• The Knight Foundation is helping to build an online innovation hub to accompany How We Got to Now, a six-part PBS series about the history of innovation airing in the fall. Knight is granting $250,000 to Nutopia, which is producing the series, to build the hub. It will include a news and community website about current efforts in innovation as well as a guide to help civic leaders foster innovation.
In other Knight grant news, the foundation also announced Tuesday the latest winners of its Knight Prototype Fund, which grants $35,000 to experimental media projects in early stages of development. Among the 17 grantees: San Francisco’s KQED, which is developing a health-care data crowdsourcing tool called Understanding Cost, Examining Impact; and Open Data Philly, an online public data repository for Philadelphia that partners with WHYY.
Rockefeller
• WETA President Sharon Rockefeller is one of four honorees for this year’s First Amendment Awards from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Also receiving honors are WETA board member Bruce Sanford, a partner at BakerHostetler in Washington, D.C.; Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of the New York Times; and Carol Rosenberg, military affairs correspondent for the Miami Herald. The four “represent the finest defenders of the First Amendment and freedom of information today,” said Steering Committee Chair Saundra Torry of USA Today. They’ll receive the awards at a dinner May 19 in New York.
• WNYC is putting audio recordings of panels at the Tribeca Film Festival online for the first time in the fest’s 12-year history. The recordings, which will be made available both on-demand and as podcasts, feature film luminaries including Ron Howard, Aaron Sorkin, Bryan Cranston, Michael Douglas, The Wire creator David Simon and Alec Baldwin, who used to host a WNYC show. They are taken from the fest’s series of panels, Tribeca Talks and The Future of Film.