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.
Prozr transforms Twitter updates into cohesive novels or articles. Writers can take work they are developing and deliver it to readers in an easy-to-read format.
RSS feeds are popular, but don’t allow customized display of content and author/reader conversations. Storify asks users to hand-pick tweets. We compile content automatically based on username, hashtags, keywords.
Our work will be built based on Twitter for content. It will also leverage Facebook, FourSquare and SMS for distribution and promotion.
Authors are already creating Twitter-based novels; journalists and bloggers are reporting and writing regularly via Twitter. On Twitter, however, it can be hard to read and follow a story. And other outlets like Storify display tweets in a disjointed manner. Prozer will deliver a cohesive piece of content that is updated in real time. Writers will also be able to interact with others simultaneously, while developing followers and distributing content.
Pueng Vongs is a 20-year journalist who has watched the industry go through dramatic changes. She wants to use technology to help journalism and writing thrive again. She works for Yahoo! and has worked for MercuryNews.com, Pacific News Service, Money magazine, and CBS.MarketWatch.com.
Sherbeam Wright is a communications, brand, social media consultant and blogger. In addition to technology, she has extensive experience working with journalists, authors and writers. She trains them in using social media, PR and online marketing to develop and grow their brands, and publish their work.
We’ve researched the creation and use of Twitter novels, the challenges and distribution technologies. We’ve also tried developing a very basic prototype for the concept using Wordpress.
We will be creating a Kickstarter or similar crowdsourced funding campaign to raise additional funds and promote Prozr. Following development and testing, we will make it available to writers using a “freemuim” subscription model. The basic version will be free while the premium version will be available for a fee.
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