Journalism innovation finalists are worth watching

These are worth following up: the finalists for the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism (via journalism.co.uk).

Kenyan website Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information, which was set up to help bloggers and citizen journalists share information about political violence in the country, has been nominated.

JDLand.com, a citizen media project documenting real estate development in a Washington DC neighbourhood, and presidential campaign database Politifact.com

The fourth finalist is Wired.com’s use of WikiScanner, a tool for tracking edits to Wikipedia. The magazine used the scanner and its readers to expose companies, who were making edits to their own entries on the site.

“The examples we are heralding show the power of a single person, the power of politics, the power of community,” said Jody Brannon, a member of the awards’ board and national director of the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative, in a press release.

Two awards for ‘special distinctions’ and a citizen media award, each of $2,000, will also be handed out at an event at the National Press Club on September 10.

The Knight Batten awards were set up to:

• Encourage new forms of information sharing.
• Spur non-traditional interactions that have an impact on community.
• Enable new and better two-way conversations between audiences and news providers.
• Foster new ways of imparting useful information.
• Create new definitions of news.

They’re funded by the Knight Foundation and run by J-Lab, a centre of the American University’s School of Communication.

Do we have any comparable awards in New Zealand?