• Katie Couric on how to conduct a good interview
• Tips from Bob Woodward on Investigative Journalism
• Nicholas Kristof on Covering a Global Crisis - …
• NPR’s Scott Simon: How to Tell a Story

YouTube is also looking for other partners as noted in the full press release below.

Here is a key paragraph from the press release:

“For the first time on YouTube, veteran journalists are making themselves openly available to aspiring  eporters around the world who want to report on the news and events happening around them,” said Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube. “As current events demonstrate on a daily basis, citizen-reporting on YouTube is a critical part of today’s media landscape - and the YouTube Reporters’ Center will help foster an even more productive relationship between professionals and these aspiring reporters.”

Here is the complete YouTube press release:

In partnership with several top news and media organizations, YouTube™ announced today the launch of the YouTube Reporters’ Center, a dedicated channel that features how-to videos on news reporting created by some of the industry’s most respected journalists and media experts. A one-stop-shop for journalism training online, the YouTube Reporters’ Center covers a wide range of topics, from preparing for interviews, to fact-checking, to journalistic ethics.

See below for a complete list of the journalists and media organizations who are partnering with YouTube on the launch of the Reporters’ Center.

“For the first time on YouTube, veteran journalists are making themselves openly available to aspiring  eporters around the world who want to report on the news and events happening around them,” said Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube. “As current events demonstrate on a daily basis, citizen-reporting on YouTube is a critical part of today’s media landscape - and the YouTube eporters’ Center will help foster an even more productive relationship between professionals and these aspiring reporters.”

Visitors to the center can browse through over two dozen how-to videos made by the experts for the  eporters’ Center. Citizens with reporting experiences are invited to share the lessons they’ve learned by adding their own how-to videos for inclusion on the site.

News organizations who are not currently YouTube partners can apply to the YouTube
partner program, through a new outreach program launched today as well - for more
details, please read this blog post.

Participating journalists and media organizations contributing videos to the YouTube Reporters’ Center:
Participating journalists and news organizations contributing videos to the Reporters’ Center:
• Bill Adair, Editor, Politifact
• Nathalie Applewhite, Associate Director, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
• Donna Cassata, Editor, Associated Press
• Chris Cillizza, Political Reporter and Author of “The Fix” blog, The Washington Post
• Kate Connolly, Reporter, Newsweek
• Katie Couric, CBS Evening News
• Jim Drinkard, Accountability Editor, Associated Press
• Kwame Dawes, Journalist, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
• Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post
• Michael Isikoff, Investigative Correspondent, Newsweek
• Riz Khan, The Riz Khan Show, Al-Jazeera English
• Nicholas Kristof, Columnist, The New York Times
• Andre Lambertson, Journalist, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
• Dana Milbank, Political Reporter and Author of the “Washington Sketch” column, The
Washington Post
• Beth Murphy, journalist, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
• Lizzie O’Leary, Washington Correspondent for Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg
• Adam Pasick, Editor of Reuters.com, Reuters
• Jon Resnick, Planning Editor, Associated Press
• Jon Sawyer, Executive Director, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
• Scott Simon, Weekend Edition, NPR
• Tavis Smiley, The Tavis Smiley Show, PBS
• Josh Tyrangiel, Managing Editor of Time.com, Time Magazine
• Bob Woodward, journalist, The Washington Post
• Dean Wright, Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards, Reuters
• Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook
• The Citizen Media Law Project
• HowCast
• The UpTake
• Witness

It is chilling, heartbreaking and informative; it is pro-am journalism combined and it is everything high impact and high quality journalism should be. Also praise must go to the producer Jigar Mehta and to the daring people in Iran who posted it for the world to see.

I love sections like this one:

Update | 11:12 a.m. A reader points out that Iran’s Press TV reports that Thursday’s rally was attended by “hundreds of thousands” of opposition supporters:

Supporters of defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Moussavi have organized rallies across Iran to mourn those killed in recent post-election violence.

Get that “A reader points out…” Is it journalism? Yes, half baked, but that sounds pejorative. Instead think of it as the raw materials that make for a truly robust, finished journalism. It is the perfect example of using the amateurs and pros to make a more perfect form of journalism.

It is really glorious to watch this materialize after watching the earlier confrontations about the pro-am argument fade into the distance.

So why is the so unlikely Twitter such a blockbuster medium in exposing what’s happening in Ira? Here is what Time says:

So what exactly makes Twitter the medium of the moment? It’s free, highly mobile, very personal and very quick. It’s also built to spread, and fast. Twitterers like to append notes called hashtags — #theylooklikethis — to their tweets, so that they can be grouped and searched for by topic; especially interesting or urgent tweets tend to get picked up and retransmitted by other Twitterers, a practice known as retweeting, or just RT. And Twitter is promiscuous by nature: tweets go out over two networks, the Internet and SMS, the network that cell phones use for text messages, and they can be received and read on practically anything with a screen and a network connection.

Here is something someone sent me from the ARNOVA-L listserv:

Technical: Twitter is very easily accessible across a wide variety of platforms; it takes very little time and almost no verification in order to set up an account, so users can change identities very quickly if needed; tweets are very easy to forward (retweet); and the format of followers/followed can create an instant community around a topic. The volume of tweets is so large, as well, that it’s much more difficult for the authorities to track down a single user or group of users.

Here is Clay Shirky:

One thing that Evan (Williams) and Biz (Stone) did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it’s easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I’m sure it wasn’t conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it’s had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook’s model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down, and now there are literally thousands of people aorund the world who’ve made it their business to help keep it open…It’s incredibly messy, and the definitive rules of the game have yet to be written. So yes, we’re seeing the medium invent itself in real time.

Here is more:

…as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think. But Twitter is also just a much more personal medium. Reading personal messages from individuals on the ground prompts a whole other sense of involvement. We’re seeing everyone desperate to do something to show solidarity like wear green — and suddenly the community figures out that it can actually offer secure web proxies, or persuade Twitter to delay an engineering upgrade — we can help keep the medium open.

But this from Time:

Twitter isn’t a magic bullet against dictators. As tempting as it is to think of the service as a purely anarchic weapon of the masses, too distributed to be stoppable, it is theoretically feasible for a government to shut it down, according to James Cowie, CTO of Renesys, a company that collects data on the status of the Internet in real time.

However, Time ends with this:

Twitter didn’t start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them possible. But there’s no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before. President Ahmadinejad — who happened to visit Russia on Tuesday — now finds himself in a court of world opinion where even Khrushchev never had to stand trial. Totalitarian governments rule by brute force, and because they control the consensus worldview of those they rule. Tyranny, in other words, is a monologue. But as long as Twitter is up and running, there’s no such thing.

The top money winner for 2009 was DocumentCloud for  $719,500:

DocumentCloud is a web site that will enhance investigative reporting by making source documents easy to find, share and read. While rich source documents are the foundation of investigative journalism, too often reporters throw or tuck them away after a story fades, never to be used again. DocumentCloud will provide an online database of documents contributed by a consortium of news organizations, watchdog groups and bloggers, and shared with the public at large. Users will be able to search by topic, agency or location. Reporters will benefit from the wisdom of the crowd, which will be able to collaboratively examine large document sets.

I sent the following email to Gary Kebbel at Knight, am waiting for a return answer:

I notice there are substantially fewer Knight Challenge Awards this year compared to the last two years and the total award this year is significantly smaller than in 2008 and 2007. Could you tell me the reason for a blog post at the PJNet.org.

Might it be the economy affecting the Knight endowment or a lack of high quality ideas?

Update: Gary Kebbel from Knight answers above question:

Hi, Leonard,

I think the reviewers were really tough this year, perhaps because they had seen two previous years of projects

By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, here is one idea that did not make the final cut.

Update: June 18: Nieman Journalism Lab does extensive interview with Kebbel about fewer winners.

.

And he is keeping a blog about his experience. Here is one nice little detail he writes that in New York:

Upon arrival, I was handed the keys to a 2009 Lexus SUV to use for the week.

Plus this:

Two of my friends from Kennesaw State University, Alex Jones and Chad Wilson, arrived today. Both had caddied for me in the qualifiers that got me here. Alex is going to caddy for me the rest of the week. Two more of my friends will be here tomorrow along with the rest of my family.

So time for me to set up my TiVo for the Open.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation today announced a $15 million initiative to help develop new economic models for investigative reporting on digital platforms.

Alas all but $3 million has already been granted.

The three newest grants were awarded to:

• Center for Investigative Reporting ($1.32 million): to launch a new multimedia investigative reporting project in California that encourages print, digital and student journalists to collaborate on stories;
• Sunlight Foundation ($565,000): to develop web tools so the public can easily access information on Congressional lawmakers, from their campaign contributions and votes;
• ProPublica ($1.01 million): to help the investigative reporting organization create a sustainable business model

Former grants include:

• News21 ($4.87 million): to help 12 university-based investigative reporting projects look for a model of self-sustainability;
• Boston University ($250,000): to create a regional, university-based investigative reporting unit that draws on reporters from the local print, broadcast and digital press;
• Center for Public Integrity ($454,000): to improve the center’s expertise in multimedia content and to pioneer new ways to raise money for investigative projects directly from the public;
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ($1.5 million): to endow a Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting;
• Investigative Reporters and Editors ($2 million): to create an endowment to permanently train journalists in the areas of watchdog and computer assisted journalism;

The cost is just $40 for AEJMC members who are attending the AEJMC annual convention that week in Boston or $59 for journalists and anyone else interested in journalism. The conference features interactive panels with the likes of Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do? and Doc Searls, the Cluetrain Manifesto, and it includes a networking dinner and even a free copy of David Mathison’s new book Be the Media.

Registration is limited to the first 100 registrants, so register now. Find all the details here.

Give a special thanks to The Harnisch Foundation Collaborative Projects at City University of New York’s Baruch College and the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State for making this all possible thanks to a generous grant to each institution from The Harnisch Foundation .

All now, except for Fosters, are in the hands of chains, none of which are doing very well. The families for the most part took good care of their employees. Of course, during my newspaper career, from 1972 to 1990, newspapers were cash cows and everyone could prosper. After the newspaper years, I worked for Minnesota Public Radio, a nonprofit, but one with a strong a leader in Bill Kling, who really ruled then and now, almost as a family patriarch would. I was lucky. For the most part, all those places were interested in high quality, and the journalism was as important, or at least almost as important, as the money.

So my choices would be a benevolent family and if not that then an independent nonprofit with a strong leader who cares about high quality. Here is part of what Kinsley wrote:

Every story is different, but to me being owned by or dependent on a nonprofit foundation is the worst possible solution.
ad_icon

The happiest arrangement is one that barely exists anymore in the newspaper industry: to be a flyspeck on the balance sheet of a large company with other things on its mind. For seven years I was editor of Slate, owned then by Microsoft (and now by The Washington Post Co.). We watched our pennies, but we were given what we needed to produce a good product. Never once did the company interfere with our content, no matter how much we goaded it. Never once did it even ask politely if we would publish an executive’s op-ed about the future of computing. Why? Partly because we were too small to bother with. But mainly because as unsentimental business types they knew that interfering would destroy the value they were investing millions to create.