When The New York Times and New York University announced last week that they would collaborate on a news site covering the East Village neighborhood, it got me thinking: Beyond Manhattan, what could this mean for the future of journalism education?

While it’s true that this isn’t the first pro-academic partnership — even the Times already has turned over editorial control of a hyperlocal site to CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism — this partnership is different in kind: NYU and its Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute get to approach this project (dubbed The Local: East Village, or LEV) like a true startup, as students and faculty work to build, design, and learn to maintain the site from the ground up.

That level of “ownership” makes this a unique experiment, and raises the specter of increased ties between j-schools and news organizations, both working together to plug holes in their offerings. Journalism programs need more opportunities for students to get in-the-field experience that is digital, “real,” and attuned to the hyperlocal, entrepreneurial, bootstrapping kind of newswork of the future. And news organizations need more outside help to blanket news and information at the block-by-block level, especially as in-house resources shrink.

Put the two together, and the possibilities are intriguing. (While critics cry foul over the Times’ “exploitation” of free student labor, they miss the point here: that this marks a progressive step for journalism training, and something students might actually want to do. Having your work appear on nytimes.com is worth a little “free” labor now for bigger benefits later.)

For NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, the partnership is something of a breakthrough, a melding of so many journalistic elements for which he has advocated over the years:

Permit me to say what I find so fascinating about this project. Man, it has everything in it — everything I’ve been studying since I gave my first talk to newspaper editors in Des Moines, Iowa in 1989. It’s neighborhood journalism; it’s cosmopolitan too. It’s about innovation; it’s about the classic virtues, like shoe leather reporting. It combines the discipline of pro journalism with the participatory spirit of citizen journalism. It’s an ideal way to study the craft, which is to say it’s an entirely practical project. It’s what J-school should be doing: collaborating with the industry on the best ways forward. It’s news, it’s commentary, it’s reviewing, it’s opinion, it’s the forum function, community connection, data provision, blogging — all at once. LEV I said is a start-up, but it’s starting with the strongest news franchise there is: the New York Times.

Last week I asked Jay to join me in a Q&A via Gmail chat. While his post at PressThink covers all the nooks and crannies of this partnership, I wanted to get his thoughts on what this arrangement could mean for journalism educators elsewhere.

Seth Lewis: What’s the key takeaway for other journalism programs? What can they learn from this partnership?

Jay Rosen: Well, first, I am hoping there are lessons in the set-up, or structure of the relationship between us and the Times, in which we have a “small project,” confined to one neighborhood, 14 blocks long, but a “big puzzle” and not a lot of bureaucracy — a simple “hinge,” as I said in my PressThink post. Then, I am hoping there will be lessons from what we actually do with the site, but those are to come.

So, are you suggesting that journalism schools could do well to focus on small, incremental steps toward local media partnerships? I mean, if I’m a journalism school director and I like what I see from this partnership, what’s the first step? What should I do?

This project began when I noticed what the Times was doing with The Local, and thought I glimpsed a need to experiment and learn. I mean, that was the logic of what they were doing. So, the first step is to get inside the head of the potential collaborator and start with a need or interest they have. The next step was to look at what we are doing at NYU and where we wanted to go with our program, and figure out where the two circles overlapped.

So, my Studio 20 concentration wants to work on innovation puzzles that matter in journalism in the broadest sense, but to do that through projects that can be completed in a semester. The Carter Institute at NYU teaches local reporting and needs a better way to do that. Put those things together and you get a version of The Local that Studio 20 can incubate, that the Reporting New York concentration at NYU can “own,” and that the Times can benefit from as a learning lab — and the community can gain from because it serves the East Village well. So it’s really four or five overlapping circles, because this is a community that NYU, the university at large, has a big stake in; it’s a big land owner and expects to own more land here.

Once I had the idea — East Village! The Local! — I just looked for ways to multiply the overlapping circles.

Oh, and one more thing: I tried to listen well to what the Times needed from such a project and understand it from their perspective as well as I did from ours.

As University of Nevada journalism professor Donica Mensing mentioned in her comment on your post, there are some structural factors in higher education that can pose a challenge for these kinds of projects. For example, university curricula (particularly at the grad level) emphasize an individual-based pattern of learning, as opposed to the group collaboration required for something like The Local. And, of course, there’s the issue of transitory students staying with a project after the semester ends. Studio 20, being nimble and adaptive, seems better equipped than most for these challenges, but can you talk about how journalism programs in general can address these structural barriers in seeking to set up media partnerships?

There are a few answers to that. The first is: I built Studio 20 for projects like this, and the whole premise and starting point for the class that is incubating The Local: East Village (LEV) is, “everyone works together on one big project.” The basis on which students are accepted into Studio 20 is collaboration is key, so that’s not a “new” demand or a detail left to be worked out later.

Also, The Local is going to migrate over to the part of the Carter Institute where it is more logically sustained: Reporting New York, where it is an ideal teaching vehicle. And we thought a lot about the sustainability puzzle before we even started down this road. Third, the way I run Studio 20, people take the lead on parts of the project, which become their “baby,” so to speak. For example, Tim Stenovec is taking the lead on community relationships within the East Village — that becomes something he can own.

Finally, the most important thing is we knew going in that we would have to overcome the biggest hurdle for academic partnerships in journalism, which is the semester clock runs one way, but a news site runs all the time. That was present at the beginning, it’s not something we overlooked at all, and it’s been in our sights since day one.

So, perhaps one lesson from this is that journalism programs need to reform the curriculum first, seek media partners second, rather than the other way around?

We were greatly aided in this project by a Studio 20 curriculum that is built around doing projects, yes. And we planned far enough ahead to have a Reporting New York course, The Hyperlocal Newsroom, that feeds talent to the project. Without those two things, I don’t think this would work.

Compared to the New York Times’ partnership with CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, which has assumed editorial control of an existing Local site, NYU will be building something from scratch. How important is that, from a journalism education standpoint? Can you talk about the “value added” involved in that process, and perhaps how that should figure into other partnerships that j-schools might develop elsewhere?

For Studio 20, all the value is in the startup, design phase, figuring out workflows and how it should operate, and making it come alive not only for NYU journalism students and faculty, but making it come alive as a “learning project” for The New York Times. That is just very, very challenging and real. What I want for my students in Studio 20 is to grapple with the innovation puzzle whole; I wanted to walk into the classroom on the first day of the project with the entire problem on the table, as it were. And this project comes very close to that.

My approach intellectually speaking borrows a lot from American pragmatism. In pragmatism, the idea is our knowledge develops not when we have the most magnificent theory or the best data but when we have a really, really good problem. How to make The Local run and perform well, given the constraints and tools we have, is a really, really good problem, and I think that is where universities should start. The result is what I said last night.

Yes, like I think you’ve said before: It’s better to focus on questions rather than topics.

Topics suck. If you have a topic, you are nowhere.

You have a media partner here, but what about a funding partner? Do you foresee nonprofit foundations wanting to underwrite this kind of project, as Carnegie, McCormick Tribune, and Knight have done with CUNY’s partnership? And, for the cash-strapped j-school out there that’s thinking, “Hey, this is a cool idea, but I’m not sure we have the money to make the structural and curricular changes needed” — any thoughts to offer on funding options?

We are fundraising for this from potential donors, and we have an idea for a revenue model, that is all I can tell you now. We would love a funding partner that understands what we are up to and why it matters for journalism education.

Photo of Jay Rosen by Joi Ito used under a Creative Commons license.

The closed applications are anyone’s guess. But the 222 open ones are posted for anyone to see — and to critique. Setting aside subjective opinions, there are two publicly visible datapoints that can give us an indication of how an app is doing: how many times each application has been viewed by the public — suggesting the level of interest in the proposal — and the average rating (on a five-star scale) each app has received from site users.

So, by those measures, who are the leaders in the clubhouse? Here are the five most-viewed applications:

1. Citizen DAN — a request for $235,000 to build a framework for local data for citizen journalists

2. GoMap Riga — $300,000 to create a map-based social platform for Latvia’s capital

3. Hollaback! — $200,000 to build a platform for women to easily report street harassment

4. Names Behind the Numbers — $125,000 for “a project that gives a human face to the statistics” of deaths in poor parts of Washington, D.C.

5. NPOffice — $58,050 for a set of web tools to provide information about nonprofits in São Paulo.

And the five highest-rated (lots of overlap here):

1. GoMap Riga

2. Hollaback!

3. Names Behind the Numbers

4. NewsShift — $585,000 to build “a collaborative research layer to online news stories”

5. NPOffice

In addition, of the five News Challenge we profiled as interesting back in December, two are apparently still in the running: 101 Source and FollowIndy. (Sorry, Journalism Shop, Homicide Watch D.C., and NewsGraf.)

In any event, the News Challenge won’t be decided by pageviews or public popularity — we’ll have to wait until June to see who the judges picked. Go poke around the entries that remain — any seem of particular interest to you?

[EDITOR'S NOTE: See Dan's comment below. This post originally used the list of still-in-the-running entries linked on the front page of the News Challenge. Turns out that's not the right list; this one is. The post has been corrected.]

[Disclosure: The Knight Foundation is a financial supporter of the Nieman Journalism Lab.]

I talked with Jose Zamora, who works on journalism programs for Knight, recently to get an update on the most high-profile competition in the future-of-news space, which is in its cutdown stage. This year, Knight received 2,489 applications, roughly 35 percent of which were in the open category. (This year, Knight gave aspirants the choice to keep their applications private during the judging process or to make them open and readable to the public.)

Zamora said that number is now down to around 500, after the first round of winnowing. (There are 222 left in open, with the remainder in closed.) Each of the surviving applicants was asked to submit a full application — more than just the precis they submitted initially — and a panel of judges is currently reviewing those full apps. “Our goal is to review all of them by the end of the month,” Zamora told me, at which point the field will be narrowed again to “50 or 60 projects.”

Those will be put before a new panel (“with fresh eyes”), which will do another round of narrowing on March 31. After conversations with the applicants still standing, a final group will be recommended to Knight’s board in June. The winners will be announced at an event at MIT shortly thereafter.

Trends among the applications

Zamora said that even after three rounds of the News Challenge, some applicants were still not understanding the basic requirements of the contest. One area that sparked lots of applications, as always, was community news sites — small news outlets that aim to do some of the work traditionally done by local newspapers in covering a community. “Those are really worthy projects, and there’s definitely a need for them,” Zamora said. But the News Challenge is designed to fund innovation, and many of those applicants weren’t proposing anything innovative — important, yes, but not innovative.

(Zamora recommends those disappointed applicants consider entering the Knight Community Information Challenge, a separate contest with a March 8 deadline. It funds those sorts of community-news projects, but requires a partnership with a local foundation to be considered. “The idea there is that local news should be locally supported,” Zamora said.)

Other hot topics among the applications: mobile, data visualization, and augmented reality projects.

Reaching out to a broader audience

Late in the process, Knight pushed back the deadline for this year’s challenge from October to December — a move that led some to wonder if the applications received weren’t up to snuff. Zamora repeated that the switch was aimed at taking time to reach out to a broader pool of potential applicants, beyond the sort of wired journalists who, say, read this site. “We’re very good at reaching journalists and media organizations,” he told me. “But we learned that we could have more outreach to social entrepreneurs, to developers, to urban planners, to people outside our natural and known networks.” Without quantifying it, he said the outreach had proved a success and created a more diverse applicant pool than in past years.

The decision was made as part of a consultation with Arabella, a philanthropy services firm that Knight retained to help improve the contest. The firm examined 29 different innovation contests like the News Challenge and tried to suss out the different models each use. The report doesn’t pick winners and say which models are best, but it does provide a useful sweep of the field and illustrate how various competitions try to generate the best results. You can download the Arabella report yourself.

Knight News Testing Labs

Perhaps the most interesting thing Zamora told me was that Knight is in the process of developing what he called Knight News Testing Labs, although it’s unclear if that’s a final title. “It’s a project where universities and media organizations will get to play and use all the technology and projects the News Challenge has been creating and see what works best, how it works best,” he told me. In other words, a chance to put News Challenge projects — which are required to have an open-source component — through their paces as replicable, spreadable ideas. “We want to make them really plug-and-play” for news organizations, Zamora said.

Knight foundation head Alberto Ibargüen mentioned the same idea last June 17, at the unveiling of last year’s News Challenge winners at MIT. (I know the date because I made sure we tweeted it at the time.)

Zamora said the testing labs are very much still in development, although he said Knight hoped to have something ready to move forward with in the second half of the year. It sounds to me like a great chance for some News Challenge greatest hits — like EveryBlock, Spot.us, and Printcasting — to find their way into traditional newsrooms.

[Disclosure: The Knight Foundation is a financial supporter of the Nieman Journalism Lab.]

Way back in the age of paper, in 1986, professor James Beniger, then at Harvard, produced a useful chart on the civilian labor force of the United States. It showed how the bulk of American workers had moved during the past two centuries from working in agriculture to industry to service, and now, to information. Point being: the digital age didn’t just sneak up on us. It’s been a long, slow evolution. So shame on us for not changing our rules and laws and institutions for this new age.

We were well warned. Just after World War II, the Hutchins Commission said that traditional media could do much better: they should take on the social responsibility of providing the news “in a context that gives it meaning.” In the 1960s, the Kerner Commission said mainstream media wasn’t diverse enough to properly tell the story of this changing nation. Same decade: the Carnegie Commission said the status quo was simply not working, that public broadcasting must be created to fill the gap.

After that, a stream of reports — from the University of Pennsylvania, from Columbia University and others — agreed and repeated the same three fundamental findings:

— Hutchins: Our news systems are not good enough,

— Kerner: They don’t engage everyone,

— Carnegie: We need alternatives.

Here comes digital media, and — boom! — an explosion of alternatives. And we’re all — shocked? Apparently. So let’s try it again. This time, the big report comes from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, prepared by the Aspen Institute with a grant from Knight Foundation, where I work.

A new examination of a familiar problem

Why a new commission? We are now deep into the second decade of the World Wide Web. It was our hope that when our leaders were finally ready to change things, they would consider a new perspective. Hutchins, Kerner and Carnegie and the others focused on what should be done to improve, diversify, add to — and nowadays the talk is to save — traditional media.

The Knight Commission started with communities, by visiting them and hearing from their residents. News and information, the commission says, are as important to communities as good schools, safe streets or clean air. Journalism, it says, does not need saving so much as it needs creating.

As a former newspaper editor, that last point seems pretty important to me. Of the nation’s 30,000 burgs, towns, suburbs and cities, how many are thoroughly covered by the current news system? Ten percent? Five? Less? We’re talking about knowing how to get, sometimes for the first time, the news and information we need to run our communities and live our lives.

Is the Knight Commission making a difference? We hope so. The Federal Communications Commission has hired Internet expert Steve Waldman to study the agency, top to bottom, thinking of reforms with Knight’s 15 recommendations in mind. Free Press, the nation’s largest grassroots media policy group, embraced the report, especially its call for universal affordable broadband. Ernie Wilson, dean of USC’s Annenberg School and chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, announced he is boosting innovation in public media. CPB backed NPR’s Project Argo in a partnership with Knight Foundation.

Community lawmakers are agreeing with commissioner and former FCC chair Michael Powell’s points about “information healthy communities,” about the role of open government and public web sites in local information flow. Commissioner Reed Hundt, also a former FCC chair, presented the Knight findings to the Federal Trade Commission.

Librarians across the country are pushing the role they can play as digital training and access centers. In addition to its dozens of media innovation grants, Knight Foundation itself took the commission’s advice: it has made more than $5 million in grants to libraries.

Taking the next steps

Now what? The policy work needs to come down to the detail level. Steve Coll and New America Foundation are among those thinking about that. How can we really spur more marketplace innovation? How can government rules and laws make it easier for newspapers to be nonprofits, treat student and nonprofit journalists equally, require the teaching of news literacy?

The hard part is ahead of us: that is, involving every aspect of our communities in this issue, governments, nonprofits, traditional media, schools, universities, libraries, churches, social groups — and, especially, citizens themselves. How do you do that? How do you make “news and information” everyone’s issue? It’s a tall order, perhaps the most difficult thing of all.

Universities could help here. Nearly two thirds of the nation’s high school graduates at least start out in a college or university of some kind. These institutions could make news literacy courses mandatory for incoming students. Understanding and being able to navigate the exploding world of news and information is as fundamental to the college students of our nation as knowing English. Stony Brook has already been paving that path. There, nearly 5,000 students have taken news literacy under the first university-wide course of its kind.

Colleges could set an example for the rest of our institutions. We are, after all, at the dawn of a new age. Who a journalist is, what a story is, what medium works, and how to manage the new interactive relationship with the people formerly known as the audience — all of these are changing as we speak. The complete metamorphosis of how a society connects the data and events of daily life to the issues and ideas that can better its life — would seem to be something colleges should want all of its students to think about.

This is hardly a short-term project. It took more than 200 years for America to change from a country where most people work growing food to one where most people work growing information. It will take time for the wholesale rewriting of America’s media policies, not to mention getting up the guts to spend the trillion dollars or more needed to remake our access to high speed digital systems and ability to use them.

Yet all of this is needed for America to become an information-healthy nation. A nation without universal, affordable broadband is like a nation without highways and railroads. We would be stuck on the surface streets of the new economy, tracing our fall from a global force to a secondary society.

More than 70 years after Hutchins, the basic story is still the same. The country’s news and information systems still aren’t good enough, still don’t engage everyone and still invite alternatives. It’s time to start doing something about this issue. Our rules, the laws, the policies — even the high school and college classes we teach — these things matter to how the news ecosystem in any given community is shaped. They can speed innovation or stunt it. So pick a recommendation — the Knight Commission lists 15 — and have at it.

[Disclosure: The Knight Foundation is a supporter of the Lab.]

“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 has assembled the largest investigative team in the state: seven reporters, two multimedia producers, and two editors.

The site is focused on investigative watchdog journalism. It won’t cover the ins and outs of the California legislature or other governmental minutiae, aiming instead to “expose injustice, waste, mismanagement, wrongdoing, questionable practices and corruption, so that those responsible can be held to account and the public is armed with the information it needs to debate solutions and spark change.” Besides political topics, the site will cover higher education, health and welfare, and criminal justice.

Assembling the team

Based in Berkeley, California Watch has a four-person team in Sacramento, and hopes to open a Los Angeles office as well. 

The team’s credentials are impressive. Katches is a California native who lived in the state most of his life; he directed investigative teams at The Orange County Register and for the past two years at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The team’s director is Louis Freedberg, a longtime reporter on California affairs for the San Francisco Chronicle and other state and national publications. Senior editor Robert Salladay is a veteran of the L. A. Times; senior reporter Lance Williams has 32 years of California coverage experience and was one of the two reporters at the Chronicle who uncovered the Barry Bonds-BALCO steroid doping scandal.  Web entrepreneur Susan Mernit, a veteran of AOL, Netscape and Yahoo, supplies web strategy. Multimedia guru Mark Luckie (of 10,000 Words fame) is producing content. And longtime Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Robert Rosenthal, director of CIR, and others on the CIR staff supply development and administrative support.

I asked Katches whether California Watch is doling out the kind of salaries reported to be going to the top talent at recent nonprofit startup Texas Tribune ($315,000 to CEO Evan Smith, $90,000 to top reporter Brian Thevenot). “Not even close,” he said. Top California Watch executives are paid closer to what Texas Tribune reporters get, but Katches says the pay scales are competitive and appropriate for the levels of talent and scope of management involved.

The model

The site aims for up to a dozen updates every weekday, including daily blog entries by most staffers. A rotation of four top stories are featured front and center, followed by the “WatchBlog” and an inside-the-newsroom feature. Like The Texas Tribune, the site offers an extensive data center, currently featuring information about stimulus-funding distribution, campaign finance, educational costs, and wildfires. It’s not as extensive or interactive as the Texas Trib databases and document collection, but the intent is to build up its contents over time.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, the oldest nonprofit investigative news organization in the country (founded 1977), and joins a growing list of state and regional nonprofits that have in common a serious journalistic mission but take a variety of approaches to funding, coverage and distribution. The highest profile, best-funded members of that list now include The Texas Tribune, MinnPost, the St. Louis Beacon, Voice of San Diego, and (at a national level) ProPublica. “The dot-org boom” is really one of the top journalism stories of 2009, Katches says.

CIR garnered about $3.5 million in funding to start California Watch (roughly the same amount as The Texas Tribune), enough for more than two years of operations at its $1.5 million annual budget. Major funding came from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation [also a supporter of this site —Ed.], the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the James Irvine Foundation.

Going forward, California Watch plans to develop a business model that includes continued philanthropic support, along with revenue from sponsorship, individual memberships, advertising, and licensing. The site is offering its content to the state’s newspapers and other media on a fee basis. One of its first stories during the development period was carried by 25 of the state’s papers, all on the front page. (This fee-based model differs from The Texas Tribune, which is offering its content free to Texas media outlets for now; Texas Tribune also covers day-to-day politics in addition to doing investigative journalism.) California Watch partners with KQED in San Francisco for radio and TV distribution; with the Associated Press for distribution through its Exchange marketplace; and with New America Media for distribution of translated versions to ethnic media.

[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 that has evolved into an editorial matchmaking service. (Its survey of ex-LATers detailing their predictions for the paper’s failure got some notice from Romenesko a couple weeks ago.)

It’s an online co-op where former Times reporters, editors, and designers can hang a freelance shingle and land jobs. The site, which evolved out of an email list for laid-off staffers, currently has around 30 members. And it’s throwing its hat into the ring for a Knight News Challenge grant. According to their application, they hope to build:

— a national network of regional reporters/editors/researchers/graphic artists who will create original work on spec, to be placed by The Journalism Shop editors.

— acting as an assigning conduit for editors looking for freelancers (a modern version of the old photo agency structure, but for writers and editors).

— a “pitching engine” to solicit assignments for our members.

— pursuing grants for topic specific journalism.

— building out the existing website to publish those stories (we’re working on some ideas for that now.

Scott Martelle, one of the co-founders and a former Times reporter himself, said The Journalism Shop helps assignment editors quickly find and tap experienced journalists for coverage. And since all of The Journalism Shop’s members are former LAT staffers, they have a built-in credibility with editors that not all freelancers can boast.

“There’s very little going on out there that tries to keep experienced journalists in the profession,” Martelle said. “We’re trying to keep people alive until the Big Bang ends and the solar systems begin to coalesce again.”

As you can see from the Shop’s Facebook page, work doesn’t always originate from traditional news organizations. The boundaries have expanded to include things like alumni magazines, annual reports, consulting, book work, and the like.

A News Challenge grant would allow Martelle and co-founder Brett Levy to dedicate more time to the project. Specifically, they want to build out the infrastructure and create additional opportunities for their stable of writers through outreach and advertising. Martelle said the model could also be extended to other locales.

Laura Norton honed her crime-reporting skills in two years as a cops reporter at the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Now Norton, a freelancer in Washington, D.C., wants to build a new way to gather information on that city’s murders. (There have been 135 D.C. homicides so far in 2009.)

With Homicide Watch D.C., she wants to aggregate a variety of web-based resources — everything from official court documents to news reports to posts on Facebook and MySpace — and then create layers of context through original reporting. And here’s the hook: All that information will be constructed around the victims, not the crimes.

What she’s proposing is a mashup of crime visualizations, homicide blogs, social media tools, and the online gathering places offered by the likes of Legacy.com. The “victim pages” would be driven by an extensive database custom built for the project. Here’s a rough prototype from Norton’s proposal, built around De’Vante Glober, a 16-year-old shot and killed on Jan. 7:

There’s a public service component to this as well. News organizations can’t cover every homicide, and they rarely go beyond cursory details on the few stories that do bubble up. This project attempts to fill that coverage gap for the people who need it most: family members and neighbors.

“I think that when a crime happens in a neighborhood, people search for this,” Norton said. “And when you have a homicide every three days, which is what D.C. averaged the first half of the year, news organizations can’t get to that so easily.”

The News Challenge received 2,489 proposals for the 2010 contest, according to Jose Zamora, journalism program associate at the Knight Foundation. That’s on par with last year, when there were 2,323.

The big change with the 2010 Challenge, and something we covered previously, was the availability of open and closed submission categories. In an email, Zamora said 65 percent of proposals came through the closed category and 35 percent were open. That’s a pretty big shift from September, when the ratio was roughly reversed — a sign that the late submitters wanted to keep their entries private.

Of course, the application window was longer this year. The original deadline for entries was Oct. 15, but Knight pushed it back two months to diversify the applicant pool. Zamora said that worked: “We were able to reach to other networks of software developers and entrepreneurs.”

Anecdotally, I spent a fair amount of time digging through the open category, and I was struck by the number of data-driven projects. It wasn’t so long ago that words like “database,” “feeds” and “aggregation” seemed novel in a journalism context. That’s no longer the case. The line between editorial and programming gets blurrier every year.

Looking through the open category you can see that a lot of people waited until the last minute to submit their applications. Procrastination is nothing new with the News Challenge, but Zamora doesn’t recommend it. “It is all cons on this issue,” he wrote. “Throughout the application period we wrote a few posts asking everybody to submit early and avoid the deadline, but most of the applicants waited until the last day. This is not good. It creates a lot of traffic to the site, making it run slower than usual, which does not give applicants the best user experience.”

As far as next steps go, the culling has already begun. Promising applications will be invited to submit in-depth proposals by Jan. 31. Judges then select the top 50 projects sometime in February. News Challenge winners — usually a dozen or so — are finalized in the spring and announced in June.

You can find further News Challenge details and milestones here. Good luck to all the applicants!

[Editor's note: The Knight Foundation is a supporter of the Nieman Journalism Lab.]

Former Indianapolis Star software developer Chris Vannoy brings something unusual to his News Challenge application: a fully functional site already built on nights and weekends.

FollowIndy is a hyperlocal aggregator, tapping into the vast web of information published through Twitter, Flickr, news sites, and blogs. Its value is in the limits of its geography: The site only targets news and information relevant to Indianapolis. “Unlike a lot of aggregators that sort of cast a wide net, the idea is to get a very small net that’s aiming for a specific area,” Vannoy said. “It’s about getting a full picture of what’s going on in Indianapolis and then providing some context around what people are talking about.”

Once the sources are pulled into FollowIndy, content is automatically tagged and aggregated, which makes it possible to aggregate all material related to arson, apartment complexes, or Peyton Manning.

Aggregating both professional and personal feeds means Vannoy has data to track how stories are pushed by each — if mainstream media is pushing a story that’s then being picked up by personal users, or vice versa. That’s similar to the Media Cloud project of our friends down the street here at Harvard. For instance, here is a visualization of mentions of the word “flu” in the sources FollowIndy tracks. Notice how mentions spike after The Indianapolis Star mentions is around 24 seconds in:

So if FollowIndy is already up and running, what does Vannoy need $100,000 of Knight money for? Vannoy wants to expand the network of sources it tracks (it doesn’t yet include local blogs, for instance), and it needs a variety of infrastructure improvements, such as better autotagging of content. But he believes FollowIndy is a model that can be duplicated in other markets, as he writes in his application:

By focusing on a single geographic area, you can go deep: pulling in blogs…alternative news weeklies, business journals, television stations and Twitter to try to grab every last speck of news. It’s that volume of data that suddenly makes things interesting and makes some things possible. Small-scale trends by geography, what a geographic area is linking to and the like become not just possible, but relatively easy.

But we also want your help. Do you know of a really interesting News Challenge application? Did you submit one yourself? Let us know about it. Either leave a comment on this post or email Mac Slocum. In either case, keep your remarks brief — 200 words or less. We'll run some of the ones you think are noteworthy in a post later this week. —Josh]

—

The most eye-catching thing about the NewsGraf’s proposal is its price tag; $950,000 over two years. That stands out in a sea of $50,000 and $100,000 requests.

But if you spend a little time digging into the intricacies of NewsGraf, that big price becomes downright reasonable. Cheap even. That’s because with NewsGraf, Mike Aldax and John Marshall want to digitally duplicate the knowledge, connections and synapses of a veteran journalist. That kind of audacity doesn’t come cheap.

Technologically speaking, NewsGraf ventures into the murky world of semantic tagging and social graphs. Unless you’ve got a computer science degree, it’s hard to get a handle on exactly what NewsGraf is. It’s a database, it’s a search engine, but it’s also a connectivity machine.

It’s easier to compare NewsGraf to a person — think of it as a veteran reporter. Someone who carries around a vast collection of interviews, research, and general knowledge gleaned from years working a beat. All this info is tucked neatly into her memory, and she taps this personal database whenever she’s assembling a story. It searches for red flags, patterns, and relationships. It’s an editorial sixth sense.

But there’s a big problem with this brain-based model: It disappears when the brain — and its associated owner — get laid off. With news organizations already running smaller and faster, how can they possibly overcome this growing knowledge gap?

Enter NewsGraf. The project is still on the drawing board, but the idea is to capture all that connective information in a format that’s accessible to anyone with a web browser. A visitor can enter the name of a local newsmaker and see the threads that bind that person to others in the community. It’s like Facebook, as designed by a beat reporter.

Data will come from government databases, local newspapers, blogs, and other sources. After running a query, a user can click through to the originating stories for deeper information. NewsGraf is merely the conduit here; Marshall said they want to send users to the information, not keep them locked within NewsGraf’s walls. As the application puts it:

As newspapers find it increasingly difficult to send reporters to monitor local politics and public discourse, communities will need alternative mechanisms to ensure transparency and good government. Local journalists and citizens will be able to draw upon NewsGraf’s data as a starting point for further investigation, uncovering important relationships that may be influencing decisions being made in their community.

The team behind the idea combines journalism (Aldax covers city hall for The San Francisco Examiner) and tech (Marshall is a software developer and a former VP at AOL). NewsGraf will focus on San Francisco and the Bay Area if it wins a News Challenge grant. But if funding doesn’t come through, Aldax hopes someone else runs with the idea. “We just want to see this happen,” he said.

The Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center doesn’t want those entrepreneurial instincts to wither on the vine. It’s just launched an ambitious collection of free legal resources called the Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), the centerpiece of which is a matchmaking service that connects online publishers with attorneys who can address their specific needs. It’s a full-service effort, covering everything from basic business structure to contracts to representation in court.

OMLN is open to any online publisher that meets the network’s requirements. Organizations must be independent, journalism-minded, and have an eye toward sustainability either as for-profit businesses or nonprofits. If that describes your outfit, you can start the application process here.

The really good news is that pro bono assistance is available and the thresholds are generous. For-profit organizations that make less than $100,000 gross annual revenue qualify, as do nonprofits with operating budgets under $250,000. The high ceiling should cover the growing legion of bootstrapped web publishers.

“As long as their work is in the public interest, as long as it involves adherence to journalistic standards, then they’re going to be able to get help through the network until they’ve grown to the point where they are no longer entitled to free services,” said our friend David Ardia, the Project’s director.

Deeper-pocketed clients who don’t fall within the pro bono requirements are encouraged to apply, for free, as well. They’ll just have to arrange payment terms with a matched attorney.

More than a directory

Machine intelligence and algorithms can’t encompass all the variations in client needs and attorney specialties. That’s why four OMLN lawyers drive the process through extensive client screenings. These screenings need to capture a lot of nuance because applicants aren’t judged against any quantitative criteria, like page views or posting frequency.

Here’s how the matching process works: A lawyer in the network logs in to the site and is presented with client requests matching the lawyer’s pre-defined criteria (“nonprofits in California” or “clients who want to incorporate,” that sort of thing). Client names are not revealed at this point. The lawyer selects a specific request, and an OMLN staffer determines if the pairing is a good fit. If it is, the lawyer receives detailed information so he/she can check for conflicts with existing clients. The lawyer and the new OMLN client then get in touch directly and OMLN fades into the background. Either side can opt out if the match doesn’t feel right. Once the client’s legal issue is resolved, OMLN gathers feedback through private surveys with both parties.

OMLN needs to maintain balance if it’s going to be useful, Ardia said. Too many clients and online publishers won’t receive timely help. Too many lawyers and frustration mounts over lack of opportunities. Equilibrium is struck through a “slow as you go” approach that was honed while the site was being built. OMLN’s initial batch of clients was limited to past winners of the Knight News Challenge, and lawyers were invited to join based on their skill sets. Some amount of calibration will continue now that site is officially open, with the aim of matching clients and lawyers within three to four weeks of a request for assistance. That’s pretty quick considering the effort and issues at play.

OMLN itself is a 2007 News Challenge winner. It used an initial $250,000 grant to get the ball rolling, and it’s now running on two subsequent years of Knight funding. The goal is to make OMLN sustainable by the time funding runs out next October. Ardia hopes that since OLMN doesn’t bring in any money through the service, law firms and others will donate to support its continued operation.

What makes California Watch different? Robert Rosenthal, CIR’s executive director, says California Watch has built something of a reputation even before the official launch of its website (now set for December), getting stories onto front pages across the state, and wants to leverage that position. “Our goal is not to give it away,” Rosenthal said in a telephone interview Monday.

There’s no way to know in advance whether the strategy will succeed, Rosenthal acknowledged. But that’s how it goes these days in the news business, whether nonprofit or for-profit: Every new project is so much spaghetti thrown against the wall. Whether it sticks is left to the vagaries of economics, social trends and, of course, luck.

But one thing is certain, Rosenthal says. California Watch, like so many new nonprofit news organizations, is under tremendous pressure from funders to find a model that works in the now and creates sustainability for the long haul.

So far, California Watch has lined up $3.7 million in nearly equal donations from three foundations — Knight ($1.3 million), Hewlett ($1.2 million) and Irvine ($1.2 million). But Rosenthal said they all want to see California Watch pursue a business strategy that generates significant revenues from royalties, advertising and other activities that typically are reported as program service revenue on a nonprofit’s Form 990 federal tax return.

How much is still an open question, Rosenthal said, but a reasonable range might be anywhere from 25 percent to 40 percent of total revenues, he said. And the more, the better to create a virtuous cycle in fundraising. “That makes it easier to get funding from the foundations or wealthy individuals,” he said, adding that $120,000 of the Knight grant is earmarked for development of a business strategy.

California Watch also plans to adapt standard nonprofit strategies to the digital age. Like his peers at ProPublica, Rosenthal hopes to pursue smaller donors, perhaps with a strategy built around communities organized on Facebook or Twitter. Rather than ask for donations up front, California Watch plans to demonstrate its good works to community members and then solicit their support. “I can go to you and show you ‘we did this, and it made a difference — help us,’” he said.

Looking to the challenges ahead, Rosenthal, a former executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, said he was confident that California Watch could do great journalism; building a successful business model will be the bigger challenge.

“The landscape is moving so quickly,” he said.

“The Reconstruction of American Journalism” (download PDF here) sets its sights wholly on local news. It’s built on the thesis that the accountability journalism found in local newspapers offers the most value to communities, and the most risk if it disappears. 

Beyond the focus on local newspaper coverage, the report is also notable for what it largely ignores: co-authors Leonard Downie, Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Michael Schudson, Columbia University professor and MacArthur fellow, offer little significant discussion on advertising, subscriptions, or for-profit models. Paywalls and micropayments get only passing mentions. The report’s six closing recommendations are instead built around private donations, foundation grants, and the repositioning of academic and government systems. Seeing as most journalism is still funded by market-driven models, this is an interesting comment-by-omission.

C.W. Anderson, research assistant on the report and a contributor to this site, told me the report’s intent is to find solutions that can maintain the previous model and its accompanying accountability journalism.

“There is no market solution obvious right now that will provide the same level of subsidy to journalism that existed under the monopoly paper model,” Anderson said. “So on some level, all the back and forth about new business models is fighting over table scraps. And so that allowed us to quickly return to the question of what we should do given actually existing cases of market failure.”

I spent a couple hours parsing the report’s high points and jotting down observations (see below). As is always the case with this kind of thing, a cursory overview is no substitute for your own in-depth read.

Reconstruction No. 1: Make the nonprofit designation easier and clearer

The considerable discussion around the nonprofit route clearly signals traction for this model. Unfortunately, passionate discourse cannot overcome outdated qualifications and slow government adaptation. The report’s authors say news operations “substantially devoted to reporting on public affairs” should get the thumbs-up for nonprofit status. (There are different opinions on whether this requires new legislation.) In addition, confusion around the low-profit limited liability company (L3C) designation needs to be cleared up so funding organizations are comfortable making qualified donations.

Reconstruction No. 2: Support ongoing coverage over one-off projects

J-Lab recently estimated that since 2005, foundations have pledged $128 million in grants for journalism and information projects. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but the authors of the report argue that foundation funding should be repositioned toward continuous reporting rather than one-off projects. The day-to-day stuff ultimately has more public value than shiny limited-term initiatives. Of course, an open-ended effort requires a semblance of sustainability, and that’s a concept most applicable in the for-profit realm. It’ll be interesting to see if the semi-commercial mindset bubbling up at the Knight Foundation eventually dovetails with funds for ongoing reporting. 

Reconstruction No. 3: The CPB needs to step it up

We’ve recently noted the shifting relationship between for-profit national organizations and local affiliates. Some companies see an upside to centralizing control in the corporate offices and then using the efficiencies of digital delivery to serve targeted communities. Whether that works or not is to be determined, but the report notes that a similar centralized/localized model could be enacted on the nonprofit side by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). 

The authors pull no punches when it comes to the CPB. They recommend a portion of the CPB’s budget be allocated toward local news coverage (actual reporting, not just debate and analysis). Dipping a toe into the Draconian realm, they also suggest duplicative stations and signals should be consolidated and station management incapable of “reorienting their missions” needs to be pushed out. Heck, they even want to change the name to The Corporation for Public Media.

Reconstruction No. 4: Universities already run teaching hospitals, why not news orgs?

Partnerships between news outlets and universities aren’t new, and they appear to be going through a metamorphosis of sorts, with investors, public/private organizations, and schools pooling resources for hybrid newsgathering. The report recommends bold and compelling steps beyond current efforts: the authors want to see full-fledged, year-round news operations run by faculty and students. Similar organizations already exist to some degree, but the picture painted by the report’s authors looks more like a teaching hospital than a college-based newsroom. 

Reconstruction No. 5: Use FCC fees to create a Fund for Local News

This point won’t go over well with companies under the Federal Communication Commission’s purview. The report says money from telephone surcharges, FCC license fees and spectrum auctions should be pooled into a Fund for Local News — sort of a National Endowment for the Arts for the journalism set. The authors acknowledge political pressures and the potential for controversy, but they note a history of organizations that have “weathered those storms.” If the intricacies of this type of fund can be worked out, it could blaze a path toward the type of ongoing coverage the authors call for in point No. 2.

Reconstruction No. 6: There’s no such thing as too much public information

Calls for openness, transparency and access to copious databases is what you’d expect to hear at a Gov 2.0 keynote. This report notes, however, that those same qualities can benefit news organizations. Under the banners of crowdsourcing, pro-am collaborations, and “adjunct journalism,” the report advocates for deeper connectivity between the audience and journalists. There’s nothing particularly new here — plenty of projects already utilize variations on these same themes — but a renewed call to arms is never a bad thing.

Why the skepticism? It has to do with donor expectations.

Stanionis thinks donors to political and other “citizen-powered” campaigns have been conditioned to believe that the candidate or institution that receives their donations will respond directly to their demands. But journalism does not — and should not — operate that way, she said. “I just think trying to force a journalistic endeavor into a hole created by these campaigns is not correct,” she said.

Stanionis is confronting the central dilemma facing journalism startups, nonprofit and for-profit alike: How to create a strong, independent editorial voice while also keeping the revenue flowing. For ProPublica, the stakes are particularly high. Though it has a rolling, three-year commitment for as much as $10 million a year from Herb and Marion Sandler, it needs to build a long-term revenue plan.

Enter Stanionis, whose clients have included The Nation and Mother Jones. ProPublica hired her firm and another — New York-based Community Counselling Service Co., which will focus on large grants — with a $1 million grant from the Knight Foundation. Like most grants from Knight, the money comes with the condition that ProPublica share the knowledge it gains. But how that will happen isn’t clear yet, said ProPublica general manager Dick Tofel. “[We] need to identify outputs relevant to others before we can determine how to share them,” he told me in a recent email.

Stanionis is just getting started, but she’s already sorted out a few elements of her approach. For one thing, ProPublica differs from her previous journalism clients, which have well-established brands that “border on a personal relationship with readers.” ProPublica — like new regional nonprofits such as MinnPost, Voice of San Diego and Texas Tribune — has positioned itself as a non-partisan, non-ideological investigative news source. It can be difficult for an outfit with that kind of professed independence to tell readers it needs their help. “You have to be okay with saying over and over again, ‘We need your support,’” Stanionis said.

There’s also the issue of managing reader/donor expectations. There’s definitely room for a two-way conversation with readers in which they provide data and other inputs, Stanionis said. But that doesn’t mean they get to dictate what stories get reported and written. “The nuance is important,” she said.

So what kind of grassroots strategy will work for ProPublica and other nonprofits? What might help, Stanionis said, is if a reward for donating is something “fun” — like the ACLU membership card. But as CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis also warned, Stanionis knows that focusing too much on premiums and other rewards carries risk of drift from the mission, which is a nonprofit’s primary reason for existing.

“It becomes a coffee cup and totebag machine,” Stanionis said. “Is that what we want to be doing? Is that where we want to be in 20 years?”

Turns out Jacqui is struggling with the same question.

The need to raise money to replace Chi-Town’s start-up funding from the Knight Foundation was well understood by the board, she told me. But what could have been done differently to keep Chi-Town going? That’s much harder to pinpoint, she said.

Among the headwinds Chi-Town and founder Geoff Dougherty faced were the severity of the economic downturn, she noted. It also “was trying to keep the geography in journalism in a new digital and citizen-choice environment. No one has yet figured out the pay model for that.”

But she also wonders, as I have, whether the skill set of a journalist necessarily translates to that of a nonprofit executive. As Jacqui said, “I’d hate to be judged for my success as a businessperson and fundraiser when what I really am is a journalist.”

She suggests that foundations such as Knight that have invested so heavily in Chi-Town and other startups take an extra step — help them develop the kinds of expertise they will need to sustain themselves. While ProPublica did get a $1 million Knight grant to get that kind of help, the rest are pretty much on their own.

“So if there’s a cautionary note here, maybe it’s to make sure new ventures are a partnership of people who know how journalism works and how money works,” she told me. “Maybe the gracious foundations who are out front in their efforts to protect the vital role of journalism in society need to dedicate part of their funding support to develop business acumen while these start-ups find their footing.”