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    Insights on Innovation: Findings from the News Challenge coming soon

    Published April 18, 2011 by

    Mayur Patel In 2007, we launched the Knight News Challenge as a five-year $25m contest to support innovative digital experiments to transform the way communities gather, share and produce local news. The backdrop to the contest was the disruption happening in journalism, with the news industry in great flux. Since then, we have funded over 60 grantees, totaling more than $21m. With the future of journalism open, we made a deliberate effort to invest in a broad range of experiments from open-source publishing tools to journalism education, and from mobile news platforms to data visualization and mapping. As with all experiments, the key is to learn from them. At the start of 2010, we put in place a multi-year evaluation to understand the impact of winners’ projects, highlight practices that are showing promise and assess the contest’s contribution to advancing media innovation. The initial results from this effort will be completed shortly and we’re excited to share them publicly with you in June! The findings will build on some of the earlier reviews we’ve done of news challenge winners and the contest itself. Here’s some more detail: In 2010, we partnered with Lucy Bernholz and her team at Blueprint R&D (an evaluation and strategy firm on the West Coast), to put in place a framework for evaluating the news challenge. To date this has included: An initial retrospective analysis to understand the progress winners have made in implementing their projects and the partnerships they have developed. Profiles of individual winners and a set of papers exploring cross-cutting themes in the contest, e.g. news on mobile phone, civic media projects and news games. We started this by looking at the 2008 and 2009 winners, who are far enough along with their projects to examine outcomes. LFA Group, an evaluation firm, has been collecting this information by surveying and interviewing winners, their stakeholders and experts in the field. We also recently put in place a system to help winners better track their progress and outcomes going forward by integrating web analytics and social media metrics into their work. John Lovett from Web Analytics Demystified has been supporting the 2010 winners with this. We’ll be demoing the platform they’re developing to track key performance indicators in the next few months. It’s our hope that the insights gathered from the evaluation will help winners strengthen the implementation of their projects and help us refine our media innovation efforts. We also hope that the findings will be meaningful for your own work. Others are also exploring the News Challenge contest independently of Knight Foundation. An example is Daniel Bachhuber’s recent post, which includes an interesting infographic. Check it out. Stay tuned for Knight's findings in June! Mayur Patel is VP for Strategy and Assessment at Knight Foundation.
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    The reviews are in: Porgy & Bess

    Published April 18, 2011 by

    The Akron Symphony's Knight-funded production of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess took the stage last Friday and Saturday April 15-16, 2011. The shows were nearly sold out and reviews overwhelmingly positive. The330.com calls Porgy and Bess a "rare treat," noting that seeing the show on opening night "felt like history...
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    O, Miami week three preview

    Published April 18, 2011 by

    The O, Miami! poetry festival begins week three with a reading by local poets, a talk and reading with leading figures of the of Argentinian Avant-Garde scene, a poetry reading at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, plus an fascinating array of cinematic events scheduled at the Miami Beach Cinematheque and O,...
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    The Red Thread arrives in Miami Shores

    Published April 15, 2011 by

    Knight Arts grantee The Playground Theatre celebrates the world premiere of The Red Thread Saturday, April 16. Inspired by Chinese folklore, this 90-minute original play is designed for children eight years and older and tells the story of a widowed weaver and his three daughters. The production is heavily influenced...
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    Borscht 7

    Published April 15, 2011 by

    Miami’s seventh “quasi-yearly” Borscht Film Festival runs from April 9-23, bringing films telling Miami stories created by regional filmmakers to iconic venues throughout Miami. Funded by Knight Foundation, the Festival hopes to forge Miami’s cinematic identity and generate global interest in the city’s film industry. In doing so, Borscht commissioned...
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    Season winding down, but programs retain challenges

    Published April 15, 2011 by

    The season is swiftly approaching its end, and this weekend marks one of the last waves of heavy concert activity before Thanksgiving rolls around again. Two concerts this weekend offer some good off-the-beaten-path pieces of repertoire mixed in along with some core repertory, which just goes to show that if...
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    Kids paint the Cass Corridor way with Gilda Snowden

    Published April 15, 2011 by

    Since 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit has invited children and their caregivers to create together during Family Days. This Sunday, kids will have the extraordinary opportunity to paint with noted local artist Gilda Snowden. Snowden is a Kresge Arts Fellow whose Flora Urbana series is currently on display...
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    Mobilize.org will develop networks of young leaders in five cities

    Published April 15, 2011 by

    Today, Knight Foundation is announcing a $1 million grant to Mobilize.org, to help build a network of young leaders in five communities. We’re making the announcement this afternoon in San Jose, where 100 students are gathered for a three-day summit to develop ways to help students overcome obstacles to obtaining their degree. Participants will pick the best ideas, and Mobilize.org and partners will fund them – liked they’ve  funded 26 Millenial-led projects around the nation. The support is part of Knight’s efforts to involve youth in promoting informed and engaged communities. Damian Thorman Similar summits will be coming soon to Miami, Detroit, Philadelphia and Charlotte, and a team will be in place in each city to make sure projects are successful. Here’s Founder Maya Enista in her own words about the work Mobilize.org is trying to accomplish: Mobilize.org was founded nine years ago, on the campus of UC Berkeley by a visionary student, David B. Smith, who believed that young people had an important role to play in building campuses, communities, and a democracy that they would be proud to lead. Nine years later, Mobilize.org has touched tens of thousands of Millennials across the country, investing over $130,000 in Millennial-led solutions to some of the most pressing challenges of our time; from the task of increasing financial literacy for our generation, to addressing the challenges that Millennials veterans face when returning from combat. The solutions lie within this collaborative, diverse, technologically-savvy and entrepreneurial generation and I know I speak on behalf of the amazing Mobilize.org team when I say it’s a true honor to go to work for and with our generation every day. Five projects that emerge from this weekend will be among the 26 that Mobilize.org has already invested in, including Team Rubicon, which deploys teams during natural disasters, and the One Percent Foundation.   Recently, we invited a group of leaders – including Maya – to talk about the best ways to engage youth in helping their communities. You can read about, or listen to that conversation here. Maya Enista Discusses Youth Engagement from Knight Foundation on Vimeo. Meanwhile, Mobilize.org is asking: Do you know an inspiring young people who may be a great addition to the Mobilize.org team? Do you know organizations in the cities above that are doing truly empowering, Millennial-led work? Do you have a solution for your community that needs support to get off the ground? If you do, email the team at [email protected]
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    Helping foundations get past their “fear of fire” when it comes to media grantmaking

    Published April 15, 2011 by

    Written by Mary Lou Fulton & cross-posted from The Media Optimist Mary Lou Fulton What will it take to get more foundations to give money to support news and information projects? This was the subject of a standing-room-only panel (see archived chat) at this week’s Council on Foundations annual meeting, where funders from across the country gathered to learn and talk about a new Knight Foundation guideoffering ideas and inspiration for how to get started in journalism and media grant-making. The guide highlights a range of media grant-making examples, and I’m honored that work of The California Endowment was featured.   But the questions and conversation at the panel discussion, ably moderated by Eric Newton,  made me think that another guide may be needed:  “How I talked my board of directors into making media grants and lived to tell about it.” I say that because while foundation representatives clearly understood the media industry crisis and the need for high-quality news and information, there is still much anxiety about supporting independent journalism that a foundation can’t control.   There is fear of what they see as the worst-case scenario, such as...
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    Going O!

    Published April 14, 2011 by

    By Siobhan Canty, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Knight Foundation   One of the great things about O Miami! is how it shows that poetry can be a daily and fundamental way of improving our lives. When placed in everyday spots, poems remind us that there are other ways of...
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    New FCC and Knight Foundation contest helps bridge digital divide

    Published April 14, 2011 by

    Can a mobile app improve the quality of life for a farmer in America's heartland? Can a web app help school children in Detroit?    That’s the fundamental idea behind the Apps for Communities Challenge, a new contest sponsored by Knight Foundation and the FCC. We’re offering up to $100,000 in prizes for software applications (apps) that deliver personalized, actionable information to people least likely to be online. The goals of the contest: ●    make local public information more personalized, usable, and accessible for all Americans; ●    promote broadband adoption, particularly among Americans who are less likely to be regular Internet users (including low-income, rural, seniors, people with disabilities and the low digital/English literacy communities); and ●    create better links between Americans and services provided by local, state, Tribal, and federal governments. This fits in with Knight’s mission to promote informed and engaged communities, which includes promoting universal broadband access. Learn more and apply by July 11 at Appsforcommunities.challenge.gov.
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    Journalists from nine countries selected for Knight International Fellowship at Stanford University

    Published April 14, 2011 by

    Stanford University has selected nine journalists from a total of 222 applications to participate in the 2011-2012 John S. Knight International Fellowships.  They will be joined by 12 U.S. fellows, to be announced early next month. Judith Torrea, one of nine John S. Knight International Fellows for Professional Journalism "The projects this year's Fellows will undertake include making data mining tools more accessible to journalists, developing an online platform for the sharing of Freedom of Information documents and using technology to make Arab governments more accessible and U.S. Mideast policy more transparent," stated a Stanford press release. A more detailed account of each of their proposals is available here.
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    The urban aesthetic of Primary Projects

    Published April 14, 2011 by

    The images of dark, wet, empty nighttime urban streets are haunting, populated by power lines and the harsh light of an uncovered street lamp. However, the canvas that German artist Lena Schmidt uses are pieces of found wood, which she then...