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: The tech sector will gain from public media's high-quality content, commitment to community, and public service mission; and public media will gain from technology's network efficiencies, professional and social connections, and radical new distribution paths.

As we spend the early weeks of this venture fleshing out our thinking and surveying the landscape, I thought I'd share both a snapshot of the accelerator scene and some of the issues triggering discussion at the Public Media Accelerator.

What's an accelerator?

Accelerators are organizations focused on early stage investment in technology startups, providing a mix of financing, mentorship and other support to help launch new companies with the potential for explosive growth.

Most accelerators boil down to a few essentials:

1. Funding -- Typically for-profit accelerators provide $20k-$50k and take approximately 5% in equity.
2. Founding teams -- The participants are small teams, often 2-3 people, who are proto-founders of a company organized around a product/service vision.
3. Program and process -- The accelerator creates a structure and curriculum, typically offered in an intensive residential 2-3 month sprint.
4. Networking and expertise -- There's enormous value in the accelerator's ability to match teams with experienced mentors, advisers and investors who assist the teams on design, product, marketing, business development, and more.
5. Space and logistical support -- Often there is co-working space and light infrastructure support for the teams during the in-person sessions.
6. Demo day -- The process culminates in a showcase of the team's products at a "demo day" for investors and press.

Accelerators are popping up all over. TechStars, one of the leaders in the field, has even franchised the model to support new accelerators around the world. Xconomy tracks 64 of them in its latest annual report. Budding entrepreneurs, faced with so many options, can use the "Unified Seed Accelerator Application" form to apply to numerous accelerators in one fell swoop.

A growing trend that includes the Public Media Accelerator is "vertical" accelerators that focus on a particular industry, platform or other niche. Examples include Rockhealth, which targets startups in health care and FinTech for financial tech. There are a growing number with social missions, including one of my favorites, the Unreasonable Institute. And just last week Code for America announced a forthcoming accelerator targeting "civic startups."

accelerators shifting into high gear

With so many groups with money and advice to give, are there enough takers? The answer is yes -- plenty, in fact -- although there is growing competition for the best teams and ideas. The fact is that today the costs of creating a startup are much lower by virtue of cloud computing and other tech efficiencies; the growth of Internet and mobile access has created a global market and means of distribution; entrepreneurial culture has taken root among enterprising developers; the high-profile successes of Internet startups and Y Combinator/TechStars alumni have inspired follow-on models.

The most obvious and meaningful benchmark of success is the number of companies in the accelerator's portfolio that secure follow-on financing, and, further downstream, a successful "exit" in an acquisition, IPO or profitability.

While the ingredients for what goes into an accelerator can be broken out and reassembled, the special sauce is the unique mix of the accelerator management team's judgment, talent, relationships, experience, and pure luck of the draw in shepherding companies through to further funding, growth and profit.

It's clear that public media needs its own accelerator -- attuned to the needs and assets of the industry and connected to the talent and energy in the broader technology and media world.

The PRX Knight team has our own special sauce, but our measure of success is not profits and exits per se -- it's furthering the values and impact of public service media, with sustainability and revenue being critical to create a lasting effect. We decided early on that the Public Media Accelerator would look for both for-profit and non-profit opportunities (something Knight Foundation has started to explore recently through its Enterprise Fund).

There are a number of for-profit organizations in public media -- production companies, service providers, subsidiaries, etc. But the vast majority of the system -- local stations, distributors, and national networks including PRX itself -- are non-profits. And many of the sources of revenue are contingent upon non-profit status -- CPB grants, foundation and government funding, individual donations, FCC-regulated broadcast sponsorship. To my knowledge, there are no venture-backed companies focused on public media, in part because a traditional definition of the market is too small to target.

finding the right mix of for-profit and non-profit

So why would the Public Media Accelerator be open to for-profit investments? Would the same ingredients hold together in a purely non-profit context? How do we harness the for-profit energy that attracts top talent and aligns incentives in the standard accelerator model, while advancing the mission-driven principles at the core of the venture?

First, while we will not restrict the accelerator to one funding path, we recognize that for-profits and non-profits require different structures and approaches to be effective. In some cases we will help pioneer new hybrid models that straddle both.

Second, we want to overcome the inherent weaknesses of the grant-driven, project-based funding that has been the means of innovation funding in the industry to date. These efforts tend to be incremental, short-lived, and at best result in "sustaining" rather than "disruptive" innovation (using Clayton Christensen's well-known construct). It's not hard to see why disruptive innovations tend to come from outside successful organizations and industries rather than from within. The Public Media Accelerator has the opportunity to change this dynamic: Knight and PRX have significant standing and relationships in public media, but are also accomplished risk-takers without the legacies and limits of many public media institutions.

Third, we see the accelerator model as a way to attract new talent into the field. While we anticipate working with a number of the current forward-leaning teams within the industry, our opportunity is to expand the pool, and inspire and enable a new cadre of public media entrepreneurs (also address the developer gap I blogged about here recently). We take our own inspiration from Mozilla, Wikipedia, Code for America, and the growing number of mission-driven technology efforts that aspire to and achieve success on an Internet scale. Technologists and entrepreneurs want to make meaningful things, and public media should embrace them.

What are we looking for?

We've said two areas of interest are mobile and monetization, but we are also intentionally leaving a wide open door for ideas that break the mold. Our evolving list of criteria includes:

Mission-driven: The ideas should encompass public media's mission and values as an impact goal, not merely a side effect.

Disruptive: We're excited about ideas that change the game through some systemic or business model insight, more so than smart improvements to the way things already work.

Scalable/replicable: Ideas should have the potential to scale to significant impact and business sustainability or be replicable by others.

The Public Media Accelerator is not a content fund, but we'll seek to connect content in ways that deepen its value and impact and address the business model of its production and distribution.

We still have a number of open questions as we get underway, but rather than attempt to answer them all, we're taking our own advice and launching the Public Media Accelerator as a lean startup of its own -- building as we go, trusting in a talented team, being ready to pivot, actively networking and learning from advisers and mentors, and relentlessly focused on the mission of transforming public media. (We are still accepting applications for the director position, a terrific opportunity to help lead the media revolution.)

Follow us on Twitter (@publicmediax and on the Public Media Accelerator site.

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 the things we loved about Kremerman's work is that he came to his conclusions using public data from the latest National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (CASEN in Spanish), one of the public data sets we're using in Poderopedia to establish a database of who's who in business and politics (based on the fact that in countries like ours, where you are born, your last name, and which school you attended very much define who you are in the scale of power).

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE PART OF THE 0.1%

Four thousand families might seem like a lot, but that 0.1 percent of the richest households (in a country of 17,094,270 people) is part of the 10 percent that runs practically everything in Chile.

According to the 2009 CASEN data extracted by Kremerman for his post: "4,459 families have a monthly average income of $19 million pesos ($37,300). This is 0.1 percent of the richest households, who generally tend to under-report their income in such surveys."

Being part of the 0.1 percent means that you might be our president or in the annual Forbes billionaires list, and that you either own one of the top 100 Business Groups or work for one of them, according to the Superintendency of Securities and Insurance (our SEC).

It also means, as Kremerman put it, that you probably own banks, insurance companies, retail stores, pharmacies, private pension funds, private health insurance companies, mining companies (the heart of Chile's economy), soccer clubs, forestry companies, fishing companies, or big media.

So what if we go deeper and see what being part of the 0.1 percent means to the rest of Chilean citizens? How do the 0.1 percent decisions affect people's everyday life?

Kremerman did the exercise. Here goes -- Chile's 0.1 percent decide:

• The interest rate you end up paying with a bank for consumer credit.
• The excessive charges on electricity, water, telephone or gas bills.
• The supermarket account you pay each month.
• The return of your pension fund (during the first half of August 2011 the Pension Funds had lost more than $8,000 billion pesos, or $15.4 billion, equivalent to more than 6 percent of the total funds).
• The value of your private health care insurance plan.
• The credit card interest charged by retail stores when you have to buy clothes or any appliance.
• The harsh conditions for small businesses that operate as a supplier, contractor or part of the business chain of large companies (sometimes waiting 120 days or more to receive pay).
• Bus fare and plane ticket costs.
• The percentage of fish available for artisanal fishermen.
• The shows and news you see and hear on TV and most radio stations.
• The editorial line of the biggest media companies.
• The fee you pay in a private school or university.
• The players that are hired by your favorite soccer team.
• And, of course, the possibility of not having universal quality public education and health because they don't want to pay more taxes (one Warren Buffett idea they failed to like).

The 0.1 percent make up the core of Poderopedia's who's who database. But in our research, we're discovering that the power map of civic, business and political leaders, as well as companies and organizations, covers the top 20 percent of the country with links in each one of the sectors mentioned above, similar to the well-known Pareto principle.

UNDERSTANDING OCCUPY CHILE

The Chilean economy is often applauded by the media and think tanks. But you don't read as much about the gap between the richest 10 percent and the poorest 10 percent.

In a recent book, however, economist Cristóbal Huneeus and Andrés Velasco, former Harvard teacher and ex-minister of Finance, demonstrate that the income of the richest 10 percent is 78.5 times greater than that of the poorest 10 percent today.

If you break down the numbers, like Kremerman did, it means that "Chile has an average per capita GDP of $32 million pesos ($64,000) a year for a household of four people, but over 80 percent of Chileans live in a household with an annual income not exceeding $10 million pesos ($19,000)."

It also means that "the richest 5 percent of the population generates income 830 times more than the poorest 5 percent," Kremerman wrote. And, according to the 2009 CASEN, the poorest 10 percent live with 1.5 percent of the country's total revenues, and the richest 10 percent represent 39.2 percent of revenues.

In addition, Chileans on average owe 7.5 times more money than what they make each month, so many are afraid of losing their jobs or becoming ill. That makes it easy to understand why long before Occupy Wall Street began, we had thousands of students and citizens protesting for free quality public education, with nine out of 10 Chileans supporting their protests.

But on the other side of the food chain, many business associations, lobbyists and large funders of political campaigns continue to reject a tax increase on the rich and oppose structural changes that would break the asymmetry of power between the major economic groups and ordinary citizens. 

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 database with additional sources of data
• use that data -- e.g., to write evidence-based articles and formulate informed decisions about how their society is financed.

Spending Stories is our effort to make OpenSpending a natural way to do data journalism about public spending.

The Problem

FACT 1: Errors occur in data, no matter how official the source.

FACT 2: Data wrangling (manipulating or restructuring datasets to correct inaccuracies, remix with other datasets to augment the data, or perform calculations on the data), generally improves data quality, for example, through reconciling entities and flagging amounts that are obviously incorrect.

FACT 3: Data wrangling can also introduce errors if not tackled correctly.

Crucial to ensuring the use of this data in articles or ensuring re-use by concerned citizens is the ability to show that the data is valid. In addition, maintaining a good relationship with public bodies who are confident that they are not being misrepresented in the data is vital to ensuring the data continues to be released in the first place. In practice, this means that the provenance of the data has to be clear including:

• where the data originally came from (preferably a URL)
• whether anyone (e.g., government, community data wrangler, or OpenSpending) has worked on the data since it was published, and what steps they took to change the data (i.e., these steps should be reproducible to produce the same result)

The OpenSpending team has gone to lengths to retain enough information to say who was responsible for both of the above.

OpenSpending is a system, somewhat like a wiki, which allows you to track back through the data wrangling process and work out what changes were made to the data, when and by whom.

Error reporting in practice

OpenSpending recently received a pointed inquiry from the U.K. Treasury disputing the claims we were making about the payment of British public money to a private company. Believing that an error had been introduced, we attempted to retrace our steps and find out where this had occurred, and who was responsible.

As we discovered, the payment had actually taken place, but the the OpenSpending descriptions used to label the transaction were not sufficiently detailed to accurately reflect the item in question.

With Spending Stories, we were able to retrace our steps because we had preserved a copy of the software tools we used for collecting the data (the data is published by about 50 public bodies, and must be downloaded, stitched together, and firmly molded into shape). These tools had been also made available to the public, so the Treasury and other concerned citizens could have checked our work themselves; the availability of this kind of check keeps all participants in the fiscal debate honest.

What had gone wrong was a problem of terminology: The transactions existed, but ambiguous language had been used to describe them, glossing over the distinction between the government department reporting what money had been spent and the government agency which actually spent the money. The bodies in question were the Department of Health and a regional health care trust; this distinction is certainly one which a concerned citizen would expect to be made clearly -- so we should make sure our system makes it easy to know which question is being asked.

Checkpoints in OpenSpending

In the short term, we are mitigating the problem of data errors as follows:

• Data provenance - is the source identifiable and the process reproducible? OpenSpending encourages people to add modified datasets to a "package" in the Data Hub. This allows other users to see the original document alongside any modified documents and track the chain of changes made to see clearly which points errors could have been introduced.
• Crowdsourcing feedback on spending data.
• Permitting re-use of the structured data we present, so that it can inform decisions in other fact-checking systems.

Ultimately, we will build our part of the ecosystem to provide feedback to the political process, by improving democratic discourse about the public finances.

Lucy Chambers is a community coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. She works on the OKF's OpenSpending project and coordinates the data-driven-journalism activities of the foundation, including running training sessions and helping to streamline the production of a collaboratively written handbook for data journalists.

Martin Keegan is a software engineer and linguist, currently leading the Open Knowledge Foundation's OpenSpending project. He is also on the Open Knowledge Foundation's board, and has worked for SRI, Citrix, University of Cambridge and co-founded and worked for various civil society organizations.

Today we are taking a big stride by formally being acquired by the Public Insight Network. There is a lot to suss out with this merger, but when you sit and think about it, it makes a lot of sense. The official press release is here.

SPOT.US + PIN = ROCKING

The Public Insight Network (part of American Public Media) was co-founded by my friend Michael Skoler, now at Public Radio International. It's a software platform (similar to Spot.Us) that has long been at the forefront of how Public Media can interact with and take cues from the public by giving them a means to inform journalism. Individuals can provide insight to make stories more informed, insightful, and reflect the community in a truer sense. Spot.Us is built on a relationship with the public, giving them a kind of editorial control and influence over what stories should be done. Both create a media that is more responsive and responsible to the public's needs according to their own volition. Combined we offer both opportunities to readers, creating a more nuanced relationship between a news entity that uses PIN/Spot and the public.

Creating and managing a more nuanced relationship -- that's what "public media" should do. I hope that as Spot.Us and PIN merge, we can continue to push the boundaries in transparency and participation in the process of journalism so that media organizations can better serve the public.

All of this is under the backdrop of my gig at UC Berkeley's J-school, which is a blast. Spot.Us is my baby, but just as it is time for it to grow up and move out of the house, it was time for me to tackle new problems. Through this merger both are happening.

I will continue working at Berkeley's J-school and will remain the founder and a part of the Spot.Us team moving forward. But it is high time for Spot.Us to grow wings and move beyond what any small team can accomplish. I believe under the PIN leadership of Joaquin Alvarado, Spot.Us can grow to accomplish much more, and I intend to be there as we reach for higher goals and aspirations.

There will be much to write about in the coming months (years). I'm happy to say that Spot.Us is able to fund itself as a project for the first year of this merger, and if revenue grows, could do so indefinitely. But I want to keep this post short and sweet. Spot.Us will continue. For the moment, it will be status quo. There will be changes moving forward, but we will remain an open platform that will fund-raise for independent journalists and news organizations.

And to close it off -- an excerpt from the first IdeaLab post I ever wrote about Spot.Us:

As I see it -- community funded reporting is low-hanging fruit. The Knight News Challenge is all about doing research and development -- the kind that isn't done elsewhere in the industry.

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? Fact is, this idea is going to be a learning process. My goal isn't to solve the business woes of journalism. I don't think anybody can do that. But I do intend to taste the fruit of community funded reporting and report back as clearly as possible how it tastes. Fact is, this idea is going to be tried by somebody. My fear, however, is that those who get to it first successfully don't have journalism's best interest in mind -- but the bottom line.

I'm happy to report back that the fruit isn't poisonous. In fact, I think it's time we begin to harvest at a larger scale.

(Image Credit: Jules Brelaz)

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 -- neither are the foundation grants and large individual donations that got them off the ground.

Non-profit news organizations will survive only if they find and build a community: Identify people who believe in their mission, engage them online and in person, and make them want to provide financial support.

This is not a new model. It's pretty much the same thing that public television and public radio have done for decades. But the recent research reports suggest that most of the new non-profit news startups have made only a little progress in this area.

"Getting Local: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability" was a report published last month by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It provides a detailed review of seven non-profit news sites and suggests several key ingredients for success:

• A business development strategy and the capacity to execute it
• A high level of audience focus and efforts to build community engagement
• Technological capacity to support and track engagement

A second report -- "Online Journalism Enterprises: From Startup to Sustainability" -- comes from the Renaissance Journalism Center at San Francisco State University. Based on a survey of 32 online journalism startups, the authors conclude:

Grants are getting harder to come by for existing sites. Two-thirds of the study respondents said they are at or approaching a crossroad where it is getting difficult to secure a second or third round of grants or financing.

The third report -- "Nonprofit Watchdog News: What's Working?" was published earlier this month by a team of journalism master's students from the Medill School at Northwestern University. The students are enrolled in Medill's Community Media Innovation Project, for which I'm the lead instructor.

The students identified eight “lessons from non-profit watchdogs” that other sites might emulate to maximize their impact and sustainability. Several of the key lessons relate to building a community and generating financial support from individuals:

• Build audience connections and revenue through in-person events
• Reach out to readers for story ideas and content
• Diversify revenue sources, with a focus on small donors

DIVERSIFYING REVENUE
Most of the sites described in these reports were able to launch thanks to grants from foundations or donations from a few generous philanthropists. But only a few of them have made substantial strides toward diversifying their revenue sources.

Two organizations that have made significant progress toward financial sustainability are MinnPost and the St. Louis Beacon. These sites have differentiated themselves from other non-profit startups by focusing from the beginning on building a diverse set of revenue streams.

Joel Kramer, founder and CEO of MinnPost, told The New York Times last year that he wanted MinnPost to be financially self-supporting by 2012. "I have a very aggressive definition of sustainability, which is that we have enough revenues to survive without foundation money,” he told the Times.

MinnPost brought in more money than it spent in 2010, and relied on foundations for just 36 percent of its $1.28 million in revenues, according to the Knight report. Almost 40 percent of its revenues came from individual donations or ticket sales for its annual MinnRoast event. As of March 2011, MinnPost had 2,400 paying members, the Knight report said.

Like MinnPost, the Beacon has built in-person engagement through events, including community conversations about race and monthly "Beacon & Eggs" breakfast panel discussions. Almost 60 percent of its $2.2 million in revenue in 2010 came from individual donations, the Knight report said. On the Beacon's website, the organization emphasizes its growing community of contributors by highlighting individual donors on every page with messages like "Charlie backs the Beacon." There's even a separate "I Back the Beacon" page with profiles of individual donors.

There's no guarantee that any of the new non-profit news organizations will survive. But MinnPost and the St. Louis Beacon seem to be pointing in the right direction.

"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 from across the state have called or emailed to express their interest in getting our help installing and using the application. Installing the application isn't much of a challenge, I tell them, but what are you going to feed it?

OpenBlock, a "hyper-local news" platform, is a beast that eats data. So before we can make the Tar Heel State a good breeding ground for the application, we're setting out on a digital public records census. We aim to figure out how well city and county government agencies are living up to the recommendation of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities that "governments at all levels should ordinarily collect data electronically and in standardized formats."

Unlike many similar audits of public records that have been done by the Associated Press and others, this isn't some sort of exercise to see how governments comply with state and federal open records laws when they think they aren't being watched, so we're happy to describe here how we're going to go about gathering our data. In my dream world, the N.C. Association of County Commissioners sends out a link to this article to its members and implores them to help.

We're focusing our census on a few of the public records that rural newspaper publishers and editors have told us will be most valuable to their readers and advertisers -- births, deaths, land transactions, crime reports and health inspections.

Crime reports are particularly interesting. We know that people love police blotters, but also have real concerns about the safety of victims and the fairness of the criminal process. We know that state and federal agencies collect crime information in digital formats, but it's old and aggregated so it no longer has news value by the time it reaches that place in the information food chain.

To properly gauge the state of digital police records, we have to go to the city and county level. So our first step was to try to find or create a comprehensive list of every law enforcement agency in North Carolina that might generate incident or arrest reports. Thanks to a great report that a state agency submitted to the legislature earlier this year, we have the names of 569 police agencies.

From there, we're in the process of tracking down the website addresses of each agency to examine whether they publish incident and arrest reports there. (We will publish that list shortly, and may ask for your help filling in the blanks.)

Taking an 'Element' State of Mind

The bad news is that there's no indication we'll find a single agency that produces reports in a GeoRSS feed. The good news is that most police departments in the state appear to use a relatively standardized paper form to record police incidents and arrests.

In most cases, we can at least get those pieces of paper. But we've already run into cases in which police departments are unwilling to turn over standard incident reports without first heavily redacting them with misused citation of the state's open records law.

We're interested in the financial viability of OpenBlock, and paper records raise the cost. We'd have to pay people or recruit reliable volunteers to gather the paper records, scan them, and upload them to a DocumentCloud service that could use the layout of the page to extract editorially meaningful elements such as the date, time, location, and description of each document. That becomes almost impossible if we run into handwritten paper reports, which would force us to re-key the documents using local volunteers or perhaps something like Mechanical Turk.

For our census, it is not going to be enough to report that police records are online or offline, or that they are digital or not digital. We really need to be able to describe the format, location and timeliness of each data element. Taking a look at the website for the Winston-Salem Police Department, gives a good idea why we have to get more granular than the "documents state of mind" of traditional investigative reporters.

Winston-Salem publishes to its site what amounts to an index of incident and arrest reports. Each record includes the date, time, "type," case number, "primary offense" and "location." But for incident reports, it also links to a fuller record that provides information that's important for readers and reporters who want to determine the relative news value of each event -- data elements such as whether a weapon was used; the name, age, race and gender of the victim; whether drugs and alcohol were involved; whether anyone was injured; the amount of time the crime went unreported; and descriptions of the items that were stolen.

But missing from even those fuller records are data elements that would be useful for journalists who want to report trends and patterns rather than simple events. Some of the data is omitted with claims of too vague "information security purposes" and other data is omitted because of technical limitations of the departments' digital records management systems.

Each element brings with it a different cost of transforming it into a complete and current digital public record.

The variety of formats that our initial tests have already turned up seem to be limited. We've come across PDFs on the web, Word documents delivered daily via email, HTML tables, CSV file on the web, CD and via email, and the Mac-proof SNP filetype courtesy of Microsoft Access.

Most of these digital formats are created for police departments by one of three vendors that have a corner on 95 percent of the market. But we also know that 15 percent of the state's police agencies -- covering 1 percent of the population -- maintain no digital records.

police records play a key role

Police records are far from the most important -- and have proven throughout the history of this and other similar applications to be the hardest to get. But they play a key role in determining the viability of OpenBlock at rural papers. When compared to other interesting public records such as real estate or health inspections, there are simply more police reports that come out more often than other record types. Volume and frequency drive most common measures of audience engagement such as time on site and return visits.

OpenBlock is a hungry animal, and we've got to find a way to help rural papers feed it without going broke. That's the whole point of our census.

As we set off on our survey, we'll report findings and failings here. We're beginning to imagine some interesting things we'll be able to measure once we have a fuller picture of the state of records in North Carolina.

In the meantime, let me know what your experiences have been gathering digital public records at the state, county and city level. Share your experiences with @OpenRural Twitter and I'll re-tweet them. I've got lots to learn from you as well.

Rather than looking for new ways to pay for doing things the same way we always have, there is an opportunity to explore approaches that can substantially cut the costs of operating a community media station while significantly expanding your reach and impact. This is the new paradigm, and it requires putting the "community" in "community media" on a whole new level.

New Paradigms in Fundraising Financial Sustainability

Everyone's favorite example of the promise of this approach is Wikipedia. Wikipedia's mission and goals are quite similar to those for community media organizations: focused on enabling the community to share information and making that information as widely accessible as possible. Five or six years ago, the Wikimedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia) had three full-time staff and a budget well under $1 million per year. Wikimedia didn't ask, "How can we raise enough money to recreate Encyclopedia Britannica or Microsoft Encarta?" The new paradigm for Wikipedia was finding a way to do it with less by engaging its community.

That approach made Wikipedia incredibly popular, with a level of community participation it never would've reached if it had aimed to replicate the model of those who came before. Today, the organization brings in more than $10 million in donations each year in small, individual gifts. Wikipedia isn't the only organization to do this. In fact, this people-powered approach is becoming the rule, not the exception for the world's emerging media leaders. The majority of the top 10 websites in the U.S. started with a smaller budget than your average Public Access TV station, and the new paradigm for each of them that resulted in their success was enabling their community to do the work.

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, Craigslist, even eBay started out with a budget and staff no bigger than an average Public Access TV station. Each of them are now ranked among the top 10 sites in the U.S., and while they may have a lot of funds now, the popularity came before the funds, not the other way around.

The opportunity exists now for community media to follow this same approach, and the result could be bigger than any of us imagine. Whether or not your station is facing budget cuts, the opportunity exists today for you to enable your community to create, curate, ingest and schedule their own programs, to truly manage their community media station. Your viewers can vote and decide what they want to see, and all your content can be made available online with little staff time or costs. With support from the Knight Foundation, the Open Media Foundation helped build a suite of software solutions that can put community members squarely in the driver's seat, ingesting and scheduling their own programs, reserving equipment, sharing and voting on the best content from your station and other stations across the country.

A New Way of Putting the Public in "Public Access"

In its current state, the OMP software still requires a skilled Drupal developer to implement and customize. A year after the completion of our beta test, we've learned that it was unrealistic of us to expect the staff of a Public Access TV station to manage the Open Media Project software. It was like asking the editors at Encyclopedia Britannica to manage the server room at Wikipedia.

In its current form, the Open Media approach requires a distinct staffing makeup, and despite our experience in Denver, that shift doesn't always represent a huge cost savings. The cost savings associated with automated content ingest and scheduling is often entirely offset by the increased cost of devoting a web developer to maintaining and upgrading the software. But the results are significant. Denver Open Media has more members now than any previous Public Access TV station in Denver, and according to Alexa.com, the denveropenmedia.org website ranks among the top 10 nonprofit websites in Colorado, up there with the top cultural institutions in Denver. This is what happens when the community feels true ownership over their community media station: They become more engaged.

Still, we recognize that the vision of the Open Media Project software will never be realized for community media until we can offer a version of the tools that are fully supported and simple to use, requiring no staffing changes or major retraining. With the addition of two key staff members today, the Open Media Foundation is embarking on a third phase of the project to help bring the vision of a collaborative Public Access TV network forward. Adam Mordecai, co-founder of one of the top Drupal development firms, Advomatic, joins OMF as our new Director of Special Projects, accompanied by Joe Meersman, a Drupal developer who has been developing nonprofit websites in Drupal for the past year through OMF's Internship Program. Adam and Joe join a strong team of developers at the Open Media Foundation, dedicated to putting the power of media and technology in the hands of the people.

OMP: Phase 3

The changing face of media represents significant opportunities for us as noncommercial, community-driven media organizations. I've previously outlined four competitive advantages we have as noncommercial media entities, in contrast to our commercial counterparts: advantages that open up the opportunity for Public Access to become a global, user-driven network that could exceed the impact of PBS or many commercial networks, much in the same way Wikipedia's impact has exceeded any similar effort that came before. And like Wikipedia, our opportunity can only be realized through a radical shift in the way we work with our community.

The Open Media Project software was designed specifically to help Public Access TV stations take advantage of these opportunities, and while the initial phases did not work out exactly as we had hoped, we learned a lot from the process. Over a dozen stations (and other entities) have implemented aspects of the software, though at least half of them are using the open-source nature of the tools to revise the code to fit their old ways of doing things -- essentially stripping away the aspects of the software that position us to capitalize on the strategic advantages tied to cooperating with other stations, mobilizing the community, and designing your station to be more constituent-led.

The next phase of the Open Media Project will revise the approach, offering a more pre-packaged option for participating stations. Modeling after the example provided by NPR's core publisher effort, the next phase of the Open Media Project will enable stations to benefit from our inherent strategic advantages on a level that hasn't been possible before. Those who want to explore this new paradigm and hand more of the community media reins over to their community will be part of a shift in noncommercial, user-generated media that I'm confident will do no less than change the way the world sees Public Access.

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 I'm not always privy to what goes on before the awards are doled out. Dan Schultz, a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner and tech wizard extraordinaire for our MediaShift and Idea Lab sites, has written about how to brainstorm for ideas when applying for a Knight News Challenge grant. You can read more about that here. But I also reached out to some other Knight News Challenge winners to get their thoughts on the application process and how winning the award was a game changer for them.

The reality is that lots of folks in the journalism industry have brilliant ideas for the future of news, but a lot of those concepts aren't going to go anywhere at all without the right backing. After all, it's one thing to have an idea, but to build it into a business takes a lot of hard work -- and money. So once you have an idea, where do you go from there?

How to Get Started

The application process itself is relatively simple, said David Cohn, a 2008 winner and the founder of Spot.Us, an open-source project to pioneer community-powered reporting. All you need is an idea and to answer some very basic questions about it. "I had an idea, and in truth, no real way to implement it in a massive scale. The Knight News Challenge represented an ideal opportunity," he said. "There is absolutely no reason not to apply in the first round and submit several ideas. The process at that stage is very easy." In fact, at that stage, you can submit as many ideas as you'd like.

There are various rounds, and each one requires more information about yourself and your concept. At each stage, it's "worth it to invest the time/energy to really think through and answer the questions as best you can because each stage [makes] winning more of a potential reality," Cohn said.

So the first thing you'll need to do is draft a submission. "Be as clear and concise as possible," said Jose Zamora, the journalism program associate at Knight. "Once you have the draft ready read it a few more times and edit it. Try to get rid of jargon and technical terms. Make it simple and to the point." Once you think it's all set, let some friends read it over and get their opinions on it.

Where to Go From There

To get your project to the full proposal phase, you should take three steps, according to Zamora:

1. Do your research -- Look at past projects to find out what Knight is looking for, but don't replicate them. It's all about innovation.

2. Develop an accurate budget-- You'll need to create a budget, and that budget needs to be as accurate as possible.

3. Be reasonable -- When it comes to how much you're asking for, you need to make sure that it's reasonable for what you're proposing to do.

A lot of times, you might have a project in mind but no idea how much money to ask for, so that second step can present one of the most formidable challenges. "You've surely talked over various aspects of your project hundreds of times with friends and colleagues, so answering most questions about your goals and methods should be easy," said Christina Xu, a 2011 winner and the chancellor of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, a nonprofit that promotes microgranting as an alternative to traditional funding. "But when's the last time you had a conversation about what you'd spend this year on printing costs? Working through the budget is daunting for a number of reasons, especially as an organization that's just starting out, but it's actually a great opportunity to think through your plans in a very concrete way."

What Is Knight Looking for?

The Knight Foundation is looking for a number of things in your application, and the main thing is that you'll need to meet those criteria. Try to remember that the foundation isn't just looking for innovative ideas. It's also looking for a dependable record, name recognition, technical proficiency and collaborations, said David Sasaki, a 2007 winner for Rising Voices, a global citizen media outreach initiative of Global Voices Online. "Create a website with more information than what you can put on your application," he said. "Perhaps show support for the concept with a Kickstarter campaign. Name recognition never hurts."

In 2011, Knight asked applicants to apply in one of four categories: Mobile, Authenticity, Sustainability, and Community, although the next iteration will have even more categories. If your project fits well into one of those categories, you'll then need to ask yourself if this is something that's going to advance media innovation and serve the information needs of a geographic community. "We are looking for projects that have a good strategy for audience growth, engagement and sustainability," said Knight's Zamora. "We are looking for projects that inform and engage citizens in communities -- projects that create new audiences, new modes of communication or new types of information, different approaches for advancing the future of news and digitally informing communities."

The biggest hurdle you'll face is that because it's a much-coveted award, the contest is extremely competitive. On average, Knight receives 1,600 applications a year. In the first five years of the contest, the foundation received around 12,000 applications and funded approximately 70 projects.

Once you've swallowed that bit of hard news, you'll want to focus on innovation. Can you come up with a transformational idea -- something that isn't a clone of past projects -- that will push the future of journalism? Considering the amount of information that's already out there, that's hard to say. As Cohn put it simply, "What some people think is innovative others do not."

How it's a game changer

Getting a Knight News Challenge grant can be a game changer, not just because of the funding, but as validation that your project is a viable concept -- and that in itself can go a long ways. "The Knight News Challenge -- even beyond the funding of our research and civic media experimentation -- has been like the wind in our sails," said Andrew Whitacre, a 2007 winner and communications manager for the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. "Its mission has helped shape our own, obliging us to be radically inventive at the same time that we work with communities, on equal terms, to meet their information needs."

Sasaki had a similar experience. The grant allowed his team to launch Rising Voices, which is still ongoing and "has trained dozens of under-represented communities how to actively participate in global citizen media, and has helped diversify the reporting in countries like Madagascar, Ukraine and Senegal."

Of course, sometimes what happens once the funding is over can be the most important steps that a project makes. "What we did after funding ended is far more interesting than what we did while funded, if you ask me," said Dan Pacheco, a 2008 winner and CEO of BookBrewer. "The grant set us on our path, but we weren't able to really hit our stride until it was over."

The main thing to remember is that there are no hard and fast answers to winning a grant, particularly in the current economic climate. When the economy is in doubt, awards become even more competitive, so even a brilliant idea may be left to simmer quietly on the back burner, unless you're willing to seek out other ways to get it started. As Pacheco put it, "With the economy teetering on going a double-dip, getting any kind of funding in the next few years is doubtful. Learning how to bootstrap is more realistic. At face value bootstrapping isn't fun and it's not for everyone, but it's great if you can make it work."

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.

But these difficulties are precisely what makes investing time on spending data worthwhile. For journalists who can navigate the labyrinth of potholes and bureaucratese and do some basic math, accurate, insightful and interesting stories lie where their less intrepid colleagues dare not venture.

contextualizing stories

Spending Stories is a project that will give journalists the tools to research and analyze spending data and contextualize their stories.

The project's two main goals are to improve:

• journalists' data literacy
• the data literacy of the public

Simple -- on paper.

We hope that Spending Stories will help journalists:

• find material that may trigger them to write new stories, and speed up the process of doing so;

• help them research or fact-check stories they are writing;

• provide supporting material for stories they're writing;

• see what others have written or said about areas they are interested in;

• get a better long-term perspective of spending trends;

• have a bigger, more comparative picture of spending in different regions;

• do more investigative research that would otherwise be a lot more resource-intensive or time-consuming;

• systematically track transactions between certain entities;

• receive alerts related to spending areas they're interested in -- e.g, related to new stories, comments or datasets;

• and contribute data that they find to build on what's currently available, juxtapose it with other datasets, and highlight where the holes are in the data.

THE TOOLS

Spending Stories will have four main parts:

• Story Aggregator - gathers news stories, blog posts and other spending-related content using a mixture of automated tools and user input. We also aim to build on numerous other projects which provide aggregation and bulk analysis of blog and news material -- such as SYNC3, which matches blog posts to related news stories.

• Matching Tool - enables users to match current and historical news stories to datasets in a variety of different ways. Users will be provided with extensive means to perform custom searches, giving them the means to find the spending records that are relevant or interesting to them.

• Behind the News - an expert blog giving analysis and context to news articles about public spending via brief posts and micro-short videos (much like Hans Rosling's short videos as part of the Gapminder project), discussing tools and techniques for analysis, and the availability of new datasets.

• Spending Stories Plugins - ambiently suggest spending datasets relevant to pages people are browsing, and assist with embedding visualizations of spending datasets.

So that's the project in a nutshell, but we would love to hear from journalists about what they would like to see from the it.

JOIN US!

The Open Knowledge Foundation, which hosts Spending Stories, together with the European Journalism Centre, is currently running a series of training workshops for data journalists showing them how to use the tools, techniques and data available to weave their narratives -- and the journalists are showing us their needs as well!

For the next session, we'll be in Warsaw, Poland for one of the satellite events surrounding Open Government Data Camp 2011. If you would like more information or to participate in the workshop, please email info [at] openspending.org.

Spending Stories from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

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, foundations, incubators and competitions that have foregone the "bigger is better" mentality of grant cycles past.

The Detroit Foundation, which gets its funding from Detroit expats who sign up as paying members, is in the process of giving out its first $5,000 grant as part of Fuel Detroit. Detroit Soup and Soup at Spaulding are two community dinner fundraisers with incredible turnout in which attendees pay $5 for dinner and a vote, and the collected funds (usually $600-$900) go towards whoever gives the best pitch during the meal. Kiva Detroit, the first U.S. program by the microfinance giant, gathered over $11,000 in its first three hours from donors giving in small amounts, fully funding all five of its inaugural entrepreneurs. Nearby, in Grand Rapids, Mich., 5×5 night lets five competitors pitch their ideas to compete for a $5,000 grant.

Overall, the general attitude about grants seems to be: less money, more often, and as public and social as possible.

Why this sudden scramble to go small? In my conversations with many Detroiters, there was a general sense of frustration at the perceived lack of results of larger grants past; in their eyes, something had to change. However, the small grants movement should not just be considered a contrarian, knee-jerk reaction. Here are five good reasons why, in funding as in food, smaller portions are a healthier way to grow.

1. Avoiding the boom-bust cycle

The traditional grant model is prone to leading organizations into instability. Organizations that get very large grants are contractually obligated to spend all of the money in a timely fashion or risk reprimands from their granting foundations. However, in doing so, many build up non-essential bulk like extra staff, facilities and programs that they then have trouble sustaining once the initial funding runs out. This not only makes the next fundraising cycle more difficult, but also pulls the organization's energy and attention away from its core programs. Unless an organization is extraordinarily well-prepared and strategic about its spending, it's better to have steady growth than to suffer from funding bulimia.

2. Well-rounded growth

To revitalize a community, injecting funds into a single organization or cause is not enough; the whole ecosystem must be systematically cultivated. A system is only as effective as its weakest component, so growing resources and infrastructure across a number of sectors is necessary for preventing bottlenecks. Splitting a large amount of funds into smaller grants acknowledges this and allows for a wider swathe of beneficiaries, which also improves general morale while minimizing resentment and conflict between different organizations.

3. Growing mutual co-dependence

When it comes to running a successful community organization or business, money really isn't everything. Bootstrapped businesses and organizations are often hardier because, in the absence of sufficient funds, their owners learn how to be more resourceful. By negotiating deals with other local businesses and discovering the bounty of free or pro-bono resources available, these entities build richer connections to their neighbors and become part of a community that runs on mutual co-dependencies.

4. Democratizing philanthropy

Microgrants allow many more people, not just foundations and very wealthy individuals, to make a meaningful financial contribution to a project. This enables more people to feel invested in revitalization efforts and think critically about their priorities in the community, which ultimately generates a more engaged, thoughtful and active citizenry.

5. Lowering the applicant barrier

Likewise, a wider range of people -- and their ideas -- can be considered with a smaller grant. It takes a great deal of inspiration, experience, resources and planning to successfully implement a $500,000 project; however, most people have a great $1,000 idea they could easily pull off kicking around in the back of their heads, and these smaller projects are ultimately the gateway drug to larger, more thoughtful involvement.

Saplings in Corktown, Detroit.

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 our three months in Iraq, our web developer programmed more than 2,000 lines of code from a mat on the floor of our garage apartment in Erbil. By the end of our trip, we were rationing pancake mix for our meals and had just barely enough to hitch a ride out of Northern Iraq.

Kurdistan in code: The Tiziano Project's director of technology, Chris Mendez, spent two months developing our site from a garage in Erbil, Iraq.

Now, our tiny organization is competing with some pretty big (and historically better-funded) fish, including CNN, NPR, Yale and the University of Miami.

I'm asked a lot how we've managed to produce community journalism programs that place our work among such admirable company. My answer? When it comes to training, you don't have to be big to be great.

We've realized that foundations of groundbreaking journalism projects have a lot less to do with a packed wallet and more with paying attention. Because The Tiziano Project can't afford to make the mistakes of larger organizations -- building complicated news platforms or shipping off boxes of technology into the great unknown -- we've been able to simplify our method to success with a few basic tenets.

key success factors

1. Be where you're wanted. Want to know why community news often doesn't work? It's because many projects launch without considering who they're reporting on or with. Most importantly, citizen journalism shouldn't be an answer to cheap news production. Before you start thinking about a new project, make sure the community members you're working with want the project, are supportive of it, and are willing to help. If they're not, don't waste your time or money.

Communities that really want a reporting initiative in their area are often eager to make the program work. If your organization is on a tight budget, you shouldn't be afraid to turn to the community you're serving for resources -- whether it's sharing a workspace, administrative duties, equipment or connections. These things don't cost much, but can be a huge boon to the project's ultimate success.

2. Collaborate. We can't stress this enough. Along with partnering with the community you're serving, you should be looking to partner with other organizations that are doing similar or complementary things to save money, time and resources. For better or worse, citizen journalism projects are a dime a dozen, and many are teaching and distributing similar things.

The Tiziano Project was formed several years ago, when citizen journalism was the latest buzzword that was going to "save" the journalism industry. Over time, we had to take a hard look at ourselves and figure out what set us apart.

What we noticed was that nonprofit journalism organizations were treating each other like competing publications, rather than groups working toward a common goal. They were keeping their training materials and resources proprietary, and remained secretive about future plans.

It seemed silly to us -- after all, we're working on donor money to improve people's lives, not fatten our paychecks. So we decided to open-source everything -- our training materials, the stories we produce, even the websites we build to house them. With our recent Knight Foundation grant, we're working to make even more technology available for other nonprofit citizen journalism groups to use. It's been a very successful strategy for us -- because we give everything away, people keep coming back for more.

So figure out what you have to offer, and be the first to give things away to other organizations and groups that need them. You'll be surprised to find how much they can offer you in return.

3. Leave your parachute behind. In whatever community your reporting project is in, remember that you're there to help that community tell their stories, not what you think they should tell.

Our executive director, Jon Vidar, often tells this story: The first time The Tiziano Project went to Iraq, our instructors prepared a list of reporting topics they thought their students could choose from to get the project off the ground. Not surprisingly, the students had many more, much better ideas. When we let the students run with them, everyone was delighted with what they produced.

Also, don't be afraid of good news. Our second program of Iraqi students were eager to tell us they were sick of the doom and gloom stories that were coming out of their country. They wanted the world to know that Iraq was more than suicide bombings -- it was a place full of family picnics and spontaneous dancing, elaborate weddings, and intimate friendships. These kinds of stories don't make headlines, but they make an impression. Our student's story on Kurdish breakdancers remains one of the most popular on our site.

4. Forget what you know about journalism. Let the situation inform how you teach storytelling and the value of the tools you provide.

Like many of my colleagues, I am used to teaching basic journalistic structures. But in some places, media resembles nothing like what we in the West know. It's important to show students how to tell a great story, and then help them adapt it to the media structures popular in their region.

go beyond traditional journalism

Two personal anecdotes underscore that:

In Northern Iraq, opinion pieces are just as, if not more, popular than traditional news stories. This comes partly from the strong political party ties to major news outlets there, but even self-proclaimed "independent" sources maintain the bent toward opinion writing. So it baffled our Iraqi students, many of whom had worked with regional news outlets, when we told them to stop editorializing their pieces. We worked with them to get beyond traditional journalism structures and craft opinion pieces that compelled readers based on great narration and strong facts -- a simple twist on the usual master class, but one that helped them dive back into their jobs with gusto and accuracy.

Another quick story -- on a side job while in Iraq, I had the privilege of teaching a group of Southern Iraqi politicians about social media for their upcoming campaigns through a local NGO (non-governmental organization). The lesson was supposed to be a straight-out technical workshop, to give them the basics on how to set up Twitter and Facebook accounts, and how to use them to promote their messages and hear from their constituents. But about 15 minutes into the lecture, one politician raised his hand and challenged me: "Why do they need to hear our voice? The party decides everything anyway." Actually, this guy was right -- until that point, elections had always been party-based, rather than the public voting for an individual leader.

Suddenly our lesson on new media wasn't about how to have their voices heard in a new way, it was about the value of their voices to begin with. Needless to say, the direction of the lecture drastically changed for the remainder of the day and proved a lot more productive for the participants.

Reading a situation and teaching accordingly doesn't cost money. But I often speak to people who have participated in citizen journalism and storytelling classes who feel like their needs weren't met for their situations.

Instead, I think it's our first responsibility as trainers to shut up and listen.

5. Find out what the community wants from it. Who has spent 15 minutes working in journalism without someone asking: "Is it dead?" I always reply with "Yes. If it weren't, The Tiziano Project wouldn't be here."

It isn't worth teaching journalism if you hope that every student becomes a professional journalist. You might as well train people how to repair typewriters and printing presses. But new media journalism skills can set people up solidly in careers that are rewarding and lucrative -- from wedding photography to corporate communications. Find out what place the skills you're teaching have in the community your students are in and teach to that end, not just to have a nice portfolio of work when the program is over.

6. Work around ideas first, money later. As my colleague Chris Mendez says often, there has been no greater time in the history of journalism that has had more opportunity for reinvention than now. There have never been easier tools or greater accessibility for the "everyman" to reach a large audience. So it's time for everyone to start thinking more wildly and creatively about how they want to consume news and stories.

do it bigger and better

We've gotten a lot of credit for making really creative projects, but it's only because there's no one to tell us no -- and because a lot of people, especially the ones whose stories we're helping to tell, are encouraging us to do it bigger, better and differently from everyone else.

It doesn't cost anything to start a serious discussion with your colleagues, your students and your audience about reinventing storytelling -- how it's presented and valued. Then, it's just a matter of gathering together the right people who share your fundamental dedication to hard work and big goals to make something that's worth going to the ONAs for.

If you'd like to learn more about how we teach new media, we welcome you to join us for a pre-conference workshop at ONA on Thursday, Sept. 22 at 1:30 p.m. EDT. We'll be teaching the basics of multimedia and would be happy to start a brand-new conversation.

Hope to see you there!

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 endeavors, from leading a cardboard penguin invasion to running for student government under an anarchist platform.

After graduation, Tim stayed in Boston and became interested in supporting crazy projects on a larger scale. He got 10 of his friends to agree to each set aside $100 per month to give to a project they collectively deemed "awesome," whatever that meant. Anyone could apply for the microgrant by answering seven basic questions, and whoever won would take home the cash upfront with no strings attached. Marketing was done through word of mouth, grant decisions were made by consensus, and a sense of humor was mandatory.

The idea took off like wildfire, spreading to other East Coast cities within a matter of months. Within the last two years, the Awesome Foundation has spread to more than 20 cities in three continents with zero marketing or outreach budget. It soon became time to put all this energy to good use.

Doing Good While Doing Awesome

I was a frequent sidekick for Tim's extracurricular endeavors in college, most notably co-founding an Internet culture convention called ROFLCon with him, but it took me until the 2010 Haiti earthquake to realize the incredible potential of what he had built this time.

Watching the news trickle in, I wanted more than anything to help, but I was deeply dissatisfied with my options. Prior to the earthquake, thousands of seemingly well-meaning organizations had already been working practically on top of each other with millions of dollars in funding, and the results had been less than spectacular. Of course, there were fantastic organizations like Partners in Health and DirectRelief that I was happy to donate to, but these were exceptions mired in a larger system that reeked of inefficient bureaucracy, unproductive in-fighting, neocolonialist arrogance, and shuffled priorities.

Though Haiti was finally getting some well-deserved international attention, I feared that the copious resources pouring in would ultimately do little for long-term capacity building, and I was right: It's been revealed that less than 2 percent of recovery dollars in Port-au-Prince have gone to local Haitian contractors. Furthermore, it felt arrogant to make a decision about where to donate based on paltry Internet searches without real connections to people on the ground or any sense of context.

Supporting Local Heroes

What I really wanted to do was to find passionate, experienced, creative and innovative Haitians so that I could ask them to invest my money in whatever project or organization they thought would have the biggest impact. If they decided it was most prudent to give the money to a large NGO (non-governmental organization), so be it. But my hunch was that they would instead support local heroes and small, bootstrapped operations that could turn my small donations into a whole lot of good.

This was starting to sound familiar, so in a moment of excitement I wrote Tim an email with the following, profanity-ridden reasoning:

FACT: Awesome Foundation's goal is to increase the amount of awesomeness in the world.
FACT: Haiti is pretty f***ing not awesome right now.
FACT: There are tons of humanitarian groups down there doing things like distributing food and providing short-term relief, but the truth of the matter is that none of this work is particularly inspiring for the future.
FACT: As we speak, Haiti slips further and further out of the news cycle. This is correlated to the last fact: People are tired of hearing about the same blah-blah millions of people are homeless and hungry and dying/dead stuff.
FACT: Haiti must have lots of native awesomeness. Taking an awesome approach to reconstruction is likely to put a smile on more people's faces, help get past this disaster mentality, and play better on the news.

Increasing awesomeness in the world

A year later, we decided to incorporate a non-profit -- the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies -- to help organize the now-sprawling movement and direct its resources toward doing good as well as fostering awesome.

This meant, in part, helping to start chapters in places currently targeted by traditional development and aid and subsidizing their grants to lower the barrier to entry for trustees. We wanted to help these communities organize a long-standing, nimble institution that makes informed granting decisions locally, $1,000 at a time.

A grant from the Knight Foundation will help us fund innovative news and civic information projects starting in Detroit. The heart of this project is in collecting the best minds in Detroit's news, entrepreneurship, social justice, and technology communities and providing them with the support to experiment with funding lots of local projects with a rapid turnaround. These trustees will meet monthly to read through and vote on applications sent in by Detroiters, ranging from professional journalists to working-class folks with an idea on the back burner.

The winning project, be it a useful gov 2.0 app for citizen reporting or a timely and underexposed story, will receive $1,000 to make the idea happen. Local news partners and the trustees themselves help spread the word and connect the winners with the resources they need to succeed. If done right, the funded projects will set off ripples of inspiration and engagement throughout the city.

We call it the Awesome News Taskforce: Detroit.

Into the Motor City

I'm writing this post from the kitchen of a hostel in Detroit in the middle of a week-long trip to meet with local change-makers. In the month and a half since our grant was announced, we've scoped out the city's extensive innovative frontier and started to recruit for trustees and deans, the people who will form the backbone of the project over the coming months. We've also been asked to present on the idea at TEDxBoston and the Asian American Journalists Association convention, which was held here last week.

Opportunities surrounding the project have been climbing steadily, and I feel the dizzying and slightly sickening excitement of a kid seconds away from the first drop of an immense roller coaster.

My goal for this trip is to deepen my understanding of the landscape of Detroit's major players, organizations and coalitions. I've scheduled meetings with makers, journalism veterans, entrepreneurs, bloggers and activists to tell them about the Awesome News Taskforce and ask for their advice and participation. The enthusiasm and passion for rebuilding and innovating here is palpable, and luckily, Awesome News Taskforce seems to be hitting all the right cylinders.

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 contest, which is in its fifth year, funds innovators in media who are helping to transform the future of community news. This year Knight awarded 16 grants totaling $4.7 million, up considerably from the $2.7 million awarded to 12 winners last year. Winners also pulled in bigger awards overall, bolstered in part by Google's contribution of $1 million to the News Challenge prize funds. The search giant wasn't involved in choosing the winners.

*****

Overview
Award: $459,000
Winner: Jonathan Stray, The Associated Press
Web URL: http://www.ap.org
Twitter: @jonathanstray
Location: New York
Summary: Overview is a tool to help journalists find stories in large amounts of data by cleaning, visualizing and interactively exploring large document and data sets. Whether from government transparency initiatives, leaks or freedom of information requests, journalists are drowning in more documents than they can ever hope to read. There are good tools for searching within large document sets for names and key words, but that doesn't help find stories journalists are not looking for. Overview will display relationships among topics, people, places and dates to help journalists to answer the question, "What's in there?" The goal is an interactive system where computers do the visualization, while a human guides the exploration -- plus documentation and training to make this capability available to anyone who needs it.

*****

The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce
Award: $244,000
Winner: Tim Hwang, The Awesome Foundation
Web URL: http://www.awesomefoundation.org
Twitter: @higherawesome
Location: Boston
Summary: To experiment with a new funding model for local journalism, The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce will bring together 10 to 15 community leaders and media innovators in Detroit and two other cities to provide $1,000 microgrants to innovative journalism and civic media projects. By encouraging pilot projects, prototypes, events and social entrepreneurial ventures, the News Taskforce will encourage a wide swathe of the community to experiment with creative solutions to their information needs.

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PANDA
Award: $150,000
Winner: Brian Boyer, Chicago Tribune
Web URL: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/
Twitter: @pandaproject
Location: Chicago
Summary: To help news organizations better use public information, the PANDA Project, in partnership with Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE), the Chicago Tribune and The Spokane Spokesman-Review, will build a set of open-source, web-based tools that make it easier for journalists to use and analyze data. While national news organizations often have the staff and know-how to handle federal data, smaller news organizations are at a disadvantage. City and state data are messier, and newsroom staff often lack the tools to use it. PANDA will work with tools like Google Refine to find relationships among data sets and improve data sets for use by others. PANDA will be simple to deploy, allowing newsrooms without software developers on staff to integrate it into their work.

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DocumentCloud Reader Annotations
Award: $320,000
Winner: Aron Pilhofer, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE)
Web URL: http://www.documentcloud.org
Twitter: @documentcloud
Location: Columbia, Mo.
Summary: A 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, DocumentCloud helps journalists analyze, annotate and publish original source documents. Hundreds of newsrooms are already using the tool. With this grant, DocumentCloud will develop a new feature allowing newsrooms to invite public participation in annotating and commenting on source documents. The tool will help newsrooms involve their readers in the news and improve DocumentCloud as a journalistic tool and investigative reporting resource.

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FrontlineSMS
Award: $250,000
Winner: Sean McDonald, The Kiwanja Foundation
Web URL: http://www.frontlinesms.com
Twitter: @frontlinesms
Location: Palo Alto, Calif.
Summary: FrontlineSMS: Media will create a new platform that allows journalists to more effectively use text messaging to inform and engage rural communities. The Frontline SMS platform already enables users in underserved areas to organize interactions with large numbers of people via text messages, a laptop and a mobile phone -- without the need for the Internet. This grant will enable FrontlineSMS to expand its software platform and work with community radio stations and other rural journalists.

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Zeega
Award: $420,000
Winner: Kara Oehler, Media and Place Productions
Web URL: http://www.zeega.org
Twitter: @karaoehler
Location: Cambridge, Mass.
Summary: To help tell rich multimedia stories, Zeega will improve its open-source HTML5 platform for creating collaborative and interactive documentaries. By using Zeega, anyone can create immersive, participatory multimedia projects that seamlessly combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio and maps from across the web. With this grant, Zeega will expand their experimental prototype to work on web, tablet and mobile devices and pilot a series of collaborative and interactive documentary projects with news organizations, journalists and communities across the globe.

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The State Decoded
Award: $165,000
Winner: Waldo Jaquith, The Miller Center Foundation
Web URL: http://www.statedecoded.com
Twitter: @waldojaquith
Location: Charlottesville, Va.
Summary: The State Decoded will be a platform that displays state codes, court decisions and information from legislative tracking services to make government more understandable to the average citizen. While many state codes are already online, they lack context and clarity. With an improved layout, embeddable definitions of legal terms, Google News and Twitter integration, and an open API for state codes, this project aims to make important laws the centerpiece of media coverage.

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Poderopedia
Award: $200,000
Winner: Miguel Paz, El Mostrador
Web URL: http://poderopedia.com
Twitter: @poderopedia
Location: Santiago, Chile
Summary: To promote greater transparency in Chile, Poderopedia (Powerpedia) will be an editorial and crowdsourced database that highlights the links among the country's elite. Using data visualization, the site will investigate and illustrate the connections among people, companies and institutions, shedding light on any conflicts of interests. Crowdsourced information will be vetted by professional journalists before it is posted. Entries will include an editorial overview, a relationship map and links to the sources of information.

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Nextdrop
Award: $375,000
Winner: Anu Sridharan, NextDrop
Web URL: http://www.nextdrop.org
Twitter: @NextDrop
Location: Berkeley, Calif., and Hubli-Dharwad, India
Summary: To develop a new way of disseminating critical community information, NextDrop will launch a service, in conjunction with local utilities, that notifies residents of Hubli, Karnataka, India when water is available. NextDrop will work with water utility employees who operate the valves that control the infrequent flow of water. The service will notify neighborhood residents via text when the water is turned on. This system will be replicable in any community as a way to distribute all types of community information.

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Spending Stories
Award: $250,000
Winner: Martin Keegan, Open Knowledge Foundation
Web URL: http://okfn.org
Twitter: @okfn
Location: Cambridge, England
Summary: News stories about government finances are common, but readers often find it challenging to place the numbers in perspective. Spending Stories will contextualize such news pieces by tying them to the data on which they are based. For example, a story on City Hall spending could be annotated with details on budget trends and related stories from other news outlets. The effort will be driven by a combination of machine-automated analysis and verification by users interested in public spending.

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The Public Laboratory
Award: $500,000
Winner: Jeffrey Warren, The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science
Web URL: http://www.publiclaboratory.org
Twitter: @publiclaboratory
Location: Cambridge, Mass.
Summary: To make technology work for communities, The Public Laboratory will create a tool kit and online community for citizen-based, grassroots data gathering and research. The Lab is an expansion of Grassroots Mapping -- a project originated at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. During the project, residents used helium-filled balloons and digital cameras to generate high-resolution "satellite" maps gauging the extent of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill -- at a time when there was little public information on the subject. Expanding the tool kit beyond aerial mapping, Public Laboratory will work with communities, both online and offline, to produce information about their surroundings.

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ScraperWiki
Award: $280,000
Winner: Francis Irving, ScraperWiki
Web URL: http://scraperwiki.com/
Twitter: @scraperwiki
Location: Liverpool, England
Summary: ScraperWiki.com provides a way to make it easier to collect information from across the web from diverse sources. The site helps anyone freely create "scrapers" to collect, store and publish public data, and make it freely available for anyone to use. As such, the site provides journalists with updated, aggregated data that allows them to produce richer stories and data visualizations. This grant will add a "data on demand" feature where journalists can request data sets and be notified of changes in data that might be newsworthy, and data embargos that will keep information private until a story breaks. To accelerate the adoption of the platform, the U.K.-based site will host "journalism data camps" in 12 U.S. states.

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Tiziano 360
Award: $200,000
Winner: Jon Vidar, The Tiziano Project
Web URL: http://360.tizianoproject.org
Twitter: @tizianoproject
Location: Los Angeles
Summary: Using visually dynamic, multimedia storytelling, the Tiziano Project provides communities with the equipment, training and web platform needed to report on stories that affect their residents' lives. Tiziano will build an improved platform based on the award-winning project 360 Kurdistan. Using HTML5, the platform will display the work of professional and community journalists and will enable news organizations, community groups and individuals to easily manage digital content for mobile and tablet devices. The project will also build an interactive map to serve as a hub for projects developing similar sites in their communities and enable direct communication between these communities and their audiences.

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OpenBlock Rural
Award: $275,000
Winner: Ryan Thornburg, University of North Carolina
Web URL: http://jomc.unc.edu
Twitter: @rtburg
Location: Chapel Hill, N.C.
Summary: Rural news organizations often struggle to move into the digital age because they lack the staff to make public data digestible. OpenBlock Rural will work with local governments and community newspapers in North Carolina to collect, aggregate and publish government data, including crime and real estate reports, restaurant inspections and school ratings. In addition, the project aims to improve small local papers' technical expertise and provide a new way to generate revenue.

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SwiftRiver
Award: $250,000
Winner: Jon Gosier, Ushahidi
Web URL: http://ushahidi.com
Twitter: @ushahidi
Location: Orlando, Fla.
Summary: As news events unfold, mobile phones and the Internet are flooded with information. Through the SwiftRiver platform, Ushahidi will attempt to verify this information by parsing it and evaluating sources. Working across email, Twitter, web feeds and text messages, the platform will use a combination of techniques to identify trends and evaluate the information based on the creator's reputation. The project builds on Ushahidi's past efforts to verify the crowdsourced information collected in global crisis scenarios like the Kenyan election crisis in 2008 and the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan.

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What do you think about this year's winning projects? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

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 context of newspapers and magazines, which customers expect to get for free.

ABOUT PRINTCASTING

Printcasting was a web-based system that made it easy for people to create PDF magazines that they could distribute locally and pay for with local advertising. We launched it in November 2008. In case you've blocked it out, that was the beginning of the global economic meltdown, arguably the worst time in history to test a product supported by local business advertising.

By early 2010, we'd gotten 400 grass-roots publishers to use Printcasting in five geographic markets. As we watched them also struggle to sell local ads, we realized that Printcasting.com's long-term future was not very bright. The service's continued existence was thus 100 percent dependent on getting additional grants.

Rather than try to live grant to grant -- something that grated against my entrepreneurial spirit -- we decided to pivot to something with a better revenue model than local advertising. And that led us to e-books and BookBrewer.

ABOUT BOOKBREWER

BookBrewer is a web-based tool that makes it easy for anyone to build, publish and distribute e-books to popular devices and retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks and Borders.

In stark contrast to Printcasting, BookBrewer came along at the perfect time in history. In 2010, Amazon announced that e-books were outselling print books only three years after introducing the Kindle, and authors were just beginning to self-publish e-books that would later sell thousands of copies each month. According to Bowker, there were 764,000 self-published titles created in 2009, up from far less than 60,000 a few years ago. And the International Digital Publishing Forum shows e-book sales increasing 300 percent or more each year.

Unlike Printcasting, which could only be supported by grants, BookBrewer pays for itself with service fees and royalty share and has an audience of nearly 7,000 active users after six months. While we've talked to many investors, we've been able to bootstrap this far and our revenue continues to grow.

SAME PRODUCT, DIFFERENT PARADIGMS

While it may not be obvious up-front, Printcasting and BookBrewer are really about the same thing: turning the average Joe into a publisher. Their most obvious difference is that one is about physical media and the other tablet-based media, but that's actually pretty minor. The major difference is the economic and cultural frameworks in which they operate.

Printcasting was built in the mold of free newspapers and magazines, while BookBrewer was built in the framework of paid physical books. This difference is extremely subtle and semantic, but it quite literally creates a rags-and-riches dichotomy between the writers who fill their pages.

On the one hand, you have journalists who, thanks to abundant online content and the collapse of local advertising, are getting laid off by the thousands and taking jobs as bricklayers and nannies. On the other, you have average people like stay-at-home moms who are paying for their kids' college education with just two weeks of sales of their self-published romance novels. (I'm not exaggerating with the second scenario. It's happening right now to one of our BookBrewer authors, and she's not the only one.)

COULD NEWSPAPERS MAKE MONEY WITH E-BOOKS?

Because I come out of the journalism world and know so many journalists, I'm tempted to take this personally. What is it about news that makes people value it so little? But it also seems like there could be opportunities for news organizations to use e-books to generate revenue.

As I recently told Amy Gahran at the Knight Digital Media Center and a seminar of non-profit journalists at CU's Digital Media Test Kitchen, there's no reason that stories told by journalists couldn't be repackaged and sold as e-books. But how many will actually even try?

Sadly, I think few newspapers will take advantage of the e-book revolution because they and their readers choose to be defined by their past relationship, which is all about free content. Magazines and newspapers have a history of being available for next to nothing and making the bulk of their supporting revenue from advertising. It's hard to change that mindset. But I hope that some of you will prove me wrong, and I would love to see you turn your fortunes around by selling good journalism to e-reader audiences.

Meanwhile, e-books evolved from a completely different direction. Books have always required payment by the reader, with new hardbacks costing $20-$30 or more. When Amazon began selling e-books for $2.99, it was received by readers like the biggest Blue Light Special of all time. As a result, the same reader who may balk at paying $20 a year to subscribe to Business Week had no problem at all loading up her e-reader with $30 worth of $3 novels.

THREE MORE LESSONS

There are a few other lessons in our story for other News Challenge grantees, and innovators in general:

1) Listen to Your Customers: We were able to change focus from PDFs to e-books because of what Printcasting users were telling us. Every month, at least one new Printcasting publisher would ask us, "Can I publish my magazine to the Kindle?" which quickly evolved to "How do I get this on the iPad?" If we'd remain focused only on our grant obligations we would have missed one of the biggest opportunities in publishing history, but because we listened we were perfectly positioned to be a major player in the e-book space after our grant ended.

2) Change and Innovation Go Hand in Hand: When doing something that has never been done before, the way you start is just that -- a start. It's hardly ever how you end up. If you do manage to do something exactly the way you planned over many years, you're either not innovating fast enough, or you have the gift of precognition. It's for this reason that I have strongly urged the Knight Foundation to give grantees more flexibility to allow their projects to grow and change over time -- something we weren't allowed to do as much as new grantees.

My advice to you all: Change and evolve based on what your customers are telling you. If you're afraid of getting dinged later by a grant manager, remember that it's always easier to beg for forgiveness when you've created a new success.

3) Everything is a Business: Apart from tax law and management, there really isn't a major difference between non-profit and for-profit enterprises. Even grant-funded projects need to make money (or in non-profit parlance, reach "sustainability") or they can't continue. If you're working on anything with Other Peoples' Money, you need to stop right now and figure out what your future business model will be when that money is gone, because that day will come sooner than you think.

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 organizations of any shape or size.

The general idea behind the gathering was to identify the reasons that newsgames have not gained more traction and brainstorm possible solutions worth exploring to move things forward.

The gathering was organized by Nora Paul, director of the Journalism Center, and Kathy Hansen, a faculty member, who have been early advocates for adopting videogames and were Knight Foundation News Challenge recipients in 2007 for their project, “Playing the News.” (See Idea Lab posts on the project here.)

The Culture Gap

There remains a wide cultural gap between newsrooms and game designers.

Let me say there was not universal agreement even on this point. But that said, many at the session felt it was a fair assumption that most people in newsrooms are not likely to be gamers of any kind, particularly those in charge of newsrooms. By comparison, when thinking about new storytelling forms like video and audio, there is at least some touchstone experience from years of watching TV or listening to the radio. Games, on the other hand, are probably an alien experience. And that can lead to a lot of misperceptions about what games are, and are not.

To some degree, social media probably encountered such resistance for similar reasons. But as it’s become part of the fabric of our digital lives, it’s helped melt away those barriers. The same, now, goes for mobile which is being embraced in newsrooms as more people buy smartphones.

Why Newsgames Matter

Let’s start with the misperception that videogames are for kids, or young adults. To the degree newsrooms have experimented with newsgames, it was probably with an eye toward reaching teenagers and young adults and other audiences that long ago abandoned newspapers. But let’s be clear: Thinking about the audience for newsgames in those terms is far too narrow.

That’s because at this point, the majority of people in the United States play videogames of some kind: console, browsers, on their mobile phones. If you don’t play a single game, you are part of a shrinking minority. And many of these forms of games, particularly social, mobile, and casual games have now expanded deeply into mainstream audiences of all ages.

And far from being just trivial or simply fun distractions, these games offer benefits that ought to appeal to any newsroom. The best games create deep engagement, they are intensely social, and in some cases, they show a path to new ways to think about making money from digital content. Any of those items ought to resonate with publishers.

If newsgames hold all of these benefits, then, what seems to be holding them back from wider adoption? Again, there was no universal agreement on an answer, but the discussions created a long list of culprits that I noted above.

How to Clear Barriers to Adoption

1. Audience: There is very little information about who is playing the newsgames that have been built, and why and how they felt about the experience. Bogost noted that the problem is that so few newsgames have been developed that there may not be enough data to be meaningful. Still, gathering what little information there is on users and experiences might be a start.

2.  Monetization: There was a legitimate frustration expressed among some game developers in attendance that they were being asked to monetize news content in a way that publishers haven’t traditionally asked their newsroom to make content pay. At the same time, that doesn’t change the reality that if news organizations are going to take on something new, they’re going to ask about the return on investment, either in terms of audience or revenue. So are there better ways to make money from newsgames? Among the suggestions put on the table: creating ad networks around newsgames; developing virtual goods to be sold within the games; fremium services that create opportunites to sell other goods or services in the game; rewards and deals for winners or players; launching a serious game publishing house; continue emphasizing the additional page views generated by newsgames.

3. Costs: Another way to attack the issue is lower the expense of creating newsgames, and reduce the resources involved. Among the suggestions generated here: build mini-games that fit within larger story structures; identify recurring information (i.e., crime, sports, weather) than can constantly refresh existing games; figure out what information is already being created than can be easily be repurposed; creates newsgame platforms that allow non-gamers to create newsgames. Bogost, who was a 2010 Knight News Challenge winner for a project called The Cartoonist , is attacking this issue by creating a set of free tools to help newsrooms produce "cartoon-like current event games - the game equivalent of editorial cartoons." Another attendee, Eric Brown, has co-founded ImpactGames, which offers just such a platform for newsrooms and is currently being used by the Reynolds Institute news site.  

These are brief summaries of the various brainstorming sessions. You can see more detailed notes here. The folks at the Minnesota Journalism Center will be digesting these results to see what next steps could be taken.

Next Steps

The first step is identify and connect with people who have developed newsgames, or have an interest. The initial gathering point is a newsgame LinkedIn Group. But more ways to connect will come. The goal is to share ideas, lessons and promote work being done by others in the field. Despite the relatively limited number of newsgames deployed so far, many of the folks at the brainstorming session were still surprised to learn about various newsgames that were built but that they hadn’t heard about previously.

From there, folks will try to identify other journalists or people in the newsroom who do play games of some sort. The hope is that this group will begin to ask a simple question when a news story is being discussed: Is there a game we could create that would help us explain this better?