The Knight News Challenge accelerates media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information. Winners receive a share of $5 million in funding and support from Knight’s network of influential peers and advisors to help advance their ideas. The first round of 2013, which opens in February, will invite innovators from all disciplines to focus on tools for open government. In 2012, three challenge rounds, each focused on an emerging trend, drew more than 2,500 entries.
Challenge 1 - on NETWORKS: Winners were announced June 18.
Challenge 2 - on DATA: Winners were announced Sept. 20.
Challenge 3 – on MOBILE: Winners were announced Jan. 17.
Anyone, anywhere can apply for the challenge - whether for-profit start-ups or non-profit ventures. For more information on a variety of topics - from guidelines for for-profits, on intellectual property licensing, open source software and more - visit our FAQ.
This morning, we announced the winners of the Knight News Challenge: Data.
We’d also like to share the 15 finalists. While we weren’t able to fund all of them, we enjoyed getting to know more about the people and ideas behind them, and hope to see them come to life in the months ahead.
We’ve heard that it’s valuable for people to see the original applications for the projects that rose to the top, so gathered them them all in one place. If you want to learn more about each of the finalists and the winners, check out the links to each of their original submissions (an asterisk notes a News Challenge: Data winner).
Census.IRE.org (*)
Joe Germuska, John Keefe, Ryan Pitts, Investigative Reporters & Editors
Community Health Analytics: Making Community Health Data Useful
Scott Lee, Harvard University
Computer Assisted Text Analysis for Journalism
Gary King, Harvard University
Data Toys
Heather Chaplin, Colleen Macklin, John Sharp, The New School
The Internet of News Things
Matt Waite, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Hyperaudio Pad
Mark Boas, Happyworm
LocalData (*)
Alicia Rouault, Prashant Singh and Matt Hampel, Amplify Labs
Mapping LA API
Ben Welsh, The Los Angeles Times
New tools for OpenStreetMap (*)
Eric Gundersen, Development Seed Inc.
Open Elections (*)
Derek Willis, The New York Times;
Serdar Tumgoren, The Washington Post
OpenIR: Mapping Your Environment in a New Light
Arlene Ducao, MIT Media Lab
Pop Up Archive (*)
Bailey Smith and Anne Wootton
Safecast Radiation & Air Quality (*)
Sean Bonner, Safecast
Sentiment Analysis Engine for Chinese Social Media
David Wertime, Tea Leaf Nation
Social Bots
Nicolas Della Penna
By Knight’s John Bracken, director/journalism and media innovation and Chris Sopher, journalism program associate.
