You can also see all of our coverage of this year’s News Challenge — including stories dating back to the fall — here.

During the conference, though, Boydston, vice president of technology and new media at McNaughton Newspaper Group in Northern California, found his ambitions for his project shifting. His original goal was simply to help small community papers — many of whom were using 10-year-old technology like Mac OS 9, he noted — publish stories to the web with less hassle.

“Early on the second day of the conference (during the wiki/semantic-web barcamp led by Benjamin Mako Hill) it really hit me that the value of this project is not found in efficiencies gained by news organizations,” Boydston said. “The real value is in surfacing valuable data online, so that it can be shared with our communities. It’s not about publishing faster or cheaper, it’s about publishing more.”

Boydston started to envision newspapers using his CMS uploader “to create a wiki of historical documents from a newspaper’s archive.” This trove of old articles could be the starting point for crowdsourcing a project on local community history.

“Taking an asset largely forgotten (old archive stories) and building an interactive, engaged online community around it is raising the bar pretty high for small community news organizations,” Boydston said. In this way, he said, he hopes the CMS uploader “will serve both the technology laggards and the innovators.”

The text files published to the web using his CMS uploader will be indexable and searchable. (At this point, the application won’t work for PDFs, video or audio, Boydston said.) “You might think of the CMS uploader as poor man’s DocumentCloud,” Boydston said, “but only in that it facilitates the creation of an easy to use, online repository of information.”

On his web site, Boydston has a sample upload of articles to a WordPress account. For 900 stories, Boydston notes, “The keyword indexing took about 4-5 minutes, but the actual data import was under 10 seconds.”

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.”

Although they’re only 2.4 miles apart, there’s little interaction between Roxbury, “the heart of black culture in Boston,” and Brookline, a neighborhood that’s largely white, upper-middle class, and Jewish. When he asked 25 residents from each neighborhood to map their routes through the city each day, Ewing found that there were almost no overlaps between the two communities.

“Traditional news media tends to be more representative of economically advantaged communities,” Ewing wrote in his application. “Virtual Street Corners relies on new technology, interpersonal contact and citizen journalism to carry news across these social divides.”

During a trial run of the project in 2008, Ewing used a series of events to get residents from the two towns talking to each other — including a back-and-forth between Roxbury City Councilor Chuck Turner and Rabbi Hillel Levine and a show by Ron Jones and Larry Tish of The Black Jew Dialogues. With the Knight money, Ewing will supplement scheduled events by hiring six citizen journalists to give regularly scheduled news updates.

“I would like to hire people who live in the neighborhoods but from different demographics, to help bring a variety of perspectives,” Ewing wrote over email. “I will choose them based on their skill in delivery and ability to acquire news. I would think that a news background would be helpful, but not necessary.” (No word yet on how much these citizen journos will be paid.)

During the test-run of the project in front of the Brookline Booksmith in June 2008, the Boston Phoenix noted predictable kinds of public engagement with the screens: kids had the most fun with them, and some prejudices came to light:

“Why would anyone want to see what Roxbury is doing?” a white man in a too-tight T-shirt asked a woman standing nearby. “Why put it in Dudley, why not Harvard Square? People are smart there. All you’re gonna see there is crime.” After the man left, the woman called him a racist.

Ewing’s goal is to replicate the kind of news sharing that he has experienced working on his different public artworks “while standing on various street corners around Boston.”

“[M]any people came up to talk to me,” he wrote. “People from all walks of life, offering their opinions, their experiences, gossip, crime stories, love stories, theories of economics, race relations etc. and it was usually delivered with a flair particular to that neighborhood. It may or may not have been factually correct.”

As a RISD-trained artist interested in “dialogic public art,” Ewing said that he works in the tradition of British artist Peter Dunn, who described public artists as “context providers” instead of “content providers.” It’s a distinction that can apply as usefully to the news business as to the arts.

While creating community interaction with digital screens is an old idea — dating back to Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s 1980 Hole in Space between L.A. and New York — Ewing noted his project was unique in using technology not to bridge huge geographic or cultural gaps, but the narrow social divides of a segregated American city. Ewing originally planned to use digital screens to link Ramallah, Tel Aviv, and New York, but decided to start closer to home when logistical difficulties stymied that project, he told the Phoenix last year. The Ramallah/Tel Aviv/New York link may still be in the future — along with a similar project connecting Havana and Miami.

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.

Scott Rosenberg: It’s called MediaBugs.org. And the idea is to create a web site, a web service, that people in a community, in this case the San Francisco Bay Area, can bring problems and errors that they find in media coverage and post them and try to get them fixed. [...]

The inspiration of the project is from what’s called a bug tracker in an open-source project. So if you’re developing open-source software, you have this project, and you put up a public website that anyone can bring these — file these bugs. If you’re using Firefox and something breaks, you go to their web site, and you tell them about it.

And that’s sort of, you know, both the practical inspiration but also a little bit of the philosophical inspiration because, really, one of my goals it to see if we can begin to alter the mentality or the mindset of journalists a little bit away from perceiving the person who comes and tells you about an error as a gadfly or a pest, which sometimes we do. I know I have. It’s a common and understandable reaction for newsrooms, for journalists to want to kind of circle the wagons when under attack or when perceived to be under attack. And I’m hoping that we can just turn that around a little bit and show people that, you know, actually, the person who’s reporting a problem or reporting an error, filing a bug, is someone who’s helping you because you want to know about that stuff and you want to fix it. [...]

Well, certainly, the blogosphere does accomplish some of this. What doesn’t get accomplished — a couple things. One is it’s very scattered, right? You don’t have any sense of continuity. You can’t kind of aggregate the — you know, you just don’t see these things in context. But also, there is no record of the resolution. You don’t have, the concept — in a bug tracker, you have the concept of an open bug and a closed bug. An open bug is one that you’re still working or that has never been resolved. A closed one, you don’t have to think about anymore.

And I think it’s going to be really valuable to be able to do that with this kind of information and to gather data over time about, you know, which news organizations had more of these kinds of bugs filed. And it might be that, you know — which ones are resolving them. And at the end of it all, I’m hoping that we don’t — we’re not in a situation where somebody thinks, “oh, this paper had all these bugs filed. They must be doing a bad job.” But rather, “oh, this paper had all these bugs filed, and most or all of them were resolved. And that’s great. That is a good thing.” [...]

Zach Seward: There are obviously several types of bugs that journalists might not consider a bug. Certainly questions of bias and opinion.

Rosenberg: Sure.

Seward: One, in particular, might be a bug of interpretation.

Rosenberg: Yeah.

Seward: I think we might all agree that several national newspapers had a bug in their coverage of WMD leading up to the Iraq War, right?

Rosenberg: One gigantic bug with many manifestations.

Seward: I can’t imagine that someone would — is it equipped to deal with that sort of bug, or is it more, you know, individual facts?

Rosenberg: The base focus is going to start with facts. Now, there’s not — you can’t easily divide all kinds of errors and problems into one pile of facts and one pile of opinions or interpretation. It’s a spectrum. And so, inevitably, this will bleed toward — into the center of that spectrum, and that’s fine.

I don’t think — this is not going to be the place on the web to go and argue that The New York Times is a left-wing rag or Fox News is not fair and — you know, there are so many places you can do that on the web already. That’s a fine thing, but we don’t need another place to have that argument.

So, you know, something like WMD, if MediaBugs had been around when, you know, some of those stories came out, I would hope that it would be a great place to file those bugs. It’s not going to be a single report that says, “The media are screwed up on WMD.” It’s going to be, “Judy Miller’s story today was erroneous because a, b, and c. What will the newspaper do about that?” [...]

So many of the exchanges today between people inside newsrooms and people on the web are overheated, right? There’s a lot of anger at the media, and now, today, there’s a lot of anger in the media at people on the web. And I think no single project is going to be able to change that, but I’m hopeful that we can begin to create a more civil exchange. And having this be a neutral ground is important to that.

A lot of people don’t trust their local media for one reason or another. Sometimes they’re not justified in that; sometimes they are. But they don’t even bother to go to the media outlet with their complaints. And then, a lot of — there are more and more journalists who have a kind of bunker mentality. They just don’t respond on the web because they were flamed once. And that’s understandable, but it’s a shame, I think. So, if we can begin to change that atmosphere, I’ll be very happy.

With his business partner, newly minted Arizona State MBA Aleksandra Chojnacka, Klawonn will offer businesses a chance to be included in twice-daily text messages to mobile subscribers. “It might be, ‘Two-for-one sandwiches!’” Klawonn said. “It might be, ‘Extended happy hour over here!’”

A print tabloid, conceived in part for advertisers still focused on physical objects, might include coverage of government actions that relate to rail transit.
 
Klawonn’s remains in a tight space: he figures his Plan B will cost $220,000 in its first year, far more than The Zonie Report ever has. He figures he has until spring to secure the next round of private grants or investments, and he’s confident that with his new idea, that’s possible. And he still believes in his first big idea, which he still hopes can become a sort of NewWest for the Southwest, or at least for Arizona. After all, believing in regional policy reporting has gotten him this far.
 
“The Zonie Report was a journalistic success and an economic revenue failure,” Klawonn said. “I just thought if I could hang in there in some way and prove that I’m committed to this field and that I’m interested in trying new things, that something was going to break my way.”

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.

Katrin Verclas: The grant is going towards what we right now call the Mobile Media Toolkit — it may get a catchier title than that. The idea is that there are all of these projects and tools out in the world of how people are using mobiles for media production, media dissemination. And there’s lots of products — both commercial, non-profit, open-source, closed-source, some only for particular phones, some more widely available, lots of different ways, using SMS for media platforms for that, et cetera — that are really hard to find. So if you are a journalist, a citizen, a media development organization, if you are somebody — a citizen journalist who would like to use your phone, you will have to painstakingly go out and try to find something that is appropriate for you. And since you may not know what’s available, it may be hard to do research.

So the idea is to aggregate tools and resources on how to use these tools in particular in one place, in an easily searchable database where we are featuring certain tools, where there’s lots of information on how to use them, case studies, possibly other users of those applications to (a) aggregate what’s there, what exists already, and where and how you can use it, and then (b) understand where are the gaps.

So, for example, in Iran right now, it’s pretty obvious in Iran with the SMS network down for the last five days — SMS being a really critical means to communicate — we really ought to look at: Are there more effective peer-to-peer kinds of tools that we can have on our mobiles that go beyond Bluetooth? Are there peer-to-peer platforms that, even if networks go down in crisis situations, for example — or just heavy usage, right, I mean? You know, on the mall at the Obama inauguration.

Joshua Benton: Right — even when there isn’t a government interfering.

Katrin: So, where are there gaps? Right? Where are there tools that we currently don’t have that need to be developed because they would aid and help in media dissemination, media development, citizen journalism, et cetera. So: one-stop resource, lots of easily findable tools, and that kind of meta-analysis of what are we missing at this point — where are there gaps?

Josh: Obviously it’s difficult to characterize what an average cell phone is like in the developing world because there are endless variety of different types of phones and capabilities. But think for the example that you just gave — if SMS is down — you know, what kinds of tools would be available on different phones that someone on the streets of Tehran might find useful? I mean, obviously it depends on the phone, it depends on the kinds of things you’re compiling — but can you give an example of the kinds of things that might be out there?

Katrin: Well, I mean if you’re, first of all, there’s a — even though we’re still talking about simple phones in many parts of the world, the proliferation of smartphones is pretty astonishing. I mean, HTC’s just introducing Android to the Indian market. In India for example, many phones have AM or FM radio. So, if you have AM/FM radio capabilities on your phone, you can use a whole new set of opportunities for media — community media, community radio, et cetera, combined with SMS in a normal situation. Lots of different ideas that we will gather.

The first step that we will do is go out to various communities, initially in the Knight network and then extend into other media organizations, to look at: Okay, what are you doing and what would you want to see? What do you need? What are your goals, and what are the kinds of strategies and tools that you’d need to accomplish the kind of reporting that you’d like to do? To then build a set of use cases and see what are the tools that actually exist, to augment what organizations want to do or what citizen reporters want to do.

In the case of Iran, as you just asked, I think you see the use video — but we are not seeing very much audio at all. So could there be better audio recording tools that actually then transmit — you know like we have here Utterli that lets just dial into a number and record audio — really kind of a mobile audio blog, if you will, or a podcast. What are the opportunities there — even in a situation where the network is down, where the SMS network is down but we can still make calls on occasion from a cell phone. Cell phones work, then they don’t work again.

But are there tools for example that would sync with a network when there is availability? Right? That actually caches information that you’d like to transmit, and then transmit it when the network is up.

Josh: Slipping in that small…

Katrin: Automatically. Exactly. Are there ways in which to distribute content in small packets that then can be reassembled somewhere else?

Josh: The IP model, right.

Katrin: Exactly. So you know — these are all sorts of ideas that we have right now, that are — some of them are half-baked and probably thrown out in the end. So the first step is really to do this kind of landscape analysis and aggregate everything that is already there and look at a variety of different areas, not just media. Sort of: What do we have available?

You know, as one example — brand new company actually called Layar, just came out yesterday I think. It is an Android application. It’s sort of an augmented reality tool. You look through your phone and you see — you have to have data access — but it grabs data on a particular…so let’s, for example here, we’re in a G— — in a Frank…

Josh: Frank Gehry.

Katrin: Frank Gehry! Thank you. Thank you. Frank Gehry building, right. So I would put my phone up and I would see this Frank Gehry building and I would get a little information about — okay, when was it built? Who the heck is Frank Gehry? What else did he do? That is a really interesting tool for media, for activism — you know, if you start to appropriate this. It’s not — it doesn’t necessarily immediately come to mind. You know, it’s this cool augmented reality tool — you know, very futuristic. But can we can appropriate that for the purposes of media development, for the purposes of activism?

So we’re just starting out — this is kind of a broad first look. And we’ll narrow in on specific things as we do, you know, our due diligence, our homework, and our research, to figure out what does it actually look like on the ground.

Josh: You said that you’ve been in this space for a few years now. I’m curious — that’s, in mobile terms, huge changes in terms of the penetration of devices, the abilities of devices. What has surprised you most about the way that you’ve seen this mass experimentation of — you know, hundreds of millions and billions of people who have cell phones who are using them in new ways. What surprised you most in the way that this has evolved?

Katrin: God, I’m not sure that I have answer to that. I don’t know — I’m like a sponge, I just soak it all in. I’m not sure that I…I can’t think of anything that has really startled me. I think the one thing maybe is that the speed of change, and the — coming out of the web world, it seems almost — and then we thought it was fast! — it seems almost, you know at snail’s pace…

Josh: It’s leisurely!

Katrin: …in comparison to this crazy mobile space. I mean, it is crazy. It’s more fragmented. It’s more complicated, in some ways. It’s more rapidly changing than I had originally thought — which it makes it all more challenging, but also way more interesting.

I’m a person who gets bored with things and I move on. I haven’t been bored since 2005, which is — I cannot say ever in my life! It hasn’t with — a work sort of focus. I just haven’t gotten bored. And there’s always so much more that is happening or that could happen, making this a really fascinating field. So I’m not sure that I would call it a surprise. It’s this great challenge and this great fun, really.

Josh: So the money that you’ve gotten from the Knight Foundation — at what point would we expect to see a product, you know, this accumulation of resources. Is there a timetable in mind?

Katrin: Oh yeah. So the grant is for, I believe, 18 months — we’re still in the process of negotiating the exact term. I am hoping that in the first six months, we have a good landscape analysis — an initial database of available tools. The second six months will be a lot more aggregation of and development of how-to resources, as well as translation of some of these. So there’ll be some localization happening.

I’m hoping to wrap this up in a year just because it is a very fast changing field. The way that we’re conceiving this also is to seed a lot of information. But we’re actually just launching a new site which will be entirely — it’ll bve very easy for users to input their tools, their case studies, their resources, their case studies. So we’re seeding it, but it’s very much going to depend on developing a really wide community who’s willing to share these kinds of tools, resources, case studies, research, etc.

So the way we set up the database now is infinitely expandable — the MobileActive database — it’s infinitely expandable around specific issue areas, whether that’s media or health, whatever it may be. You can find those kind of tools, you find the deployments on a map. You can search by functionality. You can search by all sorts of dimensions to be able to find lists, pull the data from a fairly substantial database to get what you need.

And there’s very easy ways to input data online. It’s a little onerous. We ask for a lot of information. We’ll solicit a lot, we’ll prod, we’ll nag, we’ll do whatever. We’ll be knocking at every Knight grantee’s door who has anything to do with mobile. It’s a little bit of a sleuthing game going all around the world: finding the interesting kinds of deployments, the interesting kinds of tools, and looking in unexpected places. I think in the commercial sector there’s actually quite a bit that we could adapt and adopt. And I think there’s opportunities to then either to develop similar open-source solutions or convince some companies to open source their products. That’s a long answer to your short question.

Josh: Terrific. Thank you very much and congratulations.

Katrin: Thank you very much.

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.

Q: What drove you to start Ushahidi?

A: The idea of Ushahidi was born out of the post-election violence in Kenya in late 2007, early 2008. I was covering the fallout from the election on my personal blog. My coverage went into over-drive after the government placed a ban on live media reports, and mainstream media was plagued by self-censorship and partisanship. Due to the lack of information and confusion at the time, I asked people to send me reports of what they were witnessing or hearing to my email, my phone or to leave a comment on my blog. I then posted the reports on my blog. After a while I got overwhelmed with the information that was coming to me, it basically was requiring me to be online 24-7 and I was feeling the strain of being transformed suddenly into a “crisis citizen reporter.” At the same time I felt that I was on to something and this led me to the idea of a website where people could send reports of what was happening in their area via a website or via a mobile phone. Because of the power of visualization, the website would be a mashup, where the reports could then be visible on a Google map or some other online mapping system. I came up with the name Ushahidi, which means witness or testimony in Kiswahili. In addition to allowing for citizen reporting, I thought the website could serve as a memorial so that we never forgot how bad things got during the post-election violence. I posted this idea on my blog on January 3, 2008 and asked for Kenyan techies who were interested to help me build the website. Within 24 hours, I had responses from several volunteers, some of whom became part of the core team of Ushahidi. Within three days, the website was up and running.

Q: How do you see Ushahidi furthering journalism practices?

A: It is important to remember that at the heart of it Ushahidi is merely a tool that empowers individuals and groups to be both producers and consumers of information — not just via the web but also via mobile phones, thereby reaching people who might not have good access to the internet via computers. We think that Ushahidi’s unique ability to crowdsource information from various source i.e. citizens, mainstream media, multimedia and social media will allow not just for citizen reporting but for contextualized and localized reporting. We expect to shift the model of information sharing from top down to bottom up and we want to break down the silos of information that exist between groups working in a particular area.

Q: How do you expect to use the grant money awarded to you from the Knight News Challenge?

A: The grant money will allow us to fine-tune the platform by testing it with specific groups in Kenya. It will also allow us to see what happens when multiple installations of Ushahidi exist in a particular geographic area over a period of time — what happens when we merge the information together? Do patterns begin to emerge, e.g. links between poverty and crime? Do the groups we are working with begin to get creative about how they are collecting information? Does the platform allow for new information to emerge?

Q: How has Ushahidi’s technology been received in the nations where it’s been tested (Kenya, South Africa, etc.)? Has it accrued a large user base?

A: It has been received well so far even with limited marketing, which means we didn’t reach as many people as we would have liked. It has accrued a larger user base in terms of groups interested in using us, e.g. Al-Jazeera in Gaza, and groups in Lebanon used us to monitor the recent elections. Our strategy going forward is not to get involved in implementations, with the exception of Kenya, but rather to build a tool that is easy for anyone to use and implement according to their local situations.

Q: What do you most wish to accomplish with Ushahidi?

A: Building a tool that facilitates both easy and rapid information sharing anywhere in the world, and encouraging people to act on the information that has been shared, particularly in crisis situations.

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.

Gary Kebbel: I’m Gary Kebbel and I am the journalism program director at the Knight Foundation. But in particular I work with the Knight News Challenge.

Josh Benton: Where we are here at the unveiling of the third round of winners. I think our viewers will understand how the News Challenge process, broadly speaking, works. But how is this year different from previous years that you’ve gone thought the Challenge process?

Gary: That’s a good question, because this being the third year, we saw different sorts of things. I think that one of the types of things we saw this year — a lot more mobile, a lot more mobile projects. But also we saw a lot more projects that were taking current products, current processes, and applying them in a new way or putting them together in a new way to provide new content to people. So rather than saying “I’m going to create this new thing, and we’ll figure out how it’s used and we’ll deal with that,” these are people who are saying, “I’m going to take a blog, I’m going to take a wiki, I’m going to take a mashup, and I’m going to apply it in a new way for a new purpose to deliver different types of information to a new audience.”

Josh: And I think Alberto was saying earlier, the difference between invention and innovation — is that…

Gary: That’s exactly what we’re talking about.

Josh: There were nine winners selected this year, down significantly in number from the last two years. Is there a particular reason as to why fewer winners this time around?

Gary: No particular reason, other than 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 — they’re looking for projects that are digital, that deliver public information to people in a specific geographic area that help inform communities — and that people are willing to do it all open source.

Josh: So would you say that there are projects that did not get selected this year that might have been selected in previous years — as you said the judges have gotten a little bit tougher?

Gary: I can only guess. I don’t really know. But, 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.

Josh: Were application higher, lower than previous years this year? More applicants overall?

Gary: The total number of application was 2,323. We cut one of the categories out this year, which was a commercial category that wasn’t really working for us. That said, that eliminated a lot of the applicants, but in the open source category the number of applicants grew.

Josh: Ok. How many applicants where there last year? Do you remember? Overall?

Gary: Just right around 3,000. Total.

Josh: And can you walk through what the process was like? Let’s say that I submitted an idea on midnight of November 1. What was the process that went though for the people who were announced today as the nine winners? How many, what stages did they go through?

Gary: That idea — which was basically about answering like three questions or so — was read by a group of judges who’re called reviewers. And they would look at it and say either, “No, this doesn’t match — there are like four basic criteria you have to have and if it doesn’t have those, we can say no to this one.” So they would do that, and then they would look at others and say, “You know, this is pretty interesting — we ought to investigate this a little more.” And we would have two reviewers working on these, so they would get each other’s opinions and pull it all together. So they would then say, “Okay, we want to ask this group to submit a full proposal to us. We want to learn more about this idea — we want them to do more work on it and answer more questions.”

So that took 2,323 applicants down to approximately a little over 260 or so who were asked to submit a full proposal. And then those were all read, and those were bring down to 69. And that 69, we brought in a new group of reviewers to look at those and say: “Okay, you’re going to be the final cut — these are the ones that made it from application stage to proposal stage to submitting the budget and now you, you’re new group. What do you think?” And then they spend the day talking about it, and hashing out is this good, new, interesting, not interesting, not new, whatever. And then they make final recommendations to Knight Foundation.

Josh: For applicants who got some ways into a process but didn’t make the final cut — I know it’s hard to generalize, but are there specific things that separated the ones — the nine on stage today from the next tier down? You know, if someone just missed and they’re looking for advice on kinds of things that they might need to do if they’re want to apply again next year. Is there any advice you can offer them?

Gary: First I would say when it gets down to that final 69, or whatever that final group is, that number — they’re all good. They’re all interesting, they all qualify. And then it’s just the further refining discussion of: what’s the potential, what’s the sustainability, what’s the capacity of the individual or organization to make this happen. You start looking at other questions. But by that time, they’re all good. In fact so good, that we’re asking other foundations to look at that final 69, to see there’s anything there that they’re interested in funding.

Josh: I know the Knight Foundation has been very generous in having other venues — other routes to funding for journalism initiatives. We have the investigative reporting initiative just announced a few days ago, the community grants that went out in January to MinnPost and others. Would you say that the role of the News Challenge in Knight’s overall journalism giving has changed from what it was a couple of years ago?

Gary: No, I don’t think so. I mean, what the News Challenge did is it said to us and to the world: We don’t know the answers. We’re going to ask the world what are the answers to this problem. Here’s a problem: information flow to communities. And we don’t know the answers except that we see that the news ecosystem is in trouble. So, what are we going to do about it? It’s a very open process that is seeking experimentation and innovation. And it’s still doing that, and it’s still encouraging others to do that. But the nice thing about it is that by having staked that out, the Knight Foundation can say: “And in this other program, or initiative that we are doing, we’re going to focus on investigative journalism, or we’re going to focus on working with community foundations to fund information needs in their community.”

Josh: You mentioned the criteria that the initial screeners look for in those initial applications, and one of the ones that sometimes raises the most question is the need for it to be tied to a locality. I know there are a lot of people that have complained, frankly, that — “Boy, I’ve got an idea that isn’t tied to Topeka, it doesn’t fit within the confines of that contest.” Can you talk about the reasoning behind that? And also they were a few on the stage today — what is the locality for DocumentCloud? It seems like there’s some fudginess about how local some of the winners might be.

Gary: Well, the idea with the requirement for local is that the project be tested in a locality. Therefore, Gotham Gazette is part of DocumentCloud and is very specifically testing this in New York City. And then it must be replicable to other communities. The idea behind it is that these aren’t just information and news projects for the sake of news information. But the sake is more important: It’s how information functions in a democracy, and how a democracy needs information to be optimal. Well, when you look at that, our democracy is geographic. We don’t elect virtual presidents, we don’t pay virtual taxes, and we have school boards and we have geographic districts and areas for our members of House of Representatives. So information and geography are still very closely tied to the way this democracy works.

Josh: In the way that the community information needs project that Knight is also involved in advocates. Having gone though the cycle — well, I guess you’re not really through the cycle, because there is plenty of work to do with the folks who won — but do you have anything different planned for the fourth cycle of the Knight News Challenge? Anything you’re going to do differently?

Gary: Well, we don’t know yet. I mean we are going to start meeting about it next week and we’ll see how it goes and how it develops.

Josh: No rest for the weary.

Gary: It’s still going to be the same basic contest with the same basic criteria of geography, community, open source, digital innovation. But do we add a different or other focus? Do we market it differently? We’re always looking at: Are we reaching the right people in the marketing? What I would love — I would love more entries from Japan and Korea and China. I would love more entries from computer science schools or from architects, visualizing data, visualizing information. So I think there is still a lot of people that we can make aware of that — they have skills that help all of us learn more or more easily digest information.

Josh: Okay, great. Thank you very much.

Gary: Thank you.

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 it simple, stupid. While Wikipedia’s increasingly strict citation system has made the world’s biggest wiki less accessible for inexperienced editors, the Gazette says they’ll be fighting that tendency with their interface, which will be built on the same MediaWiki software Wikipedia uses.

“We’re counting on a body of users that doesn’t necessarily have any technical expertise,” said Hickman. “I think the project will succeed or fail based in large part on the usability of our edit screens. If it’s too hard to put information in, or it feels like they’re always doing it wrong, then they’ll stop.”

— Choose one problem to solve together. One reason for Wikipedia’s success: every volunteer editor knows intuitively what an encyclopedia is supposed to do. By setting narrow goals for Councilpedia’s content, the Gazette hopes to signal to their own volunteers how to direct their energy.

“We don’t even particularly want to know if the council member kicks his dog,” Robinson said. “People are less likely to respond [to], ‘Tell us what you think about things that are going on in New York City!’ If you say to people, ‘Who’s giving money to your council member?’ people will show up.”

— Think of a wiki as community organizing. Robinson said the first six months of Councilpedia will be an “intensive outreach” effort, with paid interns fanning out to civic groups across the boroughs to promote and explain the site.

Hickman, who worked for three years as a community organizer before becoming the Gazette’s technical director, expects to spend about half her time in 2010 administering the site.

— Focus on landing one blockbuster success. The Gazette folks are eager to start their wiki grinding at a few particular rumors that, if confirmed, would spread like fire through local media.

“If we can really tease out one story that really grabs people’s attention, then I think we’ll get a flurry of activity,” Hickman said.

— Make it useful immediately. To win loyalty, Councilpedia would need to become something people feel they “weren’t able to do their work without,” Hickman said.

She and Robinson aren’t sure yet how much information they’ll need to seed the site with to start attracting contributions, but they’re certain no one would contribute to an empty site.

— Keep it accurate. Unconfirmed data and constant refinement may be good enough for Wikipedia, but it’s not good enough for the Gotham Gazette, Robinson said.

She has no idea how much staff time it’ll take to confirm every claim that is made on the wiki. But their goal is to hold everything to the standard of anything else on their web site. Anything less, Robinson said, would be unethical.

But if the Gazette’s staff swoop in to police every statement made on Councilpedia, will volunteers lose the sense of ownership that motivates their participation?

And just how accurate will the information people post turn out to be?

That’s exactly what the Knight Foundation is paying them to track, Robinson said.

“It’s always very surprising what people buy into and what they don’t,” she said. “It’s anybody’s guess at this point.”

[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.

“What we’re trying to do is to take that a step further and say, look, these kinds of visualization tools should be available to anybody,” Presnall told me. “Any creative individual, any small community news outlet, should be able to have the same kinds of data visualization tools as The New York Times and Washington Post at their easy disposal, so they can tell their essential community stories, so they can inform their local activists in community decision-making. And that’s really what it is — it’s about breaking down barriers to informed decision-making.”

The tangible goal of Presnall’s project is a data-mapping module to import raw data in a variety of formats and export it in an accessible manner. The site will be built in the popular content management system Drupal, and Presnall plans to include several export options — motion charts, timemaps, tagmaps, heatmaps, timelines and nicemaps, among others. Perhaps the biggest challenge, he told me, will be balancing simplicity and complexity — making sure it’s accessible enough for novices and advanced enough for experts.

Although Presnall insisted that data visualization isn’t the answer to every question — nothing wrong with a simple table — he does believe seeing data visually plays into something primal about the human brain.

“A lot of how we gather information news is visual, and the brain is able to process information extremely fast visually,” he said. “This is why data visualization works so well, because as humans, we’re really well-equipped to process information that way. We can capture patterns and essential themes in huge data sets very, very quickly through visual means, and at the end of the day, it’s about empowering people with that information.”

The next step is returning to the Drupal community to determine what progress has been made in visualization tools since the project was first pitched to Knight last fall. From there, Presnall anticipates “a really intense autumn of coding,” followed by the beta launch by December. Before all of that, though, something more immediate looms.

“First,” he joked, “we throw a big party. Now the hard work begins.”

The image above is a visualization of mentions of Germany, East Germany, and West Germany in The New York Times between 1981 and 2009. It was created by Vancouver artist Jer Thorp, whose terrific work we’ve mentioned before.

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?

Anyone who has waded through the National Security Archive’s wealth of FBI files and CIA reports will immediately recognize the benefit of DocumentCloud. What if you could search across the entire archive for a particular topic of interest (Pilhofer suggested Marilyn Monroe) and get pinged whenever that topic shows up in a new document? Or what if you were a business journalist up to your neck in SEC filings? Or a local blogger keeping tabs on your congressman’s earmarks?

Details are still being worked out, but running materials through DocumentCloud will involve some sort of optical character recognition (to render those pesky image-based PDFs favored by some government agencies into searchable text) and Open Calais (to extract metadata like names, locations, and dates for more effective indexing). The news organizations that contribute documents will likely host them as well, said Scott Klein, editor of online development at ProPublica and a creator of DocumentCloud. He described the project as more of a “card catalog” than, say, a repository.

There are other aspects of the project that I’d be happy to discuss in the comments, and maybe we can get Pilhofer and Klein to weigh in here as well (as though I’m not hyping them enough). The other creators are Eric Umansky of ProPublica and Ben Koski of the Times. So if you have any questions about DocumentCloud, feel free to ask, and I’ll work on getting answers.

UPDATE, 3:30 p.m.: The Document Cloud folks introduced their project at the Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT today, and I shot some raw video with Qik:

(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? Cell phones continue to be a focus; so does finding creative ways to use the knowledge of non-journalists to do better journalism. There are some great ideas on that list that I’ll be excited to see the results of; personally, I’ve got soft spots for DocumentCloud, Councilpedia, and Ushahidi.

But the most obvious trend is a decline in the number of winners and the amount they’re given. In 2007, the News Challenge funded 26 projects at a total of $11.7 million. In 2008, it funded 16 new projects at $5.5 million. And this year, it’s nine new projects at a little under $2 million.

Knight rightfully points out that several projects funded in ‘07 and ‘08 were designed to be paid over multiple years, so total Knight outlay this year for News Challenge projects — new and ongoing — will total about $5.1 million. Considering that the News Challenge was originally announced as a $25 million investment over five years, that seems to be about on pace.

But the buzz for months in future-of-journalism circles has been that the News Challenge hadn’t generated as many ideas to get excited about as in previous years. I certainly don’t think that’s a comment on Knight, which went out of its way this year to encourage more and better applications and has (admirably) continued to fund a lot of journalism projects through the economic downturn. But does it mean something larger that, for the largest and most high-profile source of grants to experimental news startups, there seems to be a shortage of great ideas to go around?

Are more of those great ideas finding V.C. funding, or money from some other grant program? Has most of the low-hanging fruit already been picked? Has Knight’s increased dedication to other journalism funding mechanisms drawn away some of the projects that otherwise would have gone through the News Challenge?

And some of the ideas that did advance far into the News Challenge process — while totally admirable and funding-worthy — seemed to have only a tenuous connection to what we’ve traditionally known as journalism. I would have expected the declining state of the industry to lead to more great funding-worthy ideas — as more folks are forced to think about new ways of doing journalism (and making a living) — not fewer.

So while we celebrate these new projects and Knight’s generosity toward them, it’s worth stopping to think about why the list of great projects to fund isn’t a lot longer — and what you can do to add to it.

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.

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.

DocViewer, which is the technology behind DocumentCloud, promises several features that would address the current failings of the PDF model. It would allow users to run their documents through an OCR (optical character recognition) service that would enable full-text searches of otherwise impenetrable material. Then DocViewer relies on OpenCalais, a web service developed by Thomson Reuters, which can tag documents with the names of known people and places found within the text. Any reporter who has ever attempted to wade through a thick stack of paper on deadline will immediately realize how helpful this would be.

“The problem we’re trying to solve here is the problem that TPM Muckraker had when they got thousands of pages of attorney general documents, and then just sort of threw it up online and said, ‘Take a look through this,’” said Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news technology at the Times. That effort, which won a Polk Award, broke new ground in crowdsourced journalism — a topic, incidentally, that we’re discussing in this month’s Lab Book Club. (And the TPM Muckraker blogger who posted those docs, Paul Kiel, now works for ProPublica.)

But the process wasn’t perfect. TPM readers had to navigate large PDF files and post their observations in the comments section of a blog post, which was helpful in the moment but limited in its long-term usefulness. “Those comments become more than just comments,” Pilhofer said. “They become actual data.”

DocumentCloud seeks to make the most of such data by allowing journalists and readers to annotate documents for all to see and benefit. Think of it as highlighting for the crowd. Pilhofer said the current proof of concept for DocViewer includes an annotation feature that’s similar to the notes users can leave on photographs in Flickr. Users will also be able to link directly to specific pages or even phrases in a document.

To get a sense of DocumentCloud’s potential, take a look at the database of Guantánamo Bay detainees that the Times made public on Nov. 3, when it was accompanied by a 1,500-word story. Each record is linked to relevant government documents that have been made public since “enemy combatants” were first held there in 2002. Pilhofer said the database isn’t using a full-featured version of DocViewer, but it certainly demonstrates the benefit of browsing documents grouped by subject rather than, say, the order in which the Defense Department happened to release them. What’s remarkable about the Gitmo collection, aside from its massive scope, is that the Times has offered up this information at all. As Pilhofer said, “It’s not usually in a newsroom’s DNA to release something like that to the public — and not just the public, the competition, too.”

Scott Klein, the director of online development for ProPublica, said that sharing — a maxim of the Internet, if not of newsrooms — would be the real power of DocumentCloud. The objective, he said, is to maximize the work of collecting documents that’s already been done on a particular topic and allow other journalists to build from there. “How can we collect those documents so the next reporter doing a story on this subject can find this information and use it and display it in a much more satisfying way?” he said.

ProPublica and the Times are asking the Knight Foundation for $1 million over three years to cover their anticipated costs. Klein said expenses would include staff to facilitate the program as well as hosting and bandwidth costs. I asked Pilhofer to respond to criticism of their application leveled by NYU’s Jay Rosen, who suggested that the for-profit Times Company shouldn’t be seeking foundation grants for its journalism. Here’s what Pilhofer said:

I can understand why some would feel that way, but I think it’s more a misunderstanding of what the project is and who it’s intended for…This is a grant submitted by us, but it’s not for us…The project is to create what we’re calling a consortium, some sort of entity that is not The New York Times, that is not ProPublica. Ideally, this will incorporate all sorts of media organizations and bloggers and watchdog groups and universities…If anything, Professor Rosen has it kind of backwards: We’re contributing to this effort. We’re contributing development resources, we’re contributing our time.

Obviously, I’m a fan of DocumentCloud and hope it sees the light of day. But whether they should receive a Knight grant is another question and depends, as my boss Josh asked, on whom the News Challenge is for. Based on the comments at my original post and around the web, it seems like DocumentCloud has generated some resentment among other News Challenge applicants more desperate for funding. One commenter also questioned whether ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, Paul Steiger, has an unfair advantage because he sits on the board of Knight, whose CEO, Alberto Ibargüen, is on the board of ProPublica. That web of ties could certainly help DocumentCloud’s application.

But what will help the project most is that it’s a good idea. And having waded through many News Challenge applications this month, I’ve seen that there’s truly a shortage of good ideas — or, at least, ones with clear potential to immediately improve journalism on a broad level. Kristen Taylor, Knight’s online community manager, said as much to me when she visited Cambridge in October. So while $1 million is a lot of money — a fifth of what Knight has committed to spend on News Challenge projects this year — but I’d bet that much cash that DocumentCloud will be one of the winners when they’re announced next fall.

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.