Thanks to the News Challenge winner Lisa Williams of Placeblogger and the Berkman Blog Group for a great Boston meetup last night where we talked about the history of the News Challenge (the $5MM yearly contest to find innovative digital delivery ideas), the Garage site for working through ideas before applying, how mentoring in the Garage works, and brainstorming ideas for this year’s contest.

You’ll see Steve Garfield and Jason Pramas (Open Media Boston) in the group below as well as developers and thinkers from MIT, Harvard, and Somerville organizations.

Next Thursday, we’ll host meetups in Austin and we’ll also be at the Maker Faire during the weekend. After that, we’ll talk in San Francisco (Facebook invite). We hope to meet you then–

Remember that the News Challenge contest closes November 1st; you can apply here and work through your idea before applying here with a mentor who has won the contest in the past.

This Thursday at 7pm, join Knight Foundation Online Community Manager Kristen Taylor and the Berkman Blog group at Harvard to discuss your great ideas for the News Challenge. (Map)

We’ll focus on your questions and talk about the News Challenge Garage incubator; if you have questions about the meetup, let us know in the comments. Please check the Facebook invite for details.

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And, thanks to everyone in Vancouver for a great meetup led by Susan Mernit at Rain City Studios last night.

Great pictures from the event by Tris Hussey are on Flickr here, and there is a new collaborative Barcamp wiki area.

We look forward to seeing what the Vancouver community comes up with, and to meeting up in Boston this Thursday–

Investigative journalism helps democratic societies work transparently. When investigations work, they unveil corruption and other obstacles that may hinder the development of a community. But investigative journalism is expensive, and as organizations face difficulties in their business models, it’s becoming more difficult to fund.

Investigative Journalism was the topic of this year’s Austin Forum, hosted by The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin and the Media Program of Open Society Institute.

The event is dedicated to raising journalism standards in Latin America and the Caribbean. Participants also discussed challenges facing journalism in the region, and ways to overcome them.

Journalists and journalism organizations from 14 countries were represented at the meeting, including participants from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Venezuela.

Investigative journalism challenges in the hemisphere were discussed from different perspectives – importance, need, quality, risks and funding – one of the key perspectives was the funding of investigative journalism or how to create a new model for sustainable investigative journalism.

There’s a need for a new business model that will allow the existence of this kind of reporting, participants said. But, “Who is going to fund investigative journalism and how?”

The forum showed that throughout the region, media organizations and their newsrooms are doing less and less investigative journalism each day, given the financial constraints news organizations continue to face.

Knight Foundation is partnering in different projects that seek to find a new model for sustainable investigative reporting. Through its Journalism Program, Knight Foundation is searching for alternative business models that will allow this vital form of journalism to continue playing a key role in democratic societies.

One of the new models for financing investigative journalism is being developed through a project called Spot Journalism or “Spot Us.” The project will provide a new way to pay for local investigative reporting by “crowdfunding,” or soliciting financial support from the public. Crowdfunding will allow an individual or group to take control of news by sharing the cost to commission freelance journalists. It uses the principle of micro lending – the model used by Kiva – to fund investigative journalism.

How does spot.us work?

1. An individual or journalist creates a pitch that outlines an untold story in a local community.
2. Members of your community vote, with their money, on what stories are most important to them.
3. A journalist researches the facts and puts together an article. Editors provide check-and-balance on the story.
4. Spot.us publishes the story in its news feeds and works with local media outlets to have the articles published more widely.

This is one example of how Knight Foundation is trying to find the answer to the question: Who is going to fund investigative journalism? Hopefully, you can help us find other models that will benefit your neighborhood, your community, and the world.

If you want to learn more about what Knight Foundation is doing to help in the search for new business models to sustain quality journalism, please visit us online at the Knight Foundation and the Knight News Challenge Web sites. And if you think you have the new model for sustainable journalism or for investigative reporting apply to the Knight News Challenge today at: www.newschallenge.org If you want to learn more about the Knight News Challenge, the kind of projects Knight Foundation is funding and learn how you can apply, please visit the Knight News Challenge Web site or the Knight News Challenge Garage.

And don’t forget that Knight Foundation is having a Meet-Up today in Vancouver and tomorrow in Seattle. You can find details below:

• Oct. 6: Vancouver: 7:00pm - 9:00pm; Rain City Studios, 420-1 Alexander Street, Vancouver, BC http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=73319110202.
• Oct. 7: Seattle: 7:00pm - 8:30pm, Fremont Abbey Arts Center, 4272 Fremont Ave N. http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=53805617176.

One of the Knight News Challenge projects (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovative digital news delivery ideas), ReportingOn, has launched in public beta.

ReportingOn’s Ryan Sholin describes the service:

ReportingOn.com will be a simple way for journalists to update their peers on the stories they’re working on right now. Tag your 140-character-or-less updates with the beat you’re on, and find peers reporting on similar beats to make connections, introduce yourself to potential mentors, or discover an unsung hero.

You can follow the ReportingOn project’s progress on the microblogging service Twitter and on the ReportingOn blog.

Ready to join the ReportingOn community? Register here. Congratulations to Ryan–

On Tuesday night, Netsquared DC chairs Matt Stempeck (pictured below, far right) and Gabriela Schneider rallied over forty people to a News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest on innovative digital news delivery ideas) meetup at Google’s D.C. headquarters.

Local developers and interested community organizers asked thoughtful questions about the News Challenge contest and the News Challenge Garage, the new incubator site to work through News Challenge ideas before applying. Knight looks forward to seeing the News Challenge entries from this area.

The full schedule of upcoming meetups is listed at the bottom of the News Challenge home page.

You can join Susan Mernit and Heidi Miller at next week’s meetups:

- Oct 6: Vancouver: 7:00pm - 9:00pm; Rain City Studios, 420-1 Alexander Street, Vancouver, BC (Details).

- Oct. 7: Seattle: 7:00pm - 8:30pm, Location TBD. (Details.)

Look for more information soon about the upcoming Atlanta and Austin News Challenge meetups–

Last night was the fourth of the Knight News Challenge North American meetups, this one in Chicago, hosted by Columbia College’s Barbara Iverson. (If you didn’t know, the Knight News Challenge is in the third year of a program that gives away $5MM a year to digital innovations.)

With about 30 curious innovators attending last night, The Knight Foundation’s Kristen Taylor led the BarCamp-style workshop, clarifying the Knight News Challenge mission, requirements and finally taking questions on the application process.

Past KNC project winner ChiTownDailyNews, represented by Community Manager Frank Edwards, showed up and shared an update on how that project is progressing–now ChiTownDailyNews has expanded to 75 reporters representing 45 Chicago neighborhoods and hosts workshops on video, radio and photo journalism in an ever-expanding training program.

Also, Brian Boyer, who was recently awarded a Knight scholarship as part of a program to train software developers to become journalists, shared his experiences as a developer pursuing a Master’s degree in journalism at Medill.

And there were a lot of questions! The group was highly engaged and ready to shape their own applications. A few of the questions that came up, with the answers:

How do you define “news,” and how timely does it need to be?

Kristen pointed folks to the list of past winners for examples of what could be considered “news,” including projects like Dan Pacheco’s Printcasting and Alexander Zolotarev’s Sochi Olympics Project; she also pointed out that if you’re submitting a mobile application, the definition of “timeliness” might be different than, say, for a blogging idea.

How does activity in the Garage affect the application process or outcome?

The judges don’t specifically consider activity in the Garage as criteria for winning the Knight News Challenge; you don’t get points for page views.

Is participating in the Garage mandatory?

No, in fact, keep in mind that while the Garage is for incubating your application, remember that you must eventually apply directly from the News Challenge site. However, the benefits of participating in the Garage are still the same: you can sign up to have a mentor help you shape your application, you can get feedback from the community and other applicants, and you can network to fill any talent voids in your application through the job list.

Why can we only use 300 words?

In general, we’ve discovered that if you can’t clearly explain your vision in 300 words, you probably need to spend some time honing it down. A clear elevator speech is the first step to a viable idea.

Is there overlap between judges and mentors? Who are the judges and what is their background?
Mentors are past winners who have been through the process and are putting their winning ideas into motion. Mentors aren’t judges. There are about 15 Knight News Challenge screeners whose job is to take the approximately 3,000 applications to about 64, and those screeners are rock stars of digital innovtion and social media, like Andrew Hyde of StartupWeekend, Brian Oberkirch, Chris Messina, Mary Hodder, Debbie Mobile Jones and George Kelly. The judges are a smaller team that take the applications to the final round and make the final determination of winners, and they have similarly diverse backgrounds in digital innovation.

Thanks to all who attended and participated for making this a great interactive meetup!

Reminder: the deadline for application is November 1st, follow this link to apply now!

On Wednesday, J-Lab (the Institute for Interactive Journalism) announced the winner of this year’s Knight-Batten Innovation Award: Wired.com’s Wikiscanner coverage “which helped readers investigate and expose ego-editing and corporate whitewashing of Wikipedia entries.”

PolitiFact.com, with its “Truth-o-Meter” for 2008 presidential campaign statements, and Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information, a site to report incidents of political violence from mobile devices, email, and the Web, won Special Distinction Awards.

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Yesterday, Patricia Martin of the Culture Scout Blog posted about teens and the Knight Future of the First Amendment survey and research.

“It seems that when First Amendment rights are made relevant through self-expressive technologies, kids grasp it. It makes the case for why information privacy needs to become part of the First Amendment freedoms.”

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At the 2008 Online News Association Conference (follow the conference Twitter updates) that continues until Saturday, sessions and pre-conference workshops on media included a workshop on news games; Kurt Greenbaum of STL Social Media Guy blogged about how journalists are embracing news games. The Knight News Challenge winner Gotham Gazette is mentioned.

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And Heidi Williamson, who helps promote the Knight News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovative digital news delivery), has posted a new Seesmic video “What are the obstacles for innovation?” More than two dozen video responses have been posted, and you can join the discussion with your response here.

Until 5 PST today, you can watch the live webcast of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy from Google HQ in Mountain View, CA. Videos from yesterday’s Knight Commission Community Forum are on Flickr here.

If you’re in the NYC area this evening, there is an informational event tonight from 7 - 9pm at CUNY Journalism School, Room 308, about the $5 million this year in the News Challenge, a yearly contest about innovative digital news delivery. The Facebook invite has more details. Future News Challenge events will be listed on this blog soon.

Questions? Thoughts? Let us know in the comments–

Part of the yearly News Challenge contest (the $5 million Knight initiative to fund digitally innovative ideas in local news delivery) is to train the esteemed panel of screeners, who will vet applications for the contest.

This year, leading digital innovation thinkers such as Chris Messina, Debi (Mobile) Jones, Jay Dedman, Ryanne Hodson, Brian Oberkirch, Beth Kanter, George Kelly, and Andrew Hyde (smiling gamely below, between David Cohn and Ross Settles) will serve as screeners.

Led by Susan Mernit, yesterday was a full day of training in San Francisco on the online screening tool, the history of the contest and of Knight Foundation, and intense discussion about the role of screener in the contest; now, the News Challenge screening team is ready to begin their work finding the best applications in year three of the News Challenge.

You can submit your application to the News Challenge here. Before submitting, you can work through your idea with expert mentors in the News Challenge Garage, a special site to help applicants refine answers to the application questions before applying to the contest.

As screener Chris Messina Twittered (read: used microblogging service Twitter to ask); “If you had a portion of $5M to promote geo-bounded digital tech to innovate journalism, what would you support?”

Leading social application thinker Clay Shirky responded by Twittering; “I’d spend $5M on raw tech-apache modules, processing libraries etc. give people geo-tools, they’ll find the uses.”

What would you support? Let us know in the comments, and thanks to the News Challenge screeners for helping Knight find the next big ideas in local news delivery.

p.s. The first News Challenge Meetup is at CUNY in NYC next Tuesday. More details in the Facebook invite.

One of the News Challenge projects (the Knight contest that funds $5 million a year in innovative digital news delivery ideas) is the MTV News Street Team, where young journalists publish mobile phone video about the 2008 presidential election cycle.

Ian Rowe, vice president of Strategic Partnerships and Public Affairs for MTV, recently blogged about a February video by Dani Carlson with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin:

Back in February, on Super Tuesday, MTV News/Knight Foundation Street Teamer Dani Carlson did a Flixwagon mobile phone interview with Alaska Governor — and now presumptive Republican vice-presidential candidate — Sarah Palin, who had some interesting things to say about energy policy and the “party machinery.”

In this interview, Palin calls controversial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul “cool.” “He’s a good guy,” she added. “He’s so independent. He’s independent of the party machine. I’m like, ‘Right on, so am I.’ ”

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She also spoke about Alaska’s natural resources, and urged the next president to look to her state for relief from the country’s reliance on foreign oil. “We have so much oil we are just sitting on,” she said. “We would be less reliant on foreign sources of energy [if we utilized that] — we need to have the ability to tap into it and produce for rest of the United States.”

Watch the entire video here.

You can receive updates from the Street Team on your mobile device by texting ST to 84465 or browsing m.streetteam08.com on your device.

What do you think about this Governor Palin video about party machinery and using Alaska’s natural resources?