Knight Foundation Sets $5 Million News Contest
by E&P Staff
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has kicked off the third year of the Knight News Challenge, a contest awarding as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news and information exchange. The deadline for applications is Nov. 1.
An online entry form is available
here at newschallenge.org. Winners should be announced by the spring of 2009.
This year’s competition, which carries the slogan “You Invent It. We Fund It!” is open to community-minded innovators worldwide, from software designers and journalists to citizens and students of all ages. Do you have a big idea for informing and inspiring a geographic community using social media, Web 2.0 tools or OpenID? Or for exchanging information via video, photos or text messaging? Then this contest is for you.
What’s more, this time around there’s a squad of professionals ready to help strengthen your entry by offering tweaks and other suggestions. At the News Challenge Garage, applicants can receive peer reviews and mentoring from a group of developers, online journalists, nonprofit evangelists, video bloggers and social media experts, among them Vidoop’s Chris Messina, Spot.us’ David Cohn, and Placeblogger’s Lisa Williams, among many others. Check it out
here.
The winning entries must contain three elements: 1) use of a digital media; 2) delivery of news or information on a shared basis to 3) a geographically defined community. Entries must be open-source and share the software and knowledge created.
In addition, Knight is holding a series of meet-ups in September and October in various cities to provide real-time brainstorming and discussion. For more information, visit newschallenge.org.
