By Amelia Brodka
Student Writer
The Tiziano Project, run and staffed by numerous USC Annenberg students and alumni, was announced as one of 16 winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge, earning it a $200,000 grant to develop a global citizen journalism platform, Tiziano 360.
Presented by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Knight News Challenge is an international contest to fund innovative digital news experiments that use technology to inform and engage communities.
The new platform will be an expansion of the nonprofit’s Tiziano 360 | Kurdistan, which is an interactive multimedia website illustrating daily life in Kurdistan with documentary material compiled by professional journalists and Kurdistani citizens. Tiziano 360 | Kurdistan supplied media tools and training to members of the underrepresented community in order to capture personal accounts of life in a city of conflict. In 2011, the project was the recipient of honors from SXSW Interactive, The Gracie Awards and The Webby Awards, among others.
Tiziano 360 will extend this platform across the world and enable news organizations, community groups and individuals to manage their own citizen journalism digital content across multiple devices. Tiziano 360 will also include an interactive map that will allow site users to directly communicate with citizen journalists around the world.
“Through the development of this platform, we seek to not only elevate the quality of community journalism as a whole through collaboration,” said Jon Vidar (M.A. Communication Management ’06), executive director of The Tiziano Project, "but to empower local community members with the ability to change perceptions of the communities in which they live.”
