summit on Arts Journalism, October 2, 2009, in Los Angeles .   If you have any questions, please contact summit organizers Douglas McLennan or Sasha Anawalt at

A new report by the USC Annenberg School for Communication has been released entitled “Philanthropic Foundations: Growing Funders of the News.”   Released in early July, the report looks back on a meeting in April 2008 of foundation leaders, commercial news organizations, nonprofit news organizations, and academic institutions looking at how foundations and their funders might provide answers to the news business’ fast decline.

Alberto Ibarguen

USC’s Geoffrey Cowan, one of the conveners stated “When we had the meeting last year we saw a need, but now we’re in a state of desperation.  The collapse of the traditional economic model has increased both the need for nonprofit journalism, but also the receptivity toward it.”

The report states “a growing number of foundations are getting into the business of supporting news-and-information nonprofits.” “One things is clear,” says Jan Schaffer, director of American University’s J-Lab, “Philanthropic foundations are increasingly embracing the idea that journalism projects can be a funding fit.”

The Knight Foundation is working with community foundations to encourage them to begin to fund news and information in their hometowns . “Community foundations have billions and billions at their disposal,” says Alberto Ibarguen, CEO of the Knight Foundation.  “We think more and more of them are going to find that information has become one of their community’s core needs”

The full report is available here.

i was blessed today to have the opportunity to attend ‘beyond broadcast 09′ at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. it’s focus was the world’s emerging Digital Renaissance. The video i’ve posted was a video presented during the conference that will challenge the mindset of any individual in our time. i also hope it encourages all to use the technology we have in place as well as think outside of the paradigm of our current world. Anything is possible!

p.s.

i’m back blogging!
and the eMagazine titled The Sophisticate, will be in circulation soon…
First issue: “The Rise happens in the Fall”

The Online Journalism Review has risen from the dead.

The new OJR was announced in a posting on the Knight Digital Media Center by Geneva Overholser, the new director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Annenberg suspended publication of the OJR in June as the school went through a major transition. The site is now housed with the Knight Digital Media Center, and will see the return of media academic Robert Niles.

Overholser wants the resurrected OJR to focus on:

1. Reporting and writing in a conversational environment. How can, and should, we report the news when publications are now a two-way conversation, instead of a single-direction monologue?

2. Investigative reporting in the Internet era. How can news organizations, and individual journalists, harness the power of modern computing and networking (including crowdsourcing) to investigate public data?

3. Entrepreneurial journalism. The old business model for news is broken. How do we prepare journalists to develop new ones?

4. “Guerilla-marketing” the news. This builds from topics 1 and 3, and addresses how journalists ought to be thinking about making their content “viral,” optimizing for search engines and using promotional techniques to draw audience to their content, at minimal financial expense.

The OJR was an invaluable forum for news and debate around the emergent field of online journalism since its creation some 10 years ago and the archives are still accessible.

Now, there are far more sites and blogs on journalism and the media, including this one. But the return of the OJR is to be welcomed.

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