This afternoon, I attended a mega-panel with the winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge grants (which I mentioned in this earlier blog post) at the Editor & Publisher/Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference.
The grants themselves ranged from $15,000 up to several million dollars – some grants were for one year, some were for longer. The central question posed to the panel: How did you come up with a $1 million idea?
The responses were as varied as the projects themselves (list here), but there were a few central themes among the 34 winners. (A few examples of each theme are listed here – but this is in no way inclusive of all the amazing ideas. For the full list of winners and more on the projects, go to NewsChallenge.org.)
Many of the projects are experimental in nature, but had the goal of creating a system or model that can be replicated in the future.
Duke University has an initiative to literally build the newsroom of the future, using Web-based input, documenting all the decisions and research and making it available for news companies, journalism schools and anyone else looking at constructing a new newsroom or renovating an old one. (Chris O’Brien is the grant winner for that project.)
Dianne Lynch of Ithaca College, who is working with several other colleges, said, “Often, we’ll get foundation money and the project happens and that’s it.” Instead of developing a single project, students will work on creating hubs of creative thinking about solutions to digital news challenges. The ideas will be solid and replicable across multiple newsrooms. The incubators will be at Ithaca College, Michigan State, University of Kansas, Kansas State, Western Kentucky University, University of Nevada – Las Vegas and St. Michael’s College.
Other projects either fill a need or aim to fill a perceived future need.
Many of the projects are futuristic in nature. Chris Csikszentmihályi and Henry Jenkins of the MIT Media Lab will create the Center for Future Civic Media. The center is a leadership project that will encourage experimentation in community news with emerging technologies. One example Csikszentmihalyi gave was based on connecting people through mobile devices and GPS, bypassing satellites and the Web. One of the blog project winners, Paul Lamb, will focus on ways to use GPS to inform people through mobile media in what is called the Interactive Community Spaces Project.
Other commonalities of note:
Sharing (many of the grant winners said they would license their works under Creative Commons) and user-directed interests (such as allowing the user to dynamically search for information based on what they want or need to know at a given time with advanced database technology).