Knight News Challenge Years 1 & 2 Assessment

A Contest to Accelerate Innovation
The Knight News Challenge was launched to
advance the future of news by supporting new
ways to digitally inform communities.

Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves
2007–08 Knight News Challenge
what the media landscape actually looked like
when the Challenge began.


Pushing the Envelope
“When you don’t know what the future looks like,
you have to engage in intense experimentation
and stay open to new trends and ideas.”
– Alberto Ibargüen, President, Knight Foundation

We asked all applicants to stick to three simple rules:
1. Use digital, open source technology

2. Distribute news in the public interest

3. Test the project in a local geographic community


Ideas by the Thousands
The contest changed the way we operated –
it lowered the barriers to entry, inviting in
thousands of applicants over the past 4 years.


By the Numbers


Winners Circle*

* This slide and the review that
follows do not include grants
made to individuals to blog.


What Emerged
Taking a closer look
at the early winners


Experimentation & Learning
Funding innovation requires being open to
experimentation and a commitment to learn from
the experience. We reviewed the early winners to
better understand their impact and influence as
they’ve progressed.*

* The findings that follow are based on an independent assessment
conducted by LFA Group and commissioned by Knight Foundation.


Where are they now?

* The list does not include grants
that were made to individuals to blog
about their projects and ideas.


Scaling & Spreading

One of the contest’s aspirations was that winners might
catalyze broader change through the adoption, replication
and expansion of their ideas.


Creating code
The contest supported open
source product development
to encourage widespread
adoption of funded ideas.


A Capital Idea
19 of the 31 winners secured additional funds beyond
their News Challenge grant, sometimes tapping into
multiple sources, to continue or expand their projects.


Project Status

2007–08
The Evolution of an Idea:
Knight News Challenge

Freedom Fone (2008 winner)
A project to create a DIY platform for two-way, phone-based information services,
using interactive audio voice menus, voice messages, SMS and polls.

2009 2010 2011


Key Insights
Learning from the early winners


Mobile News
Platforms

Patterns, Platforms Digital Tools for

& Products Public Media

Citizen Media
To surface key lessons, we
grouped winners together in Innovative Tools
& Practices
terms of their platform type and
approach. We didn’t start with News Games

these categories in the contest,
Local News
but found the winners clustered Aggregators

together in these ways.
Field-Building for
Media Innovation


Mobile News Platforms
Hand-held news

• Knowing Your Niche: By actively listening to users
and adapting to new opportunities, winners found
unexpected successes.

• Setting Expectations: Early community partners
need to be comfortable deploying platforms still
under development.

• Versatility Matters: Ensuring users could access
content, regardless of which mobile network they
belonged to, helped support more seamless pilot
testing.


Digital Tools for Public Media
Going Public

• Retrofitting Challenges: To successfully use
digital tools, organizations need to adopt new
work processes vastly different from traditional
broadcast media.

• Using Local Assets: Connecting digital content
to local, physical events helped increased levels of
interactivity and engagement.

• Think Modular: Building specific modules that
allow users to customize may generate greater
adoption than developing a universal platform.


Citizen Media
Re-sourcing the news

• Training Inspires: Training was a powerful tool
for providing users with the necessary skills to
produce content and building overall commitment
to the project.

• Trust and Identity: A consistent presence in
communities and strong relationships with local
partners were critical to ensuring ongoing project
success.

• Scope and Skills: Projects that stumbled often
overestimated the reporting skills of individuals and
underestimated the challenges of keeping people
engaged.


Innovative Tools & Practices
Transforming the News

• Marketing and Outreach: Investing time and
resources in effective marketing was critical for
gaining widespread adoption.

• Transparency Rules: Crowdfunding models require
journalists to be highly entrepreneurial and
comfortable with transparent approaches to pitching
and producing stories.

• Data Potential: Efforts to improve authenticity and
accuracy by surfacing the metadata in stories might
also help create a richer media environment.


News Games
What’s the Score?

• The Pros: Building a compelling gaming experience
requires a rare combination of design skills, technical
skills and expertise in interaction design.

• Feeding the Beast: Producing high quality games
involves heavy content development requirements,
which winners often found to be overwhelming.

• Development Difficulties: Open source
requirements created a unique challenge for news
games, impacting their implementation.


Local News Aggregators
Knowing Your Town

• Built for Me: Personalisation of the product helped
build audience traction and engagement over time.

• Network Power: Project leaders with a rich
network of contacts and strong online reputations
were able to translate these assets into early traffic
and media attention for their projects.

• Team Assembly: Identifying, building and
structuring strong technical teams took time, but
helped prevent unnecessary development problems
down the line.


Field-Building for Media
Innovation
Behind the Scenes
• Innovation Hurdles: Finding the right set of faculty
and students to participate in interdisciplinary programs
focused on innovation, technology and media is challenging.

• Constant Adaptation: Teaching innovation requires an
effective process for revising curricula on a much more rapid
and frequent basis than traditional academic programs.

• Alumni Prowess: Leveraging alumni and their success
is a powerful asset for marketing programs, recruiting new
students and securing new funding.

The Hacker Journalist
Many of the field-building projects are focused on creating
graduates with a new hybrid set of skills required to advance
the future of news and information.*

* Loosely based on the life of Brian (Boyer), a programmer
bored with creating e-solutions for insurance companies,
who got jazzed about journalism and received one of
the Digital News Academics (News Challenge Winner 2007)
scholarships to attend Northwestern. He now runs the
Chicago Tribune’s news application team that’s built tools
to help parents compare school performance, used data
to contribute to nursing home reforms and supported
other investigations.


What we learned
How we can improve our eﬀorts
to support media innovation


Room for Improvement
• Speed of a Contest: The 8 months cycle between the
receipt of applications and announcement of winners is
inconsistent with the rapid pace of innovation and affects
applicants’ ability to respond to market opportunities.
We need to move faster.

• Open Source: Open source licenses can be a powerful way
for ensuring greater adoption of funded software
development, but it often requires documentation, training
and technical assistance to support user adoption.
We need to be mindful of the time and resources it takes
to build a developer community.


Room for Improvement
• Building Budgets: Many winners experienced difficulties
in accurately budgeting for project costs and
technology and marketing expenses. Upfront assistance
in both business development and programming
prowess can help address some of these issues.

• Tapping into Talent: Many winners faced challenges in
assembling a team that possessed the necessary mix of
skills to be effective on the web: content development,
user experience, and technical programming.
We need to explore ways to help winners connect
to other resources.

Continuing to
Experiment & Learn
This review is part of an ongoing assessment of the
News Challenge. We continue to track the progress of
2009, 2010 and (tba) 2011 winners. Findings from this
will be shared on a regular basis as insights are
gathered.

Knight News Challenge Years 1 & 2 Assessment

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