Knight News Challenge - Applications Due!

Got a great idea for improving digital journalism? Hurry up and apply to the Knight News Challenge! The media innovation competition plans to give away US$6 million through the challenge to projects focused on four key areas: mobile, sustainability, authenticity and community. Applications are due by December 1.

We’re proud to be a supporter of the News Challenge this year, augmenting it with $1 million in prize money as part of our recent grants to non-profit organizations developing new approaches to journalism in the digital age. Now in its fifth year, the News Challenge has funded such projects as Spot.us, which connects journalism projects with public funding and Everyblock, an aggregator of local data like crime stats and restaurant reviews.

The competition benefits more than just the grant winners - News Challenge recipients that develop software also need to open-source it, so that their tools can be adopted by anyone interested in finding new ways to gather and transmit the news, whether they’re a national newspaper or a blogger.

Ushahidi has perhaps become one of the most famous winners (it won in 2009) and is a great example of how a good idea for news can spread as quickly as the news itself. It was started in 2007 by a Harvard law grad as an effort to track the violence surrounding the elections in Kenya (Ushahidi means testimony in Swahili). Using messages sent by 45,000 Kenyans via SMS and the Web, it built a near-instant view of where each part of the country was tilting over those terrifying weeks. Since then, the concept has proved remarkably adaptable. Platforms based on Ushahidi have been built to track this year’s Brazilian election, floods in the U.K. and outbreaks of cholera in Haiti.

So far, international recipients have hailed from India, Latvia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lithuania, England and Russia - but none yet from Australia or New Zealand! If you’re interested in applying - or know of someone you think should apply - visit newschallenge.org to learn more.

Posted by Chris Gaither, Senior Manager for News Industry