OK, who’s the smart-aleck? This is only one of the 687 entrants to this year’s Knight News Challenge (a contest that funds very innovative journalism projects, most notably and successfully EveryBlock), and it’s easily the least likely to win. The call for entries was closed last night, so these are the entries. We’re personally gunning for our friends at The Ann, many of whom we worked with at Bluffton Today back in the heady, throwing-stuff-on-walls days of 2005 and 2006. (We’ve got your back, K-Pop!) Their application is here. Check out some of the other entrants that caught our eye: Newsroom data-organizing appliance Panda, dissident voice amplifier Crowdvoice.org, and Ninty (an ambitious crowdsourced audio news concept akin to making NPR a lot more like Pandora). Check out the entries yourself. source
From small news projects to ambitious advertising products, there’s some cool stuff here. Among the winners of this year’s Knight News Challenge – which means that the Knight Foundation gives tech-leaning journalists money to chase their dreams – are the Windy Citizen (which has a pretty cool real-time ads platform), CityTracking (which hopes to make city visualizations interesting and embeddable), The Cartoonist (which hopes to make editorial cartoon games), and LocalWiki (which is seriously the kind of idea we’ve heard bandied about more than a few times). Oh, and lots more. Check out the video and the full list to get the scoop. source
Oops, this open source code isn’t very useful on its own! The Knight Foundation, which has been funding startups for a few years as part of their Knight News Challenge, was quite excited at the sale of EveryBlock to MSNBC in August. But now it’s having second thoughts. Why? Because it was released to the public as a piece of open-source code – not a plug-and-play package that newspapers can easily use. So they’re getting a new team to finish up the EveryBlock code which so it can be rolled out simply. Other startups will get treated the same way. We imagine some applicants to the Knight News Challenge (deadline coming soon!) might get turned off by this, but the goal was always to help journalism in general. source
