This entry was originally posted on the Council of Foundation's blog.

What role do funders play in the future of community news and information?

It's a question the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy asked in its big national report last year, and one the Knight Foundation has been posing annually to community and place-based foundations, the local funders with the pulse of their neighborhoods and cities.

This year, more than half of the 135 foundations that responded to our survey said they were funding news and information projects - for a total of $165 million. Interestingly, more than a third said they had increased their funding in the area in last three years - and expected it to increase in the future.

Foundations also viewed this funding as a critical ingredient to effecting meaningful social change, the survey, conducted by FSG Social Impact Advisors in conjunction with the Council on Foundations, found.

The portfolio helped foundations reach their objectives in areas like health, education and economic development.

We'd heard similar perspectives from winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge, a matching grant program to encourage community and place-based foundations to invest in news and information projects.

The views of the wider field suggest that local foundations are an increasingly important component in helping communities meet their information needs.

Knight funded the Lex Mundi Foundation to create a web site that provides free legal support and resources to non-profit organizations.

Lex Mundi is dedicated to linking social entrepreneurs to pro bono legal services from law firms across the country and abroad.

If you are a social entrepreneur, or your organization is working on social innovation, we hope you take advantage of the Lex Mundi network and their new site.

Jose Zamora is a journalism program associate at Knight Foundation.

This week Webbmedia Group held a chat for journo-entrepreneurs, providing business models and use cases for journalists hoping to launch media start-ups.

Here are eight tips and a few examples of entrepreneurial journalism projects you can launch or replicate in your community. You can also find these and more tips on twitter: #kwchat.

Tip #1: Don't be a generalist. Create highly-specialized content that you're  an expert on.

Tip #2: Content producers must syndicate across platforms, but the RIGHT platforms.

Tip #3: Try to fund your new entrepreneurial jurno venture alone. Projects have launched for less than $10k.

Tip #4: You must create a business and marketing plan, regardless of how small your new venture is.

Tip #5: Find a few people whose opinions your trust to serve as advisers as you start your new venture.

Tip #6: "If you are passionate about your idea, find some people you trust and then go talk to people you don't know."

Tip #7: Remember, if you're going to record a demo of your product, make it good. Bad demos can doom great projects.

Tip# 8: Remember, most ideas fail. A vast majority of ideas fail. But, get to that point quickly.

Patch.com is an example of an entrepreneurial model that can be run with a low budget in any community.

Spot.us is another innovative model that includes crowdfunding and most recently a new sustainability model based on advertising through surveys.

Other journo-entrepreneur efforts include projects like WindyCitizen.com and its NowSpots advertising model and Front Porch Forum among other Knight Foundation grantees in this field.

If you are a journo-entrepreneur the Knight News Challenge, the Knight Community Information Challenge and J-Lab’s New Voices are great opportunities to launch your start-up to inform and engage communities.

For grant application tips and and other resources for freelance and entrepreneur journalists visit: knightchallenge.net. And to learn about Knight funded innovations that are ready for you to use, please visit Knight Apps.

Jose Zamora is a journalism program associate at Knight Foundation

What if the “best solution” for the climate change challenge is better land planning? That’s the theory of architect/urban planner Peter Calthorpe, who presented his research at the recent 18^th annual Congress for the New Urbanism, New Urbanism: Rx for Healthy Places.

Calthorpe, a founder of the “transit-oriented development” idea, is seeking to prove his theory by using metrics and software that can measure the impact on carbon emissions of denser development near public transportation hubs. His work comes as California grapples with Assembly Bill 32, which mandates a statewide reduction in carbon emissions. The new software Calthorpe designed models the carbon consequences of land use planning, transportation and new technologies. It was funded by Vision California, a project of the California High Speed Rail Authority. You can read details about Calthorpe’s work in an article in Fast Company magazine.

It’s not easy stuff for laypeople to digest, so part of the challenge is informing and engaging citizens about these crucial issues. That’s the goal of a related Knight-funded project, Envision Bay Area, which seeks to increase the involvement of Northern California residents in pressing land-use issues. The grant will help launch an Internet, public radio, television and community information campaign so residents can better understand the policy debate surrounding land use.

Envision Bay Area, also supported by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, was one of 24 grant winners in the second year of the Knight Community Information Challenge, a five-year, $24 million contest that helps community and place-based foundations find creative ways to use new media and technology to keep residents informed and engaged.

In her graduation picture, Samantha Guzman is wearing a purple feathered dress clutching a diploma. Her mom picked up the framed portrait the day after she was shot and killed on a Bronx street corner while walking to catch a bus.

“I lost my child on Mother’s Day,” her mom Diana Rodriguez said in a video shown to close to 500 New York City students this week.

The video, produced by young filmmakers, is part of the Beyond Bullets campaign. Funded by the Knight Community Information Challenge and the New York Community Trust, the effort aims to use the power of the media to quell America’s gun violence epidemic. Young filmmakers have been chronicling the effects of the violence, and their works will be shown to students and posted at beyondbullets.org.

The project’s “Cybercar,” a bus equipped with a TV production studio and viewing area, traveled to New York schools this week to show the video about Samantha Guzman and host town hall meetings on how to prevent the bloodshed.

After one forum, organizers asked people in the audience to raise their hands if they knew someone who died from gun violence, the Wall Street Journal reported. Every hand went up.

Implicit in many news stories about local problems is the need for someone to address them, leaders of the Minnesota Community Foundation thought. So they create a way to encourage the public to do just that. With funding from the Knight Community Information Challenge, the foundation created a statewide contest to bring the state’s residents together to solve critical issues.

Launched in March, the Minnesota Idea Open asked its first question: How could your community use $15,000 to help people eat smart and be active? The topic – the obesity epidemic – struck a nerve. More than 400 people submitted ideas at MNideaopen.org, and close to 4,800 voted for one of three finalists.

The foundation announced its first winner this week: Kids Lead the Way, which enables kids to design and create their own field days and activities for their classmates, with the help of volunteer personal trainers and other partners. The key component is having the kids be the active decision makers in the program, winner Christine Tubbs says.

“This generation has a shorter life expectancy than preceding generations,” Tubbs said. “They need to know how to do this, how to lead healthy lives. It has to be instinctive, and they have to be given the opportunity to really make it their own.

Here’s some impressive journalism – and proof of the potential for hard-hitting public service reporting in new media ventures.

During its first week of operation, NJ Spotlight – a grant winner in the second year of the Knight Community Information Challenge – published a report revealing that PSE&G Power, an unregulated affiliate of Power Service Electric & Gas, has failed for years to pay a state-mandated energy surcharge. In 2009 alone, PS&G Power should have paid an estimated $47 million into the societal benefits charge (SBC) fund, according to one estimate.

The very next day, NJ Spotlight published a follow-up report detailing a call by a powerful state senator for an investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. Under the state’s deregulation law, passed in 1999, all gas and electric customers are required supposed to pay the surcharge to support clean energy and energy assistance programs for low-income customer. A spokeswoman for PS&G Power, which is PSE&G’s largest customer, told NJ Spotlight that the arrangement was “was approved by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities in a number of open, on-the-record proceedings.”

The original NJ Spotlight story was referenced and linked in a report by The Star-Ledger, highlighting NJ Spotlight’s credibility (its founding editorial team is made up of veteran, award-winning New Jersey journalists) and the innovative partnerships that are emerging between new and traditional media.

In 2009, the Community Foundation of New Jersey received a $352,000 matching grant from Knight Foundation to create a public interest news service providing online news, continuously updated, as well as online discussion forums. NJ Spotlight describes itself as “non-partisan, independent, policy-centered and community-minded.”

The grant was part of Knight’s Community Information Challenge, a five-year, $24 million initiative. The matching grants are awarded to community foundations to support creative ways to use new media and technology to keep communities informed and engaged about the issues that affect their lives.

Jose Zamora, a Miami-based journalism program associate for Knight Foundation, is in Washington, D.C today, participating in an invitational gathering of the White House and Case Foundation. The one-day program, Promoting Innovation: Prizes, Challenges and Open Grant Making, is being billed as a public-private strategy session hosted by the White House Office on Science and Technology Policy, the Domestic Policy Council and the Case Foundation.

More than 200 participants are representing several dozen federal agencies and more than 20 corporations and organizations.  Knight is one of two foundations invited to the roundtable to give advice on how contests and open grant making are driving innovation.

The meeting is designed to encourage citizen involvement in matters that affect them. That goal merges with the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive, which seeks to elicit ideas from top American thinkers and doers to address the nation’s problems.

Knight Foundation has committed millions of dollars to a range of contests it sponsors to encourage innovation in journalism, the arts and community information and engagement. There’s the Knight News Challenge, the Knight Arts Challenge and the Knight Community Information Challenge.

Watch the live stream, Tweet your questions to #opengov and see Jose’s presentation at Knightchallenge.net.

Earlier this week, Knight Foundation hosted the Media Learning Seminar to help inform community foundations about the information needs of communities in a democracy. As traditional local news sources and investigative reporting decline, citizens are increasingly involved in the co-creation of new information sources, including online news startups, localized Twitter feeds from political candidates and community leaders, and blogs.

Knight Foundation realizes that the community information ecosystem is not limited to news and information itself, but also access to news and information and the ability to engage with it. Community foundations have the opportunity to play an important role in this evolving landscape.

As the application period for the third Community Information Challenge is closing (the deadline to apply is March 8), Knight Foundation has released a study, Reports From the Field: Place-Based Foundations and the Knight Community Information Challenge, about how place-based foundations are incorporating community information needs into their work.

Michael Marsicano, CEO of the Foundation for the Carolinas, says:

"You cannot conduct meaningful civic work without good information. Engaging citizens without data bears little fruit. Engaging citizens with poor data compromises all future community leadership activities."

What have we learned in the first two years of the Knight Community Information Challenge?

• Foundations are committing significant financial resources to address information needs through and beyond KCIC.
• To be effective, place-based foundations are building capacity to  manage their projects.
• Foundations are increasingly engaging in multiple community leadership activities to increase the impact of their KCIC projects.
• Foundations are engaging in informations initiatives in addition to their KCIC projects.
• Foundations are attracting considerable outside support from funders and sponsors.
• Foundations are also aligning the necessary partnerships and expertise to address their own capacity gaps.
• Through their project experience, foundations are learning more about other projects in their communities and the overall information ecosystem.
• Although for more grantees it is still too early to see evidence that residents are changing their attitudes and behaviors, foundations are putting in place evaluation activities to collect data.

Reports from the field: Place-Based Foundations and the Knight Community Information Challenge provides further insight into these findings, as well as presenting challenges that grantees are facing, what Knight Foundation is learning from the challenge, and a guide on how to address information needs in your community.

Click here to download the PDF of the study.

We are now accepting applications from community and place-based foundations for the Knight Community Information Challenge (KCIC), which funds news and information projects. The deadline to apply is March 8. Applications can be submitted at www.informationneeds.org.

So far, the Challenge has awarded $7.3 million for 45 ideas in communities large and small. The projects include funding public interest online news sites; creating online hubs to engage communities around specific issues and examining a region's changing media landscape in order to help fill the voids, among many others. Click here to read about past KCIC winners.

Live chats will take place at noon EDT Feb. 16 and 22 at www.informationneeds.org to help answer questions about the challenge. Visit the site sign up for a reminder.

To help educate leaders of community and place-based foundations about media trends and information needs, Knight will host the third Media Learning Seminar March 1 and 2 in Miami. To find out more about the seminar and to register, click here.