Let’s play oddsmaker for a moment. I’m unaware of any sports books offering prop bets on who’ll win the 2010 Knight News Challenge. We’re still early in the application process, and wannabe grantees must still navigate a multi-layered process that no one can predict. But just for fun: Who might be some early favorites?
The closed [...]

The sad-spin headline might be this: “Dreams of 2,000 journalists crushed.” But when you have nearly 2,500 applications for what at most will become a few dozen Knight News Challenge grants, there’s necessarily plenty of disappointment to spread around.
I talked with Jose Zamora, who works on journalism programs for Knight, recently to get an [...]

There’s a school of thought that says video is the future of information, that rich media is the endpoint of the evolution of text. I don’t know that I buy that, since text still has so many advantages over video: its scannability, its searchability, how much easier it usually is to create and polish. But [...]

[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]
Jackie Hai traces the idea for 101 Source back to two projects she worked on while [...]

[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 [...]

Technically Philly looks like a prototype plucked from an entrepreneurial journalism textbook. The website offers targeted coverage. The founders nurture their community, online and off. In-progress revenue streams are smartly diversified across advertising and services. 
But what if you did everything right, implemented all your ideas, and the business still didn’t catch on? That’s the concern [...]

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 [...]

San Francisco-based Spot.Us is expanding its crowdfunded journalism tools to Los Angeles, a move founder David Cohn hinted at in an interview with Zach in June. 
The expansion ushers in a refocusing for Spot.Us, as the nonprofit puts its development energy into serving as a platform rather than eyeing growth as a full-fledged news organization. Cohn [...]