Worldwide Contest Reopens With $5 Million For Digital Media Experiments to Innovate Journalism

Worldwide Contest Reopens With $5 Million For Digital Media Experiments to Innovate Journalism

Knight Foundation's News Challenge Contest Now Offers Online Assistance for Applicants; November 1 is Deadline.

MIAMI – The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has launched the third year of the Knight News Challenge, a contest awarding as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news and information exchange. The deadline for applications is Nov. 1, 2008.

With the slogan “You Invent It. We Fund It!” the contest is open to community-minded innovators worldwide, from software designers to journalists to citizens and students of any age. Do you have a big idea for informing and inspiring a geographic community using social media, Web 2.0 tools or OpenID? How about exchanging information via video, photos or text messaging? A way to integrate game theory with web browsing to support local community engagement? Come on, push the edge – we’re seeking true innovation!

To support applications, Knight has created a new incubator – the News Challenge Garage – where prospective applicants can receive peer reviews and mentoring from screeners and awardees from previous years. A diverse group of developers, online journalists, nonprofit evangelists, video bloggers and social media experts are on hand to coach at garage.newschallenge.com. The 50 mentors are available to coach and guide everyone who enters a project in the Garage. They include Vidoop’s Chris Messina, Spot.us’ David Cohn, Contentious editor Amy Gahran, Placeblogger’s Lisa Williams, Beth Kanter, J.D. Lasica and many other digital media specialists.

The incubator's blog features stories about mentoring already under way (www.kflinks.com/garageblog).

The first two years year of the contest produced individual, private and public winners ranging from Twentysomething journalism innovators to the inventor of the World Wide Web. Winning projects included:

• ChiTownDailyNews.org: Recruits and trains a network of 75 citizen journalists – one in each Chicago neighborhood.
• Everyblock.com: Allows citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block.
• Spot.us: Pays for local investigative reporting by soliciting financial support from the public.

Winning entries must have three elements: 1) use of a digital media; 2) delivery of news or information on a shared basis to 3) a geographically defined community. Entries must be open-source and share the software and knowledge created.

“We have committed $25 million over five years to the Knight News Challenge because we believe in media innovation through experimentation,” says Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation president and CEO. “Each winning project is an experiment with the potential to transform how we practice journalism in the digital age.”

“With the addition of the incubator site, we are taking a page from technology companies,” says Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation’s journalism program director. “We hope that the Garage coaches will help the applicants create even more high quality applications and proposals.”

In September and October, Knight is holding a series of meet-ups in various cities to provide real-time brainstorming and discussion – check newschallenge.org for more information.

A simple online entry form is available at www.newschallenge.org. The web site will accept applications through Nov. 1, 2008. Winners should be announced by the spring of 2009.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation invests in journalism excellence worldwide and in the vitality of 26 U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950, the foundation has granted more than $400 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. The foundation focuses on projects with the potential to create transformational change. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

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I'm going to enter this again this year. I did the first year and skipped the second year.

This time, I'd like to involve YOU, the community at AFP, in some way. 

Stay tuned for details...