Editor’s note: There’s a lot of interesting academic research going on in digital media — but who has time to sift through all those journals and papers? Our friends at Journalist’s Resource, that’s who. JR is a project of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and…

A new set of guidelines aimed at helping disaster relief workers better use SMS in crisis scenarios was unveiled Monday at the Mobile World Congress. “Towards a Code of Conduct: Guidelines for the use of SMS in Natural Disasters” focuses on the role that mobile providers play in these scenarios and the importance of collaboration….

The head of Knight’s journalism initiatives talks about who it funds and how it tries to give its projects life beyond a grant’s expiration date.

There might not by Internet access out in the fields, but WeFarm hopes that SMS and a human network built on translation and information sharing can let farmers get more out of their land.

The common thread through several of the eight winners: turning underpowered phones into information engines.

“The story-specific platform is a relief: profound by the nature of our content, calm by the focus of our mandate.”

Some projects, like DocumentCloud and Ushahidi, were widely adopted in the media. Others stumbled due to technical problems or resistance from partners.

News startup Rappler is trying to bring social media smarts to the Filipino market, and one focus is capturing readers’ emotional state.

The mapping platform had a a hiccup a couple days ago; around 24 hours’ worth of user data may be impacted.

While at the Mozilla Festival in London earlier this month, we were struck by how much the Knight and Mozilla Foundations have in common. Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, began the event’s first “opening circle” by noting that people should be “media makers, not media consumers.” Michael Maness, Knight’s vice president for journalism and media innovation, offered a similar logic for change, telling potential MoJo participants, “One of the things we have seen is that people are more passionate about storytelling and content rather than design.”

One of the surprisingly pleasant things about Dean Starkman’s recent CJR piece — the one in which he took on the “future of news” establishment — is that it brings Jay Rosen’s questions about “what journalism is for” back into a debate that often stops at the bleak shores of basic economics. News’ future is about much more than business models; it’s about ideas.

One of the most common complaints about newspapers’ adaptation to the digital world — or, depending on your perspective, their lack thereof — is their failure to create their own versions of Craigslist. Papers ceded the market of micro-marketing, the complaint goes…when, with a bit of foresight, they might have built platforms that might have preserved, at least to an extent, their all-important classified revenue streams. So goes the argument. But it doesn’t follow that, in 2011, Craigslist has completely cornered the market on classified advertising — or, for that matter, on community messaging overall. Today, a major paper is getting into the community messaging game: The Guardian is launching n0tice, a social news platform that draws a little from Craigslist, a little from Foursquare, a little from Ning.

A journalist demonstrates how easy it is to dig up the personal details of a total stranger http://nie.mn/pt6now via @amichel » Check out @TPM‘s sweet new home-page CMS http://nie.mn/oabLek » RT @digiphile: Wow. @afromusing says @Ushahidi has more than 16,000 deployments in 128 countries & 16 languages http://bit.ly/n4ErxK #fo … » Pretty great 404 “page”…

One of the biggest challenges news organizations face is the real-time aspect of newsgathering: the massive problem that is making sense of the torrent of information that floods in when breaking-news events take place. How do you process, and then verify, and then organize, hundreds and often thousands and sometimes millions of discrete data points, even before those points transform into something that resembles useful information?

Swift River, a project of the crowdmapping platform Ushahidi, just won a $250,000 Knight News Challenge grant to help figure that out.

Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news. This week: The New York Post blocks access on the iPad; the Knight News Challenge announces its final round of winners; a mixed decision in a hot news doctrine case; Righthaven is dealt a setback; debates over online anonymity; Bill Keller and Twitter battle it out again; and this week’s required reading.