Knight Grants Go Global and Younger
Important Details: The Knight Foundation, emerging as a vital node in pushing forward digital journalism, is going younger and more global in its recent grants. The foundation, with more than $2.5 billion in assets, has funded traditional journalism projects, many academically-based, over the years. Last year, it announced its new Knight News Challenge and, in May 2008 awarded Round Two of grants in that program. This year’s grants totaled $5.5 million, funding 16 projects, following first-year grants of $12 million for 25 initial projects, many of which are ongoing. Applications totaled 3000, an 82% year-on-year increase.
What’s most noteworthy about the current crop of funded projects is how global they are in reach and how much money is going to young innovators. Take a look at the winners and their projects, and you see pronounced attempts to harness the new technologies (especially mobile and internet radio) to engage communities around news. This year, 10 winners live in the US, while the other six reside in Canada, England, Lithuania, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Russia.
“We believe answers to communications issues might come from anywhere in the world,” Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibarguen told Outsell. “So, we cast a wider net to raise the number of international entries and we did, from about 15% to nearly half…[This year, we] published information about the Knight News Challenge in eight more languages rather than just English.” A high profile winner this year is Sir Tim Berners-Lee who, along with Martin Moore, won a $350,000 grant to investigate Transparent Journalism, a way to make it easy for content creators to “source tag” their content to help the public better divine reliable sources.
Ibarguen says that Knight also announced that it intended to make at least $500,000 of the $5 million in awards for people aged 25 years old and under. In fact, it ended up awarding more than $1 million in that age bracket.
The rules of the competition are few:
- Use digital, open-source technology.
- Communicate news or information in the public interest.
- Apply your idea in a specific geographic community.
Overall, the grants build on a strengthening belief of the foundation that realization that, in Ibarguen’s words, “if you’re not digital, you’re a second class citizen: second class economically and socially and a second class receiver of information. That is unacceptable to us.”
Implications: Outsell believes that the Knight Foundation should be lauded for its focus and eclectic selection of award winners. Its increased global and younger focus make sense as internet-based journalism — native to the young and global by its very nature — becomes commonplace. It is also noteworthy that Knight is agnostic as to recipient “type” — individuals, philanthropic organizations and for-profit businesses have all applied and won grants.
More such leadership is needed, as Oliver Luft recently pointed out in the UK’s Online Journalism News, decrying the lack of a UK equivalent to the Knight Challenge. Outsell believes that it is both a matter of more and of better connecting the dots. Knight Foundation’s Ibarguen says he understands the intricate business of dot-connecting is becoming a priority, while making sure the foundation doesn’t lose its focus on “experimentation.” Dot-connecting though is crucial. It’s a time of passing ships in the night. Much legacy media is sailing increasingly haphazardly toward a sunset, while the newer craft are frequently captained by wild, undisciplined crews, often long on dreams and short on business savvy.
There is matchmaking to be done here, by Knight and others, as the sea of journalism churns away.