Knight News Challenge: Creativity Goldmine for Reaching Communities of Difference

The Nov. 1 application deadline for the Knight News Challenge is fast approaching. As a former News Challenge grantee, I’ve been mentoring several current applicants, helping them hone their proposals. Through this, I’ve discovered that the News Challenge Garage and the list of already-submitted public entries are a potential gold mine of talent and ideas for innovative projects that could serve all kinds of communities of difference…

The Knight News Challenge provides grants for experimental digital media projects that build or bind a sense of geographic community. Anyone, anywhere can apply. You don’t have to be “in the media business,” or part of a nonprofit or educational institution, or in the US to apply. This opens the doors for a level of creative thinking about media that goes beyond what I’ve seen elsewhere.

The Garage is an online community where News Challenge applicants can engage in public discussion about their proposals. This helps them sharpen their ideas, question their assumptions, and figure out the resources they’ll need before they finalize and submit their entires.

If you’re trying to figure out creative ways to use online or mobile media to connect with underserved communities in your coverage area, you really should take the time to peruse the Garage and the list of submitted entries. Even though only a few of these projects will receive News Challenge grants, many of them are very good ideas that could benefit your community and your news org. Also, many of the people behind these ideas might make good additions to your team as staff, freelancers, or consultants.

From a Total Community Coverage standpoint, here are a few News Challenge ideas that caught my eye:

• Rural Information, Practices, & Peer Learning Exchange (RIPPLE). This existing online network seeks funding to expand. They currently offers rural communities “virtual tools to share ideas, find answers, and connect with experts on hosted discussion forums.” They wants to expand their services to rural Hispanic and tribal communities. Whether or not RIPPLE gets a News Challenge grant, if you want to reach rural communities of difference, you might want to explore working with or learning from Ripple.
  
• Success Through Storytelling (STS). This project would establish “a central online hub for education news with five satellite sites operated by students attending four targeted under-served high schools and one school for adults in Stockton, CA. ...[We will] establish operating newsrooms in each school ...to cover the surrounding community, telling stories that are over-looked by traditional news organizations. Stockton is a widely diverse community with four main high schools with majority populations of Hispanic, Black and Filipino students.”
  
• CultureSurfer.com. Another existing site seeking to expand, CultureSurfer.com explores St. Louis arts and culture with the goal of enhancing cross-cultural appreciation and understanding. This includes highlighting “the talent within St. Louis’s untapped Asian, African, Bosnian, and Latin communities.”
  
• Mobile Crimesourcing in Mexico City. Sounds like something that might also apply to many urban inner cities in the US and elsewhere…
  

These are just a few intriguing projects that could serve communities of difference that I found in a quick search. Who might be hatching News Challenge ideas in your backyard—or that could benefit communities in your backyard? Might it make sense for your news org to get involved?

You can apply, too! Journalists and news organizations also can apply for News Challenge grants. If you have an idea that might meet their criteria, this could be an option to get the seed money needed to make it happen—no small matter in these tight economic times. I strongly recommend that you post your idea in the Garage today so you can benefit from the expertise of this community before finalizing your entry.

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