Knight-Batten honor goes to NPR’s Carvin for his “new form of journalism”

NPR’s Tweeter extraordinaire Andy Carvin has won a Knight-Batten Award for having “pioneered a new form of journalism” during the recent Arab Spring uprising. “By using his Twitter account as a newsgathering operation, he has demonstrated how reporting can be done remotely and created a highly engaged community of more than 50,000 Twitter followers,” said a release from J-Lab, which administers the honors funded by the Knight Foundation. (J-Lab and Current are both journalism centers at American University’s School of Communication.) The Knight-Batten Awards recognize creative uses of technology to engage citizens in public issues and showcase compelling models for future newsgathering.