Quiddities awarded a $327,000 grant by the Knight Foundation
Yesterday, Margaret and the Quiddities team were in Las Vegas accepting a grant awarded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to fund innovative digital media projects. As one of the 16 project winners out of over 3000 entries, we were awarded $327,000 for our project RadioEngage which will be powered by Drupal. RadioEngage will be available as an open source, comprehensive solution for public radio stations nationwide to promote local discourse, engage with their community, and use the Internet to increase participation.
We will be working with our local Public Radio Station KUSP as our test market. Last fall, KUSP approached us about working with them to make their website more relevant to the community. Local news in the Central Coast region has been on the decline and we saw the Knight Foundation grant as an opportunity to use emerging technologies to reinvigorate local media.
We plan to make it easy for volunteers at the radio station to merge local radio news with blogs, podcasts and other rich content on the web. We will create tools that allow community members to take a more active role in what gets reported by their local radio station.
The website will be built entirely on the Drupal open source platform. In the future, other public radio stations will be able to replicate the tools we’re creating for KUSP.
We are thrilled to be working on this project with KUSP and our community. We will be inviting you to join us in the conversation.
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[...] in a PDF I can send to a local printer, and boom, I’m a media mogul! Can’t wait. And Margaret Rosas is going to make radio station websites suck less. Good, because I love radio. And David Cohn got [...]