Post Date: September 19, 2006
The Knight-Batten Foundation awarded the Grand Prize for Innovations in Journalism to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society’s Global Voices Online. The award, administered by J lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland, spotlights the creative use of new information, ideas and technologies that involve citizens in public issues. Among other things, it credited the project and its corps of bloggers with helping to elevate standards in the blogoshpere.
A citizen media project co-founded by two of Berkman’s research fellows, technologist Ethan Zuckerman and journalist Rebecca MacKinnon, Global Voices Online is a network of global news and conversation from more than 160 countries. With a focus on countries and communities outside the U.S. and Western Europe, the site is run globally by a team of 16 international, multilingual blogger-editors, and more than 80 volunteer contributors.
“We at the Berkman Center could not be more proud of what the Global Voices community has accomplished in an extraordinarily short period of time,” said John Palfrey, clinical professor at HLS and the Berkman Center’s executive director. “As the Knight-Batten Award has recognized, Global Voices is helping to change the way people access, publish, and analyze information about enormous parts of the world that mainstream media has failed to include meaningfully in its coverage.”
Additional information, photographs and the full press release are available at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society.