Knight Foundation Pumps $12 Million Into Digital Future
Important Details: The Knight Foundation, a leader in journalism education and civic engagement in more than 20 cities across the US, named the first winners in its five-year program to blaze new pathways in digital journalism.
The Foundation, the 24th largest in the nation with $2 billion in assets, recently took on a new mandate to find solutions as the print to digital tranformation accelerates. In all, it has pledged at least $25 million over five years. In the first year it dedicated $12 million, in part multi-year grants, to a variety of projects. The most noteworthy projects included:
- Think Tank: The Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology got the largest grant ($5 million) to create a Center for Future Civic Media to “develop, test and study new forms of high-tech community news”.
- Data Mastering: Journalist/web developer Adrian Holovaty, creator of chicagocrime.org, got $1.1 million to focus on harnessing public records and local information data on a city basis.
- Community Platform Building: VillageSoup, an independent, heavily user-generated community site in Maine received $885,000 to build free software to enable such sites across the country.
- Bridging Journalism and Computer Science: Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism received $639,000 for nine full journalism scholarships for students who have undergraduate degrees in computer science.
- Practical Incubator: Arizona State University got $552,000 to create and launch digital media products.
Twenty-seven other winners received prizes between $15,000 and $340,000, including NewAssignment.Net’s Jay Rosen, PlaceBlogger’s Lisa Williams and IReporter’s Amy Gahran.
Implications: The awards are a breath of fresh air, amid the spreading gloom of declining newspaper circulation and advertising results. $12 million isn’t a fortune, but it’s a beachhead, dropping money in lots of forums and hoping for sparks to emerge. The Knight Foundation’s efforts stand alongside innovation within newspaper companies. Both newspaper companies and the Knight awardees can learn from each other and would do well to keep tabs on each other’s progress. Fast learning, application and knowledge transfer is what’s key.
“We want to spur discovery of how digital platforms can be used to disseminate news and information on a timely basis within a defined geographic space, and thereby build and bind community. That’s what newspapers and local television stations used to do in the 20th century, and it’s something that our communities still need today,” said Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen. That connection, now frayed among cutbacks, is what’s vital to make anew.