Knight’s Data-Centric News Challenge Winners

Posted on | September 20, 2012 | No Comments

By Joshua Ben­ton, Nie­man Jour­nal­ism Lab

Sept. 20, 2012

Today at the Online News Association’s annual con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco, the Knight Foun­da­tion will present its newest class of Knight News Chal­lenge win­ners. This cycle — the sec­ond of three this year under Knight’s new harder-better-faster-stronger con­test régime — was focused on data, and the six win­ners are unusu­ally tool-heavy — and heavy on the infor­ma­tion needs of com­mu­ni­ties, Knight’s inclu­sive fram­ing for a lot of civic-minded data and infor­ma­tion that isn’t nec­es­sar­ily trans­mit­ted through what tra­di­tion­al­ists might con­sider jour­nal­is­tic enter­prises. Ambi­ent com­mu­nity data — in one case, lit­er­ally from the air around us — can be col­lected and used in ways that don’t fit into tra­di­tional story mod­els. The more notably jour­nal­is­tic grants are aimed at capac­ity build­ing — like the con­struc­tion of com­mon data­bases of elec­tion and cen­sus data that could be used by jour­nal­ists (or any­one) anywhere.

This shift to tools has been grad­ual — this year’s win­ners look quite dif­fer­ent from, say, the first year’s win­ners, which were more likely to include com­mu­nity jour­nal­ism projects them­selves. I think it’s a smart move. There’s a new infra­struc­ture of dig­i­tal tools slowly being built that, col­lec­tively, will make jour­nal­ism and journalism-like work eas­ier to do. Many of those ideas come from peo­ple in news orga­ni­za­tions, but their poten­tial value spreads far beyond one outlet’s bound­aries — per­haps mak­ing it harder for that out­let to invest the time and money in build­ing and main­tain­ing it. So it makes sense for an out­side force to deal with that commons-based issue. (Oblig­a­tory dis­clo­sure: Knight has also been a fun­der of the Nie­man Jour­nal­ism Lab.)

The win­ners will be pre­sented at ONA on Sat­ur­day. (As an aside, the Nie­man Lab staff will be at ONA this after­noon too, once our flight from Boston lands. We love to meet our read­ers, so come say hello.) Here are the win­ners, with Knight’s writeup:

Local­Data

Award: $300,000
Win­ners: Amplify Labs, Ali­cia Rouault, Prashant Singh and Matt Ham­pel, Detroit
Twit­ter: @golocaldata

Read the rest of the story at Nie­man Jour­nal­ism Lab.

Category: Competition, Digital Journalist, Digital resources, Fellowships, Grants

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