Poynter Online - From the ONA Convention: Knight Digital Journalism Projects Emerging

More from the convention:

The grants come from $25 million the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has pledged over five years for projects using digital innovation to transform community news.

The projects reflected in Toronto were chosen from about 1,650 applications. Round two brought out almost 3,200 applications by Monday's deadline.

The foundation hopes that the projects will multiply and spread as their creators release them online as free, open-source software and in other ways. So, if you're not a Knight Challenge winner, comfort yourself knowing that someone else is developing projects, tools and partnerships for you.

Here are a few of the progress reports from Wednesday's ONA session:

EveryBlock, $1.1 million: Adrian Holovovaty reported that four developers are at work on the database that will let ordinary citizens find and use civic data right down to the block level, even for a major city. They are at work on Chicago.

Mobile Youth Journalism, $700,000: MTV's Ian Rowe, vice-president for strategic partnerships and public affairs, reports that 51 young journalists have been recruited in all states and the District of Columbia to cover the 2008 elections for the perspectives of young voters.

Digital News Academic Program, $639,000: Rich Gordon of the Medill School of Journalism says this project hopes to create more people like Adrian Holovaty by putting developers through a one-year master's degree in journalism program. He said the first two of nine such students have been admitted and begin classes in January.

NY News Games, $250,000: One of three games projects in the first year of funding, the Gotham Gazette hopes to use games to help citizens learn about and discuss public policy. Gail Robinson said she hopes to see the first of half a dozen policy games comes out this fall. It will be about garbage.

Paulding.com, $15,000: G. Patton Hughes was excited but seemingly overwhelmed by the success of his blogging project, www.Paulding.com. "I have the distinct advantage of being in a place where there is no daily newspaper," he said. Reading from a sheet of statistics, he reported 10,000 daily visitors who read over 100,000 pages a day and who supply 97 percent of the site's content. He joked that he could use 10 student volunteers.

Ideal Newsroom, $60,000: A student at Duke University, Chris O'Brien, has 40 student volunteers scouring his campus, talking to people and trying to imagine the kind of student newsroom design that will work even 50 years into the future. The design will be adaptable and an intersection of news and community. This will be part of Duke's new student media center.

Playing the News, $250,000: Nora Paul, at the University of Minnesota, is working with Kathleen A. Hansen to develop a virtual environment in which journalists and citizens can see how stories are developed and reported. It is one of the gaming projects. This follows an earlier effort in which they tried to piggyback the idea on a commercially available game. "The ultimate goal of this project is to deliver to the news industry an open-source tool set and some rules for interesting, motivated play with good characters, innovation and a sense of place."

Having heard from dozens of project leaders, the ONA crowd had a number of questions. The first was, how can we keep track of all this. The answer is at a site launched Wednesday, where the innovators will blog about their work and, as one threatened, about other projects he'd like to do.

And the obvious question: What was it that set the winners apart? Well-written proposals.

Round-three bids will be due in about a year.

Latest Poynter Blogs (See All Blogs)