Today Knight Foundation is announcing a $1.5 million grant over two years to support NPR’s digital transition. The grant will enable NPR to provide deeper training to journalists in its newsroom and to expand the program to include staff at public radio stations. The grant builds on an investment we made in 2007 to help NPR staff become “more competitive and […]
Article · December 14, 2011 by John Bracken
We’ve had a busy fall in the Journalism & Media Innovation Program, and I wanted to share some of what we’ve been up to with you. First, I want to highlight two grants we made recently. On Thursday, we announced a grant to Northwestern’s Medill School to extend a scholarship program we began in 2007 […]
Article · November 11, 2011 by John Bracken
Above: Knight VP for Journalism and Media Innovation Michael Maness on the future of the News Challenge. Today is Day 2 of Mozilla’s “Media, Freedom and the Web” Festival in London. The news Friday was the announcement of the five Knight-Mozilla News Technology fellows; the news today and tomorrow is an amazing array of collaborations, design challenges, labs, hack sessions […]
Article · November 5, 2011 by John Bracken
John Bracken A comment I made yesterday (“Print could be the new vinyl”) at the Asian American Journalists Association conference in Detroit stirred up a good bit of chatter on Twitter. I suppose it’s only appropriate that after I touted the value of Twitter as a new storytelling platform, I saw its limitations up-close. Twitter […]
Article · August 12, 2011 by John Bracken
Today’s a busy day for Knight Foundation. In addition to the list of News Challenge winners, which we will share later this afternoon, we are announcing a $3.76 million grant to the (newly renamed) Center for Civic Media at MIT. This is a major investment for us, one that we’re excited to make because of […]
Article · June 22, 2011 by John Bracken
Today’s an exciting day for Knight Foundation, and for the Knight News Challenge. One of the projects that we helped start through our contest, DocumentCloud, is merging with Investigative Reporters and Editors. Since winning a News Challenge award in 2009, DocumentCloud has become an important tool to more than 200 newsrooms across the country. (A […]
Article · June 9, 2011 by John Bracken
On Wednesday, Knight Foundation participated in We Media’s NYC conference. (The day’s Twitter archive here.) Along with the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation, we sponsored We Media’s PitchIt challenge. Eight projects competed for two $25,000 awards: Milena Arciszewski of Pando Projects and Ben Stacks of Stable Renters Clear Health Costs FastCast Longshot Media Meridian […]
Article · April 8, 2011 by John Bracken
A fire at the Miami airport couldn’t keep 16 media and technology experts from joining Knight Foundation in our board room last Friday to review 75 Knight News Challenge semifinalists. (I’ve listed the reviewers below, along with the name of those who read applications earlier in the contest.) We asked them here to help us […]
Article · April 1, 2011 by John Bracken
Cross-posted from newschallenge.org Today is both exciting and melancholy for those of us working on the Knight News Challenge. After weeks spent with 364 full applications, we’ve settled on 75 semi-finalists. We will pare that group down to a smaller number of finalists over the next couple of weeks. Winners will be announced in late […]
Article · March 22, 2011 by John Bracken
The crisis in the news industry has resulted in numerous attempts to create new platforms and approaches for informing, and engaging’audiences “the people formerly known as the audience.” Knight Foundation has’supported a number of nonprofit news start-ups focused on local news. Our latest grant in that area was announced earlier this morning: we’ve made a […]
Article · March 11, 2011 by John Bracken
Last week we began reviewing the 364 Knight News Challenge applications we invited into the contest’s second round. While we don’t award prizes for making it past the fist round, being selected from among a field of 1,641 is an accomplishment in and of itself. Second round entrants include major commercial and noncommercial news organizations […]
Article · February 11, 2011 by John Bracken