Knight News Challenge is an organization dedicated to serving the community through an online platform. They seek social entrepreneurs and innovators who are committed to developing neighborhood and community-based projects, programs and services. Their mission is to sponsor those with groundbreaking, new ideas to create platforms or tools that will revolutionize online media. It is an annual contest, in which they distribute $5 million to various people for them to foster their ideas.
The Knight News Challenge was started by John S. and James L. Knight, two brothers who were American publishers and editors and started the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a non-profit organization promoting quality journalism.
Amongst the winners of 2008, "Transparent Journalism" was extremely fascinating. Headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Martin Moore, both British media experts, the project aims to create a system called "source tagging," which will allow content creators to add additional articles or sources to their reports. Users will not only be able to find related articles, but also be able to filter exactly what type of related articles they want (for example, eyewitness accounts or related articles by a particular publication). Berners-Lee and Moore started this project under their non-profit organization Media Standards Trust, a program which aims to harbor high-quality journalism. They believe that with the expansiveness of the internet, there is a lot of information and "misinformaton" on the web, thus the public needs a program to help filter out inaccurate news.
Another entry that seemed fascinating was "Spot Journalism." With large media conglomerations and the conflict of interests resulting from the monopolies (GE owning NBC; Disney owning ABC), it is hard for many news outlets to pursue investigative journalism. Investigative reports are costly and at times, viewers cannot be sure if there are ulterior motives connected to the reports. Read this article. With this new project, the public will be able to act as independent journalists and can pursue their own reports. Those interested will receive "micro-payments" that will cover their investigations. Started by David Cohn, this idea will be able to initiate interest in uncovering truths starting at a local level.
A dominating theme from all the winning entries is the idea of community. Every idea tries to attract attention from regular citizens and hopes to better the community. Each project originates on a local level, whether in South Africa or India, and has a potential to expand globally.
With the advent of online journalism, these funded endeavors are definitely worthwhile. The internet is the only resource that cross-cuts through various cultures, ethnicities, and languages. Despite one project specifically designated for the olympics in Sochi, Russia, it does not necessarily mean it is limited to only that area. That idea has room to proliferate and flourish in various areas of the world as well-- all because of the internet.
I sincerely believe that the Knight News Challenge represents a sustainable online venture. It is without a doubt that the direction of journalism is heading towards the web. The Knight News Challenge not only motivates journalists to "think outside the box," but also encourages those with a different background to try and think of breakthrough news opportunities.
One of the most interesting ventures I read about on the site was started by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The school is currently offering a full-ride scholarship for those with a computer science degree to receive a masters in journalism. Rather than seek journalists with knowledge in programming and coding, the school has turned it around by finding engineers who are interested in journalism. I thought this was a fresh and unique idea. Here is their press release.
I would be ecstatic if one of my ideas was sponsored by the Foundation. I am not sure what the technical program or idea will be, but I am concerned about an issue that needs to be resolved:
Because of the economy, we are finding that more and more smaller news agencies are getting bought out by large media conglomerations. These giant corporations own multiple news outlets, which hinders each individual news agency from reporting the complete truth. There are conflicts of interest between the parent company and the news organization, and most often, it is the parent company who overshadows the agency and decides to bury the news. The integrity of journalists get compromised, and thus citizens are not informed of the truth at times. (see image below)
Blogging also seems to be a source of news these days. (Bloggers like Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report even break news faster than regular news agencies.) However, are bloggers to be trusted? They are, in essence, a derivative of news paper editorials, and they lack credible sources that only professional news organizations can obtain. So who is the public to trust? I hope that with the advent of online journalism, there will be a way to solve this problem. Using online tools like the search button or search engines (or some new tool that I will be able to pitch to the Knight News Challenge), I hope to sustain journalism of its core values (impartiality, accuracy, objectivity, etc).
No comments:
Post a Comment