ReadWriteWeb

Today, one year-old Demotix, the London-based citizen journalism site, has introduced video to its popular photo-centric site.

Demotix, the winner of a Media Guardian Innovation Award, has placed its crowd-sourced photos on the front pages of traditional media organizations from Le Monde to the New York Times to BBC News Online. Although there have always been articles as well, it is the photostream that has proven to be Demotix's bread and butter. Video, like photos, may prove capable of speaking across more borders than words.

David Warthen, co-founder of search engine Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves) has joined citizen journalism site Allvoices as its Chief Technology Officer.

Warthen was co-founder, and CTO for, Ask Jeeves. As Ask.com it remains the fourth most consulted search engine. It was sold to Barry Diller's InterActive Corp for $1,85 billion in 2005. After Jeeves, Warthen acted as CTO for Eye Games, "a pioneer of full-body motion interactive webcam video games that presaged the Nintendo Wii" and Answerbag, acquired by Demand Media in 2007.

Two years ago social news site Newsvine was acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture. The site had launched publicly in March 2006 and was considered to be one of the best designed new breed of 'web 2.0' news sites. Features include user-generated content, reputation, voting, comments, friends lists, tags, and more.

At the time of the sale, Newsvine was promising to integrate some of those web 2.0 features into the main MSNBC properties. CEO Mike Davidson told ReadWriteWeb in 2007 that "over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense." Has that actually occured? Let's check in with Newsvine to find out.

In the debate on the future of journalism, bloggers say, "We have a better economic model. The future is digital, and we are the future, so whatever we do is right." Traditional journalists, mourning a passing world, say, "We defined how journalism works, and everyone should adhere to that model, even if it won't work economically." This is a gross simplification of the arguments flying back and forth. But sadly, it is a dialogue of the deaf. Neither party seems to want to listen or learn from the other.

Tonight, The Wall Street Journal reports that the Knight Foundation has just awarded a total of $5 million to a number of local journalism projects in the U.S. These projects range from creating hyper-local online news sites, to building local Web portals, and establishing local news bureaus.

While the Knight Foundation's endowment has been hurt by the current economic climate, the Foundation is still committed to granting a total of $24 million to local media projects over the next five years.