Idea Lab

New Poderopedia Features Let You Reuse Content, Find Power in Community

by Miguel Paz

The Poderopedia platform helps show the relationships among the elite in a country or region, especially in places where power is concentrated in the hands of a few people. After winning the Knight News Challenge in 2011, we launched Poderopedia in Chile last fall, with the goal of mapping who's who in business and politics in our country. We also wanted to offer an open-source version of our platform that would let anyone map relationships in their own communities. Since then, the platform has received a lot of international press coverage, and many Chilean news websites have used Poderopedia...

• May 17, 2013
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10 Simple Steps to Get Your Journalism Project Funded

by Jordan Young

This post was written by Jordan Young of the Knight News Innovation Lab and originally appeared on the Lab's blog. International Women's Day is always inspiring and encouraging. But this past March 8 was even more special. That's the day I found out a project I co-founded, Boxx Magazine, had been chosen as one of the winners of the McCormick Foundation's New Media Women Entrepreneurs (NMWE) grant! Selena Fragassi and I had talked about creating a music magazine highlighting women since our days at Venus Zine in 2010. After watching the documentary "Hit So Hard" in May 2012, Selena and...

• April 5, 2013
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How to Embed Open Spending Visualizations In Your Own Website

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Spending platform is a hive of activity and packed full of colorful displays of spending and budgets from all over the world. Its aim is to help track government and corporate financial transactions across the world and present them in useful and engaging forms. For some time now, users have been able to upload any of their own spending to the platform and make a range of visualizations, but now you can embed any of the visualizations on your own website. This means you can have the full interactive display on your site. How to...

• March 20, 2013
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Spending Stories, Open Spending Are Moving Beyond Visualizations

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

2013 is going to be a big year for the spending stories project. In 2012, as we explained in more detail on our blog, we improved usability of our platform for spending data and developed stronger community ties around the world. Now we're primed to roll out some really empowering resources for the open spending community based on our experiences so far. Here's a look at what to expect in 2013. badge of approval To build on our reputation as a trusted source of financial data we will introduce badges that show for each dataset uploaded that it has been...

• March 4, 2013
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Is Crowdfunding the Answer for EveryBlock?

by Rodrigo Davies

The news that NBC is closing the hyper-local news site EveryBlock has been met with widespread disappointment -- rooted as much in the failure of a good brand as the uncomfortable reminder that the hyper-local community is yet to find a business model that pays. EveryBlock's open-source architecture (funded by the Knight Foundation) exists, so its cheerleaders could fork their own version and bring the platform back to life in another form. But what about the value of the company's brand and existing audience? In a fickle and fast-changing news economy, that may be EveryBlock's biggest asset. So is that...

• February 13, 2013
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How Omidyar Network Could Boost Online Investigative Journalism

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This post is long and not every section is relevant to every reader. Please feel encouraged to skip to those sections that are most relevant. Opening Up Philanthropic Strategizing I often emphasize the importance that philanthropy become more transparent, participatory, and accountable. Most related initiatives -- such as the Foundation Center’s Reporting Commitment -- advocate for greater public access to information about how foundations spend their money; but there has been less of a focus on opening up the strategy process that defines how that money will be spent. How does, for example, the Ford Foundation decide to focus on...

• February 4, 2013
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Major Lessons Learned by News Publishers in 2012

by Emily Harris

In early 2012, just about a year ago, the Journalism Accelerator invited a half-dozen people with a range of unique roles in the news production mix, to identify the most crucial challenges facing publishers at that moment in time. No enormous surprise: Money was the top concern. More specifically, a collective sense emerged that publishers could benefit from a road map of the many small steps needed to increase and stabilize revenue across the industry. As 2012 drew to a close, we once more turned to these insightful people, asking each to share what he or she learned over...

• January 7, 2013
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An Open Call for Ideas: How Would You Use OpenSpending's Data Calendar?

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the new year just a week away, it's the time of year when you might be thinking about the calenders you use and wondering how they could work better for you. Just over a month ago, the OpenSpending team floated the idea of an open spending calendar. The idea was to monitor some key open spending data sets -- the ones that require work to get the story and that show where government money is going. Journalists can select which data sets they're interested in, and the calender will alert them when the data is due be released. When...

• December 26, 2012
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Poderopedia Launches Public Beta with Crowdsourced Data Journalism

by Miguel Paz

That's right: The world did not end when we launched Poderopedia's Public Beta this Wednesday at 12:12 p.m. in the Chile time zone. So please come in, check out the menu, and grab a bite of our editorial and crowdsourced data journalism website that uses public data, semantic web technology, and network visualizations to map who's who in business and politics in Chile. We are pleased to invite you to Poderopedia, a project backed by Knight Foundation through its News Challenge 2011. We believe that Poderopedia will save reporters time in their reporting and will help citizens understand the...

• December 14, 2012
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Follow the Money: A Spending Stories Guide for Journalists

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

History is littered with awards and accolades for those tenacious journalists who have dutifully discovered money that was spent on something it shouldn't have been. Evidence of spending is often the ultimate proof of wrongdoing. These stories have ranged from presidential campaigns spending money on surveillance to Members of Parliament dipping into the public purse for their own benefit, with many variations in between. These days, governments are keen to be transparent with their spending. But is this enough to drive out the corruption that so frequently comes with power? By being smart about government spending data, journalists could answer...

• December 13, 2012
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10 Things to Know Before Raising an Angel or Seed Round

by Adriano Farano
2012 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our startup, Watchup, has just closed a $500,000 angel round, and since creating a startup is an increasingly appealing idea to a number of journalists, I thought I should share on Idea Lab what I believe every entrepreneur should know before starting raising a first round of funding. Watchup, an iPad-only app that unleashes the power of video journalism by letting you build your personal newscast, is a winner of the 2012 Knight News Challenge. Knight Foundation invested in it through the Enterprise Fund. This first round had much to teach, and here's what I've learned so far. But, take...

• December 12, 2012
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How OpenSpending Is Getting the Story Out of the Data

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

At OpenSpending we really want to make it easy and fun for journalists to write great stories with data. But what can we do to help? There are already tons of ways for journalists to find newsworthy data. For example, in the U.K. there are daily email alerts for government data releases and even calendars pointing to upcoming releases months in advance, not to mention the maps that lead a journalist straight to data about a place. Clearly there's no reason for a journalist to be short of data or receive it too late -- when journalism is all about...

• November 9, 2012
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Open Interests Europe 'Hackathon' to Track Flow of Money in EU

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

As a journalist, to understand European Union institutions, policies and commitments, you have to look where the money goes and understand who affects the money flow in the EU. As the influence of Brussels lobbyists grows, it is increasingly important to draw the connections between lobbying, policy-making and funding. The EU publishes information on its spending and also maintains a transparency register. These, however, are difficult for journalists and citizens to use. With OpenSpending, we set out to use the power of technology to catalyze greater government transparency by providing new tools for media and citizens to more easily access...

• October 22, 2012
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Want to Track U.K. Government Spending? We Just Made It Easier

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Continuing in their mission to make spending data more accessible and comprehensible, the Spending Stories team and data.gov.uk have just released a reporting tool that will help journalists and analysts pick the freshest and best departmental spending data to work with when exploring the U.K. central government expenditure. Why spending data gets neglected Spending data is juicy for journalists, but it gets neglected for many reasons. One key reason is that the shelf-life of a spending dataset is pretty short from journalists' point of view -- if they have to wait six months or even a year for spending data...

• September 14, 2012
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Data Journalism Takes Center Stage at OKFestival, Hackathon in Helsinki

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

OKFestival, the world's largest open knowledge and data event, will take place September 17-22. We're pleased to announce that streams on three whole days of this year's festival (two festival days and a satellite event) will be dedicated to the topic of data journalism and visualization to encourage more journalists from around the globe to engage more deeply with the topic. So what's in store for visualizers and data journalists at the event? Satellite Events and Hackdays Monday, September 17 - Data Visualization Day A seminar on making information visible, with lots of great speakers with backgrounds in science, art,...

• September 12, 2012
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Pay Walls and Social Media Could Shift the Public Agenda

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

If conversations around digital journalism have been dominated by anything in the first quarter of 2012, it's probably been about subscriptions, also known as pay walls. Walls are going up at the L.A. Times and Gannett papers, and getting higher at The New York Times. And the editor of The Guardian asked his readers, "What would you give the Guardian? Money, time or data?" At the end of last year, Raju Narisetti proposed a pay wall alternative he dubbed the "'Why don't we pay you?' pay wall" ... and then left the unwalled Washington Post for the walled Wall Street...

• April 17, 2012
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At SXSW: Building Trust With a Penny Press for the Digital Age

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

As Americans turn more to online news sources, a panel at this week's SXSW Interactive conference will look at the Americans who aren't going online for news. They are, among other things, often rural and poor. And that's exactly the audience at which the OpenRural project is aiming. The panel was organized by Fiona Morgan, a researcher at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, who worries that as newspaper companies try to harvest more revenue from a shrinking audience, they are catering both content and delivery to a wealthy, educated, white audience. She asked me...

• March 6, 2012
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Why PRX, Knight Created an Accelerator for Public Media

by Jake Shapiro

We announced PRX's partnership with the Knight Foundation to create the Public Media Accelerator about a month ago. Since then, it's become clear that the accelerator concept is new to many people in the non-profit and public media worlds, even as tech folks fret that accelerators have jumped the shark. Our tagline for the Public Media Accelerator is "seeking mission-driven entrepreneurs changing media for good." We're in a time of remarkable technology innovation, and our goal is to channel the forces driving that growth towards public service media. The two forces, the tech sector and public media, need each other:...

• January 19, 2012
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Meet the 1% Who Call the Shots in Chile

by Miguel Paz

Marco Kremerman, an investigator from SOL, a Chilean foundation that conducts research about the labor market, recently published a column in which he stated that 4,000 families run Chile. Kremerman's post was highly controversial among Chile's elite, an endogamous group of power players, little accustomed to public scrutiny and not fond of being forced out in the open. It also caused some deep rumblings among the middle class, during a time when issues such as inequality and the extreme gap between the rich and poor have become a matter of national and international public interest around the world. One of...

• December 16, 2011
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How Spending Stories Spots Errors in Public Spending

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This article was co-written by Martin Keegan, project lead for Spending Stories. How public funds should be spent is often controversial. Information about how that money has already been spent should not be ambiguous at all. People arguing about the future will care about the present, and if data about past or present public spending is available, many will certainly look at it. When they do, occasionally they will find errors, or believe themselves to have found errors. OpenSpending, which aims to track every (public) government and corporate financial transaction across the world, encourages users to: augment the existing spending...

• December 2, 2011
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Spot.Us Merges With Public Insight Network

by David Cohn

Spot.Us launched in November of 2008, making this our three-year anniversary. Counting the months of planning (and applying for the Knight News Challenge) that went into the launch, I've been working on Spot.Us, a journalism crowdfunding project, for almost four years. In that time, we've pushed boundaries, and have had many successes and shortcomings which I've tried to share along the way. As I've always said, Spot.Us will never be perfect. It will never be "done," and as long as we can strive for something, we're making progress.Today we are taking a big stride by formally being acquired by the...

• November 29, 2011
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The Future for Non-Profit News: Build a Community of Members, Donors

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the past few years, foundations and philanthropists concerned about newspapers' declining fortunes have put up millions of dollars to launch non-profit online publications covering national affairs (ProPublica), statewide topics (Texas Tribune, Wisconsin Watch, MinnPost, California Watch) and metropolitan areas (the Bay Citizen, the Chicago News Cooperative, St. Louis Beacon). These new "watchdog" organizations have produced some distinguished journalism -- ProPublica, in fact, won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting earlier this year. But three separate research reports, released in the past two months, make clear that great journalism isn't going to be enough to keep most of them alive...

• November 28, 2011
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Feeding OpenBlock: A New Newsroom Pet That Eats Elements

by Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few months ago, my kids hit an inevitable, but still terrifying, milestone -- they began asking for a pet. Being a complete Scrooge, I quickly set to work explaining that pets are hard work and expensive. Showing a strong knack for journalism, they demanded proof of my assertions, so we set off to the pet store where my son quickly was ready to invest his birthday money in a small bird. "Sure, you can buy the bird," I told him. "But what are going to feed it?" With the launch of our OpenBlock project in North Carolina, rural newspapers...

• November 17, 2011
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Open Media Explores New Paradigms in Community Media

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the Alliance for Community Media Conference in Tuscon, Ariz., I participated on a panel called "New Paradigms in Fundraising." Despite the name of the panel, my focus was more on "financial sustainability" than on fundraising, per se. I've outlined a variety of fundraising approaches emerging in non-commercial media in previous posts. But to me, the true "new paradigm" for community media lies not with raising more money, but with finding ways to enable the community to serve more of their own needs. Rather than looking for new ways to pay for doing things the same way we always have,...

• November 2, 2011
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What You Need to Know to Win a Knight News Challenge Grant

by Desiree Everts

As the media industry continues to be upended and traditional publishers search for ways to survive, those of us who've chosen journalism as our craft are left wondering what the future holds. The Knight Foundation, as it happens, appears to be one of those entities exploring that very question. So it's no wonder that many in the industry look to Knight for answers. When it comes to the Knight News Challenge grants, of course, the first question that pops up is, so uh, how do you go about nabbing one? I get to read a lot about the winners, but...

• October 4, 2011
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'Spending Stories' to Help Journalists Analyze Spending Data

by Martin Keegan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Data journalism is hard. In particular, when it comes to data about spending, stories hide behind the numbers, veiled with jargon. Holes in the data conceal entire chapters in the great narrative about where the money flows and goes. For many journalists, investing time grappling with tools to analyze spending data is unfruitful or unsexy. Even if they uncover a juicy figure -- an illegal company funneling funds intended for good or an erratic spending trend, for instance -- without context, the numbers can be as useless to a reader as a tour guide with a passion for reciting dates....

• September 23, 2011
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Better, Faster, Stronger: 5 Reasons for Smaller Grants

by Christina Xu
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm occasionally asked by well-intended fans of the Awesome Foundation if there are plans to ramp up our granting efforts, to go beyond the measly $1,000 each of our chapters offers every month so that we can fund higher-impact projects, especially now that we are entering the arena of community development and revitalization. While it's certainly possible, I have come to strongly believe that the small size of our grants is, as software developers might say, a feature, not a bug. I'm not the only one. A quick survey of the revitalization landscape in Detroit shows an abundance of organizations,...

• September 22, 2011
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How to Produce Groundbreaking Journalism on the Cheap

by Victoria Fine
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at The Tiziano Project were shocked and honored last week to be named as finalists for the 2011 Online Journalism Awards in the categories of General Excellence in Online Journalism - Micro Site and Community Collaboration. The Tiziano Project provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to report their stories and improve their lives. We're nominated for our citizen journalism site, 360 | Kurdistan, a project that was produced on a shoestring budget, with a group of incredibly talented volunteers. When I say shoestring, I mean it -- during...

• September 7, 2011
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The Awesome Foundation Fosters News Innovation, $1K at a Time

by Christina Xu
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The citizen journalism and new media movements have made it increasingly possible for anyone to be heard in the media, first as sources and then as writers. But what if these interested and informed citizens became builders and innovators as well? The Awesome News Taskforce wants to empower anybody to create and test out community information and journalism projects of their own -- $1,000 at a time. The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences was started in the summer of 2009 by Tim Hwang. During his undergrad years at Harvard, Tim was notorious for his long history of bizarre...

• August 18, 2011
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Knight Announces 2011 News Challenge Winners

by Desiree Everts

Not so long ago, journalists were playing catch-up in the digital media space. But at this year's MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, it's become evident that journalism 2.0 is growing up. Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, today announced the winners of the Knight News Challenge at the annual conference held in Cambridge, Mass. This year, the contest focused on four categories: Mobile, Authenticity, Sustainability and Community, and winners ran the gamut from popular tools like DocumentCloud to a mobile platform that will help people in Hubli-Dharwad, India find out when water is available. The...

• June 22, 2011
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A Tale of Two Paradigms: E-books and Newspapers

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last night, on the eve of the latest Knight News Challenge winner announcement, I was reflecting back on what I've learned from working on BookBrewer -- a project that grew out of the 2008 Knight News Challenge-funded Printcasting -- and what it says about how packaging and consumer expectations affect the monetary value content. These two products are essentially the same underneath the hood, but the expectations of the reader couldn't be more different. The bottom line is that I now wonder if we ever could have made a successful business with Printcasting simply because it was built within the...

• June 22, 2011
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Why Are Newsrooms Resistant to Creating Newsgames?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past weekend a group of 25 game developers, academics and journalists gathered at the University of Minnesota’s Journalism Center to examine the state of newsgames. While it can be a slippery term to define, generally speaking newsgames covers a wide range of game-like experiences from puzzles to graphically-rich presentations that convey some kind of interactive news content.The use of videogame-like narratives is one of the many promising new forms of digital storytelling that have emerged over the past 15 years. And yet for all the potential, and some extremely successful examples, newsgames have not been widely adopted by news...

• April 8, 2011
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Why the New York Times' Pay Model is Similar to NPR and Spot.Us

by David Cohn

From the launch of Spot.Us, I've always said the following: Anyone can tackle the crowdfunded journalism model. In fact, NPR could do it tomorrow and blow me out of the water. It's just about being transparent and giving up control over how donation money gets spent. This model would have more success at the national or international level. This model would have more success if a known brand took the lead. (Again, I always tend to cite NPR.) There has been much opining about the New York Times pay wall that went up this week. I was quoted in a...

• March 30, 2011
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How Grahamstown Now Combines Mobile Content, Daily Deals

by Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Giving African newsrooms, particularly community media and non-profit organizations, the ability to leapfrog into the mobile era is at the core project of Iindaba Ziyafika's work in South Africa. As Anne-Ryan Heatwole reported last year on this site, our Knight-funded NIKA Content Management System, which was designed and coded in South Africa using Drupal as its base, provides powerful SMS and IM "in and out" service. When combined with the largest citizen journalism program in Africa at Grocott's Mail, it has allowed an unprecedented level of interactivity between our newsroom and our community of about 100,000 people. Last year, we launched...

• March 22, 2011
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Help Spot.Us Find a Path to Financial Sustainability

by David Cohn

Spot.Us recently launched a new design, so this is an opportune time to write a "State of the Spot" post -- something we haven't done since the website was six months old. I hope to lay out how far we've come and what's on our plate and make a call to arms to the Spot.Us community and anyone else interested in the future of journalism. In the two years since our site has launched, we've funded over 160 projects with the help of 5,000 contributors, a fifth of whom contributed more than once. We've done this in collaboration with 95...

• February 22, 2011
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U.S. Local News Experiments Leagues Ahead of U.K.

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is easy to overestimate the similarities between the U.S. and the U.K. As Oscar Wilde wrote back in 1887, ''We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language." But one of the unfortunate recent similarities has been the parallel crisis in local news, especially at newspapers. In both countries existing local news providers have been the hardest hit by the structural changes in news provision and consumption, each having relied so heavily on classified and recruitment advertising. Yet the reactions of the two countries have been very different, particularly in the last couple of years....

• February 1, 2011
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The Challenge of Sustainability for Non-Profit Startups

by Philip Neustrom

I recently had a conversation with a friend who's just been accepted into the Y Combinator startup seed fund. His organization, as is typical of the Y Combinator program, was given a very modest sum of money (less than $20,000). In exchange for acceptance into the program, he and his co-founder quit their jobs and worked full-time on their startup for three months. While chatting with him about his efforts, I got to thinking about some differences between non-profit startups and for-profit startups. People talk a lot about the challenges of being a startup organization. They're typically talking about traditional,...

• January 14, 2011
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Innovation Strategy #1: Don't Take 'No' for an Answer

by Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past week, Tom Grasty and I were invited to the Paley Center as part of "The Next Big Thing: The New News Entrepreneurs." We were asked to present Stroome before an extraordinary audience stuffed with CEOs, COOs and presidents of some of the world's most important media companies. During one presentation, Google's entertaining president of global sales operations and business development, Nikesh Arora, claimed the company culture regarding innovation at Google is about saying "let's try to find a way to say yes." It was one of the most inspiring leadership principles laid out during the two-and-a-half day conference...

• November 24, 2010
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How Spot.Us Doubled Its Grant Money with Community-Focused Ads

by David Cohn

There are many things that excite me about Spot.Us. One in particular, which I believe is part of our pathway to sustainability is "community-focused sponsorship" (CFS). It is the main thrust of my fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. My evolving view of advertising is becoming a passionate topic. In some respects CFS gave me a needed shot of adrenaline into the Spot.Us project. If I'm not pushing boundaries and trying something new, I get bored. To date I still know of no other media entity trying anything exactly like it. So what is community-focused sponsorship? The quick version: We...

• November 16, 2010
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The Pros and Cons of Using Kickstarter to Fundraise

by Philip Neustrom

We recently ended our first big fundraising drive for the LocalWiki project and wanted to take a moment to step back and reflect. In particular, we'd like to talk about the funding platform we used, Kickstarter, and its advantages and disadvantages. While we already had a grant from the Knight Foundation to develop the LocalWiki software, we need to raise more money to go beyond just the software and help us do community outreach, coordination and education to ensure our project's success.What is Kickstarter?Kickstarter describes itself as "a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors." It works like...

• November 15, 2010
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Local News Needs 'Bottom Up' Structure to Survive

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week Orkney Today announced it was closing. The paper, which served the small islands of Orkney just off the Scottish coast, was -- like countless other local papers -- battling against declining circulation and disappearing ad revenues. "Orkney Media Group management and the newspaper's excellent staff have tried a number of initiatives to reverse the fortunes of the newspaper," the paper reported, "but to no avail." If the news industry as a whole isn't exactly the picture of good health, local news is in the emergency room. News problems at a national level -- falls in circulation, and collapse...

• September 27, 2010
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5 Mistakes That Make Local Blogs Fail

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

So you're thinking about starting a local blog. Maybe you're a reporter tired of office politics and lowest-common-denominator assignments. Maybe you're a neighborhood gadfly who wants to create a new place for locals to gather. Maybe you're a realtor who wants to generate new leads.Either way, your local blog, like most new things, will probably fail. It will fail to support you.  It will fail to win an audience.  It will fail to have real impact in your community.I meet a lot of local bloggers and people thinking about starting local blogs who ask me for tips or for feedback. ...

• September 17, 2010
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Where Did We Go Right? How to Be a Successful Entrepreneur

by CJ Cornell
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine a well-known Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Wanting to repeat his success, he scrutinizes all his articles and discovers they contain the letters "E" and "R" 10 times more frequently than any other letters. In his next article, he focuses on increasing the use of these letters, and then plans on teaching his new-found secret during his journalism seminar next fall. More than likely, his success as a reporter is due to a combination of talent, hard work, circumstances, personal relationships and some luck. Which means that evangelizing the benefits of proper letter frequency is irrelevant at best and probably harmful...

• July 9, 2010
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News Organizations Must Innovate or Die

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

People in news don't generally think of innovation as their job. It's that old CP Snow thing of the two cultures, where innovation sits on the science not the arts side. I had my own experience of this at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in Washington a couple of months ago. After one of the sessions I spotted an editor whose newspaper had adopted hNews (the Knight-funded news metadata standard we developed with the AP). "How's it going?" I asked him. "Is it helping your online search? Are you using it to mark up your archive?" Before I...

• July 8, 2010
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Crafting a Simple Elevator Pitch for the Public and Investors

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A Knight Foundation grant is a wonderful gift, but in our case at CityCircles (and for many projects), the grant only lasts for one year. Because most of that year may be spent on programming, this gives winners very little time to craft a pitch. By "pitch" I mean: How do you explain this to your audience in 10 seconds or less (i.e., an elevator pitch)? How do you explain this to people who may want to work with you after the grant ends? We've finally found an approach that seems to be working for CityCircles, so let me save...

• June 28, 2010
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FeedBrewer Pays It Forward to Knight Media Innovation Fund

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week at MIT's annual Future of News and Civic Media conference, I stood on the stage with Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen and made an announcement. FeedBrewer Inc., a new company I co-founded with two other Printcasting team members, is donating 6 percent of its corporate stock to a brand new Knight Media Innovation Fund. Our hope is that our future success can also enable success for others who, just as we did with the Knight News Challenge, will receive grants that allow them to create new innovative media tools and programs. You can read more about our company...

• June 21, 2010
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Knight Announces News Challenge Winners for 2010

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- I am at MIT for the announcement of the latest round of News Challenge winners. First up is the president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, Alberto Ibarguen. (Note: The Twitter widget on Idea Lab is now a feed taken from the conference's hashtag: #fncm.) Alberto Ibarguen, Knight Foundation CEO: We didn't have a clue as to how to deal with the changes in the media business, so we started the News Challenge. We've had thousands of applicants. It was designed to be open, and was meant for news and information to be shared in a...

• June 16, 2010
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Social Media and Corporates -- the #Promise Conference

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few days ago Vince Stehle from the Knight Foundation invited me to the Think Social's The #Promise conference in New York, and so I organized babysitting for my new son and came for the day. The conference was about how companies are using social media to advance their goals, and many people (mostly very attractive people, I would add too!) from NGOs, design firms, the corporate world and others turned out to hear the likes of Pepsi, Nokia, MTV, GE and others present their beautiful glossy social media campaigns. It felt like the "place to be" in New...

• June 11, 2010
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How 'This American Life' Attracted Donors with Mobile Giving

by Anne-Ryan Heatwole
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Those of us at MobileActive have written before about mobile giving during disasters, and the dramatic results these campaigns can have. But mobile giving can also be used for non disaster-related fundraising drives, and the popular public radio show "This American Life" is one of the latest organizations to embrace this trend. The weekly radio show tells stories about the experiences of everyday people. It's distributed by Public Radio International and attracts 1.7 million listeners each week. Its free podcast generates 600,000 weekly downloads, creating significant bandwidth charges. As a result, "This American Life" holds twice-yearly pledge drives in order...

• April 29, 2010
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What Kinds of Experimental Ads Are Local News Sites Using?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the search for new business models for community news sites, many experimental advertising platforms have been used. MinnPost has its Real-Time ads widget. Printcasting is trying out MediaBids. And Spot.us is planning something called Community-Centered Ads, where people could view an ad or fill out an advertiser's survey in exchange for credits they can use to pay for original reporting. So here's a question to Idea Lab bloggers and readers: What other experiments have you seen in local sites running advertising that's beyond the norm? What is working and what has failed? Share your thoughts and observations in the...

• April 2, 2010
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A Plan for Spot.Us to Use Community-Centered Ads

by David Cohn

Perhaps it's ironic for me to write about advertising. Fellow Knight News Challenge winner Dan Pacheco can quote me as once saying "f*&# advertising" and one of the initial inspirations for me to get into journalism was Adbusters Magazine. Below I want to describe a potential advertising model that Spot.Us hopes to employ (and others can steal) along with general thoughts about the diversification of revenue streams.Community Centered Advertising The underlying inspiration for Spot.Us is to give the public a freelance budget so they can help set the editorial agenda. Right now that is done via contributions from their own...

• April 1, 2010
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Councilpedia Uses Crowdsourcing to Link Money, Politics in NYC

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

As Gotham Gazette gears up to launch a pilot version of its Knight-funded Councilpedia project, we are confronting a number of interesting issues. To step back first, though, Councilpedia will provide information about New York's 51 City Council members and two citywide elected officials, including their campaign finance information, the bills they introduced, and the groups they gave "member items" -- the parlance here for pork or earmarks. (Our third citywide elected official -- the mayor -- only takes contributions from one person: his billionaire self.) Readers will be able to search this data and tag it, providing information and,...

• March 2, 2010
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What Can Virtual Goods Teach Us About Paying for News?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Why will people spend $1 to send you a virtual beer on Facebook, but not to read a news story online? On the surface, it defies logic. I think most people would agree that whatever economic value news and information has, it's greater than a virtual piece of clothing, or something that gives your avatar a special power in a gaming environment, or that gives you elevated status on a social network. But in terms of consumers' actions, the exact opposite is true. I've been thinking a lot about this issue because the market for virtual goods has exploded. People...

• February 8, 2010
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Moving on After the Knight News Challenge

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2008, the Open Media Foundation (then Deproduction) received a $380,000 Knight News Challenge award, and it was a major turning-point for our organization. We added staff, formed new partnerships, and maintained a level of growth that had us approximately double in size each year over our first five years after forming in 2004. The Open Media Project grant is for a four-part effort that began with a re-building of the software we developed to automate an unprecedented approach to user-generated and community-powered TV in Denver. The second phase saw our team implement this re-built Drupal software and business model...

• February 5, 2010
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The Great News Business Model Hunt is a Wild Goose Chase

by Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It may be impolitic to admit this, but I'm weary of the Great News Business Model Hunt. For those journalists who have just woken up to the changes in their industry, I know that this issue couldn't be more fascinating and pertinent. But if you worked in the news business on the web from the start, as I did at Salon.com beginning in 1995, this hunt has become an overly familiar routine and, at its worst, a rite of futility. Over the course of the decade I spent at Salon, we tried it all -- pay walls, partial and total;...

• January 25, 2010
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The Search for a New Revenue Model in Journalism

by David Cohn

My writing on PBS Idea Lab was introduced to me as a way to publicly discuss the growth of Spot.Us, my Knight News Challenge project. I've received kudos for being honest in my blog posts. I'm comfortable talking about where Spot.Us is falling short, and where we are exceeding expectations. I think we are doing a bit of both -- and trying to adjust to succeed more and fall short less. Hey, that's the nature of iterative projects, which I've always said needs to be at the heart of Spot.Us as a new concept. So let's keep that bit of...

• January 19, 2010
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Advertisers Still Prefer Print to Online

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A rare bit of good financial news for journalism points once again to the difficulty of financing online media. PaidContent reported this week that Politico raked in more than $20 million last year, finishing with operating profits of about $1 million. That's the good news. But as Molly Fischer wrote in the New York Observer, Politico's print publication -- something few of us outside the Beltway ever see -- accounted for 60 percent of operating revenues. This was the case even though the paper version has an estimated circulation of 32,000 compared to the more than 3 million unique visitors...

• January 6, 2010
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Case Study in Collaboration: Spot.us, Public Press, and McSweeney's

by David Cohn

I spend a lot of time talking about the notion of "collaboration." So whenever I have a good example of the value of collaboration, I try to highlight it. Only one month after a Spot.Us-funded project was also published in the New York Times, we have another great example of what happens when various partners come together. I like this one in particular because it includes several media entities. I'm talking about The Bay Bridge Explained pitch on Spot.Us, which has been published online by the SF Public Press and distributed in print through McSweeney's San Francisco Panorama and the...

• December 8, 2009
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FTC's Hearings on Journalism: Why?

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As everyone knows, the nation's scam artists, monopolists and market-riggers have all gone into hibernation during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. This has given the Federal Trade Commission the breathing room it needs to intercede in an arena where its role is, at best, unclear. This week, the commission held a two-day workshop entitled How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? -- the purpose of which is "to explore how the Internet has affected journalism." There's been lots of blogging, Tweeting and journalizing about it. Some people think it was a valuable exercise. I question that, especially...

• December 3, 2009
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The Challenge for Non-Profit News Organizations

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Non-profit status is often cited as an exciting new option for struggling local news outlets. ProPublica, MinnPost, and the Voice of San Diego are inspiring examples of non-profit startups, while the Christian Science Monitor, NPR and other organizations are all long-standing examples. It's not difficult to see that old and young non-profit platforms alike are among the leaders in news innovation. I agree that there are many upsides to the non-profit path, but it also carries significant management risk. The business environment of non-profits is often deeply misunderstood, even by the managers of tax-exempt companies themselves. More worrisome, boards are...

• December 1, 2009
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Why it Matters that Pierre Omidyar is Launching a News Startup

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is launching a for-profit news startup in Hawaii, where he and his family live. This is important news, and not just because he's involved. A few months ago Pierre and Randy Ching founded Peer News. Their first project was a Twitter-related experiment called Ginx, which didn't get critical mass and is being closed. Now they've announced Peer News' more important move -- a project aimed at creating the kind of local journalism that brings accountability and value to a community. Pierre, in a note on the company blog, says he and his team are launching...

• November 18, 2009
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Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sergii Danylenko and Anna Prymakova asked me to speak about "changes in media over the past five years" at MediaCamp Kyiv last week. It's a pretty standard topic of discussion for me, but I felt that it would be more interesting and more useful to look at changes in media over the past 550 years. What follows is a hyperlinked version of my talk. I recently received an email from NowPublic, a popular citizen journalism website in North America, with the subject "Now Hiring." This is a rare thing in the field of journalism these days - citizen or traditional...

• November 14, 2009
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The New Era of Media Development, Part III

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spend your money wisely: this is the mandate given to program officers of philanthropic, government, and multilateral donor organizations. Each year they are given a certain budget, and they are expected to use that money as effectively as possible to further the objectives of their program. But how do these individuals gauge the impact of their investments? How can they cooperate with other donors to seek holistic solutions to complex problems? And to what extent should they be preparing for the likely challenges of the future, or focusing on the urgent problems of today? In part one of this series...

• October 31, 2009
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The New Era of Media Development, Part II

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is a telling sign that Wikipedia has no entry on media development. Rather, the search results suggest that perhaps you are looking for "ICT for development". Indeed, what is the future of media development when we're still unsure about the future of media in general? And, for that matter, where should funders invest their money to ensure that the same social benefits associated with traditional media (a sense of community, good governance, an informed citizenry) remain while journalism increasingly moves beyond broadcast, and beyond financial sustainability. In part one I looked at the history of media development, the major...

• October 25, 2009
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Viva CityCircles! Light Rail Publication for Phoenix in Alpha

by Aleksandra Chojnacka
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

First, a quick recap of our project: CityCircles is a multi-platform portal (using web and mobile) which delivers stop by stop information for Phoenix's light rail system. Information includes businesses and services, news, events, and promotions around each stop. We encourage collaboration and will feature a social networking aspect to the site. Our launch party in Tempe this past month led me to realize that this is all just now starting... Up until that moment CityCircles had been a concept that we've had to explain to our friends and colleagues - using hand gestures or drawings. Many people thought the...

• October 21, 2009
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Non-Profit News Becomes the Flavor of the Month

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Something that's been lurking just below the surface of the San Francisco Bay Area news scene for several months finally bubbled up to the top last month. Financier Warren Hellman announced the creation of a new, non-profit news organization. This news organization will partner with KQED, the the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and most likely the New York Times. The Bay Area News Project has a web site and a Twitter feed. The San Francisco Chronicle had a story. And so did the New York Times. There are few details available about the...

• October 9, 2009
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The New Era of Media Development, Part 1

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Media development as a field within international development has existed for at least 30 years. Broadly speaking, media development organizations provide financial support, training, and resources to groups in developing countries that want build and sustain media organizations. An active and dynamic media ecosystem, the thinking goes, leads to greater government transparency, a more informed public, and greater civic participation. Some of the major players in the field of media development are: Internews, which was formed in 1982 during the Cold War dynamic of international relations. IREX, which was founded in 1968 and was similarly established to promote more free-flowing...

• October 7, 2009
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What Both Sides Are Missing in the Pay Wall Debate

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Arguments about paywalls around news content are becoming increasingly dogmatic and ideological. As a result, lots of sensible ideas about how to make money from new models of journalism are being obscured. Not least, how to add value to existing content so it becomes more identifiable, more searchable, and helps lead people "back home" (that's where the Hansel and Gretel theory comes in). On one side of the fence you have pro-pay-wallers, led by the Murdochs, for whom pay walls seem to answer the question, "How are we going to solve the economic crisis in news?" They're in the process...

• September 25, 2009
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Adrian Holovaty Talks about EveryBlock Sale to MSNBC.com

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The big news last week was that Knight-funded startup EveryBlock was bought by MSNBC.com for an undisclosed sum. EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty is one of the Idea Lab bloggers, and has been a pioneering programmer/journalist at the Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan., and at the Washington Post. There had been some online scuttlebutt around the way EveryBlock released its open source code, and then was bought by MSNBC.com, so I thought it would be a good idea to go straight to the source, with a Q&A with Holovaty himself. The following interview took place over email, and included a couple questions...

• August 25, 2009
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Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

During an otherwise mundane story about Microsoft's recent decision to offer a free, web-based version of its Office suite of products, I was struck by this sentence in an Associated Press story: With Office 2010, Microsoft must decide how much software it can give away online without undermining its lucrative desktop software business. If it doesn't make the right calculation, the software maker could find itself in the same position as newspapers that gave online content away and now are struggling to replace print revenue. That second line is almost a throwaway, written with no attribution. That means that the...

• August 13, 2009
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How Fear, Brand Addiction and Paranoia Block Innovation

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been thinking a lot lately about organizational behavior and innovation, and how the former can hinder the latter. It comes to mind not because I like to dwell on the negative, but rather out of hope that understanding the root cause of problems can help us all avoid the mistakes of the past. This is an important exercise because, as many of us were reminded in the re-imagined "Battlestar Galactica" series, "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." Or if you prefer the non-geeky version: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned...

• August 3, 2009
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Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A fierce and fascinating debate has broken out over the cover photo on Time magazine's April 27 print edition. Time paid a pittance for the picture -- at least a pittance next to what big magazines normally pay for cover art -- and that's made a lot of professional photographers furious. They should get over it. But they and their gifted-amateur and part-timer peers -- especially the ones capturing breaking news events -- should start agitating for some better marketplaces than the ones available today. More on that below, but first some background: The marketplace for photography in the...

• July 29, 2009
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Saving (or Destroying) Public Radio on a Mobile Phone

by Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Is the iPhone app Public Radio Player the good guy or the bad? The critics aren't so sure. Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on ReadWriteWeb, "How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio" took the super-hero stance, but Rafat Ali opted for the villain with "Public Radio Dangerously Close To Making Public Radio Obsolete" on PaidContent. Public Radio Player, the new version of the old Public Radio Tuner, is a free application that allows users to access more than 300 radio stations across the country. With a few swipes to the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch, users can listen to...

• July 27, 2009
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Discussing Spot.Us Business Model with Mother Jones' Steve Katz

by David Cohn

I met Steve Katz of Mother Jones in 2007 at a Personal Democracy Forum conference and he has been a fantastic resource for brain-picking. Recently Katz and I have been having an interesting conversation about the funding model for Spot.Us, the future of non-profit journalism, and other related topics via our blogs. Now that our conversation has turned to the web, I thought I would share this open brain-picking session. Kudos to Steve for starting it up. The recap The conversation began when Katz asked a question about fundraising for Spot.Us, which allows readers to donate to fund individual journalism...

• July 8, 2009
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Reports of Journalism's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spare a thought for journalists these days, the folk feeling particularly unappreciated as they face a barrage of public scorn on the one hand and panic-stricken managements pushing for cuts in salaries, rises in productivity, and even retrenchments, on the other. They don't want your pity. They're seeking your respect -- and your helpful answers to some of their questions about the future. Journalists under siege For sure, professional reporters are not saints deserving of hero-worship. But they don't deserve to be dubbed a closed priesthood interested only in preaching to the masses and keeping lay-people out of the profession....

• June 25, 2009
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Saving Journalism, One Idea at a Time

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

True/Slant's hybrid model (reporters find their own advertising sponsors) will save journalism! Or not. The Huffington Post is creating tomorrow's business model for journalism! Or not... Northwestern University's "computer nerds" will save journalism! Really? Ultra-cheap netbooks could save the media industry! Umm... Journalism Online LLC will save newspapers (!) by helping them charge for what they've been essentially giving away for 50 years. Could be.The iPhone will revolutionize mobile journalism! Or not. The recent panic over the demise of newspapers has led to a predictable flurry of omigod, now-what speculation. We're being treated to one hype-filled piece after another about...

• June 11, 2009
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Singing the Praises of 'Strategic Journalism'

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With all the talk of how newspapers can retain readers, it's still worth remembering some useful advice to newspapers from more than ten years ago. It comes from Mike Smith, at that time the assistant director of the Newspaper Management Center at Northwestern University. In a publication titled Values. Culture.Content, he addressed the question, "How do you differentiate your product from the growing number of media and information options?" Observing that "newspapers are place-based media," he went on to note that the standard answer was that newspapers should "become the primary source of local news." Rebutting this, Smith declared that...

• May 26, 2009
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Journalism's 3.0 Business Model(s)

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A guest blog post by Jeremy Pennycook: The Internet killed journalism. At least, as we know it. Legacy media is on a serious decline. It's hard to argue with the numbers. The often named champions of web 2.0 - Google, Facebook, Twitter - these tools didn't destroy the foundation of a business model which supported journalism and promoted a free, democratic, and open society for decades. Instead, the real culprit is a fundamental shift in how society communicates, collaborates, and disseminates information.

• May 6, 2009
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As Newspapers Implode, Diverse Voices Move Online

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a few weeks the American Society of Newspaper Editors will release its annual census. The census, created to capture an accurate picture of the industry's diversity, will also tell us how many jobs were lost in this year of layoffs, buy-outs and shuttered newspapers. As newspaper companies struggle with advertisers and audiences continuing to migrate to the web, the horrifying and at times mind-numbing rate at which the industry appeared to be imploding has take the question of diversity virtually off the table. As one newspaper CEO said to me a while back, "Diversity isn't only off the front-burner,...

• April 1, 2009
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Good News as a Business Model?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In his "Are We Home Alone?" OpEd today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says "I've never talked to more people in one week who told me, "You know, I listen to the news, and I get really depressed." I feel the same way. It's something I've wondered about for years...why people are willing to accept a constant barrage of bad news? And not just recent Chicken Little reporting about the economic meltdown, but the endless reports on murders, shootings, natural disasters, bombings, etc. Not that we should ignore the real state of affairs in the world, but if you...

• March 22, 2009
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Where the Journalists Aren't

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Where the journalists aren't: the Marketplaces/Drilling Down on Local conference, a gathering of industry execs and venture investors. The "how do we make money on local" question that is generally the conversation ender at journalism confabs is the conversation beginner at this gathering, where the first panels are stocked with venture investors talking about what they will -- and will not fund, and what they expect to get back, and why. The tone -- and the dress code -- are totally different than those you might find at ONA or Poynter. I'm in stealth mode. (Don't tell anyone: I'm wearing...

• March 16, 2009
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Breaking Even While Staying True to the Margins

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We recently applied to present Freedom Fone: Dial-up Information Service at an upcoming ICT for Development workshop. Our application was eventually accepted, but not before concerns were raised that Freedom Fone might be on its way to becoming a for-profit entity, which would be inconsistent with the conference sponsors' objectives. This was an ironic obstacle for us to encounter, particularly at a time when we're beginning to think through what our business model is going to look like as we move toward self-sufficiency. We are committed to making information accessible to people at the margins of society. And Freedom Fone...

• February 27, 2009
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Endow Newspapers? Wrong Question

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's a debate under way in the newspaper/journalism corner of the blogosphere and Twittersphere, spurred by an op-ed commentary in the New York Times earlier this week. The piece, by Yale's chief investment officer, David Swensen, and his colleague Michael Schmidt, a Yale financial analyst, starts with a questionable idea -- that newspapers should be endowed as nonprofits in order to save them -- and goes south from there. The column begins: "The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right," Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. "And...

• January 30, 2009
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Building a Social Entrepreneurial Garage Startup in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Moving from ideas to execution is an ultra cool feeling. Gram Vaani is finally on the go and we are all extremely excited to see our dreams taking shape. The garage startup mode I always used to wonder what a Silicon Valley garage startup would feel like. Well, here's what it looks like -- a social entrepreneurial garage startup in India. This is Bala in his pyjamas, with dozens of audio cables and connectors strewn out on his desk in a manner that only he understands. Bala spends part of his day reading Kafka, and the rest of his day...

• January 24, 2009
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The Journalism Bubble

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

You've heard about the housing bubble. And the dot-com bubble. I'm here to tell you about The Journalism Bubble. Anybody who's paying attention to the state of journalism in the US is aware of the financial crisis facing the news industry. And there's wide agreement on the cause of the crisis: advertising revenue for print and broadcast is declining, and advertising revenue for internet offerings is not rising fast enough to make up the difference. That's true. It's also a completely inadequate explanation for the waves of layoffs, bankruptcies, and outright closures of news organizations. There is a journalism bubble....

• January 16, 2009
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Local Press Subsidies Are Not The Answer

by Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are a growing number of voices from within the media and politics in the UK who are suggesting the government should subsidise local newspapers. This is not, IMHO, a good idea. The government can set parameters - particularly fiscal parameters (i.e. tax) that incentivise people to collect and publish public interest news. But this is fundamentally different from providing a subsidy, however arm's length, that organisations can apply for.

• January 16, 2009
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Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect. But perhaps we shouldn't use the J-word. The precipitous slide of journalism from iconic cultural power status to cultural irrelevance during the past decade is stunning. When the Shorenstein Center's Prof. Tom Patterson told his board last month that the nation's premiere think tank of, by and for top-notch...

• December 18, 2008
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Tough Economic Times Put New Spin on Beanstockd Game

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's official: the US economy is in recession. The reality of our current economic crisis has hit corporations hard and is now starting to affect the American consumer. Reports on this year's Black Friday show that the annual post-Thanksgiving shopper has a new attitude, one that is cautious about what and how much is bought. According to an article in the New York Times friday&st=cse, "this year there were more shoppers than shopping bags. Even many die-hard Black Friday shoppers -- the ones who camp out on sidewalks overnight to be first through the doors -- said they were cutting...

• November 30, 2008
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Two Weeks, Two Stories, Too Early For A Victory Dance

by David Cohn

It has been two weeks since the "official" launch of Spot.Us. I'm happy with its progress, but I remain unsatisfied. The new media hype has been great. I'm truly honored at how much attention Spot.Us has received, the optimistic and hopeful remarks, the young journalists with questions, etc. But that will die down. With the initial hype of our launch we've managed to fund two different stories: "Return of the Hooverville" and "When the Longevity Revolution Hits Your Town." Together they represent $1,550 donated by 53 people who gave an average of $29 each (some of that money was raised...

• November 24, 2008
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Toward a National Journalism Foundation

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amid so much talk of federal bailouts for the banking and auto industries, what would a national bailout plan for journalism look like? If you were given $700 billion to save journalism, how would you use it? How would you fix the system? The End of Commercial Media Several months ago I watched Roger Alton, the new editor of the Britain daily, The Independent, get absolutely skewered by Stephen Sackur on the BBC evening talk show, Hard Talk. Their 30 minute discussion boiled down to 15 minutes of Sackur asking how The Independent planned to stop losing money and 15...

• November 17, 2008
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Apply for a Knight News Challenge Grant by Nov. 1

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here at MediaShift Idea Lab, you get to hear directly from all the innovators who received grants from the Knight Foundation in the News Challenge. Now, you have the chance to join them by coming up with an idea that will help connect communities with technology and the Internet and help create the next generation of community news. Yes, times are tough for newspapers and traditional media, as the shift continues toward digital media. But Idea Lab represents hope for change in journalism, new ideas that will help lead us into a journalism future that will include more voices and...

• October 30, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 5
Hardship Letter

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Please think of him as your mother or father, or your grandmother or grandfather, who rely on your help to make sense of the mail they get, even more so when they are shocked, dismayed or confused. You are their shield, their sword, their justice, their advocate, their Includer. David and I share his hardship letter to Aurora Loan Services.

• October 18, 2008
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Can the Internet have a heart?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I attended a conference on "Online Giving Marketplaces" at Stanford University this past week, which was a great gathering of online donation, volunteer, and social matchmaking sites like Kiva.org and GlobalGiving. The kind of organizations that are doing in the social service sector what sites like Prosper.com are doing in the commercial peer to peer space. One site among many worth checking out is ModestNeeds, which gives grants of up to $5,000 to average folks - for things like paying off overdue bills and rent, etc. In these challenging economic times it's a welcome and important service. One of the...

• October 11, 2008
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Challenges for the Collegiate Press, Part 2

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In my opinion everything the new media people are working on equals better journalism, and more accessible content. But it's not enough. Newspapers have to find a way to become central to the exchange of information and ideas in their communities if they want to start making more money.

• September 12, 2008
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Challenges for the Collegiate Press, Part 1

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I would argue that two strong, independent student publications taking drastic cost cutting initiatives in the midst of a budget crisis should be seen as a canary in the coal mine. If other papers aren't careful, and don't take preemptive action, they could be caught in this mess very quickly.

• September 11, 2008
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Participatory Philanthropy, Part II

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the second of a two-part piece which examines how participatory media can help streamline and democratize philanthropy. In the first post we saw three examples of how philanthropic foundations are relying on public input to help decide which proposals receive funding. This post will examine how participatory media can redefine the evaluation process after a project has already been funded by giving the targeted community a greater say in how the initiative has (or has not) had an impact on their lives. As far as development work goes, the Millennium Villages project based at Columbia University's Earth Institute...

• September 1, 2008
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None of Your Business Model

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"What's the business model?" It's a question I hear again and again at meetings and events. The existing model for newspapers is quickly unraveling, so we need a 'new new thing' to serve some of the vital functions that newspapers used to. Whatever that new new thing may be, it is supposed to have a business model: a business model is what separates the well-meaning amateur from the sustainable enterprise. It is vital for securing loans or venture capital. You can't be serious about sustaining a venture unless you have a plan for a business that will sustain that venture....

• August 10, 2008
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The Blogosphere Needs to Mature -- But How?

by David Cohn

I'm leaving Chicago, physically tired but mentally invigorated. 1. I was inspired by the loft and good natured vibe of Knight's mission. 2. Took time to rethink my personal blogging motivation and experience. 3. Worked more on pushing spot.us into existence. (latest design work here). But in this post I want to take a moment to examine the evolution of technology reporting, particularly from large/mainstream technology blogs (think TechCrunch). I am in part inspired by a blog post from Robert Scoble on how tech blogs have failed. The reason I'm interested in this space isn't just because I'm a huge...

• July 29, 2008
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When the Star of the Story is Understanding Itself

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Maybe information and explanation ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. What put me in that mind is a special episode of "This American Life" called The Giant Pool of Money. It's a one-hour explainer on the mortgage crisis, the product of an unusual collaboration between Ira Glass, the host and force behind This American Life, Alex Blumberg, who works with Glass, and NPR, which lent economics correspondent Adam Davidson. He used to work for the show he was collaborating with. If you don't know "The Giant Pool of Money" you...

• July 17, 2008
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The Bull Pen is Active at Spot Us

by David Cohn

We raised $250 in 10 days to support a journalist. On July 3rd I announced that Spot.Us created a wiki that could accomplish our basic goals: The wiki would allow groups of people to come together around topics, let journalists create pitches and using a 3rd party e-commerce solution, we could crowdfund. Two weeks later, we have successfully raised enough money for our first example of "community funded reporting." Best part: You can duplicate this. I've used no secret technology and I tried to detail the steps I took at the Spot Us blog. A note about this first example:...

• July 14, 2008
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Swimming Lessons for Journalists

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday on the Poynter Institute's E-Media Tidbits blog (which I edit), contributor Alan Abbey posted an item about the latest spate of newsroom layoffs. He noted: "For media workers, these aren't necessarily bad times. For every job shutting down at LA Times, there is probably one (albeit less well paid, less prestigious, and more nose-to-the-grindstone) opening up in new media. However, for media veterans, this downturn does feel similar to the widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago. What can we do with our outdated skills?" That's pretty blunt talk, and I'm glad that Abbey had...

• July 4, 2008
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Cheap, But Not Free

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A lot of the interest in citizen journalism over the past few years has been related to economics. Sign up a bunch of users on your site, get them to write stuff, sell ads along side the free content, retire early. While some content that comes in this way is impeccably written and delightfully newsworthy, most is not. So news organizations interested in publishing quality content, and hoping to do it for free, are bound to be disappointed. Partnering with citizen journalists to produce great neighborhood coverage involves money, and sometimes a lot of it. The journalists need training, and...

• July 3, 2008
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People-Funded Journalism Budding

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A week ago at this time a small group of journalists and new media stalwarts were at Adobe headquarters in San Francisco talking with two dozen social cause proponents (they run a marvelous little private philanthropy fund called the Full Circle Fund) about the new Spot.us initiative. David Cohn, who writes below about the interesting issue of whether audience-funded journalism would work better for beats or stories, explained the contours of his nascent project, while a consultant, journalists for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Fog City Journal, and yours truly pitched in with thoughts about where this whole citizen...

• July 1, 2008
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Representative Journalism: Funding Beats or Stories

by David Cohn

I'm on the "board of advisers" for Representative Journalism and Leonard Witt, who coined the phrase, is also on the board of advisers for Spot Us. So - I thought I'd take a post to look at how Witt defines Representative Journalism. It is very much in-tune with Spot Us. In fact, whenever I explain Spot Us - I also bring up RepJ as an experiment playing in the same space. In my mind the only real difference between RepJ and Spot Us is the scope of what we are trying to raise money for. More on that below. The...

• June 26, 2008
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The Sweet Nectar of Experimentation

by David Cohn

Now, it may turn out that this low-hanging fruit is poisonous. But aren't you glad that somebody is at least going to give it a good honest bite to find out? More importantly - aren't you glad it's somebody who shares the values of the news industry.

• June 19, 2008
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Making Print Pubs a Vital Part of Web 2.0

by Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the 13 years I've been involved in online media, I've learned firsthand how dangerous it can be to be lead by ideology. Ideals are great, but if you become too invested in them they can blind you to the real needs of the customers you're trying to serve. And when it comes to innovation - which is part of the brand of The Bakersfield Californian newspaper where I work - the temptation to drink your own Kool-Aid is huge. So it's not without some humility that I come to you today with a confession. My name is Dan Pacheco,...

• June 18, 2008
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Knight Announces News Challenge Winners

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hello from sunny Las Vegas! I am here for the E&P Interactive Media Conference at the Rio Hotel, but also to welcome the next round of winners in the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge. These folks will soon be blogging here on Idea Lab, and it's quite a group of winners. (To see the whole list of winners, go here, and for Knight's press release on the winners, check this out.) Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibarguen (pictured below) announced the winners at the conference this morning. I think the most exciting aspect of the next round of winners is...

• May 14, 2008
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It's Not Just a Newspaper Problem; It's a Media Problem

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past week, the National Association of Music Retailers landed in San Francisco to hold their 50th annual convention. Never heard of them? Neither had I, until I responded to a random email pitch and decided to attend for a few hours. Essentially, NARM is a trade group that includes every piece of the music ecosystem, from artists and songwriters to retailers to record labels. While the organization was unfamiliar to me, the main topic of conversation at the convention was all too familiar: How do we find a new business model in a digital world? The music world has...

• May 12, 2008
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Copyright and the Demise of Newspapers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Neil Netanel, a highly regarded legal scholar, has an interesting post on Balkinization entitled "The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech." Netanel, who has written extensively on copyright issues, posits that part of the reason for the decline in newspapers stems from Internet competitors that build on the content and value that newspapers create. He suggests that imposing a statutory license or levy on commercial Internet service providers and news aggregators might be a workable solution for ensuring that newspapers receive compensation for their investment in quality reporting. While I think he gives too little credit to citizen...

• May 8, 2008
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A Collage of Business Models from NewsTools2008

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some of the most interesting discussions and demonstrations at last week's NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley centered around making the changing news landscape sustainable. Here are some of the ideas I heard, along with a few of my own: 1) News Consultancies: Leveraging local information channels & relationships to connect average people with local influencers and experts. Examples: -An online/offline service which people pay journalists to help them navigating local political/business channels. i.e, the fastest way to get a building permit approved or knowing which local developer to talk to about a project. -recommending a trustworthy plumber of mechanic. This idea...

• May 5, 2008
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Newspapers Struggling Online, Not Just in Print

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As disturbing as the recent numbers on declining print circulation and plunging advertising revenue at newspapers have been, less attention has been paid to ominous signs of a slow-down on the online side as well: - Most newspaper chains reported online revenue growth in single or low double digits this quarter, compared with growth rates of 15-20% or more a year ago. - The amount of time the average visitor spent at most newspaper web sites declined in February compared with a year ago, according to an Editor & Publisher report on Nielsen Online data. E&P reported similar data for...

• May 4, 2008
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Press Can Survive Newspaper's Demise, But Must Benefit Public

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two weeks ago I participated in a forum on newspapers and the net put on by Britannica Blog. The tone was: are newspapers doomed and does anyone care? My part includes this: At many a conference I have attended on new media and journalism, some old pro whose subsidy is fast disappearing will (mentally) place hands on hips and say about the Internet as a whole, "Well, that's all very nice, very Web 2.0, but where's the business model, people?" As if that were some kind of contribution. I can't tell you how disconcerting-and weird-I find some of these performances....

• April 21, 2008
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Ten Things Journalists Should Know About Surviving In a High-Tech Industry

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Journalism is becoming a high tech industry, and that means that career norms for journalists are approaching those of high tech workers -- shorter job tenures, working for smaller companies, and much more. Here are ten things that can help journalists survive Web 2.0 with their sanity intact: High tech is a boom and bust industry. We get laid off when the economy is good, and we get laid off when the economy is bad. Investors get fed up and pull the plug on small companies; at big companies, the CEO must, on ceremonial occasions, throw a few sacrificial victims...

• April 17, 2008
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Journalism Will Survive the Death of Its Institutions

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Massive layoffs with no end in sight. Wave after wave of acquisitions and mergers fueled by the excesses of artificially cheap capital. Widespread fear that an entire industry and its contributions will stall or simply stop.

This describes the news industry today, but it also described the high tech industry in the late eighties and early nineties.

• April 15, 2008
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Jumping Back on the Entrepreneurial Horse

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The irony was deliberate when Steve Outing and Steve Kearsley soft-launched their new online comic strip, techGRL, a week ago today. It's a humor site, yes, but the goal -- "not just a comic strip, but also an online community" -- was no April Fools joke.Reinventing comics online is an expanding arena. Mark Fiore and other talented folks have been blazing digital paths to revive a once-tired form. Adding online community is a natural extension of going digital.Before I continue, several disclosures: Steve Outing (pictured at left) is a longtime associate and friend in the online journalism world. He's written about my work, and vice...

• April 8, 2008
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Hyperlocal Sites Can Deliver More Than Display Ads

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mark Glaser, our host on Mediashift, asked: " ... is there something (hyper-local news sites) can offer the businesses beyond just a display ad or a place in an online directory? Is there a more creative partnership they might have, where reader/contributors could give the business honest feedback on the site -- positive and negative? Paulding.com, for those who are aware, is based on a simple message board shtick. We have a front page with news but the majority of the action - some 2200 posts a day - occur within the forums. These posts are typically viewed by members...

• March 30, 2008
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What Journalism Needs: A Product People Want

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When journalists were asked in a recent survey to identify the most important aspect of their work, 91% said "make my publication successful by creating appealing content for its audiences." What a turn-around from the not too distant past when such sentiments would have been denounced in many newsrooms as pandering to the public and giving people what they want, not what they need. This shift in perspective was predictable in the face of hemorrhaging print circulation and broadcast viewership and the recent precipitous decline in ad revenue, at least for newspapers. But I think it also should inform some...

• March 30, 2008
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(Only) Two Visions for the Future of Blogging?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

An interesting battle of the blogging titans was covered in the "Bits" section of today's New York Times. It's basically an exchange between popular technology bloggers (and blog owners) Michael Arrington and Rafat Ali. Their differing views are worth examining because they touch on a hot button issue in blogging and journalism: How are new for-profit business models impacting blogging and the journalistic integrity of bloggers? In their personal scrap Mr. Arrington and Mr. Ali are tackling the difficult question of profitability models for blogging. Mr. Arrington seems to favor a monopoly approach, where blogs are brought together to form...

• March 30, 2008
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How Can Ads Support Community News?

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm going to be posting weekly questions here on Idea Lab to spark discussion by the various authors, as well as our community of readers. This week I'd like to follow up on the recent theme of new business models for local news sites. Many small hyper-local community sites start up with Google AdSense ads and other automated, quick ways of bringing in a small revenue stream. Eventually, though, they need to make more money than that, and must turn to local businesses to advertise. But it's difficult to entice small businesses online, as they are more likely to employ...

• March 26, 2008
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The Case for Local Ownership of Newspapers

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Beating the street looking for a job in journalism is not a pleasant thought these days. As the firing of editors at places like the LA Times over newsroom staff cuts demonstrates, out-of-work journalists are totally divorced from the decision making that affects their lives. This is because the big decisions in this industry are being made by corporate management types whose primary goal in life is a seven figure bonus. These titans of industry are not just in the media companies; they are also in advertising and marketing. That the opinions of a few carry such weight is simply...

• March 26, 2008
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Know a Good Manager?

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the biggest challenges of building ChiTownDailyNews.org has been running the business side of things -- fundraising, ad sales, etc -- while also trying to build a network of volunteer community journalists, edit their stories, manage our bloggers and beat reporters. As of this week, we're looking to break those tasks into two separate jobs. All of our non-editorial operations will be supervised by a general manager, and we're looking to fill that role ASAP. You can check out the complete job posting here. And please pass it on to anyone you know who might fit the bill....

• March 21, 2008
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Life Inside the Non-Profit News Model

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of our group bloggers here, Geoff Dougherty, founder of the Chi-Town Daily News, is the focus of an extended profile that appears in Miller-McCune magazine. The profile was written by one of my former Mercury News colleagues, Ryan Blitstein, who uses Dougherty's story to explore some themes that have emerged on this blog: The possiblities of citizen journalism and the sustainability of the non-profit news model. An excerpt: "Civic entrepreneurs across the country are offering multiple visions of local journalism's future, from technology-heavy, amateur-dependent nonprofit sites to more traditional approaches to news that just happen to be tax-exempt...

• March 21, 2008
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Markets Fail News

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Thanks to Chris O'Brien's challenge, serious talk of business models for journalism have come to the IdeaLab blog. Let's pause a moment for an overarching view. Turn off the bright lights and stare into the empty studio. Markets - selling and buying at prices set by supply and demand - don't work for news and information. Valuable news is a public good. All right, if you care about journalism, you already believed that. But news is also a public good in the sense economists use the term: once one person comes into possession of it, everybody can have it. Expensive...

• March 18, 2008
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Where's the Innovation in Business Models?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been following closely a theme that has developed here in recent days. It began last week with David Sasaki's post about the legacy of the Knight family, continued with Dan Gillmor's call for more entrepreneurial thinking in journalism, and was amplified by J.D. Lasica's call for newspapers to innovate or die. All great thoughts, and worth reading to the word. But I have a particular interest here. As a business reporter at the San Jose Mercury News the past nine years, I've been living at the tragic center of the events being addressed to some degree by each of...

• March 13, 2008
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Bringing Entrepreneurial Thinking to Journalism

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

(Note: I wrote this initially for PR Week magazine. What follows is slightly updated.) A cliche of business holds that good ideas are a dime a dozen; it's hard work and investment capital that turn them into businesses. As with most cliches, this one has a solid foundation of truth. But something has changed, and it has profound meaning for the future of media and communications, including journalism, entertainment and PR. Digital technologies are dramatically reducing the cost of entree for creating new products and services, and, in the case of digital media, those costs can be close to zero....

• March 7, 2008
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Can the Knight Legacy Lead to Sustainability?

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a story about who foots my paycheck. It is a story about who funds this very blog, along with all of the projects that we write about here. It is the story of the transformation of media and the efforts to make that transformation sustainable. From the Akron Beacon Journal to National Media Conglomerate It is a story that begins in 1896, when Charles Landon Knight, a recent graduate from Columbia University Law School, took a job at the Philadelphia Times. Four years later he moved to Akron, Ohio where he worked his way up from advertising manager...

• March 5, 2008
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Why I Love Forums -- and Not Blogs

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I have an admission to make. I really don't like blogs. They are not conversational and they don't build a community. I love forums because they are conversational and with a little nurturing, they can blossom into a full-blown on-line community. This is true whether the common interests are cars, collectibles or a geographic community. Another reason I love forums is that, unlike a blog, I could have stopped writing at the end of the last paragraph. On an active forum that assertion would have been enough to effectively start a conversation that possibly would be just as informative as...

• February 5, 2008
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It's The Sales Stupid!

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is the sales stupid! No it is not ... it is the network (Check the companion entry It is the network stupid) that determines if you attract a viable audience that generates monetize-able journalism ... I.e. journalism that attracts a salable audience. My belief has always been that sales will come when you have a viable audience. I'm here to report that it does even when you're barely competent at sales. Yep, I've had sales ... although any reasonable businessperson would say that sales I've generated so far are lackluster. The secret of good sales is a good salesperson...

• December 30, 2007
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Rethinking Newspapers

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been reading with fascination the email threads in the Rethinking the Mercury News project, which launched a Google Group discussion this month. In news circles, the San Jose Mercury News is considered one of the top-tier mid-size papers in the country. after its sale to MediaNews last year, the paper has been undergoing a series of cost reductions, resulting in staff reductions, slimmed-down sections and less original news coverage. In other words, like almost every other paper in the country, it's feeling the pain, both financially and journalistically. Not sure if MediaNews breaks out finances by newspaper, but...

• November 19, 2007
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Advertising and Information Asymmetry Online

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mark Andrejevic: Living through the '90s, there was this euphoric set of predictions about the empowering and democratizing capacity of the new medium. I read that against what the current political and economic situation looks like today. [...] What concerns me is the way in which the celebration of the potential so quickly slides into a claim that this potential is being actualized. An interview with the author of iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Well worth the read. As long as the funding model for journalism is advertising-based, these issues will frame our work and - in...

• October 31, 2007
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Getting Down and Practical

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I love practical tips for multimedia journalists and other media makers to help us get our arms around the personal media revolution without costing us a fortune. At the session "Running a Digi-Newsroom on the Cheap," Dale Steinke of KING TV pointed to a wealth of online resources: Trumba.com is a powerful public events calendar. Put 5 lines of codes on your site and you've got a community calendar. He pointed to Videozilla, which, at $30, is an inexpensive alternative to Flash ($700) for video conversion. Want to put supertitles scrolling across the bottom of your videos? "Our IT dept...

• October 19, 2007
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Baristanet Book Club Launches with Jay McInerney

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Debbie Galant of Baristanet has launched the Baristanet Book Club, opening with an author interview conducted by Jay McInerney: So, why is Jay McInerney writing for Baristanet? It starts with the precipitous decline in book reviewing by mainstream media, a trend documented here and much fretted about by authors, reviewers, and publishers. As an author, I knew about this. But who thought I could be part of the solution? Well, Paul Bogaards, a Glen Ridge resident, avid Baristanet reader and executive at Knopf, did. In mid-September, he invited me to a lunch with representatives from the Association of American Publishers...

• October 19, 2007
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We Don't Have to Save the Newspaper Industry. We Do Have to Bring "The Press" Across the Digital Divide.

by Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the recent Networked Journalism Summit I referenced a darker argument on the future of online advertising by Doc Searls. Here is where I discuss it. Because I write about the Internet and what it's doing to the press, and follow that story at my blog, I am sometimes asked what I believe the future of newspapers to be. Or, more bluntly, "will newspapers survive?" Very rarely is anyone satisfied with my answer: "I really don't know what's going to happen." (I like that answer, myself.) "... And I don't think anyone does." Not knowing what the model is, we...

• October 16, 2007
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Innovation, Entrepreneurism and Multiple Disciplines at Core of ASU's New Knight Center

by Christopher Callahan

Too often journalism schools are islands within the larger university communities. At the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication here at Arizona State University, we wanted to not only build an incubator for great new digital media ideas, but to create an environment where student journalists could work side-by-side with computer engineers, business majors, designers and students from other disciplines across campus. We also felt that J-schools traditionally have spent little or no time fostering an entrepreneurial spirit in our students. And we believe that spirit is vital in the creation of viable new media products that are...

• October 15, 2007
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My 21st Century News Challenge

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am G. Patton Hughes and I publish a hyperlocal website in Paulding County Georgia. My 21st Century Knight News Challenge is to write about how I am going to make money out of this hyperlocal new media venture. My goal is to share with you observations of a lone entrepreneur who had a new media idea and is trying to make it work. I feel it important to set the stage for what will follow so bear with me while I present a little history. I'll use a "QnA" format. Q. The first question is how I came to...

• October 15, 2007
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From Community Newspapers to Community Hosts

by Richard Anderson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

VillageSoup is one of the James S. and John L. Knight Foundation's first year's recipients of a Knight Brothers News Challenge Grant. It is in Gary Kebbel's words, the only single platform, full service projected funded in 2007. I will try in this blog to share a view which will hopefully encourage others to engage the idea of Community Hosts and to share their thoughts and experiences as well. The idea of a new business model for community newspapers formed in 1997 in the coastal Maine community of Camden. The idea was stimulated by the 1997 book Net Gain: Expanding...

• October 14, 2007
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