SochiReporter, a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, was presented in 240 McDonald’s restaurants throughout Russia.

The fast-food chain placed hundreds of thousands of leaflets on every food tray of every patron over the course of 14 days.

The leaflets, which included SochiReporter’s logo and URL, informed customers of SochiReporter’s support of McDonald’s World Children’s Day, and also thanked its other media partners.

The partnership brought 35 percent more visitors to SochiReporter.com and 30 percent more content uploads by citizen journalists.

SochiReporter launched in October 2009, allowing the people of Sochi, the Russian resort city hosting the 2014 Olympics, to use the latest online tools to discuss and influence the impact of the Games.

--Marly Falcon, contributing blogger of Knight Foundation

Two Knight Foundation grantees have made MIT Technology Review’s list of 10 technologies to watch.

Printcasting, a project of Participata, which is currently testing a service that allows amateur publishers to create newsletters and magazines, is supported by an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge.

The second Knight Foundation project on the list is the Ushahidi Engine, which is developing an open-source platform that allows amateur and professional journalists to respond rapidly to regional crises through mobile phone, e-mail or Web interface.

For the remaining eight technologies to watch, follow the link.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Back when we launched the Knight News Challenge in 2006, using contests to spur innovation was a relatively new concept. But in just four years, the number of similar competitions in the media, information and communication field has doubled.

So we decided to take a closer look at the contests globally, to see if we could adapt any lessons to improve the News Challenge.  We reviewed all 29 contests, including the Stockholm Challenge, NetSquared  N2Y4 Challenge, We Media Pitch It and Sunlight Lab Apps for America contests, and explored their judging criteria, outreach and marketing plans, application and selection processes. Along the way, we also interviewed former News Challenge judges and entrepreneurs for their insights too.

Today, we want to share the resulting study, conducted by Arabella Advisors, with the greater community. We hope anyone running or hoping to launch a contest – or innovators searching for funding – will find it as useful as we did.

You can access the PDF of this study here.

- Mayur Patel, Gary Kebbel and Jose Zamora

Note: This post is cross-posted at the News Challenge blog.

When tragedy struck in Haiti last week, the folks at Ushahidi, a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, leapt into action. By Tuesday evening, they were hard at work, collecting and mapping eyewitness reports from the area devastated by a catastrophic earthquake.

A story in today's Washington Post highlights their work:

The site is www.Ushahidi.com, and it allows users to submit eyewitness accounts or other relevant information for disaster zones via e-mail, text or Twitter -- and then visualize the frequency of these events on a map. By Friday, Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, had received nearly 33,000 unique visitors, and several hundred personal reports that mainstream news organizations might not hear about. [...]

Taken individually, these bits of data might not be terribly useful. The goal is that by aggregating the incidents in a visual format, people and organizations using the site will be able to see patterns of destruction, to determine where services should be concentrated. A red dot on the map, for example, signifies that looting is happening near a town called Pétionville; another shows that Hotel Villa Creole has become a site of medical triage.

On the Ushahidi blog, founder Ory Okolloh and director of strategic operations Patrick Meier have been sharing insights on the organzation's response to the crisis and how it will develop over the coming days. Okolloh writes:

Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.

Ushahidi is also aggregating resources for information about the crisis and how you can help. Look here for instructions on embedding Ushahidi's crisis map on your own site.

How great would it be for web sites to let us know when news stories we’ve been following have been updated or corrected? How about also seeing a box of information explaining the type of sourcing used within the story, as well as a link to the organization’s editorial standards?

According to an article released by the Columbia Journalism Review, hNews is trying to make all of these features possible.

hNews is a microformat for news being developed by the Media Standards Trust and the Web Science Research Initiative. It is also a winner of last year’s Knight News Challenge grant.

For an example of how this would work, take a look at this article. Scroll down to the bottom of the text and place the cursor over the blue box labeled “Value Added.” A small box of text will pop up that lists the article title, author, date, published and the last date the article was updated. This information is automatically generated, thanks to hNews. 

The goal of hNews is to:

Design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interview with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data – the “story behind the story” – to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list.

Currently, the Associated Press and AOL are encoding articles using hNews.

hNews is hoping to bring more transparency to news. Its features will provide people with the back story of an article they’re reading.

Visit the CJR Web site to read the complete story on hNews.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Photo of Wired writer Evan Ratliff courtesy of oxmour on Flickr.

The November issue of Wired Magazine contains a fascinating narrative account of how writer Evan Ratliff disappeared and created a new identity for himself, and how Knight grantee Jeff Reifman and a community of dogged Web pursuers found him, using Knight-funded software. (Previously on KnightBlog.)

Ratliff's evasion was nothing if not thorough:

I began my planning months in advance. I let my hair and beard grow out, got a motorcycle license, and siphoned off extra cash whenever I visited an ATM, storing it in a hollowed-out book. One day over lunch, a friend from Google suggested software to hide my Internet address — “but all of these things can be broken,” he warned — and how best to employ prepaid phones. I learned how to use Visa and American Express gift cards, bought with cash, to make untraceable purchases online. I installed software to mask my Web searches and generated a small notebook’s worth of fake email addresses.

I shared my plans with no one, not my girlfriend, not my parents, not my closest friends. Nobody knew the route I was taking out of town, where I was going, or my new name. Not even a hint. If I got caught, it would be by my own mistakes.

But when he opened an account for his new identity on Facebook, it was the beginning of his undoing:

On August 24, a former Microsoft group program manager in Seattle named Jeff Reifman read about the hunt in Wired. Reifman, self-employed these days, had recently launched a series of grant-funded Facebook applications to study the engagement of young people with the news. From a technical standpoint, the contest seemed intriguing.

On August 27, working on a desktop in his living room, he created Vanish Team, a Facebook app dedicated to information and discussion about Ratliff. He announced it on Twitter, and people began clicking over to check it out.

Read the full story for the details on how Reifman's efforts sealed Ratliff's fate.

In other news about Newscloud - the application Reifman modified to locate the Wired writer - University of Minnesota researcher Christine Greenhow has published the results of her study showing how this Facebook app increased engagement with the news among a group of 16-to-25-year-olds. Listen to Greenhow discuss that study on American Public Media's Future Tense.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

2007 Knight News Challenge winner, Citizen Media Law Project, announced today the public launch of its Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help.

OMLN is accepting applications for legal assistance from online publishers and media creators who meet the network's criteria of viability, adherence to journalistic standards, innovation, independence, original reporting, and public interest. For details on these criteria, see the OMLN FAQ.

You can also read a post about the new network at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Local media is the focus of the journalism conference circuit. Estimates claim $100 billion in local-ad revenue could support local news and information projects, if it could only be successfully tapped. This follows the Knight Commission for the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy recommendation for innovation: its report says journalism does not need saving so much as it needs creating.

So what’s an entrepreneur to do? First, you need a business model. Looking for just such a holy grail, the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism created the New Business Models for News Project. The project researched the best practices in the business of online journalism and released four business models that can be used by anyone in any community.

The four business models were presented and discussed last Wednesday at the New Business Models for (Local) News Conference and Hypercamp at CUNY. You can download the models at newsinnovation.com.

Ideas and experiments are springing up weekly. If you are interested in learning more about new business models for news you might also want to take a loot at:

Ideas for Micropayments

Journalism Online, LLC.

Village Soup.com an internet-age business model to transform the
traditional community newspaper business.

Printcasting, a new revenue model for "people-powered magazines."

Spot.us,  a new crowd-funding model for paying for investigative reporting.

Minnpost, is a new hybrid non-profit model  that is supported by ads, memberships and foundation support. You can also look at the Voice of San Diego.

Other non-profit experiments include St. Louis Beacon and Gotham Gazette (in NY).

News 21 and the Chauncey Bailey project pioneered public-private experiments in investigative reporting.

Other university-based news models include the investigative reporting projects at Boston University, UC Berkeley, Brandeis and Northeastern.

Other nonprofits that are doing well include Pro Publica in NY,
Center for Investigative Reporting in SF, Center for Public Integrity in DC.

These are only a few of the models that individuals, organizations and universities have been using to figure out a new way to sustain journalism.

If you think none of these projects are the right digital innovations to provide quality news and information to communities, come up with one of your own, and enter the Knight News Challenge at newschallenge.org

Back in July, we told you about the collaboration being explored between the New York Times and Knight News Challenge winner Spot.us. This morning, the fruits of that collaboration appeared in the pages of the Times, where you can read Lindsay Hoshaw's reporting on a garbage patch in the Pacific the size of Texas.

In a post at the Spot.us blog, founder David Cohn explains how the partnership came to fruition:

My hat is off to the NY Times. They interfaced with Spot.Us as if they were a lean and mean startup. I spent half a day at the Times talking with various decision makers who agreed to entertain the idea further if we drafted a pitch. Once the pitch was approved all we had to do was make it live and let them know. I am still in awe of that experience. It contrasts with everything I’ve experienced with other larger media organizations and it a testament to why the NY Times is not just the paper of record – but also leading the charge into the digital future.

In the video at the top of this post, you can view Lindsay Hoshaw's thank you to her Spot.us funders.

Cross-posted from the Knight News Challenge Blog

and the Sunlight Labs Blog

The reason why we extended the Knight News Challenge deadline is because we want to invite and partner with organizations that share our mission, values and goals, and that have networks of software developers and entrepreneurs. Our first partner is the Sunlight Foundation and its Sunlight Labs.

You're part of a community doing amazing work on some hugely important issues of government transparency, especially at the state and national level. We're partnering with the Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs in hopes of engaging you in a complementary challenge: bringing your great ideas to cities and other local communities.

The Knight News Challenge is an annual $5-million contest to fund the best ideas for reinventing local news. The contest deadline for 2010 was originally set for October 15, but we extended it to December 15 in large part because we saw an opportunity to partner with more folks like you all. The Knight News Challenge projects meet three criteria: 1) use digital, open-source technology to 2) distribute news and information in the public interest to 3) to a local, geographic community.

In past years, we've already funded projects that are terrific complements to the work done by Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs. For example, take a look at one of our 2009 winners, DocumentCloud (which recently announced a partnership with the Sunlight Foundation). DocumentCloud will allow some of the most robust investigative journalism outfits in the country - organizations like the New York Times, ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, the ACLU, and Talking Points Memo - to share, publicize, collaborate on, and crowdsource the documents they're uncovering every day in Freedom of Information Act battles. Or check out the Transparency Initiative we funded in 2008, creating a microformat - hNews - to mark up news stories with metadata about sourcing, geo-location, and more.

Becoming a Knight News Challenge grantee would put you in the company of some of the leading innovators at the intersection of technology and information - folks like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, and Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of the Django programming framework and originator of one of the first Google Maps mashups, which evolved into his 2007 Knight News Challenge award.

We've got the money and the mission. You've got the ideas we'd like to fund. If you're interested, check out our website (the FAQ is a great place to start), and feel free to send any questions to newschallenge@knightfoundation.org.