Fwd: [Rising Voices] Tips for Knight News Challenge Applicants

[Jiew]

FYI

Chiranuch (Jiew)
chir...@gmail.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
http://www.twitter.com/jiew

Sorry, I forgot to add the links. To apply:

http://www.newschallenge.org/apply

The video with Eric is now available here:

http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/blog/2009/10/10/video-interview-with-eric-newton-of-knight-foundation/

Remember, the deadline is Thursday October 15. Just five more days.

Best,

David

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Chiranuch Prachatai <chir...@prachatai.com>
Date: 2009/10/11
Subject: Fwd: [Rising Voices] Tips for Knight News Challenge Applicants
To: Jiew <chir...@gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Sasaki <osop...@gmail.com>
Date: 2009/10/10
Subject: [Rising Voices] Tips for Knight News Challenge Applicants
To: Rising Voices <rising...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: RV Grantees <rvgra...@googlegroups.com>

Dear All,

Over the past few days I have received dozens of emails asking for my advice on proposals for this year's Knight News Challenge, which is giving away $5 million for innovative projects that involve:

1) news and information

2) specific geographic communities

3) digital innovation

4) free and open source technologies

It is important that the projects meet all four requirements. It is also important that you search extensively online to make sure that the idea you have come up with hasn't already been developed by somebody else. Unfortunately this is an extremely busy week for me and I will not be able to provide specific feedback on any individual proposals. However, what I recommend is that if you are looking for ways to improve your proposal (and chances for funding), apply in the "open category" and then send a link to your proposal to this mailing list. Please be very specific about what parts of your project proposal you feel could use improvement. There is a lot of experience and expertise in this community and I think that many people will be happy to offer their suggestions and advice.

Also, earlier today I interviewed Eric Newton, who is the vice president of the journalism program at Knight Foundation, about the News Challenge and his recommendations for international applicants. The video is being uploaded to the Rising Voices website as I type, but I will also include a transcript of our conversation below.

I wish you all the best and I hope that we see a lot of international representation in this year's winners.

David

Eric: My name is Eric Newton. I’m the Vice President of the journalism program at Knight Foundation. The Knight News Challenge is a kind of open, international, research and development contest for news innovation. And the idea behind it is that the digital revolution has turned information and news upside down and inside out, and things are changing so rapidly that no one - not traditional media companies, not even the entrepreneur community - can keep up with the pace of change. So our foundation thought that if we have an open, international contest and collected thousands of entries and picked the very best ideas for news innovation that it would help speed the process of moving good news and information into the digital age.

David: How does the Knight News Challenge relate to media development? Or does it?

Eric: Well, it relates to media development in that each of the entries needs to have four key elements. 1) It needs to involve news and information. The kind of news and information that people need to run their communities and their lives. 2) It needs to involve specific geographic communities. So it is not about technology platforms that aren’t related to a specific community - a place where people live and work and run their government. 3) It needs to involve digital innovation; something new. And because of the fourth element, it is very helpful for media development because the fourth element is that whatever technology is developed is then free and open source, and usable by anybody anywhere in the world for news and information in their communities.

David: Does innovation have the same meaning in all countries and all contexts?

Eric: No. Things that are new in one culture might be quite old in another. But we don’t think that it’s the job of the News Challenge to try to bring all of the new developments to everyone in the world. We think that the governments will do that and businesses will do that. There are already structures involving millions and even billions of dollars in media that will spread the innovations. What we’re looking for are things that no one has tried before. No one meaning no one. Those innovations can be technological, but they can also be innovations of technique. If someone in a culture outside the United States says, ‘hey, we can combine these technologies in a unique way in our community’, that is innovation.

So, when Rhodes University in South Africa says ‘we can develop a cell phone citizen journalism program in the township, we can create a web platform for the English-language newspaper, we can create a new web platform for the Afrikaans radio station, and then we can digitally connect all three of these things so that for the first time this community can have a unified news system’ - well, that wasn’t any new technology necessarily. That was taking things and putting them into action in specific communities because of the unique characteristics of that community.

David: Can you give a couple other examples of News Challenge winners internationally, from outside the US?

Eric: Sure, in Sochi, where the Olympics are coming, a citizen journalism project is in the process of organizing the community to talk about whether the olympics are a good thing or a bad thing for the town, or something in between. A major citizen journalism project in Russia is not the norm - so that should be an interesting experiment. In Zimbabwe, there is an experiment in mobile news distribution called Freedom Fone. In Kenya, Ushahidi is experimenting with data visualization and real-time mapping of citizen journalism contributions so that if major news events are occurring you can see the reports that are coming in from all quarters and get a visual idea of what is happening. Those are just some of the examples.

The News Challenge is open internationally because the idea is that anyone anywhere can come up with a good idea. We haven’t done as many international projects as we’d like to because a lot of people think that they have new ideas, but really they just don’t know that it is already happening somewhere else and the technology already exists, and in fact models already exist. So nothing new needs to be developed. What needs to happen in that case is that aid programs or the commercial sector or any number of other funders need to step in to spread things that we already know work.

David: We are about one week from the deadline of this year’s News Challenge. What recommendations and advice would you give to applicants?

Eric: Well, I think that the main thing to remember is that we’re looking for projects with all the elements: great news and information, great digital innovation, specific geographic community and free and open source sharing of what is learned and developed. We frequently will get project proposals that are very strong in one of the categories, but weak in the others. The best thing that anyone can do is partner with experts in the other areas and do their homework in the other areas if they themselves are only experts in only one of the areas.