This week, Knight Foundation and Gallup announced the second year of results from the Soul of the Community study - a three-year survey of almost 28,000 residents of the 26 Knight communities exploring what attaches people to where they live.

Two years of research have reinforced the finding that the top three community characteristics that connect to the passion and loyalty residents feel for a place are openness (how welcoming a place is), social offerings (fun places to gather) and aesthetics (an area's physical beauty and green spaces). These qualities rose to the top in both years of the study, despite its occurrence against the backdrop of the U.S. financial crisis.

The study also found that community attachment is tied to local GDP growth - communities with higher attachment saw the largest growth in their economies. In the third year of the study, researchers will explore this connection further.

At the Soul of the Community site, you can dig into the findings from the study - compare results from all 26 communities on an interactive map, add your thoughts and insights to the perspectives posted on our blog, view detailed reports from all the communities, read coverage from news outlets like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and even download the actual data, if you'd like.

Cross-posted from the Knight News Challenge Blog

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

1. Do your research

2. Develop an accurate budget

3. Be reasonable

You have a great idea, and you want to apply to the Knight News Challenge, but you are not sure about how much money to ask for. The answer lies in how much the project will cost.

To decide how much funding to ask for you have to create a budget. And that budget should be as accurate as possible. You should take into account things like salaries, contractors, rent, utilities, travel, legal fees, marketing, etc. Include everything you are planning to do and how you will do it. Then do research and get real estimates of what each activity, salary and fee will cost.

It might also be helpful to look for other projects in the application pool and see how much they are asking for. You also could examine the budgets of organizations or individuals that are doing projects similar to the one you want to develop. That number should also help you determine how much you should ask for.

The Knight News Challenge contest does not request a line-item budget unless you are a finalist. However you need to know your general budget when you apply to be able to state the amount you are requesting. Creating a budget will be a helpful exercise. It will allow you to know how much to ask for and it will also allow you to have a budget ready in case you move forward in the contest to the phase where we do ask for a budget.

The most important thing to remember when asking for an amount for your project is to ask for an amount that is reasonable for what you are proposing to do.

Knight Foundation announced a grant of $2.1 million in Wichita to take aviation composite technology, which we're very good at, and transfer it to a new industry, the manufacture of medical devices.

I actually learned about composites when I was a kid, but didn't know what I was learning. My dad built a sailplane in our garage while I was growing up. He bought plans and over a number of years, with help from his flying buddies, many of whom were engineers at Cessna and Beech, built the fuselage and wings.

He used fiberglass and epoxy glue to create part of the wings so they'd be lightweight. When the epoxy dried, the fiberglass was much more durable with the hardened resin on it. That's composites.

Dad is 75 now and building another plane. This time it's a Tailwind in their basement. And yes, he's still making stuff out of composites. I wasn't aware of it until I started telling my parents about the grant I'd been working on while having Sunday dinner with them. That's when Dad went down to his basement and brought up a little part he'd made from carbon fiber and resin.

He couldn't believe I was taking a class on composites. I couldn't believe he was making them himself.

So we had no choice but to open a great bottle of wine and toast all that is well with the world.

A few weeks ago I held in my hand what looked like the handle of a salad tong. Dark-colored, curved, and lightweight, it was really a surgical retractor made from composites instead of metal. Up close the fibers were arranged in a criss-cross pattern, like a tweed jacket. To create it, the fibers were covered with resin and heated in an autoclave. The result is a product completely different from its metal counterpart.

The retractor was lightweight yet strong, requiring at least 60 pounds of force to break it. Even more important, it was x-ray translucent. Used in place of a metal retractor during surgery means it can be left in place instead of being moved several times.

Fiber, resin and heat are the building blocks of aviation composites. The Center of Innovation for Biomaterials in Orthopaedic Research (CIBOR) is working to make them the building blocks of a new industry in Kansas: the manufacture of orthopedic medical devices. Knight Foundation's grant announced today, $2.1 million over five years, will help make this vision real.

Our grant will build the composite laboratory where this new work will happen. In just a few years the CIBOR team hopes to create new medical devices that can be manufactured here in Kansas, leading to new jobs and a more diverse economy.

Is it risky? Sure. Even with the best of plans, plans change. But the CIBOR team has what it takes to be transformational: vision, courage, tenacity and know-how. They're committed to improve the quality of life for people with acute and chronic orthopedic conditions. And they're committed to create new opportunities for Kansans.

Sometimes the simplest discoveries become the greatest. I'm optimistic that discovering new uses for composites can lead to the greatest possibilities for our state and its people.

DocumentCloud, the 2009 Knight News Challenge project recently seen launching open-source parallel processing software, made two big announcements today.

First, they've assembled an unprecedented coalition of two-dozen, high-wattage partners to contribute documents and feedback to DocumentCloud. NiemanLab sets up the tremendous possibilities here:

Imagine being able to search across the New York Times’ cache of records on Guantánamo Bay detainees, the ACLU’s unrivaled set of documents on detention policy, Jane Mayer’s source material for her coverage of the CIA in The New Yorker, and The Washington Post’s valuable contributions to all of the above. That’s the promise of DocumentCloud, which I’ve explained at length in previous posts.

Second, the project announced a partnership with Reuters' OpenCalais:

OpenCalais uses natural language processing to extract information from documents, instantly identifying and tagging the relevant people, places, companies, facts and events. This will make it easy for readers and journalists to explore connections between documents and across the full collection of source materials.

In other words, not only will the service be filled with a never-before-seen assemblage of hard-won source documents from some of our biggest journalism heavyweights, those documents will also be deeply searchable, linked in immensely powerful ways. Once again, NiemanLab's got the goods.

As ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick says, "DocumentCloud is building up a whole lot of steam!"

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

For a century, daily newspapers were the civic glue holding many American communities together. But today new technologies are rapidly changing the way we connect with each other.

First it was the rise of television. Now, it’s the internet. Most of us use cell phones and other gadgets to find out what we want to know. Though technology connects us with the world, it can leave us disconnected from those right in our own backyards.

Knight Foundation wanted to help people use the new digital tools to find out what they need to know to run their lives and their communities.

Our founders, John S. and James L. Knight, served their communities with their newspapers. News and information that helped citizens in communities understand their common interests and opportunities. Knight Foundation wanted to know what, in the 21st century, will do what the Knight brothers used to do with ink on paper alone.

To reach this goal, Knight Foundation created the Knight News Challenge: A five-year, $25 million contest designed to spur media innovation.

We didn’t want to limit the ideas by setting up too many rules, and that is how the contest was born, a worldwide open contest with very few questions and requirements. Worldwide because you never know where innovation will come from.

The deadline for year four of the contest is Oct. 15, 2009. Don’t miss the opportunity to win part of the $5 million that will be awarded on this round.

Spot.Us, which has been pioneering the practice of crowdfunded reporting in San Francisco, has expanded to Los Angeles in partnership with USC's Annenberg School of Communications. On the Spot.Us blog, founder David Cohn explains what this means:

The main Spot.Us homepage will aggregate pitches from both the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles regions. You can go to Subdomains to find pitches specific to those regions: la.spot.us and sfbay.spot.us.

As many know, I grew up in Los Angeles (Hamilton High School anyone?) so this is a bit of a home coming for me. I will remain up north running the Bay Area Spot.Us – but will be working closely with folks in Los Angeles building up our SoCal presence.

Read more from the Spot.Us blog.

This week, residents of Grand Rapids, MI, welcome a brand new citizen-powered news initiative created by the Grand Rapids Community Media Center. The Rapidian, a first-round winner of the Knight Community Information Challenge, has already enlisted dozens of local residents to receive training in covering their communities. Here's more, from Michigan Radio:

As a professional reporter, I can tell you, this is a real newsroom. A half-eaten muffin sits on a desk, coffee cups are everywhere. There are no windows. But there is a huge white board, with different colored writing that no one can understand except the people who work here.

One of the people who works here is Laurie Cirivello. She's the head of the Community Media Center. She likes to say she's the mom of The Rapidian. And it's a big family.

"We have 500 people on our Facebook group," Cirivello tells me. "Some of them came to a meeting, some of them have written in comments. Some of them have stepped up and put in massive amounts of hours trying to sort through editorial policy and mechanics. We have 97 people so far who've signed up to be reporters."

Ninety-seven people. Each one of them says they'll put in the grueling, thankless job of being a news reporter. And they're going to do this work voluntarily for The Rapidian. As in, they won't be paid.

Impressed by what the folks from the Grand Rapids Community Media Center and the Grand Rapids Community Foundation have accomplished here? You've got till September 23 to submit your application for the Knight Community Information Challenge. Applications must satisfy three rules:

* Applicants must be U.S. community or place-based foundation (though community partners are welcome);
* Projects have to meet a local information need;
* Foundations must match Knight Foundation’s investment.

Read more about the Info Challenge at InfoNeeds.org.

Twitter is a-buzz with conversation today about the latest issue of Nieman Reports, "Let's Talk: Journalism and Social Media." (Full disclosure: I wrote an article for this issue, wearing my other hat as a student of journalism's evolution.) Knight grantees and affiliates compose a nice chunk of the issue's contributors list. Here's a round-up:

• Northwestern Professor Rich Gordon, whose programmer-journalist scholarship program was funded by a Knight News Challenge grant, writes about making journalism social in a world where social networking is "like air."
• Vaughn Hagerty, Web development manager at the Wilmington, N.C., Star-News, writes about his Knight-Batten Award-winning MyReporter project.
• Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, writes about turning media consumers into active media users.
• Scott Rosenberg, winner of a 2009 Knight News Challenge grant for his MediaBugs project, writes about earning back the public's trust online.
• Christine Greenhow and Jeff Reifman write about using the Knight-funded NewsCloud software to research how to engage younger communities with the news.

Did I miss anyone? The issue is a great read*, so take a look.

Update: I have it on good authority that Mr. Hagerty is, in fact, a mister. I regret the error.

* I promise I'd say that even if I weren't in it.

On Monday, Google launched a product called Fast Flip, a new way for users to browse through articles from different Web sites. In this beta period, only a select group of publishers are included in the Fast Flip catalogue. One of them is a Knight grantee, the Center for Public Integrity. Here's what Bill Buzenberg says about the effort on the Center's blog:

In-depth, highly credible, fact-checked, no-stone-unturned investigative journalism is seldom going to appear as the highest item in a quick-hit search engine sweep. But with Google’s new Fast Flip service, the Center for Public Integrity sees hope. Here, at last, is a way for the deep-dive content we create to rise to the surface by a new algorithm.

Fast Flip, launched by Google Labs on Monday, offers a new way for users to view online media through an easy-to-use format that resembles magazine browsing. The Center is among dozens of publishers included in Fast Flip’s experimental launch.

There are still bugs to be worked out with Fast Flip — such as making sure the Center’s most important investigative projects are there for flipping — but we believe the work we do will find new audiences. And, if that happens, and if Fast Flip and the Center are successful, this can mean shared revenue for a non-profit investigative news organization. It goes without saying that investigative journalism is expensive, time consuming, and yes, risky. So, added revenue for the heavy-lifting investigative work we do is no small matter.

Read more at publicintegrity.org.