Knight Foundation Awards $12-Million for Digital News Projects

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced this month the first winners of an unusual contest to foster blogs and other digital efforts that seek to bring together residents of a city or town in ways that local newspapers historically have done.

The foundation awarded $12-million to universities, nonprofit Web sites, bloggers, and companies.

The 25 Knight News Challenge winners were announced at Editor & Publisher’s and Mediaweek’s digital news conference, which was held this month in Knight’s hometown of Miami.

The largest grant — $5-million — went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, to build the Center for Future Civic Media.

The center will develop new technologies and practices to help newspapers attract readers as a greater number of Americans use the Internet as their primary news source.

The foundation, which was set up by two brothers who operated the news-media company that was known as Knight-Ridder, has supported journalism programs for more than 50 years, primarily by giving money for midcareer fellowships for journalists.

But with newspaper readership declining around the country, the Knight Foundation wanted to take a bolder approach and create new ways that residents of, say, Biloxi, Miss., could learn about neighborhood crimes, mayoral elections, and other local news, said Alberto Ibargüen, president of the fund. “We’re looking for ways to help the industry transform itself to stay relevant,” said the former publisher of The Miami Herald.

Mr. Ibargüen asked Knight staff members to “seek the wisdom of the crowd” and open up as wide as possible the pool of potential grant recipients.

To that end, the fund allowed people from around the world to submit applications and for the first time awarded grants to businesses and individuals.

“We in philanthropy talk a lot about risk taking,” Mr. Ibargüen explained. “Then we go back and often fund things that are not terribly risky and are not terribly new. So we thought the best thing to do would be to walk the walk.”

Knight also chose unconventional ways to advertise the competition, such as posting a video on YouTube.

Such efforts helped to bring in 1,650 applications — and led the foundation to choose some nontraditional grant beneficiaries.

For example, the music television network MTV received $700,000 to form a corps of “Knight MY Jos” — or mobile youth journalists — to cover the 2008 presidential election, as well as environmental and sexual-health issues. The best reports by MY Jos will appear on MTV.

In addition, Knight awarded eight grants of $15,000 each to bloggers. They include Dan Schultz, a sophomore majoring in information systems at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. Mr. Schultz, 20, said he will use the money to create a Web site that allows people to search for news stories from mainstream sources or local amateur reporters based on Global Positioning System coordinates. For example, a person could search for articles using the coordinates of his or her house or neighborhood.

People will “get a more personalized version of the news,” Mr. Schultz explained.

For the next round of the contest, which starts July 1, the foundation wants to receive a larger number of entries from young people and foreigners. It is dedicating 10 percent of the grants to projects started by people age 21 and younger and will translate its contest materials into Chinese, Spanish, and seven other languages. Previously the materials had only been in English.

“We just dipped our toe in the water,” said Mr. Ibargüen. “This time around we’re going to dive in.”

More information about the contest is available on the Knight Foundation’s Web site.