Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
From shrimp Jesus to fake self-portraits, AI-generated images have become the latest form of social media spam
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Jan. 22, 2014, 10:28 a.m.
Business Models

Knight Foundation is giving a boost to 24 early-stage media projects with its latest funding round from the Knight Prototype Fund. The projects, including 10 with a journalism focus, will each receive $35,000 in funding from Knight as well as training and additional resources.

Two of the projects come from former Nieman Fellows: !nstant is a proposed mobile app that to help readers verify and look for context around breaking news on social media. Keepr is a data-mining tool to help journalists better track signals on social media. !nstant was conceived by Paula Molina, Borja Echevarria de la Gandara, Ludovic Blecher, and Alexandra Garcia, all from the Nieman Class of 2013. Keepr was created by Hong Qu, a 2013 Nieman Visiting Fellow.

These projects and the 22 others will go through a six-month prototyping period where teams learn about human-centered design and prepare for a demo day.

Here are the more journalism-focused projects receiving money from the Prototype Fund. You can see the full list of winners, with more information on each, here. Have an idea for a prototype Knight should fund? They’re taking applications for the next round until January 31.

Zago: Seeking to make newsrooms more efficient by building a mobile app that will allow secure data sharing between reporters and their newsrooms.

Data Driven Detroit: Informing the public and addressing important community issues by developing an interactive tool that helps Detroit residents discover and use relevant data about their city.

Vizzuality: Building an open source tool that allows journalists and other users to quickly turn data, maps and other content into interactive stories for online publication.

University of Missouri: Developing a system to collect and report noise data to better track problems of noise pollution in Columbia, MO that will be informed by community hacking events and prototype tests.

The Center for Rural Strategies: Testing an approach to generate data-driven, localized news stories that media and other organizations in rural U.S. counties can use to produce local stories.

Moneca Core: Making it easier to capture community-generated news by creating an open source code library to capture multimedia content by citizen journalists in mobile apps.

Keepr: Creating an open source data-mining tool for journalists to track breaking news stories, so they can easy find quality news sources.

!nstant: Building a mobile app designed to verify and provide context to breaking news on social media so that the public is given a more accurate and clear picture of news stories.

Restatement: Making legal information more accessible by producing a design-driven system for the creation and parsing of machine-readable legal text.

Argos: Making news content easy to digest by building a design-driven news platform that aggregates and analyzes news stories and creates concise news backgrounders, including insights and connections regarding specific stories.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
From shrimp Jesus to fake self-portraits, AI-generated images have become the latest form of social media spam
Within days of visiting the pages — and without commenting on, liking, or following any of the material — Facebook’s algorithm recommended reams of other AI-generated content.
What journalists and independent creators can learn from each other
“The question is not about the topics but how you approach the topics.”
Deepfake detection improves when using algorithms that are more aware of demographic diversity
“Our research addresses deepfake detection algorithms’ fairness, rather than just attempting to balance the data. It offers a new approach to algorithm design that considers demographic fairness as a core aspect.”