The Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies and its director, Ardyth Sohn, were named winners in the 21st Century Knight News Challenge, a worldwide contest designed to find new ways to gather and distribute news. The $230,000 award from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is the largest competitive grant received by the journalism program to date.
Designed to foster innovative thinking about the future of digital journalism, the winning proposal is a collaborative effort between UNLV and six other institutions, including Ithaca College, Michigan State, University of Kansas, Kansas State, Western Kentucky University, and St. Michael's College in Vermont. During the year-long project, teams of students from each school will work together to create innovative ideas for using digital news and information to build and bind community in specific geographic areas.
The UNLV team, which will be coached by UNLV journalism professor Charlotte-Anne Lucas, consists of students Johann Castro, Lauren Johnson, Jenna Kohler, Heperi Mita, Robert Ponte, and Kristin Dero.
Sohn said the UNLV students were chosen for the project through a competitive process that included writing an essay about how they would persuade their peers to pay attention to news in their community.
Alberto Ibarg?en, the Knight Foundation's president and CEO, said the worldwide contest was designed to help invent the future of journalism. "We want to spur discovery of how digital platforms can be used to disseminate news and information on a timely basis within a defined geographic space, and thereby build and bind community," Ibarg?en said. "That's what newspapers and local television stations used to do in the 20th century, and it's something that our communities still need today."
UNLV's project was one of 25 winning proposals that received a total of $25 million from the Knight Foundation. Other winners include the Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MTV, VillageSoup in Maine, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. The 25 winners were announced last week at the Editor & Publisher/Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show in Miami.
