Media Heroes Award
May/June 2001 -- By Andy Steiner, Utne Reader
AlterNet, a San Franciscobased news service that created the Media Heroes Awards to honor journalists and producers bringing progressive views to the public, decided this year to single out the contributions of people working in the New Media. The AlterNet staff nominated 24 people for its New Media Heroes, and visitors to its Web site (www.alternet.org) were invited to vote for the winners. The process, says AlterNet executive director Don Hazen, was "an opportunity to look around in this climate of dot-com failure and see what works online. These heroes reach more people with information that makes a difference in their lives faster than they ever could before the technology of the Internet."
Josh Knauer greenmarketplace.com
Back in 1991, when Josh Knauer was a freshman at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he founded EnviroLink Network, an online community forum for environmental activists. The group fostered lively discussions in the green community, with topics as complex as strategy debates on how to save the rainforests and as personal as advice on navigating the grocery aisles.
"Right away, we noticed that a huge percentage of comments coming to Envirolink were people asking, ŒWhere can I find this or that product? How do I know if it's really green?' " Knauer, 28, recalls. "We went looking for answers online and we couldn't find them, so we decided to create a shopping space for people who wanted to make green choices, who wanted to shop for products without guilt."
What eventually developed was Greenmarketplace.com, an online store featuring a diverse array of products from tampons to dish soap, all certified "green" by Knauer and his staff of researchers.