Editor’s note: On Tuesday, J-Lab announced that Vtdigger.org won a New Voices award for an interactive platform called Tipster that will involve readers in the newsgathering process. This is thrilling news for that special project, and we can’t wait to get started on it.
Read Dan Barlow’s story about the award at The Times Argus.
Read Shay Totten’s story on Blurt, the Seven Days blog.
Press release follows
May 18, 2010
Contact: Jan Schaffer or Andrew Pergam (202) 885-8100, J-Lab Institute for Interactive Journalism. J-LabTM is an incubator for innovative, participatory news experiments and is a center of American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C. New Voices is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Contact: Anne Galloway, editor of vtdigger.org, 802-441-1016 (office), 802-595-9159 (cell), vtdigger@gmail.com
Vtdigger.org wins $25,000 New Voices award
Two-year Knight Foundation grant will fund crowdsourcing platform on Vermont news site
WASHINGTON, D.C.— Nine promising community news projects from across the U.S. have been selected as this year’s New Voices grant winners. Each can receive up to $25,000 to launch a news initiative and work to sustain it over the next two years, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism announced today.
Grant winners are eligible to receive $17,000 in the first year to launch their projects and $8,000 in matching support in the second year. The goal is to experiment with new models for sustainability. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation funds the New Voices program.
Tipster at VTDigger.org – This news start-up covering Vermont plans to build a crowdsourcing platform called Tipster to help develop stories. Using Tipster, readers and reporters will collaborate and exchange information to build in-depth reports. Future support is expected from business and college sponsorships.
This year’s winners were selected from a competitive field of 284 applicants. Including the new grantees, a total of 55 community start-ups have been funded from 1,533 entries since 2005.
Vtdigger.org is a nonprofit, statewide news Web site dedicated to coverage of government, business and community life issues in Vermont. The organization’s mission is to enhance democracy through in-depth, interactive journalism.
Read the full press release http://www.j-newvoices.org/site/story
