Funding for the New Media ToolKit

The idea for the New Media ToolKit grew out out of a Renaissance Journalism project called the New Media Lab & Incubator. Renaissance Journalism thanks the following funders for their support of the New Media Lab & Incubator and the New Media ToolKit:

• Chicago Instructional Technology Foundation

• Denver Area Education Telecommunication Consortium

• Instructional Telecommunications Foundation

• Portland Regional Education Telecommunications Corporation

• Twin Cities Schools Telecommunications Group

About the New Media Lab & Incubator Project

The New Media Lab & Incubator helped five nonprofit organizations to test and experiment with innovative ways to utilize journalism, media and social media tools to engage audiences in civic dialogue.

  • Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP) utilized media and social media tools to strengthen its Vietnam Involvement & Engagement Tour (VIET2010), a project designed to mobilize young Vietnamese Americans around the health and environmental impact of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
  • Free Speech TV tested the concept of offering live webcasting services to nonprofit organizations as a new business offering.
  • Guernica, an online arts and politics magazine, created a Web-based community engagement strategy that included a Web redesign, forums, blogs, podcasts, events and collaborative projects.
  • Mother Jones, a nonprofit investigative news organization, experimented for the first time with multimedia field reporting and blogging as a way to facilitate conversation among readers and its international human-rights reporter.
  • National Civic League invigorated its All-America City Awards with citizen blogging and video-blogging; a robust social media strategy; and by live-streaming its awards event in Kansas City.

Each nonprofit partner received grant support and guidance from a bank of media producers. The initiative was conceived by Halcyon Liew, representing the five Educational Broadband Service (EBS) organizations. The project was implemented by the Renaissance Journalism Center staff, including executive director Jon Funabiki, deputy director Valerie Chow Bush, and former program manager Whitney Wilcox, along with consultant JD Lasica and media producers Tanja Aitamurto, Marc Smolowitz, Toluse Olorunnipa and Sharon Vaknin.