SAN FRANCISCO, California, U.S.A. — With digital apartheid growing by the gigabyte, it’s good to see a soulful media program that reaches the masses who lack the cash or connections to shmooze at clubby business and tech confabs. Spent last Friday at the “Seizing the Moment” multimedia training put on by San Francisco State University’s Renaissance Journalism Center, a three-year-old entity that aims to provide training and research on new business and media models for diverse communities, including non-profits and ethnic groups. No caste system here – all were welcome at U.S. $25 each, in the true populist spirit of non-profit altruism.
The Renaissance Journalism Center is run by Jon Funabiki, a former Ford Foundation deputy director of media and San Diego, California-based journalist who once organized a group of Pacific Rim reporters called “The Rim Rats,” and Whitney Wilcox, former deputy director of a grant-making program called New Routes to Community Health. Co-founded with ZeroDivide, the center gets funding from ZeroDivide, the Ford Foundation and the McCormick Foundation. You can skim the highlights from some of the workshops here, and check out resources and handouts here. I especially enjoyed:
- ”Launching a Web Site on a Shoestring Budget” by AllVoices.com co-founder Erik Sundelof and desig ner Brad Eller, whose handout on Web design can be found here. Ah, to be a Web wizard.
- “Building Your Brand With Social Media” by writer/editor Kwan Booth and tech consultant Sarah Dopp. Kwan twitters that he played Vanna White to Sarah’s Pat Sajak
- “Making Twitter Work for You & Your Organization” by Marc Smolowitz, an Academy Award-nominated producer and media & tech consultant. Marc flies soon to Japan to work on his documentary Power of Two, filing blog posts on his iPhone on the Dopplr.com travel-planning site.
