Knight News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovation ideas in local news delivery) winner David Cohn’s project, Spot.Us launched yesterday.

An overview of the project:

As David posted on his blog:

The problem: Revenue.

Journalism is a process not a product, but that process takes time and people who do it professionally need to be compensated.

The Solution: Community Funding.

The process of journalism should be participatory – and perhaps one way it can be made participatory is if the public has the opportunity to commission the journalism they want to see.

Traditionally .001% of the public has a freelance budget to hire a journalist. We call those people “editors.” Spot.Us is an attempt to increase the percentage of people that can have an editorial influence.

Congratulations to David and the Spot.Us team; we look forward to watching this project continue to develop–

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.

The New York Times writes about Knight News Challenge (the ~$5 million yearly contest to fund innovative news delivery ideas) winner David Cohn’s Spot.Us project today:

“Spot Us would give a new sense of editorial power to the public,” said David Cohn, a 26-year-old Web journalist who received a $340,000, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to test his idea. “I’m not Bill and Melinda Gates, but I can give $10. This is the Obama model. This is the Howard Dean model.”

You can contribute to (help “crowdfund”) the Spot.Us campaign the article mentions that will check political advertisements in San Francisco for accuracy here (campaign is 89% funded as of this morning). More details about that project are on the Spot.Us wiki.

The article also mentions Knight Foundation Trustee Paul Steiger’s new ProPublica organization, which produces “journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.” An interesting ProPublica site feature is the “Scandal Watch” sidebar, where progress on highlighted stories is charted throughout the week; read Friday’s summary by Alexandra Andrews.

The NYT article lets another News Challenge winner, Jay Rosen, (who blogs along with Cohn and the other News Challenge winners on the IdeaLab group blog; you can read his entries here) have the last words about alternative reporting models:

“The [traditional] business model is broken,” [Rosen] said. “We’re at a point now where nobody actually knows where the money is going to come from for editorial goods in the future. My own feeling is that we need to try lots of things. Most of them won’t work. You’ll have a lot of failure. But we need to launch a lot of boats.”

What do you think about crowdfunding?

Below, links to projects and news around some of the Knight News Challenge winners, their local news delivery projects, and other journalism items from this week:

News Challenge winner Dan Pacheco asks for feedback on the Printcasting (a project to “make it possible for anyone to create a local print newspaper, magazine or newsletter with local ads”) interface:

Does the drag-and-drop interface work for you? Let Dan know here.

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Fellow News Challenge winner Ryan Sholin (whose project Reporting On is “the backchannel for your beat”) reports that WiredJournalists.com and BeatBlogging.org are merging now exploring “cross-promotion” (per Ryan’s comment below).

Pat Thorton is taking BeatBlogging editorial reins from David Cohn, who has started working on his News Challenge project, Spot.us; find out how Cohn addresses his early Spot.us critics in this IdeaLab blog post.

BeatBlogging.org is part of News Challenge winner Jay Rosen’s distributed reporting project NewAssignment.net, and he talks about Beatblogging progress here.

(Recent buzz on Rosen has been around an OffTheBus experiment with Huffington Post; you can join the OffTheBus Special Ops team.)

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Earlier this week, New York Times writer Lawrences Downes bemoaned the lack of copy editor presence at the Newseum; journalist David Sullivan offered an answer.

And this list of current newspaper jobs was posted (and pointed to from Ryan Sholin’s Twitter (a microblogging service) stream).

Items to add? Leave a comment below.

Last week in Las Vegas, sixteen 2008 Knight News Challenge winners were announced and a total of $5.5 million was awarded for ideas to innovate digital information delivery.

President and CEO of Knight Foundation Alberto Ibargüen noted in a Wall Street Journal interview (linked to from Mashable, Reportr.net, and Poynter’s Romenesko) that he wants to experiment even more, characterizing a rising trend of mobile funding as a place to “begin.”

Two mobile News Challenge projects, Bev Clark’s Freedom Fone (a news database accessed by mobile devices in Zimbabwe) and Joel Selanikio’s News on Cellphones project (news delivered on less expensive mobile devices), were congratulated on the MobileActive blog. Both organizations are part of the MobileActive community.

Below, Bev and Joel explain their projects at the Editor & Publisher conference last week. (Note: This is casual footage shot with a Flipcam.)

Fellow winner David Cohn, whose Spot Journalism project will “crowdfund” freelance journalists to cover important stories through micropayments, has already generated a line of questioning on entrepreneur Rick Burnes’s blog.

Cohn addresses thoughtful queries about how his project can promote an open marketplace instead of a press release factory in the comments.

This is how David explained the phases of his project last week at Editor & Publisher in Las Vegas:

What questions do you have about the News Challenge and these projects?

(More News Challenge projects will be featured on this blog in coming weeks.)