[In October, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy issued its report on how our media need to evolve to serve the public interest in the digital age. The effort included some big names: Google's Marissa Mayer, former solicitor general Ted Olson, ex-L.A. Times editor John Carroll, former FCC chairman [...]

“Ten years ago,” says Mark Katches, editorial director of California Watch, “there were 85 reporters covering the California state house; today there are fewer than 25.”
Katches sees California Watch, which officially launched yesterday after a soft launch period and months of preparation, as stepping into a “big void in doing investigative work in California.” Katches [...]

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]
You may have already heard of The Journalism Shop, the assemblage of ex-Los Angeles Times staffers [...]

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]
Laura Norton honed her crime-reporting skills in two years as a cops reporter at the Santa [...]

We’ll have to wait another six months to find out who wins 2010 Knight News Challenge grants, but early data does reveal one key thing: the future of journalism has an abundance of ideas. Nearly 2,500 of them, all told.
The News Challenge received 2,489 proposals for the 2010 contest, according to Jose Zamora, journalism program [...]

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]
Former Indianapolis Star software developer Chris Vannoy brings something unusual to his News Challenge application: a [...]

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The Knight News Challenge closed submissions for the 2010 awards last night at midnight, which means that another batch of great ideas, interesting concepts, and harebrained schemes gave their chance to convince the Knight Foundation they deserve funding. (Trust us — great, interesting, and harebrained are all well represented at this stage each [...]

If you’ve gone the entrepreneurial route you know that first flush of enthusiasm often dampens when nitty-gritty decisions need to be made. There’s accounting, taxes, incorporation, insurance — and that’s the clear stuff. Toss in murky issues around trademark and branding and it’s easy to see how dreams of independence get squelched.
The Citizen Media Law [...]

ProPublica invites publishers to “Steal Our Stories.” John Thornton, founder of The Texas Tribune, asked newspapers to pay for stories, but concluded the effort was hopeless. But another new nonprofit news organization, California Watch, the Sacramento-based reporting initiative to be launched next month by the Center for Investigative Reporting, is barreling full speed into the [...]

We are not lacking deep lamentations and grand plans for the future of journalism (clever commentary is abundant as well). New additions to this canon appear weekly, and many have a reactionary bent with lots of chest thumping and hand wringing. It’s often a bit much — which is why the appearance of a long-view, [...]

You might expect the fundraising consultant just hired by ProPublica to be optimistic, if not ebullient, about prospects for a tech-savvy, grassroots campaign to help sustain the nonprofit financially for the long haul. But Madeline Stanionis, CEO of Watershed Co., pronounces herself “skeptical.” “I’ve never drunk the Kool-Aid,” Stanionis told me in a phone interview [...]

Like a lot of people who are concerned about the future of journalism in the digital age, I’m still wondering what we’re supposed to have learned from the demise of Chi-Town Daily News last month. So I called one of my favorite editors of all time, Jacqui Banaszynski, who sits on the nonprofit’s board.
Turns out [...]

Everyblock won a $1,100,000 grant from the Knight Foundation in 2007 to build its innovative platform for aggregating local news and information. Two years later, soon after the Knight grant had expired, founder Adrian Holovaty announced that MSNBC had acquired EveryBlock.
The sale raised questions about nonprofit funding of for-profit ventures. After all, Knight had essentially [...]

You’ve still got two weeks to come up with the brilliant idea that’ll save journalism — or, to be more realistic, an idea that’ll earn some Knight Foundation cash and let you try something new and innovative. And unlike last year, you can choose to keep that idea secret until the cash arrives.
That’s because [...]

DocumentCloud, the souped-up repository of primary-source material that I’ve been raving about since it first emerged in November, has a big announcement today: They’ve signed up 20 more organizations — including The Washington Post, New Yorker, MSNBC, and ACLU — to contribute documents and test the first iteration of the consortium, which is expected to [...]