Idea Lab

Kicking Off the Grant Process With Monitoring and Evaluation

by Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We at the Jefferson Institute began our experience as a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner with one of the more exciting and misunderstood elements of the grant cycle: monitoring and evaluation (M&E). When done properly, M&E begins with the grantee setting out clearly the objectives of the grant, the activities necessary to achieve the objectives, and the resources applied to make these activities happen. So, for example, blogging for Idea Lab is an activity. An objective might be to create a thriving community, or to help guide the way for community news in transition. For our Knight project, the objective...

• November 5, 2009
• No comments

The New Era of Media Development, Part III

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 31, 2009
• 2 comments

DocumentCloud Going Open Source Every Step of the Way

by Jeremy Ashkenas
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

What does it mean to work on a project where open-source principles are written into the founding contract? A little over a month after receiving a 2009 Knight News Challenge grant, DocumentCloud released its first open-source component. The system, called CloudCrowd, performs the distributed computing that helps process the vast quantities of documents that will eventually be stored in DocumentCloud. It might seem premature to be releasing code so early -- in the past some Knight grantees have chosen to wait until the end of their grant -- but the larger part of open-source is community, not code. We're planning...

• October 29, 2009
• No comments

Spot.Us Expands to L.A. with USC Annenberg

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

First: The big news. Spot.Us is expanding to Los Angeles and we are doing so with USC's Annenberg School of Journalism. Needless to say, we are very excited about the opportunities and possibilities. The main Spot.Us homepage will aggregate pitches from both the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles regions. You can go to Subdomains to find pitches specific to those regions: la.spot.us and sfbay.spot.us. As many know, I grew up in Los Angeles (Hamilton High School anyone?) so this is a bit of a home coming for me. I will remain up north running the Bay Area Spot.Us -...

• September 22, 2009
• 2 comments

Journalism Teachers Get Mobile-ized in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Most Africans don't have computers or access to the Internet. Cell phones are a different story. So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places -- even in places with access to computers and the Internet. Answers to this challenge were provided in Grahamstown, South Africa last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas, a Knight grantee, ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University. Participants were brought together under the auspices of another...

• September 21, 2009
• No comments

Knight Rewards On-the-Spot Competitors at MIT Meetup

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last Thursday, I returned to Moscow from the Future of News and Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass. Organized by the MIT Center of Future Civic Media and the Knight Foundation, this is the annual meeting where all the Knight News Challenge Winners discuss the future of civic media and talk about the digital tools to build local communities. This year, nine new exciting projects joined this community of innovators, raising the total of Knight News Challenge projects to 45. The conference was also a good chance for the past Knight News Challenge winners to talk about their progress on...

• July 1, 2009
• 5 comments

EveryBlock Source Code Released

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today's a big day for us at EveryBlock. We're making our source code available. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "micro-local" news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we're fulfilling that second purpose. You can read more about the open-sourcing and download the code at our source code page. (Keep in mind it'll probably make sense only if you're a web developer/programmer.) We hope this extensive code base helps...

• July 1, 2009
• 1 comment

Phase 2 of the Open-Media Project Begins This Week

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Deproduction's KNC grant was designed in 4 distinct six-month phases. The first phase included an updated release of our Open-Source Drupal tools: the set of Drupal modules which enable Denver Open Media to function as a user-driven Public Access Community Media Center with no operating support from the city or cable provider in Denver. The process of developing these modules, and the features they are designed to include, can be seen at http://groups.drupal.org/open-media-project. The second phase officially launches this week, and involves a group of 6 beta-test partners who we will guide through the process of implementing the modules, and...

• January 23, 2009
• No comments

End of the Year Radical Transparency for Spot.Us

by David Cohn
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is the end of the year and I received some questions from the TIdes Center who are doing due-diligence reports for the Knight Foundation. I've been meaning to do a public "where is Spot.Us" post for some time and since I'm answering all these related questions I thought - why not just go crazy and blog the questions and my answers. If I have to update Knight Foundation - I should update everyone, since in the end I view this as a project owned by the community of people who take interest in it (everyone who has been following...

• December 22, 2008
• 1 comment

Mistakes I Made with the Next Newsroom Project

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now that I've officially completed the work on our Knight Foundation News Challenge grant that funded the Next Newsroom project, I wanted to share some of the horrendous, grotesque mistakes I made over the past 18 months. I'm doing it not because I'm feeling particularly masochistic. But rather, I hope there will be something valuable here for those still working on projects, and those who are going through the current application process. For some context, let me confess that I'm a full-time, paid journalist at a newspaper. I'd never written a grant proposal before applying for a News Challenge grant...

• December 11, 2008
• 5 comments

The Next Newsroom Proposal is Complete

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is with great pleasure that I'd like to announce that we have completed work on our newsroom proposal for The Chronicle, the independent, student-run newspaper at Duke University. The Chronicle’s board has adopted our proposal for a new home. That document will now serve as the basis for negotiations with officials at Duke University. The plan is available here: http://nextnewsroom.wikispaces.com. But first, I want to establish a little context for that document. The plan was written in collaboration with The Chronicle's board, officially known as the Duke Student Publishing Company. The proposal conforms to explicit guidelines created by the...

• November 20, 2008
• No comments

Apply for a Knight News Challenge Grant by Nov. 1

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• October 30, 2008
• No comments

Are the Info Needs of Local Communities Being Served?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy arrived in Silicon Valley to hold the first of its three planned community forums. I was asked to speak on a panel that day about "technology and innovation" but hung around for most of the day to listen to the other two panels and the wide-ranging discussion. This is timely and important work. I've spoken with numerous community leaders in Silicon Valley in recent months who are growing more anxious about what will happen to the quality of civic life if the coverage of local...

• September 15, 2008
• 5 comments

Getting Closer to SMS Journalism

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In August, we start some initial workshops with high school learners, to discuss with them what it takes to be "citizen journalists" - contributing content that the mainstream will publish. What's more, the content is constrained by being 140 characters long - sms is the method of communications for now. Over the course of 8 workshops, 80 learners in their penultimate school year will be trained about optimum Cit-journ in this way ... all over two months. The workshops, to be run by university journalism students and co-ordinated by colleage Sipho January, will cover the skills of contributing opinions, news...

• July 10, 2008
• No comments

African Cell-Phone Media: Hostage to Policy Delays

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are a couple of delays in implementing our Iindaba Ziyafika - the news is coming project around cellphone journalism, supported by the Knight Foundation - but the tardy policy context in South Africa is also a constraint. At present in South Africa, at least six out of ten adults have access to cellphones, but their main use is for interpersonal conversation. The notion that these are devices that can also be used to receive, and contribute to, journalism is not well-developed beyond sms comments sent to the mass media. What could begin to change this culture is free-to-air television...

• June 11, 2008
• No comments

Finalists for the Knight News Challenge

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight Foundation today posted a list of the finalists for the next round of its News Challenge grant program. This list does not include the names of the 17 projects that were chosen for funding. Those winners will be announced on May 14, 2008, at the E&P Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas. Knight says it posted this list of finalists because: "Many finalists had excellent proposals worthy of being considered by other foundations and funders." The 29 projects listed are all intriguing and worth checking out just to get a sense of where some of the sharpest minds...

• March 31, 2008
• 2 comments

Can the Knight Legacy Lead to Sustainability?

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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

• March 5, 2008
• 6 comments