What would you do to innovate journalism if you had the funding? The Knight News Challenge is in it’s third year of a five year plan to provide $25 million in grants for geo-focused open source projects which drive innovation in journalism. I’m very excited to be involved in this year’s competition as an application screener along with a team of web and new media thought leaders. Led by News Challenge program manager, Susan Mernit, the screener team met in San Francisco on September 5th for a day of training and discussion.
This is a great opportunity for mobile developers to achieve funding for projects that apply location services and the strengths of mobile devices for capturing and delivering media in real-time. The core requirements for a winning application include the following.
- Must be a digital innovation applied to journalism
- Must apply to a specific geography which can be replicated to other geographies
- Must be built on open source technologies
For more information on how to apply for the News Challenge visit the web site.If you need assistance in framing your application or refining your idea, the News Challenge is also providing a virtual “Garage” where applicants can interact with mentors.
October 14th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Sounds very interesting, thanks. Just to let you know audio is basically unintelligible on the video, even with volume set to max on both player and my computer, and the video visuals are not informative, so perhaps you could provide a synopsis of what the lady said?
Thanks.
October 13th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Hi Allan, Great questions. To get the details of the Knight News Challenge including how to apply visit their site at http://www.newschallenge.org .
The News Challenge awards grants with no equity position.
As for how local is local? I had the same question. And it depends on the solution and particular locale. Some tiny countries in the world would be local enough, while an America-wide application is unlikely to be local enough. In some cases, a statewide solution makes sense, but most important is that your idea be innovate journalism.
Visit the site and you may want to join the Garage for mentoring as you develop your application for the grant.
October 12th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Debi – could you tell me more about the Challenge? Do the sponsors expect to take any equity participation from the winners or is it merely a grant with no equity participation? When you say geo-focused, how granular do you want to go? National, State, Local, Hyper-Local? Thanks in advance.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:33 pm
I’ve been thinking about this challenge, but for one reason or another haven’t been able to come up with anything globally relevant just yet.
The good thing about yourself and others in the mobile field is that we have so many ways to take ideas and now another outlet for them.