ICFJ Knight Fellowships

'Part App, Part Map' Tracks Amazon Forest Loss

"As the endangered Amazon forest faces tougher challenges – deforestation, forest fires, and mining and oil drilling, among them – there must be a way to track the destruction," writes Chelsea Diana of Reuters Alertnet.

Knight Fellow Moderates Historic Kenyan Political Debate. The Hot Issue: Land Reform.

Election campaigns in Kenya are normally noisy, lively and bloody. But this one had a difference. Instead of the usual three or four presidential candidates, there’ve been eight. There’s also been less bloodshed, but certainly more money spent in wooing the voter.

And for the first time ever, all candidates seeking the keys to State House – seven men and one woman – appeared together in public debates. There were three in February, broadcast live on radio and TV and streamed on the Internet.

How Making Maps is Evolving Online

Just 10 years ago, creating an interactive online map was complicated, if not impossible, for most Web users. Now, journalists can design attractive maps in the cloud and publish them in minutes.

And in recent years, the news industry has seen exciting opportunities for Web-based maps beyond Google. The two-year-old company MapBox is an important driver of this development.

A product of the Washington-based company Development Seed, MapBox gives newsrooms and bloggers the ability to control how maps look and what data appears on these maps.

What Journalists Can Learn From the Citizen Science Movement

Knight International Journalism Fellow Gustavo Faleiros is tapping ordinary, environmentally concerned citizens in the Amazon region to help contribute data and information to InfoAmazonia, his digital mapping project that tracks deforestation. Faleiros says "citizen science" movements like this one can be a powerful force for connecting communities, for telling stories about the environment and health, and for helping explain the problems and issues to policymakers.