Project: Report Round 2 Begins, Semi-Finalists Announced

All of the entries for Round 1 of Project: Report are in, and a panel of judges from the Pulitzer Center have chosen the top 10 semi-finalists. We saw terrific submissions from around the country, each telling a powerful story of an individual through a day in his or her life. Now you can vote for which Round 1 submission you think should win the Community Award.

Below is a list (in no particular order) of the 10 Round 1 winners who will proceed to the second and final round of Project:Report. The grand prize? One of five $10,000 travel fellowships to work with the Pulitzer Center on an international reporting project.

• Patrick Aviles, California - Santos Camacho
• Richgail Enriquez, California - A day in the life of Lolita Kintanar
• Takayuki Ono, Illinois - Pilot volunteers his wings to help patients in financial distress
  
• Paul Franz, Florida - Dr. Pedro Jose Greer
  
• Alex Rozier, Missouri - The Story of Amanda McDaniel
  
• Felix Ramirez, New York - Mr.Zulu.mov
• Jack Ballo, New York - ELIO
  
• Samatha Ann Danis, Maine - Project Report: A Day in the Life of Alice Fogg
• Mark Jeevaratnam, North Carolina - Sharon Hill: The Smile of Commons
• Emmanuel Elan Gepner, Pennsylvania - The People's Painter

Each of these 10 semi-finalists also received a Sony VAIO notebook with the new 2010 Intel Core i7 processor and a Sony HD video camera, which they will use these to produce their videos for Round 2.

But don't worry, even if you're not one of the 10 semi-finalists there's still an opportunity to win a prize. At the end of Round 2, the Pulitzer Center will look at all of the videos submissions that came in for Round 2 and select one additional contestant to receive a Sony VAIO notebook.

If you're game, here's the assignment for Round 2:

Report on a compelling topic or subject of any nature which you believe has not been sufficiently and/or accurately covered by the national media. All entries must be less than five minutes long and shot in High Definition.

Submissions are due by 12 p.m. ET on April 4, 2010.

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Iraqi Voices: Voter Perspectives on Election Day

On Sunday, despite as many as 100 bomb blasts throughout the country, according to news reports, Iraqi citizens flocked to the polls in higher-than-expected numbers to vote in the first nationwide parliamentary election since 2005. Amidst 38 confirmed casualties, Iraqi citizens from 18 different provinces inside Iraq -- as well as 16 other countries around the world -- cast their ballots to determine who will fill the Prime Minister's office and 325 seats in the nation's parliament.

What is it like to be an Iraqi citizen during this important and volatile time in the nation's history? We partnered with Al Jazeera English to find out, by collecting opinions directly from Iraqi voters on video in our "Iraqi Voices" project. The footage is still coming in as the votes are counted, but you can go to Al-Jazeera's YouTube Channel to see the playlist of content uploaded to YouTube so far. (If you'd like to put things in perspective, you can compare these clips to the ones we collected from American voters during the 2008 election in our Video Your Vote platform with PBS.)

One Iraqi got to the polls at 5 a.m. only to find out that his name was not on the list:

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Join Jeremy Piven’s “Video Volunteers” Entourage for Global Development

Is YouTube Buggin'? Check Out Our Current Site Issues Page

Ever encounter an issue on YouTube and wonder whether you're the only one experiencing it? There are two places you can go to find out more about the situation:

1. If you see your issue on the Current Site Issues page, it means that the bug has been reported to YouTube and that our engineers are working on a fix.



2. We also suggest taking a look at the Popular Discussions section of the Help Forum. The team frequently posts bug acknowledgments, new feature information and useful Help Center articles here.



If you don't see your problem reported in either place, you can always visit the Help Forum and chat with other users to find out if they're experiencing a similar issue or know a work-around for the situation.

The User Support Team recently watched "The Famous Chicken Danceoff." … Continuar

Celebrating Innovation in the YouTube Screening Room

Whether it's utilizing new techniques, telling a story in a novel way or focusing on a groundbreaking subject, filmmaking is a craft in which innovation takes center stage. So it's with great pleasure that we introduce a new round of films in the Screening Room, courtesy of Lexus, celebrating convention-breakers, thought-provokers and envelope-pushers.

To start, we've got four very different films. "Papiroflexia" (Spanish for "origami") is the animated tale of Fred, a chubby man with a passion for paper folding, who wants to change the world with his art. The documentary short "Kung Fu Wang" explores the life of a martial arts master whose real contribution to society is not what you think. In "Little Minx Exquisite Corpse: Cara," a less-than-glamorous actress in Los Angeles might not be exactly what producers are looking for, but why should something like that stand in the way? And in "Windowbreaker," a pair of young siblings build a home-alarm system to protect themselves against a group of neighborhood burglars.

Stay tuned because in two weeks, we'll have a new round of innovative shorts.

Nate Weinstein, Entertainment Marketing Associate, recently watched "Muni Fight." … Continuar