Bill Densmore's blog

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AN INVITATION . . . to affirm the role of news in the classroom
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The Media Giraffe Project at UMass Amherst, the Media Education Laboratory at Temple University and other collaborators invite you to to Philadelphia for some or all of Oct. 23-25 for a short, strategic convening of journalists, teachers, educational administrators, public policy researchers and engaged citizens. The topic: News literacy.

A former Los Angeles Times reporter has launched what he calls "an innovative program to help secondary-school students sort fact from fiction in the digital age." Alan C. Miller plans pilot projects in 2009. The "News Literacy Project" is backed by funding from the Ford Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The idea for the project arose from Alan Miller.s experience talking about his work and why journalism matters to 175 sixth graders at his daughter's middle school in Bethesda, Md. The first pilots will be in schools in New York City and Montgomery County, Md.

UPDATED 10:56 p.m., Jan. 29, 2008

By Bill Densmore
The Media Giraffe Project

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. -- More than 250 activists meeting at a conference hotel here over three days resolved to create a new "non-corporate" news aggregation website that would serve as a distribution system for progressive political and policy news, according to a key organizer contacted on Tuesday.  "We don't want blogging, really, as much as we want hard news and analysis," said W. David Kubiak, of Half Moon Bay, Calif.

Jim Metrock, the Birmingham, Ala.-based businessman who has waged a seven-year campaign to undercut advertiser support for Channel One, says on his webblog that the company now appears to be deleting ads from its own website. Also, he says the in-school , ad supported satellite network seen daily in classrooms by at least seven million U.S. teen-agers appears to have lost its president. Here's a link:
http://www.obligation.org/article.php?recordID=871

01-19-2008 -- UPDATE: Watch a 22-minute video interview with Jim Klurfeld and Howard Schneider:

http://newshare.typepad.com/mgpaudio/2008/01/video-the-deman.html

In the last couple of years, mainstream media has figured out that its future lies in part with figuring out how to engage youth with civic affairs and . . . the news (however the news evolves). Here's a column from the Waco, Texas, daily -- which is owned by Cox Communications of Atlanta, about what they're doing.
-- bill densmore

http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2007/09/30/093...
http://www.wacotrib.com/services/content/services/aboutus.html

HEADLINE: Ken Sury: From print to small screen
PUBLISHED: Sunday, September 30, 2007

Equipped with a $1.7-million grant from the Knight Foundation and $2 million of institutional support, a bold experiment is underway at Stony Brook University on Long Island: Whan happens when you teach media literacy to students across all college disciplines? For details: http://commcgi.cc.stonybrook.edu/artman/publish/article_1246.shtml

Brad Seawell of the MIT Communications Forum writes to note that a free public forum on Thurs., Sept. 20 launches a new center studying the relationship between emerging media and civic engagement. A key area of inquiry is how virtual worlds such as SecondLife affect civic engagement in the real world.
READ MORE: http://newshare.typepad.com/nenf/2007/09/virtual-vs-real.html

Youth media and literacy were key topics at Journalism That Matters: The DC Sessions," a gathering of more than 150 journalists, bloggers, educators and activists Aug. 7-8, 2007, in Washington, D.C. The Media Giraffe Project at UMass convened the two-day gathering as part of a year-long effort to establish "The Next Newsroom," -- a prototype news organization in a U.S. community that will be created from scratch.