Jenka Soderberg Chosen as 2011 John S. Knight Fellow

KBOO is proud to announce that Jenka Soderberg has been chosen to be a 2011 John S Knight Fellow at Stanford.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

KBOO’s PM News and Public Affairs Director is a Knight Journalism Fellow.

Jenka Soderberg, KBOO’s PM News and Public Affairs Director, has been named a 2010-2011 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. Soderberg plans to develop a way to standardize the use of social networking, mobile and tagging sites for news gathering.

The program received 133 applications for the U.S. Fellowships and 183 applications for the International Fellowships.  Only 12 were chosen for the U.S. Knight Fellowship and 8 International Fellowships.

Jenka Soderberg has been the KBOO Evening News and Public Affairs Director for  the last three years. She has trained hundreds of volunteer reporters in the art of audio storytelling, standards of journalism and investigative reporting.  She has helped KBOO develop its capacity in new media, including podcasting, collaborative digital radio productions, an iphone app and dozens of popular podcasts.

Jenka plans to develop a way to standardize the use of social networking, mobile and tagging sites for newsgathering. She would like to put together a system for use in the KBOO newsroom to use new media effectively for community news gathering.  This would also be an openly-available tool under the Creative Commons license, so that other newsrooms around the world facing the dilemma of how to use social networking sites and devices in their newsgathering can benefit from this project as well.

Jenka is a founding member of the Indymedia network (http://www.indymedia.org ), which, in 1999 and 2000 when it began, was the predecessor to the blogosphere and other open-publishing news and multimedia sites, and quickly expanded to a network of over 250 open-publishing media websites worldwide, with tens of thousands of regular contributors and upwards of 1.5 million unique visitors/month on the main site.

Nearly 800 journalists have held journalism fellowships at Stanford since the program began in 1966. Fellows have won numerous honors, including 26 Pulitzer Prizes and other major print and broadcast awards.

More info: http://knight.stanford.edu/