The deadline for applications in the third Knight News Challenge is this Saturday at 11:59 p.m. But don’t let the closeness on the calendar intimidate you: The initial application is quick and easy. So if you have only the core nugget of an innovative idea and haven’t worked through things like budgets and implementation, enter anyway. Otherwise, your chance at a slice of $5 million slips away.

The best way to get a sense of what Knight is looking for is to browse the winners from 2008 and 2007. You can also browse through the entries that have already been submitted for this year’s contest, although most will probably come in on the last day. For more information, check out these highlights from a meetup of potential applicants at Harvard a couple weeks ago.

Knight is expecting about 3,000 entries and will go through several rounds of winnowing before announcing the winners next fall. But here at the Lab, we’ll be wading through the applications right away, hunting for the most intriguing ideas. So if you notice anything good or want to pitch your own entry, please email or leave a note in the comments.

[Saturday was the deadline for submissions for this year's Knight News Challenge. In the coming days and weeks, we'll be looking at some of the most interesting applicants. If you know of one you think worth highlighting, let us know, via email or in the comments. —Ed.]

Two of the biggest names in journalism have applied to this year’s Knight News Challenge: The pioneering investigative-reporting non-profit ProPublica and The New York Times are seeking $1 million from the Knight Foundation to launch an online repository of primary-source documents. The project could lead to greater information sharing among news organizations and their audience. As they put it in their grant application:

Documents are the foundation of investigative journalism, but today’s newsroom is a throwaway culture. Too often, reporters gather reams of information, do their stories, then chuck rich source documents into a dusty corner, never again to see the light of day.

The project, which is called DocumentCloud, would let news organizations upload their materials for public consumption and analysis. (“Readers will also be able to quickly search, annotate and bookmark documents — and for the first time link directly to specific pages or passages.”)

The proposal relies on a piece of software called DocViewer, which was developed by the Times’ Interactive Newsroom Technologies team. The head of that team, Aron Pilhofer, recently confirmed that the Times will release DocViewer as open source “sometime after the election.” Brian Boyer, the blogger who broke that news, said the software was created by the Times for its searchable database of Hillary Clinton’s 11,000-page public schedule as first lady, which was a journalistic marvel.

In an email today, Pilhofer said the application has already made it to the second round of the News Challenge, and he explained the proposal’s provenance:

The project started with a conversation between Scott Klein, Eric Umansky (of ProPublica) and me and my boss, Marc Frons. They were interested in using our DocViewer, and we were talking about the possibility of just open sourcing the darn thing. So, we got into one of those… “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could also…” sorts of conversations, and things went from there.

DocumentCloud would focus initially on New York City “because it has favorable FOI laws and a vibrant journalism and blogging community.” (The community focus is also a requirement of the News Challenge.) A consortium of media outlets, bloggers, and watchdog groups would submit documents, though the application mentions only one partner on board: the Gotham Gazette, a news website published by the Citizens Union Foundation of the City of New York. ProPublica also plans to contribute state- and federal-government documents.

For the technically inclined, DocumentCloud will run on open APIs, so readers or other news organizations could search and interact with the document database as necessary for investigative projects. “Think of it as a ‘card catalog’ of standardized metadata for primary source documents,” the application argues.

It isn’t clear if the project could or would go ahead without funding from Knight, which will award its News Challenge grants next summer. ProPublica’s $10-million annual budget is funded primarily by the Sandler Foundation. We’ve sent an email to Mike Webb, ProPublica’s director of communications, seeking more information.

The full text of the grant application is below the jump.

Keep reading »

NYU’s Jay Rosen doesn’t seem too thrilled by the ProPublica/NYT application for the Knight News Challenge — at least based on his Twittering tonight:

Rosen’s point seems to be that $1 million going to big dogs like the Times would mean $1 million less for the small, scrappy startup ideas that the News Challenge is probably better known for. (Although, to be sure, healthy slices of News Challenge money have gone to big dogs like MIT in the past.)

In the end, of course, it’ll be up to the Knight folks to determine how to divvy up their funds. And that process is months away. But if I were an aspiring media entrepreneur deeply invested in the crazy idea I just submitted to the News Challenge, I could imagine being chuffed that I was competing with the nation’s top newspaper.

Here’s some more information about the Knight News Challenge application by ProPublica and The New York Times that generated some buzz and criticism earlier this month. They’re seeking a $1 million grant to develop an online repository of primary-source documents that anyone could contribute to or take from. I spoke at length with developers at both organizations, and they discussed the technology behind their effort, how it could benefit investigative journalism, and why they’re seeking seven figures to launch the project.

The venture, which is called DocumentCloud, seems like it could vastly improve document-based journalism. (That’s separate from the issue of whether they’re deserving of a News Challenge grant.) At the moment, when a reporter gets her hands on paper documents, the best she can typically do is post them online as scanned PDFs, where they often can’t be searched and will likely be forgotten by the end of the day. Worst of all, it’s a one-sided experience: The reporter drops a dead tree in a forest and has no idea if it ever makes a sound.

Keep reading »

Susan Mernit — another prolific and incisive writer that may not be yet be among the bookmarks of enough journalists — shares a long excerpt of an even more exhaustive White Paper on how she and her team used social media to significantly raise awareness of the most recent Knight News Challenge.

In “Case study, using social media for social good: The Knight News Challenge 2008/09,” Mernit shows, step-by-step, why you weren’t imagining things when you thought that there was an awful lot of publicity about the Challenge this time around.

The Knight Foundation has well-established relationships with influential journalists, bloggers and educators in the online news and international online news arenas, and deep ties with journalism, new media, and communications programs at many universities. However, for this program, Knight wanted to reach beyond their core audience to connect with technologists, social media innovators, product developers and local organizers who might have innovative ideas for sharing news and information and supporting engagement and discussion in a specific geographic area.

To achieve this goal, we did an analysis that suggested using a suite of social media tools would not only be extremely effective for outreach, but would reinforce the message that we were innovative and cool. Our plan relied on using tools that had worked in previous years–web site, email, purchased ad words–but we put more emphasis on the new tools: blogging, video blogging, Twitter, seesmic, Flickr in particular

Mernit then recounts, in detail, what they did. I found myself reading the report as a template, one which could be molded and applied to other problems of communication. In the news business, for instance, perhaps we’re not launching new products as quickly as we might because “there’s no money to market them.” True, there isn’t, if you’re simply looking to buy TV ads and billboards. But if you’re willing to think differently and expend some human capital, Mernit’s case-study argues, there are lots of possibilities:

Overall, we were able to create an interactive, virtuous circle or open loop, where our real world community, which we successfully targeted online and off, not only got our message but then went on to publicize it on our behalf. This created a bigger impact that we might have gotten otherwise and led to a lot of success with carefully measured resources.

(See a larger map of the winners here.)

The winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge have been announced, about seven and a half months after the initial deadline for entries last November. The envelope, please:

— DocumentCloud, $719,500 for a ProPublica/New York Times effort to open up the documents reporters and advocates use in their work. (Read more in Zach’s post.)

— Media Bugs, $335,000 to Scott Rosenberg’s idea to create an open process for correcting news coverage, a la the bug trackers that software projects use. (Read more in Zach’s post.)

— Councilpedia, $250,000 to Gotham Gazette to build a user-contributed wiki on New York’s city council members. (Read more in Michael’s post.)

— Data Visualization, $243,600 to the Jefferson Institute and Aaron Presnall to build cheap and easy tools for visualizing data sets. (Read more in Ben’s post.)

— Mobile Media Toolkit, $200,000 to MobileActive and Katrin Verclas to build tools to make media creation on cell phones easier. (Read more in my post.)

— The Daily Phoenix, $90,000 to Aleksandra Chojnacka and Adam Klawonn to build a news product around Phoenix’s new light-rail system. (Read more in Michael’s post.)

— Crowdsourcing Crisis Information, $70,000 to Ushahidi to further develop its system for allowing citizen reports of events by cell phone. (Read more in Jessica’s post.)

— Virtual Street Corners, $40,000 to John Ewing to create a way for citizen-created video newscasts to be shared between two Boston neighborhoods. (Read more in Lois’ post.)

— CMS Upload Utility, $10,000 to the McNaughton Newspaper Group to build a tool to make it easier for small newspapers to move their content online. (Read more in Lois’ post.)

We’ll be profiling the winners in other pieces over the next few days. Zach and I are at the MIT conference where the winners are being announced, so we’ll have more to come.

Are there any trends to be found? Keep reading »

The Knight News Challenge’s biggest winner, with a two-year grant of $719,500, is DocumentCloud, the primary-source index conceived by journalists and developers at ProPublica and The New York Times. Here’s why you should care: There’s good reason to believe the project will transform how some investigative journalism is conducted — and who conducts it.

Like a lot of software in the cloud, this one is complicated to explain. I wrote a long overview of DocumentCloud in November, and you can read their initial grant application in my first post about the project. Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news technologies at the Times and one of the project’s creators, told me on Monday, “DocumentCloud isn’t really conducive to a two-minute elevator pitch.” But later in our conversation, he ventured one: “It will turn documents into data.”

In the analog version of investigative journalism, a reporter obtains documents from sources and freedom-of-information requests, writes a story, and… that’s it. If we’re lucky, the materials are posted as unwieldy and barely searchable PDFs.

DocumentCloud’s vision is to collect, archive, and index the text and metadata of all documents used by participating news organizations, advocacy groups, bloggers, and others — “so they’re not just sitting in the corner of a newsroom collecting dust,” Pilhofer explained. That way, anyone — from other news outlets to curious readers — will be able to search across all documents in the project to find information that might not have been relevant to the original piece. If it were an animated TV series, the catchphrase might be, With our newsrooms combined — we are DocumentCloud!

Early partners in the project include the Times, ProPublica (the non-profit investigative journalism outfit) Gotham Gazette (a New York City news site published by Citizens Union Foundation, themselves winners of two Knight News Challenge grants), TPM Muckraker (the investigative arm of Talking Points Memo), and the National Security Archive (home to the largest public repository of declassified government documents). Are you salivating yet? Keep reading »

[Our series profiling winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge continues with Ben Cohen writing about Aaron Presnall's data-visualization grant. —Josh]

Aaron Presnall is neither a journalist nor a developer. He’s a political economist who specializes in the role of participation and information in decision-making. His job makes him acutely aware of journalism’s impact on democracy, and he knows that sound data informs good decisions.

He also understands that only a handful of news outlets can afford to invest significant resources in the beautiful-yet-intelligible presentation of such data, which is why he plans to use his $243,600 Knight News Challenge award to build an open-source data visualization module targeting community newspapers, independent journalists and bloggers — really, anyone interested in publishing data visualizations. With a team of five coders and designers, Presnall hopes to launch a beta version by December; the initial sample visualizations will focus on alternative energy and eco-issues in Belgrade, where he has been stationed with the Jefferson Institute for seven years.

Tools to visualize data are nothing new, and the market has already produced several attempts to make them accessible to non-geeks. But Presnall believes his project can push the difficulty and cost of data visualization down further and encourage its use among those who wouldn’t have considered it before.

Keep reading »

[Our series profiling winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge continues with Michael Andersen writing about Gotham Gazette's grant for a local wiki called Councilpedia. —Josh]

Every newsroom’s got them: A few dozen gadflies who’ve been in town forever and are proud to have their favorite reporters on speed-dial.

The little team at New York City’s Web-only Gotham Gazette — two reporters, two geeks, and a boss — wants to recruit more people like that. In fact, they want to train them. And they think the way to do it is with a closely edited wiki.

The Gazette’s plan for Councilpedia, a planned guide to the filthy lucre that links real estate and politics on New York’s city council, just made the Gazette the first two-time winner of a Knight News Challenge grant, this one worth $250,000 over two years. (Editor-in-chief Gail Robinson’s team won the same amount in 2007 for a series of educational Web games, such as one that asked readers to balance the city budget.)

The idea is to combine the anyone-can-contribute model of Wikipedia with the editing and fact-checking that marks good journalism. The hope is that by directly enlisting the eyes and ears of the public, Councilpedia will uncover watchdog stories that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

I talked with Robinson, a veteran journalist, and her top geek, Amanda Hickman, about their strategy for launching a topical local wiki. Here are the six most interesting choices they’ve made:

Keep reading »

I had a chance yesterday afternoon to talk with Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director at the Knight Foundation and, thus, the administrator of the Knight News Challenge, which announced its newest set of winners yesterday. (News Challenge winners new and old are meeting at MIT this week.)

I asked him why there were fewer winners this year than in the past two cycles:

…I think the judges are getting tougher. I think also competition is more difficult each year because you’ve got other years to look back on and say, “Well, you know, we did that. Or this is real close to something we’ve done.” So I think it gets more difficult every year for one thing. The judges have a very exacting standard…I think that one thing that happens is people look at what won the previous year and decide, “Well, obviously that’s the kind of thing they’re looking for — I should do that.” And that’s exactly the wrong thing to do in a contest seeking experimentation and innovation.

Overall, applications were down about 20 percent from last year, but he attributed that to the elimination of a commercial wing of the contest he said had not worked out well; in the contest’s remaining open-source competition, applications were up. Who does Gary wish were applying to the News Challenge in larger numbers? He mentions computer science departments, architects, and people from Asian countries. And we also talk about the reasoning behind the News Challenge’s requirement that all applications be tied to a specific geographic area — a requirement which has frustrated a few applicants.

Along with talking about this year’s contest, we also talked more generally about how the winnowing-down process works for applicants. (This year’s went from 2,323 applications to about 260 semifinalists to 69 finalists to nine winners.) That should provide some good background for anyone thinking of applying when applications open up again in September. Watch the video above, or read the full transcript below. Keep reading »

Citizen journalism further came of age this week as regular citizens using tools like Twitter and Facebook out-reported much of the mainstream media, keeping the world riveted with news and photos pouring out of Iran. It seems particularly appropriate, then, that the Knight News Challenge also announced its grant recipients this week. Many of the platforms developed for the Challenge are aimed at helping citizens report and aggregate news content.

One winner in particular, Ory Okolloh, has cultivated a platform specifically designed to technologically aid citizens in the collection of local news. Her site, Ushahidi — Swahili for “testimony” — seeks to empower people in disenfranchised regions who frequently lack the resources to report on the atrocities occurring in their areas.

Billed as a way to “crowdsource crisis information,” the site culls reports from cell phones, email and the internet and, using a Google Maps mashup tool, visually displays them on a map. Ushahidi was originally developed to visually display the crises occurring in post-election Kenya, and the results proved so successful that Okolloh has since extended the project’s reach to other nations, including South Africa, India and the eastern Congo.

I spoke with Okolloh over e-mail about Ushahidi, and below is the edited transcript of that interview. Keep reading »

Mobile was one of the big themes of this year’s Knight News Challenge; yesterday, we talked about the Kenyan mobile-crowdsourcing grantee Ushahidi. But it wasn’t the only cell-themed winner that promises to make spreading information in the developing world easier.

Katrin Verclas and her group MobileActive won a $200,000 grant to build new and better toolkits for the production and spread of media on cell phones. There are lots of tools already available, of course, but they’re spread haphazardly across phone types and cellular technologies — not to mention difficult to track down for a typical cell phone user, whatever her place in the world. With the Knight grant, they’ll assemble a database of what’s available and figure out what gaps need to be filled — for which phones, in which formats.

I talked with Katrin about her project, about the incredible pace of change in the mobile industry, and about how the current situation in Iran points to the potential of using diverse mobile technologies to create and share information.

Plus: augmented reality, Frank Gehry, and Indian Androids! Full transcript below. Keep reading »

When Adam Klawonn quit his job at a shrinking major metropolitan newspaper in 2006, he did what so many other journalists have: launched an online news operation that looked a lot like a newspaper’s web site, only with less stuff.
 
On The Zonie Report (“A New Kind of News for Arizona”), he set out to cover growth, immigration, the environment. The big issues. “The traditional papers were going local, and they were pulling back their bureaus,” said Klawonn, now 30. “It seemed like it was just wide open.”
 
And from the start, he seemed to be doing everything right — learning enough PHP to slap together a sharp-looking Web site; shooting videos and producing podcasts; painstakingly tagging articles into a dozen geographic categories; looting his bank account for a freelance budget; hiring a New York Times stringer for what turned out to be award-winning environmental reporting.
 
After two years, it was clear: The Zonie Report was — have you guessed, dear reader? — a complete commercial failure. Without a single town to target, advertisers shunned the site. And though Klawonn’s scattered readers gave him 20,000 pageviews a month, they passed on his offer of CafePress mugs and T-shirts.
 
So last year, Klawonn started sketching out the plan that, this week, landed him a $95,000 Knight News Challenge grant: a news service devoted entirely to Phoenix’s six-month-old light rail system. Its working title is Daily Phoenix.
 
Plan B is narrower. Much narrower. Old idea: regional trend stories about migrant labor. New idea: opt-in text alerts about train delays. Old content: “In Prescott, a water war escalates.” New content: the details of every crime within a five-block radius of each rail stop.

Keep reading »

On their weekly podcast last month, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen and programmer Dave Winer blended their backgrounds to propose a new way of conceiving errors in the news media. Corrections, they argued, should be treated like software bugs — a valued element of programming, recorded systematically in bug-tracking databases. “If you help us catch a bug — if you point it out — that’s good, because it helps us make the program better,” Rosen explained.

Not a revolutionary idea, but a good one, and when Tim Windsor pointed to it here, the suggestion of a bug-tracking system for news prompted an excellent question from Daniel Bachhuber: “So…who’s going to build it?”

Now we know. Scott Rosenberg, best known as the co-founder of Salon, has been mulling this idea for a while, and last week, he received a $335,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to build MediaBugs, the first correction-tracking system for news outlets in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Well, maybe not the first. One might argue that blogs already do a fine job at pointing out bugs in media. (That criticism of the project came up among the Knight News Challenge judges.) Many newspapers, meanwhile, already have thorough, internal systems for dealing with corrections submitted by readers. (On the other hand, some of those systems are broken.) And what if readers don’t want to visit a third-party site to deal with media mistakes, or if news organizations simply choose to ignore MediaBugs entirely? I posed those and other questions to Rosenberg at MIT last week, and you can see his responses in the video above.

Rosenberg’s site will be independent of media outlets in the Bay Area, but what if it worked like the mock-up I’ve created at right, as integral to news sites as the “email-this” button? One of the greatest impediments to an effective corrections process is that readers don’t know how to submit one. (I had an awful experience on Sunday night trying to find the Washington Post’s corrections page.) A bug-tracking system for news is a great idea, but it needs to be as easy as possible for readers and news organizations alike.

A full transcript of the video is after the jump. Keep reading »

Newspapers have long viewed themselves as a kind of virtual public space — a place for community members to trade information and learn about each other. New media, however, has largely thrived on specialization: think clubhouses, not the town square.

With a $40,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge, Boston artist John Ewing hopes to reverse that thinking, using digital technology to stimulate old-school public dialogue. It’s a vision of the media as “context providers,” not “content providers,” as Ewing told me over email.

His Virtual Street Corners project will install large storefront video screens connecting two very different Boston neighborhoods, Brookline and Roxbury. These “portals” will give residents of each town a real-time way to talk, argue, share news, or simply watch each other. Video and podcasts of what happens on the screens will be available for download onto the mobile phones of passersby. Ewing said the information shared via the digital screens will be personal and only possibly factual — a real-life Twitter, if you will.

While Ewing sees Virtual Street Corners as a complement to Roxbury and Brookline’s existing community papers, the project is also designed to bridge racial and class barriers that newspapers have often failed to overcome.

At first glance, Ewing’s art project may not seem particularly journalistic; one Knight News Challenge judge called the project “very unKNC,” while others called it the “least newspapery” of the contest’s finalists and a “fun” idea that “probably doesn’t fit into the KNC.”

But the art project that aimed to bring social media back into the physical realm won anyway. As one journalist at the conference told Ewing: “I love this project because the street corner is where news happens.” Keep reading »