Knight Foundation: Reshaping journalism?

Knight Foundation spending millions to reshape journalism
The Knight Foundation is funding innovative journalism experiments, searching for answers to the future of media.


In San Francisco, freelance journalists use a website to solicit your story ideas and donations to do the reporting on them. In Chicago, a team of computer programmers links databases that allow you to find out whether someone was mugged on your street and whether the corner pizza joint has mice. And in Bakersfield, Calif., anyone can publish his or her own newspaper.

Is this the future of journalism? No one knows for certain.

But these initiatives and other journalistic experiments are getting a chance to take root because of the personal fortunes and foresight of two old-school Miami newspapermen, long deceased.

Brothers John S. and James L. Knight were media titans in the era of upright typewriters and gray fedoras -- publishing newspapers, including The Miami Herald, in more than two dozen communities.

Now, their Miami-based charity, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is underwriting an ambitious effort to shape journalism in the digital age, through a five-year, $25 million initiative called the Knight News Challenge.

''We're at a point now, a period of transition, where we need a lot of experimentation,'' said Alberto Ibargüen, chief executive of the Knight Foundation, and publisher of The Miami Herald from 1998 to 2005. ``We're trying to fund experiments that will lead us to answers about the future of media.''

OTHER FUNDING

Knight is not the only charity funding media innovation. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, for instance, funds innovative and participatory journalism projects, and the Ford Foundation underwrites research and technology initiatives.

Still, the Knight News Challenge funds dozens of projects, such as Spot.us. Dreamed up by David Cohn, 26, a freelance journalist in San Francisco, it works like this: Journalists and readers propose stories on his website. Then donations are solicited to cover the reporting costs.

If the promised donations reach a preset threshold -- typically $1,000 -- a journalist is dispatched and the story gets done. If not, the story idea is discarded.

It's participatory investigative journalism. The money has to come from a variety of sources, though, and contributions are capped to avoid personal crusades.

The stories, or in some cases video reports, are posted on Spot.us, but they can also be purchased by a traditional media organization. In such cases, the money raised is refunded to the donors, Cohn said, so they can apply it to another story proposal.

''What I'm trying to find out through Spot.us is if journalism can be valued as a civic good that people donate towards,'' said Cohn, whose idea got $340,000 in seed money from Knight last year.

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