Roger Macdonald and Brewster Kahle of the Knight Foundation recently wrote, “We are seeing more and more public benefits arising from applying digital search and analysis to news from our most pervasive and persuasive medium— television. That’s why, we are thrilled to announce that the Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest public digital libraries, is expanding our television news research library to make readily available hundreds of thousands of hours of U.S. television news programs for users to search, quote and borrow. The expansion plan is being supported by $1 million in funding from Knight Foundation. With this support, we will grow our TV News Search & Borrow service, which currently includes more than 400,000 broadcasts dating back to June 2009, to add hundreds of thousands of new broadcasts.” Read more

Miguel Paz of the Idea Lab recently announced that Poderopedia, a data journalism project that we have reported on recently, went into public beta last week. Paz writes, “We are pleased to invite you to Poderopedia, a project backed by Knight Foundation through its News Challenge 2011. We believe that Poderopedia will save reporters time in their reporting and will help citizens understand the relationships between people, companies and organizations that influence our daily lives. We know our 3,000 pre-registered users have been waiting several months, and therefore we want to thank them and you for your patience and support through this invitation to browse our site and review the profiles of individuals, businesses and most influential organizations in our country.” Read more

Good news for media startups: “Fusing public media values with Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, KQED, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Public Radio Exchange (PRX) today launched Matter Ventures, a start-up accelerator supporting media entrepreneurs building a more informed, connected, and empowered society. Reflecting their commitment to media innovation and leadership development, founding partners KQED and Knight Foundation have each invested $1.25 million in the initial $2.5 million fund, while PRX will provide strategic and management support to Matter.” Read more

A recent article reports, “Five coders will help newsrooms innovate and develop prototypes for digitally delivering news and information as the first group of Knight-Mozilla News Technology Fellows. Announced at the Mozilla Festival in London, the fellows will be spending the year in leading newsrooms around the globe, including The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Al Jazeera English, BBC and Zeit Online. Fellows will address a specific issue at each organization and then produce open-source solutions that advance the values of journalism and the open Web.” Read more