OKLAHOMA CITY -- Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation has announced the distribution of $1.85 million in grants to 29 journalism organizations nationwide.

Edith Kinney Gaylord founded Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation in 1982 to support local and national efforts to improve the quality of journalism practices among various media. The foundation invests in building the ethics and skills needed to advance principled news and reporting.

Organizations awarded grants from Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation include:

· $180,000 to Center for Public Integrity for the second phase of the Pearl Project, a faculty-student initiative at Georgetown that investigated the circumstances of reporter Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder.

· $170,000 to Carole Kneeland Project for Responsible Television Journalism for its Newsroom Leadership Conference and Advanced Media Leadership Seminar.

· $150,000 to iFOCOS for operating support and for Pitch It, a competition to identify promising early-stage innovative media projects.

· $110,000 to Associated Press Managing Editors Association Foundation for NewsTrain regional training workshops and the Online Journalism Credibility Project, a project to test innovative and model approaches in online news.

· $88,000 to George Washington University for the Kalb Report, four forums that will be held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

· $75,000 to Center for Investigative Reporting for the Cold Case Truth and Justice Project, a multi-partner, multi-platform effort that will look back at the unresolved history of the South during the civil rights era.

· $73,000 to National Press Foundation for Understanding Violent Weather, a 4-day seminar taught by University of Oklahoma journalism and meteorology faculty and experts from the National Severe Storms Laboratory and Storm Prediction Center.

· $70,000 to University of Oklahoma for Oklahoma Institute for Diversity in Journalism summer workshops for high school students.

· $57,000 to American University for J-Lab: the Institute for Interactive Journalism to support training, a summit and an initiative examining how conventional journalism differs from citizen news reporting and digital news.

· $50,000 to Youth News Service Los Angeles Bureau for community-based teen news bureaus and workshops that focus on ethical reporting and investigative journalism.

· $50,000 to South Dakota State University for distance learning journalism courses for tribal colleges.

· $40,400 to Oklahoma Newspaper Foundation for its summer Internship Program which places college journalism students in Oklahoma newsrooms.

· $30,000 to Fund for American Studies for the Institute on Political Journalism, a hands-on summer training program for undergraduates.

· $30,000 to Debatepedia, an online wiki encyclopedia of pro and con arguments in public debates.

Other grants include Brandeis University, Daniel Pearl Foundation, Eric Friedheim National Journalism Library at the National Press Club, Mid-America Press Institute Foundation, Midwestern Innocence Project, NAMME Foundation, North American Street Newspaper Association, Pundit Productions, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Student Press Law Center, University of California-Berkeley, University of Colorado, University of Southern Mississippi, Vietnamese American Association, and Washington Center for Politics and Journalism.

For more information on Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, visit www.journalismfoundation. org or call 604-5388.