News Blog
The official blog from the team at Google News
Applauding the 2011 Knight News Challenge winners
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Official Google Blog
and the
Google Public Policy Blog
)
Over the past few months,
we’ve announced
$5 million in grants to be distributed by the
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
and the
International Press Institute
—two non-profit organizations developing new approaches to journalism in the digital age—and we’re pleased to congratulate the first initiatives that have been selected as part of that funding.
Today at
M.I.T.
, the Knight Foundation showcased 16 projects selected as the winners of the 2011
Knight News Challenge
. Now in its fifth year, this media-innovation contest included $1 million in support from Google. As you’ll see in
the full list of winners
, these initiatives come from organizations large and small and are reminders that entrepreneurship can be sparked anywhere. Here are just a few examples of the creative ways the journalism community around the world is merging traditional skills with an online landscape:
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
OpenBlock Rural
will use its seed money to work with local governments and community newspapers across the state to collect, aggregate and publish data.
In Virginia, the Miller Center Foundation’s
State Decoded
will serve as a platform to display state codes, court decisions and information from legislative tracking services to make government more understandable to the average citizen.
The
Chicago Tribune
will collaborate with the
Investigative Editors & Reporters
organization and
The Spokesman-Review
on a set of open-source, web-based tools that make it easier for journalists to use and analyze data.
Liverpool, U.K.-based
ScraperWiki
will bring its experiences with public data to journalism camps in 12 U.S. states.
Chile’s
El Mostrador
will develop an editorial and crowdsourced database to bring greater transparency to potential conflicts of interest.
Ushahidi
will build off its
past crisis efforts
to improve information-verification across email, Twitter, web feeds and text messages.
Other winning proposals
tell rich multimedia stories, bridge the gap between traditional and citizen media and further improve the utility of data to journalists. Our sister program
in partnership with the International Press Institute
is also well underway. The entries in that competition are now in and the winners will be announced later this summer. We look forward to seeing the impacts these initiatives have on digital journalism and hope they encourage continued experimentation and innovation at the grassroots level.
Posted by Jim Gerber, Director, Strategic Partnerships, News
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