Grant Event on Monday

Raincity Studios is hosting the Vancouver stop for NewsChallenge -  a project by the Knight Foundation. The event is at the RCS HQ at 1 Alexander St. in Gastown on Monday, October 6th from 7-9PM.

The event features web veteran Susan Mernit who is driving the NewsChallenge project for Knight. Follow knc08 on Twitter to get micro-updates on their tour.

To attend, you must RSVP so check out the NewsChallenge Meetup Facebook event and/or Upcoming listing for NewsChallenge to express your attendance.

Get a Grant

Basically, this is a worldwide campaign to grant $5 Million to digital media experiments and which will innovate journalism. Certainly, Drupal, CMS, RSS (and other acronyms) are all part of the mix of tools which contemporary journalist use to spread their message in an engaging and participatory manner. The press release tells more about the big picture.

To get your hands on the grant to create your revolutionary project, start at the online entry form at www.newschallenge.org. Apply through Nov. 1, 2008 and wait until Spring of 2009 for the announcement. In the meantime, you can peruse projects in the works now at the (Drupal-ized) NewsChallenge Garage.

What's NewsChallenge?

NewsChallenge is a project of the Knight Foundation focused on funding innovative journalism/news publishing project. Here's how they describe themselves on the NewsChallenge website:

We’re giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs.

If you have a great idea that will improve local online news, deepen community engagement, bring Web 2.0 tools to local neighborhoods, develop publishing platforms and standards to support local conversations or innovate how we visualize, experience or interact with information, we’d like to see it! You have the opportunity to win funding for your project and support within a vibrant community of media, tech, and community-oriented people who want to improve the world.

There are three rules to follow to apply to the 2008-09 Knight News Challenge:

   1. Use or create digital, open-source technology as the code base.
   2. Serve the public interest.
   3. Benefit one or more specific geographic communities.

... and The Knight Foundation?

In brief, a fund created by the Knight brothers, the Foundation offers grants and programs, including mentoring, to encourage freedom of expression in the press and in communities.

They blog about their efforts and here's the blurb from the Knight Foundation's site:

We are a national foundation with local roots. We choose, as the Knight brothers chose, to seek opportunities that can transform both communities and journalism, and help them reach their highest potential. We want to ensure that each community's citizens get the information they need to thrive in a democracy.

And we ask, as we evaluate opportunities and grants, "Is this truly transformational?"

Because grant making requires a sound financial base, we preserve the Knight brothers' gift through prudent investment and careful management.