We announced last week that the five News Challenge applications that receive the most support from the public will advance to the second round of consideration along with the  100 or so projects identified by our review process.  Some applicants have expressed confusion by what we meant by public support, so I wanted to clarify our plans.

First, as I mentioned in the previous post, we’ll be selecting those five based on the total number of likes and reblogs on Tumblr. In addition, in our evaluation of the proposals, we will take into account the conversations taking place on the Tumblr comments page and on Twitter. Tracking more than that is difficult for us. However, if you feel like there are other conversations happening on other networks, please mention and link to them in the comments of your application page – we’ll take them into consideration too. We’ll stop counting the Tumblr likes and reblogs on midnight, March 29. We’ll continue to follow the online conversations throughout our evaluation period in April.

I hope that helps –  as ever, please hit us up if you’ve any additional questions.

By John Bracken, director/Journalism and Media Innovation at Knight Foundation

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