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.

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

How can data be used to fuel positive social change? Knight Foundation recently brought together a panel of three expert data wranglers at the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT to discuss the answers. 

Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, Laurel Ruma, editor at O’Reilly Media, and Nick Grossman, director of Civic Works at OpenPlans, each gave a brief speech and answered topical questions. Although each speaker expressed different ideas about how to foster civic engagement and social change, their strategies all revolved around a similar theme: transparency. The speakers agreed that social change can be fostered by increasing the amount of quality data available and correspondence between residents and their governments. Watch to find out more.

Knight-Wallace Fellows spend eight months living and studying in Michigan. Director Charles Eisendrath leads the group and helps them build skills to advance their careers. Some fellows find new jobs after their time at Michigan by starting new programs. At least one fellow has launched his own company: Chris Carey was a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and now runs shareslueth.com, a for-profit investigative news site about stock fraud.

The University of Michigan, Stanford University and MIT host many of Knight Foundation’s fellowships for professional journalists. Knight has endowed a Batten professorship at Davidson College, Latin American fellows as part of the the Nieman Fellowship program at Harvard University, and Knight Chairs at journalism schools throughout the country. The foundation also supports the fellowship program run by both the International Center for Journalists and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative's News21 project.

How did this story on a group of atheists putting up a billboard in Charlotte - along Billy Graham Parkway no less - end up on the front page of the Charlotte Observer?

The controversy was first publicized through a post on the Observer's new Facebook application, Insight from the Charlotte Observer, which uses technology developed through a Knight Foundation grant.  Charlotte Insight allows residents to not only comment on the news but also post original stories and blogs. The issue then became a giant local debate with full bore coverage on the Observer's front page and main website, and on local television stations.

While there are more than 400 million Facebook users worldwide, most news organizations lack the knowledge, technical capacity - and often funds - to engage them directly on one of the largest social networks in the world. Jeff Reifman and NewsCloud developed the application to help engage readers in the news. They are now working with 12 outlets to implement it.

Previously, NewsCloud used a Knight grant to test ways to engage youth in news and information through Facebook applications for a student newspaper and an environmental newsmagazine.

We caught up with Reifman at the Future of News and Civic Media conference last week, where he talked about how the application works.

www.openstreetmap.org

In the last few years, mapping has become an increasingly important element among the winners of the Knight News Challenge. Five of the 12 projects which won grants in 2010 involved mapping in some form: TileMapping by DevelopmentSeed of Washington DC; CitySeed by Arizona State University’s New Media Innovation Lab in Phoenix; CityTracking by Stamen Design out of San Francisco; GoMap Riga by two Latvians; and LocalWiki by the founders of Davis Wiki of Davis, California. In addition, a 2009 grantee,Ushahidi also made its reputation through crowd-sourced crisis mapping. Many of the projects out of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, a 2007 grantee, involve mapping, including Sourcemap and Grassroots Mapping

As such, Knight Foundation will be a sponsor at the State of the Map conference in Girona, Spain, which is taking place from July 9 to 11, 2010. Jennifer 8. Lee, the lead Knight News Challenge reviewer, will be available at the conference to explain how to craft an effective proposal and to field questions. The News Challenge is interested in all layers of the map stack, including data gathering, tile rendering and interactive consumer-facing applications.

State of the Map is the largest annual event for Open Street Map, a collaborative project to create an open-source, editable map of the world. The data from Open Street Map is used in Flickr and other commercial applications. In addition, Open Street Map volunteers helped generate maps used by many response and relief organizations in the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

In a later session, participants discussed successes in mobile news and got a neat guide to mobile media from MobileActive. Two attendees who work in sub-Saharan Africa said that local media outlets provide numbers people can text to contact the journalists and learn more. Justin Arenstein, a Knight Fellow at Stanford, said that people reporting their moods onVodacom’s platform for social networking in South Africa provided the company with data they could compare to places with ethnic conflict. Now a “happiness report” follows the daily weather report on T.V.

Shu Choudhary, a Knight International Journalism Fellow, uses Google’s free SMS service to reach rural India. The service allows users to send 140 characters to everyone who signs up on the list. Google, like many major companies, focus on user-generated content rather than employing journalists to vet and report information.

The team at Department of Play, a project by C4FCM students, developed the What’s Up neighborhood news system. It connects voicemail and a web site to connect young people in Lawrence, MA who may not have Internet access. Department of Play’s Leo Burd is developing Voip Drupal, an open-source platform for community information systems.

See Frontline SMS and Mobile Commons for more on mobile news and information.

Dan Pacheco

Knight News Challenge grantee Dan Pacheco announced today that he is going to donate 6% of his new company FeedBrewer Inc. to the newly created Knight Media Innovation Fund. FeedBrewer is an outgrowth of Printcasting, a company that Pacheco created with a News Challenge grant that has run out after two years. "We recognize the unique role that philanthropy played in our development. By donating a percentage of our new company to the Knight Media Innovation Fund, we'll be paying that good fortune forward and helping the Foundation develop other innovative products that meet the ever increasing information needs of communities," said Pacheco.

The Knight Media Innovation Fund at the Dade Community Foundation is a donor-advised fund that will support innovative digital projects that inform and engage geographic communities.  Knight Foundation staff will be the donor advisors to the fund.

Stay tuned for more information about the fund next week.

Click here to read Dan Pacheco's news release.