Yesterday, Jan Schaffer of J-Lab announced that 10 new community news ventures have been awarded grants under the New Voices program. They will receive a $12,000 first-year grant for startup funding, and they will be eligible for $5,000 follow-up grants in 2007 if they successfully launch their projects and supply matching funding.
This year's winning projects are:
- Western Breeze: Montana's Rural News Network, from the University of Montana School of Journalism.
- Great Lakes Wiki, from Michigan State University's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.
- Monroe County Radio Project, from West Virginia University.
- Route 7 Report, from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Ohio University.
- Learning to Finish: Solution that Leads to Graduation, from the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, Charlottesville, Va.
- MURL Building Blocks, from Temple University in Philadelphia, with public broadcaster, WHYY-TV.
- Creating Community Conversations, from Columbia College Chicago.
- One Sky Radio South Central Magazine, from Alaska Educational Radio System.
- Ethnic News Service, from the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism (CIIJ) of San Francisco State.
- Federation of Community Correspondents, from WMMT, the community radio station of Appalshop, a media arts and education center in Whitesburg, Ky.
(See links and details for each winner.)
Let's watch these projects, and previous New Voices grant recipients (2005 grantees, project updates), closely. It seems to me that citizen and community journalism ventures could end up being a significant lifeline for media organizations and journalism professionals. I think media/news organizations and journalism schools could learn a lot from New Voices about how to wisely invest in and nurture such projects in a way that complements and benefits traditional (professional) journalism.
In fact, tomorrow I'm speaking to the Ted Scripps Fellows in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado's Center for Environmental Journalism on this topic: How citizen journalism could end up saving your job.
