Mobile Media Toolkit

The media innovation competition, now in its fifth year, announces a new approach to better match the pace of innovation.

The Knight News Challenge, an international media innovation competition, has seen 12,000 applications and awarded $27 million to journalism and information projects in its five-year history. And now it’s all about to change -- for the better, for the most part.

One significant change is on the speed of the competition, to more closely match the pace of information and technology. Previous challenges happened once a year. Now, Knight News plans on three competitions in 2012, the first kicking off on Feb. 27, and closing just under three weeks later, on March 17.

Previous Knight News Challenge entries in so far as they developed code were required to use open source software. A Nieman Journalism Lab post on the topic suggests this will open the contest to new players: “And Knight is going farther than ever before to widen the kinds of people who might apply: removing its requirement to open-source the project’s work and emphasizing it will take appeals from individuals, nonprofits, for-profits, and presumably any organizational structure on land or sea.”

We applied for and won a grant in 2009 to develop our very own Mobile Media Toolkit. We’re excited by the more rapid iterations of the Challenge for faster innovation in media but we are sorry to see the open source requirement go.  The Knight folks were at one point unabashed to make every winner contribute back its code base to the community  - another way to build and leverage networks if done right.  It seems inconsistent with the goals of the Challenge to drop this requirement.  

Nieman puts it well on its blog: The overarching message seems to be a desire to cast as wide a net as possible to spur innovation in journalism and community information. By pulling back on past restrictions, while emphasizing things like impact and scalability, Knight is also trying to be a smarter, more agile organization that can ensure a return (even if its not a monetary one) on their investments. 

The first challenge this year is all about networks: More about existing platforms, less about re-inventing the wheel.

For this year’s first Knight News Challenge, we intend to harness the momentum from people thinking about and building networks. In the course of our work, we often come across proposals to “build a Facebook that connects X and Y.” We want to move away from that. There are a lot of vibrant networks and platforms, on- and off-line, that can be used to connect us with the news and information we need to make decisions about our lives. This challenge will not fund new networks. Rather, we’re asking you to describe ways you might use existing platforms to drive innovation in media and journalism.

Future applicants may be interested in some of the insights on what makes a successful media innovation project, including knowing your niche, building community, training for engagement, and earning income. The first News Challenge opens for applications on Feb. 27 and closes on March 17.