The Pew Center is spinning off into an exciting new initiative, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, a venture fund for interactive news and information.

J-Lab will support newsroom experiments that advance civic participation in the digital arena and spotlight and reward best practices.

Civic journalism taught us that people accept information when they own some of it. And they own it, not when it's spoon-fed, but when they help gather it, discuss it, examine trade-offs and envision solutions.

J-Lab's goal is to empower people to be global and civic players by pioneering interactive ways to participate in news and information.

J-Lab will solicit interactive news ideas, such as state budget calculators, clickable maps, environmental-choice games or dynamic databases. Then it will tap the intellectual muscle of universities by teaming computer scientists with newsrooms to build the software that creates easy entry points for people to interact with public issues.

As part of J-Lab, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will fund a new Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism, starting in 2003.

J-Lab will be a center of the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Check us out at www.j-lab.org.

Jan Schaffer will be executive director. Email her at jans@j-lab.org.

Updates on the status of J-Lab, calls for proposals and Batten entries will be sent to the 20,000 subscribers on the Pew Center's J-Flash email list. To join the list, email awyatt@j-lab.org.