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
Journalism needs ideas like EveryBlock. Everyone's complaining about losing jobs and how big media organizations like the Associated Press don't get it. Why don't you help write the plot? Here's a few thoughts on how.
Get to coding If you’re a journalist with tech tendencies who’s been laid off, or even one without tech tendencies who wants to write the plot, start working on your Web skills. Find a niche that’s being underserved or a community that could a new journalism approach. Learn your options, try your hand at coding (don’t be scared; it’s like riding a bike), and put your heart into it.
Think biggerIdeas like EveryBlock don’t happen by accident. People behind startups notice niches and find ways to make them flourish. They aren’t modest about their ambitions. They’re willing to try and fail. They’ll sweat heavily and spend long hours working on their project even when it feels like it’s not bearing fruit. But if you want to turn journalism on its head, be bold. Be brash.
Come a-knockin’Knight News Challenge: In two weeks, the organization that birthed EveryBlock will begin accepting applications for the 2010 version of its venture-capital contest. You should apply. Y Combinator:Just this morning, the startup incubator announced plans to fund a journalism-centric company with aspirations of making money. Learn more here.
I often tell friends and industry colleagues that EveryBlock in is current incarnation is only about 5 percent of what we want to do with it. We’re now in a position to make this happen.
EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty • Discussing his company’s acquisition by MSNBC.com. This is a BIG DEAL for journalism, because EveryBlock’s experimental model, which leans on using public records and RSS feeds to provide a to-the-block organization of information in a city, is an alumnus of the Knight News Challenge, which encourages Web-centric approaches to journalism. Some have questioned whether what EveryBlock does is journalism; Holovaty has famously said he doesn’t care. For what it’s worth, EveryBlock got a warm welcome from NewsVine founder Mike Davidson, whose own MSNBC-owned site has only benefited from acquisition. • source
