Meet The People The Knight Foundation Thinks Can Save Journalism
One wants to build a database for public records. Another plans to launch street-corner newscasts. A third wants to develop a tool to turn numbers into something more visually exciting than charts. They are among the projects getting parts of the $5.1 million that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is disbursing to push the envelope on community reporting. It’s the third year of the foundation’s five-year, $25 million Knight News Challenge, an international contest to fund digital news projects. See the other six winners after the jump
– MediaBugs: $335,000 for a neutral independent site where the public can report, track, discuss and fix errors in news coverage.
– Councilpedia: $250,000 goes to the NYC-centric public policy site Gotham Gazette, which will add a feature looking at local legislators
I wish all the winners the best, because creating something new is always hard, but I don't feel like this is a particularly strong set of projects given the current climate.
It's also interesting how only two ideas (crisis info and virtual corners) focus on the needs of the people, and they are at the bottom of the funding pile.
As for the winners:
DocumentCloud seems to be for source material, which sounds really cool, but I have to wonder if you can train reporters to share what is essentially their bread and butter.
Mediabugs is predicated on the idea that the media cannot be trusted or held accountable. If that's true, then what's the point? It's like shining a rotten apple.
Councilpedia is already being done in many forms, but every newspaper should be doing this.
Data visualization? Are the judges living in a cave? Plenty of charting libraries exist already in every programming language. Not to mention Web services that do this, too!
Mobile media toolkit? Again, lots of open source tools already exist. And I don't see how $100K gets them very far with software tools as complicated as these are likely to be.
The Daily Phoenix? I don't even see how this one is relevant to anything. They should have just found a local advertiser to pay for it.
Crowdsourcing Crisis Information: This is the only truly important idea of the bunch, and it's sad how little money she got for it.
Virtual Street Corners is an art project. Cool, but not sure how it relates (it's not duplicable on any kind of scale).
CMS upload utility: this one is frankly hilarious. $10K for a "utility" that you could have any programmer write for less than $500. If small newspapers really have a CMS problem, they need a better CMS, not some hacky utility.