The Knight Digital Media Center will host a free, four-hour training designed for budding Bay Area bloggers – who’ve been at it for at least three months – and are interested in boosting their multimedia skills in order to strengthen blog content and increase site traffic.

The typical blog post involves an author holding forth, followed by responses to that post from the public. But UC Berkeley's Office of Public Affairs turned this model on its head recently with the launch of blogs.berkeley.edu. In Berkeley's model, topical questions are chosen by site editors, then farmed out to more than 100 campus experts ...

Sarah Hoye (Jan 09) followed a diverse group of students from the election to the end of the 2009 school year, and produced a thought provoking multimedia piece regarding race in the age of Obama.  Hoye is a multimedia journalist for the Tampa Tribune.

Kathleen Galligan (June 08) and Regina Boone (Jan 08) were part of the Detroit Free Press team that won an Emmy for their multimedia package on Christ Child House, a foster home for boys in Detroit.

Time Magazine has pledged to follow Detroit closely for the next year.  The findings will be reported in The Detroit Blog. Steven Gray (June 2009) will blog and cover stories for the initiative.  He introduces the project in his post Letter to Detroit.

The New York Times covered the project in Investment in a City of Struggles.

Ann Lolordo is the Opinion Editor for the Baltimore Sun and a writer for the Baltimore Brew.   The Baltimore Brew is an irreverent mix of hyperlocal reporting and opinion writing about the Baltimore area. It was awarded Best Local Blog 2009 by Baltimore City Paper.

Knight Fellow Manny Cristomo of the Sacramento Bee produced an excellent video piece about a collection of 45 RPM records that found its way back to the original owner's son, 30 years after her death. The feel-good piece has generated more than 1.8 million page views.

Our July multimedia workshop has come and gone, and was once again a smashing success. Webcasts from two of our featured presentations are now online, and can be found here. Also available is a downloadable PDF from our Multimedia Design Principles lecture.

Anna Johnson, an AP reporter and editor based in the Middle East, produced a photo slideshow and a video on the Iranian elections. Anna was in the KDMC's May 2009 multimedia workshop.

Another week of multimedia workshops has passed, and we've beeen webcasting featured panelists and speakers live.  Video archives are now online.

An interesting question came up amongst alumni of our training programs recently: Are journalistic organizations seeing an up-tick in traffic to their sites as a result of regular Twitter usage? What other incentives are there to use Twitter, if driving traffic isn't the main goal? We thought some of our alumni reactions were so interesting, we're reposting them here (with permission):

The KDMC webcast system handles week-long events which consist of multiple presentations, which in turn may or may not include a webcast. Meanwhile, webcasts have to be handled both live and in archived form. Webasting presents some special problems when delivering Django views (KDMC is a Django-driven site). Webmaster Scot Hacker has done a write-up on his own blog explaining ...

The May 2009 Multimedia workshop is complete, and featured an excellent collection of speakers, including representatives from the Detroit Free Press, UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, NewsMarket, and the Portland Press Herald.  Archived webcasts have been posted for posterity.

Fellow John Temple, who is associate dean of P.I. Reed School of Journalism implemented a program whereby students of the school will produce multimedia projects for local papers, and in turn teach the staffers at those newspapers on how they did it. Congratulations John on spearheading this program.

Fellow Scott Anderson, video and technology editor for The Times in Shreveport, Louisiana shares with us a Google Map he produced offering locations of hurricane shelters to the public and which ones were over-capacity during Hurricane Gustav.

Fellow Eric Seals, photographer and multimedia producer for the Detroit Free Press produced this fantastic video on local coach Courtney Hawkins of Flint (MI) Beecher High School.

Fellow Penelope Carrington, multimedia reporter for the The Richmond Times-Dispatch, shared with us some videos she produced for her paper during the recent inauguration ceremonies. Check out her videos  (She produced "Virginians grasp a piece of history", "Outside the Mall", and "Early Morning").

Our good friends over at J-Lab, located at American University's School of Communication in Washington D.C., have announced their Knight-Batten Awards for innovation in Journalism.