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.
Throughout 2012, innovators from all industries and countries are invited to participate in three challenge rounds, each with focused topics on emerging trends.
Round 1 - on networks - is closed, and the winners will be announced June 18.
Round 2 - on data - will be open May 31 - June 21. We’re looking for new ways of collecting, understanding, visualizing and helping the public use the large amounts of information generated each day. Winners will be announced in late September.
Details on Round 3 will available later this year.
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.
Inspired by TV’s second-screen experience, we propose an open digital newsroom fueled by our community’s conversations on Social Media networks.
For example, USC Annenberg School, IBM and The Los Angeles Times created a “Senti-meter” around Oscar chatter. Our project expands this concept to the daily sentiment of a university’s stakeholders.
Using feeds from multiple Social Media platforms, Colorado State’s student media will collect, analyze and visualize social commentary from the school’s students, faculty, administrators, alumni and neighbors. Using WordPress, we will package those conversations and distribute them online, on mobile and in print. See Mock-Up: http://bit.ly/xV2bu8
It will work because it captures discussions CSU is having in ways newsgatherers never could before. This is not toe-dipping, it is deep integration with the content and sentiment of a university talking to, and about, itself. Through both algorithmic and human curation, we discover and reflect the overall “mood” of the campus, finding the key topics that drive that sentiment. Lists, feeds and visualizations of top conversations drive readership. They also catalyze student journalists, who in turn enrich the conversation with verification, context and analysis. It will work, because everyone has a place.
The team building this service is made up of students and professionals with experience in journalism, social media, natural language processing, text analytics, digital design, mobile delivery and data visualization. Michael Humphrey, who advises the newsroom for Rocky Mountain Student Media at CSU and covers Social TV for Forbes.com, would advise a team led by Allison Sytle, 2012-13 Digital Media Manager and senior journalism /computer science student. Using expertise from multiple departments on campus and professional partnerships with digital media companies, a core team of students and professors will create the system as a key new service of Collegian.com.
We have developed a seed of the larger concept with a platform called “RamTalk,” a very popular user-generated feature about life at Colorado State University. Over the past year, “RamTalk” has been the third largest generator of traffic for student media, behind only the homepages of the newspaper and the radio station. In two weeks we will launch the “RamTalk” app, which will allow users to vote on submissions, determining which entries get published in the newspaper each day. This small step has helped us gauge the desire for user engagement.
Student journalists and programmers will continue to augment and improve the service, through content curation and algorithm adjustments. Advisers and professors will assist students in maintaining its efficacy. And feedback from the community – through comments and analytics – will guide improvement of the site.
samnoblett reblogged this from newschallenge1 and added:
Here’s a proposal by our newsroom adviser Michael Humphrey for a grant from the Knight Foundation. Really interesting...
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