YouTube is offering a $10,000 fellowship with the Pulitzer Center for “high-quality video pieces focused on stories that are not usually covered by the traditional media.”  The first round is asking people to make a 3 minute video highlighting a person in your community.  They are taking submissions til October 5th.

This is a great opportunity for citizens to go out into their communities and report on what is really important and how individuals are making a difference.  There is a lot of news to be found especially when it comes to corruption in politics.  The best place to hold elected officials accountable is in your own backyard.  So get to muckraking super sleuths.

Get your cameras ready and good luck!

h/t to PJnet.org

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Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics are partnering with Helium to hold a contest for citizen journalists who can best write about the influence of money in US politics and elections. Here’s the run-down from CRP:

The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) has partnered with Helium to bring you the OpenSecrets.org Citizen Journalism Awards. Compete by writing unique, compelling articles about money’s influence on US elections and public policy. You could be named the next OpenSecrets.org Citizen Journalist and win a cash prize.

The assignment: CRP will feature one new title each month. Follow CRP’s article guidelines, research the featured topic using OpenSecrets.org and other resources and write a compelling article for your chance to win.

The awards: CRP will pick one winning article each month. The winning writer will receive an OpenSecrets.org Citizen Journalism Award and a $100 cash prize from CRP.

CRP will also feature the winning articles on its website and in its email newsletters, which reach thousands of journalists, activists, academics and citizens.

Get started

Pick a title: See CRP’s current contest title below. You can also visit CRP’s partner page at Helium to write to more (noncontest) titles.

Research: OpenSecrets.org is an unparalleled resource for researching the influence of industries and interests in U.S. politics, and on issues that affect all our lives. The more you draw on OpenSecrets.org in your article, the better. Please attribute all data and statistics and provide URLs, whether you find the information on OpenSecrets.org or elsewhere. Expressing your opinion is fine, but please back it up with facts.

Write: Write a unique, well-researched article in 750 words or less. You can submit articles to this contest until noon on Friday, August 8. CRP’s staff will begin reviewing essays on August 5 from the top articles rated by the Helium community. Selection will be based on the most compelling essay and the winner will be the essay that brings the freshest insight on the issue presented.

Submit: File your article at Helium.com, where other Helium users will be able to read and rate it. CRP will pick the contest’s winner from among the top-rated articles.

Do not pass go. Proceed directly to OpenSecrets.org to enter the contest and collect your $100. The current contest topic is:

How have campaign contributions and lobbying efforts influenced policy on an issue you care about?

Submissions are due by August 8th.

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Next week (March 11-17) is Sunshine Week, during which journalists, activists, and bloggers raise awareness about the importance of open government and advocate for more transparency.

To celebrate, we are hosting a contest! We will give a $2,000 prize for the best “Web 2.0 Mashup” ^(wikipedia) that displays information about Congress:

Our judges–Esther Dyson, Jimmy Wales, and Craig Newmark–will select the winning mashup based on creativity and how effectively it displays Congressional information.

We are not looking for something complicated — simplicity is often the best transparency tool. Entries should have been created in the last six months.

The deadline for entries is April 15.

Confused? Wondering what a mashup is? A mashup is a website or web application that combines content from more than one source. You’ve probably seen a mashup even if you don’t realize it. Sunlight Labs made this mashup last year, taking an excel spreadsheet of earmarks in the Labor, Health and Human Service BILL and “mashing them” onto Google maps so that people could locate earmarks designated for their zip code:

Hundreds of citizens used that mashup to learn more about earmarking in Congress.

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