Knight News Challenge

The Knight News Challenge is a grant program by the Knight Foundation for "ideas and projects that will transform community news." It appears that the grants also can cover information other than news.

The first winners were announced May 23, 2007.

One winner in 2007 was Chris O'Brien, for The Next Newsroom Project, at Duke University's Chronicle. As of early July 2007, this project appears to have made the most-public advances. (Also see the accompanying blog.)

Applications

Applications for the second round are being accepted starting July 1, 2007.

Eligibility is very broad, but projects must meet the following criteria:

1. Use digital media.
2. Involve new forms of news in the public interest.
3. Focus on specific geographic community.

Some changes from the first to second rounds of competition are:

• $500,000 for people 21 and younger, in a partnership with MTV
• Applications online only
• Ability for "open" applications, in which the entire online world has the opportunity to see, rate, and comment. For more information, see the interview with Gary Kebbel, the Journalism Initiatives Program Officer for the Knight Foundation, by Amy Gahran at the Poynter Institute, posted June 4, 2007.

Categories: ("If you can’t decide, enter in the idea category. If we have a better sense of where it belongs, we’ll move it.")

• Ideas ("... think big ... ways for you and others to further develop the idea ... about digital experiments that improve news and information in actual, geographic communities ... blog for a year on a Knight-designated web site.")

• Pilot project and field test ("support the development of innovative pilot projects, prototypes, field tests or trials that use news to inform or inspire physical, geographic community ... for real-life experiments designed to prove whether new ideas actually work. ... The best pilot projects tend to have sustainability plans")

• Leadership (" ... to turn pilot projects into trends [or] ... find the best among competing technologies or ideas ... [or] bringing people together in new networks to achieve greater collective impact. The goal ... achieve large-scale impact.")

• New Business Ventures ("for products or companies that will have positive social impact. ")

Also: What they're not looking for

The main questions for the summer 2007 Knight News Challenge, other than contact information:

• Project Title, 255 characters max.
• Requested Amount
• Time to Complete Project
• Total Cost of Project, Including All Sources of Funding
• Describe Your Project, 2075 characters, approx. 325 words
• Who Would Want to Use It, and Why? 830 characters, approx. 125 words
• Why Are You the Best Person or Organization to Develop This Project? 2075 characters, approx. 325 words
• (You may attach supporting material)

When you submit your entry online, leave the trailing slash off your URL. And in the "Amount" and "Cost" boxes, write just a number, no comma. Otherwise, it apparently won't be accepted.

Open entries

• "Open" entries can be read by the public. Anyone who registers can also rate and comment on the entries.
• The system apparently does not read paragraph breaks. All the text in a section is run together with space between paragraphs. Unclear whether this happens with "closed" entries. A possible work-around is to submit an additional word-processing file.

2007 Winners

• Christopher Csikszentmihályi, MIT Media Lab/Comparative Media Studies
  • Co-winners:
  • Henry Jenkins, MIT Media Lab/Comparative Media Studies
  • Mitchel Resnick, MIT Media Lab/Comparative Media Studies
• Adrian Holovaty, Journalist/Web developer
• Richard Anderson, VillageSoup
• Ian V. Rowe, MTV: Music Television
• Rich Gordon, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
• Christopher Callahan, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University
• Geoff Dougherty, CEO, PublicMedia, Inc
• David Ardia, Citizen Media Law Project, Berkman Center for Internet and Society,
• Harvard Law School, and the Center for Citizen Media
• Gail Robinson, Gotham Gazette
• Nora Paul, Institute for New Media Studies, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota
• Ethan Zuckerman, Global Voices, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School
• Lisa Williams, Placeblogger
• Todd Wolfson, Media Mobilizing Project of Philadelphia
• Amy Gahran, co-founder of I, Reporter
  • Co-winner: Adam Glenn, Co-Founder of I, Reporter
• Paul Grabowicz, University of California - Berkeley
• Chris O’Brien, The Chronicle, Duke University’s student newspaper
• Dianne Lynch, H. Park School of Communications, Ithaca College
  • Co-winners:
  • Angela Powers, School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Kansas State
  • Ann Brill, William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Kansas
  • Ardyth Broadrick Sohn, Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies, University of Las Vegas
  • Jane Briggs-Bunting, School of Journalism, Michigan State
  • Kimberly Sultze, department of journalism and mass communication, Saint Michael’s College
  • Pam McAllister-Johnson, School of Journalism & Broadcasting Western Kentucky University

Bloggers (Idea category)

• Benjamin Melançon, Co-founder, Agaric Design Collective
• Dan Schultz, Carnegie Mellon University undergraduate student
• Dori Maynard, president and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education
• G. Patton Hughes, CEO, neomaxcom, LLC
• J.D. Lasica, Ourmedia.org
• Jay Rosen, Department of Journalism, New York University
• Paul Lamb, Principal, Man on a Mission Consulting and Co-Founder, Lambs on Love
• Leslie Rule, director, Center for Locative Media
• Steven Clift, Board Chair, E-Democracy.org

External links

• Poynter's E-Media Tidbits is writing a series about the grants.
• Recent (June 5 2007) Online Journalism Review interview with Kebbel, by Sarah Colombo (covers: strengths of the 2007 Round I winners; and for Round II, a) "$500,000 for a special category to award ideas and projects created by young people" and b) "we hope for more international applications")
• Older (September 2006) OJR interview with Knight's Gary Kebbel, by Robert Niles.