John S. and James L. Knight Foundation yesterday announced the winners of the News Challenge grants for 2008.
The News Challenge is a program that grants seed money to individuals and groups to use digital media to promote journalism in a geographic area. Oh, and the projects need to be completed with open-source programs. The Knight Foundation set aside $25 million, or about $5 million for five years, to fund these grants.
This year, two U.S. newspaper-focused people won grants. They are Dan Pacheco of The Bakersfield Californian (and one of the minds behind Bakersfield’s InsideGuide and Bakotopia), and Ryan Sholin of GateHouse Media, where he is director of community site publishing.
Pacheco’s project will focus on niche publications. Here’s the project description from the News Challenge site:
Printcasting will allow individuals to easily create ad-supported, customized publications with a mix of local news and information. The software will help aggregate feeds from news organizations, bloggers or newsletters, for example, so that would-be publishers can pick and choose among them to create a niche publication. The Printcasting model then will guide users through placing articles, photos and ads onto a template that either could be delivered by e-mail or printed at home and distributed. For example, a publication for reef-diving photographers could include ads for nearby dive shops or underwater cameras. The idea is to pair localized ads and content to create targeted publications.
Sholin’s project will connect reporters who are working on similar projects across regions through social networking.
Reporters working on similar topics will be able to communicate and share ideas using a social networking tool and a web site created through this project. The site will indicate how many journalists across the country are working on the same issue, such as declining tax bases or water problems. Reporters then could exchange resources and approaches, or use one another’s communities as examples in their own stories. Journalists in small newsrooms often feel isolated. Given the opportunity to communicate with others, a reporter can add context to articles and, perhaps most importantly, know when a seemingly small local story is part of a larger regional, or national, trend.
Other projects in the News Challenge focus on mobile news, community-produced video content, radio and new editorial management systems.
Also, Web-celeb Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Martin Moore received a grant to create a system that will help the public find fair and accurate news.
The News Challenge site has descriptions for all the projects, as well as biographies of all the grantees. For the 2007 grants, MediaShift blogger Mark Glaser hosted a group blog for grantees called Idea Lab. I believe that blog will continue.