By John Bracken, director journalism/media innovation at Knight Foundation

Today, I’m speaking at the SOCAP conference on a panel, New Alliances in Social Innovation, with Knight partners Jesse Shapins of Zeega and Corey Ford of Public Radio Exchange. The panel was put together and will be moderated by Jeff Leifer.

I’m talking about four things that Knight’s journalism and media innovation program is looking to focus on in 2013:

• Many social entrepreneurs do not work within the standard nonprofit 501c3 organization. To support them, we’ve developed funding tools for whatever structure they choose, for example our Enterprise Fund, Prototype Fund and Program-Related Investment. With these tools we can work with the best partners regardless of how they choose to organize. The Slideshare above, by Knight’s Director/Business Consulting, Ben Wirz, helps you decide what makes sense for your project in just four easy steps.
• We’ve found that transformative leadership is the key ingredient to successful projects and, but its nature, the hardest to manufacture. We’re exploring ways we can try to foster more transformative leaders and higlight their work.
• Our emphasis has been on funding projects that are first over the wall. We’re also exploring ways we might better support the most successful of these early stage projects. 
• We plan to share more about what we’ve learned about social investment, and put us in a position to learn from other entrepreneurs and funders. So, we’re planning to talk more about what we’re doing—expect more like the talk Michael Maness gave at the Online News Association last month and this DocumentCloud piece.