Photo: Flickr.com/photos/nyoin/ Cross-posted from NewsChallenge.org

The Knight News Challenge is a contest designed to inspire bold new digital experiments in community news. This year the local geographic requirement applies only if you apply under the Community category. However, we do prefer projects that plan to be tested in a specific community. Our goal is to spur media innovation and find new ways to inform and inspire communities.

Innovation is a key element of the Knight News Challenge. For us, innovation means a product created or produced in a way we’ve not seen before, or a process created to do something unique. Many interesting applications fail in the early stages of this contest because they do not propose anything innovative.

Innovation can be seen as two different things:

1. Invention, that is the creation of something entirely new, of something that did not exist before.
2. The mixing of things that already exist to do something new or something old in a new, different, more effective and efficient way. We are interested in both and we find the latter very interesting.

We usually explain the second form of innovation with the following example:

‘We love the person who invented the suitcase and the person who invented the wheels, but what we really are looking for is the person who put the wheels on the suitcase.’

The clock is ticking. Make sure you send us your best media innovations by the Dec. 1 deadline.

If you have questions please tweet them at #KNC or ping us @knightfdn @jczamora @jsb or send us an e-mail at: newschallenge[at]knightfoundation[dot]org.