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Grants Awarded to Three Bay Area News & Technology Experiments

[Source: February 10, 2010]

San Francisco – The Renaissance Journalism Center has awarded $20,000 grants to three Bay Area projects to test innovative models for gathering and distributing community news. The grants represent the first awards under the Center’s Media Greenhouse, which are designed to strengthen community and ethnic news media outlets and the groups they serve.

Recipients of the awards include:

  • Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), a media technology center, to support the development of a neighborhood news network (n3) program. BAVC will train community television news producers and make use of a high-speed fiber optic network to enable live broadcast and Internet streaming of the news programs. The grant will help launch the first three neighborhood sites.
  • Nichi Bei Foundation, an educational and charitable organization, to support the launch of an online community hub to serve the news and information needs of the pan-Asian American community. The award helps the foundation, which publishes the Nichi Bei Weekly newspaper, to expand its content, audience and fundraising capabilities by going online.
  • Oakland Local, an online news and community site serving Oakland, to pilot two small-scale projects designed to deliver news and information to residents who utilize inexpensive, low-end technology cell phones.

"News media outlets across the nation are struggling to adapt and survive as technology and business practices change," said Jon Funabiki, Executive Director of the Center.  "We hope these experiments—which are modest, yet daring at the same time—will offer lessons for all journalists, but especially those committed to community coverage."

The Media Greenhouse is administered by the Renaissance Journalism Center, an interdisciplinary center that works to identify and spark promising new journalistic models and practices that serve, strengthen and empower communities.

The Renaissance Journalism Center is an initiative of San Francisco State Journalism Department in partnership with ZeroDivide. Support for the Media Greenhouse comes from ZeroDivide, the Ford Foundation and the McCormick Foundation.

More information about the award winners and their projects can be found at www.rjcmedia.org.