CyberJournalist.net

Knight announces 16 media innovation grants

Posted: 22 Jun 2011 12:18 PM PDT

The Knight Foundation is giving $4.7 million to 16 ideas aiming at creating innovation in media, as part of its annual program to fund digital news experiments that inform and engage communities. Keep an eye on these — past winners have produced very interesting products, including Spot.Us and DocumentCloud.

Winners include experiments to:

Help newsrooms organize and visualize large data sets so that they can find relationships and stories they might not have imagined (with projects from the AP and the Chicago Tribune.)
Create a mobile platform that will enable residents of a city in India to learn when water is available (an unpredictable event that has residents waiting hours).
Build tools that help to verify and display breaking news – with projects from Ushahidi and premier Web design firm Adaptive Path.
Leverage efforts to improve the use of government data in the U.S. – with projects from the Open Knowledge Foundation, ScraperWiki, the University of North Carolina and The Miller Center Foundation at the University of Virginia.

A full list is below…

2011 Knight News Challenge Winners

Project: iWitness

Winner: Adaptive Path, San Francisco, Calif.

Award: $360,000

Project Lead: Jesse James Garrett

Web: www.adaptivepath.com

Twitter: @AdaptivePath

To bridge the gap between traditional and citizen media, iWitness will create a web-based tool that aggregates user-generated content from social media during big news events. Whether a parade or protest, election or earthquake, iWitness will display photos, videos and messages in an easy-to-browse interface. Created by a premier web design firm, iWitness will make it easier to cross-reference first-person accounts with journalistic reporting, opening up new avenues for storytelling, fact-checking and connecting people to events in their communities.

Project: Overview

Winner: The Associated Press, New York, N.Y.

Award: $475,000

Project Lead: Jonathan Stray

Web: overview.ap.org

Twitter: @overviewproject

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.

Project: The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce

Winner: The Awesome Foundation, Boston, Mass.

Award: $244,000

Project Lead: Tim Hwang

Web: www.awesomefoundation.org

Twitter: @higherawesome

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.

Project: PANDA

Winner: Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Ill.

Award: $150,000

Project Lead: Brian Boyer

Web: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/

Twitter: @pandaproject

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.

Project: DocumentCloud Reader Annotations

Winner: Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), Columbia, Mo.

Award: $320,000

Project Lead: Aron Pilhofer

Web: www.documentcloud.org

Twitter: @documentcloud

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.

Project: FrontlineSMS

Winner: The Kiwanja Foundation, Palo Alto, Calif.

Award: $250,000

Project Lead: Sean McDonald

Web link: www.frontlinesms.com

Twitter: @frontlinesms

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.

Project: Zeega

Winner: Media and Place Productions, Cambridge, Mass.

Award: $420,000

Project Lead: Kara Oehler

Web: www.zeega.org

Twitter: @karaoehler

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.

Project: The State Decoded

Winner: The Miller Center Foundation, Charlottesville, Va.

Award: $165,000

Project Lead: Waldo Jaquith

Web link: www.statedecoded.com

Twitter: @waldojaquith

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.

Project: Poderopedia

Winner: El Mostrador, Santiago, Chile

Award: $200,000

Project Lead: Miguel Paz

Web: http://poderopedia.com

Twitter: @poderopedia

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.

Project: Nextdrop

Winner: NextDrop, Berkeley, Calif., and Hubli-Dharwad, India

Award: $375,000

Project Lead: Anu Sridharan

Web : www.nextdrop.org

Twitter: @NextDrop

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.

Project: Spending Stories

Winner: Open Knowledge Foundation, Cambridge, England

Award: $250,000

Project Lead: Martin Keegan

Web: http://okfn.org

Twitter: @okfn

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.

Project: The Public Laboratory

Winner: The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, Cambridge, Mass.

Award: $500,000

Project Lead: Jeffrey Warren

Web: www.publiclaboratory.org

Twitter: @publiclab

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.

Project: ScraperWiki

Winner: ScraperWiki, Liverpool, England

Award: $280,000

Project Lead: Francis Irving

Web: http://scraperwiki.com

Twitter: @scraperwiki

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.

Project: Tiziano 360

Winner: The Tiziano Project, Los Angeles, Calif.

Award: $200,000

Project Lead: Jon Vidar

Web: http://360.tizianoproject.org

Twitter: @tizianoproject

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 projecthttp://360.tizianoproject.org/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.

Project: OpenBlock Rural

Winner: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C.

Award: $275,000

Project Lead: Ryan Thornburg

Web: http://jomc.unc.edu

Twitter: @rtburg

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.

Project: SwiftRiver

Winner: Ushahidi, Orlando, Fla.

Award: $250,000

Project Lead: David Kobia

Web: www.ushahidi.com

Twitter: @ushahidi

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.