Essay on Transformation

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Media Innovation

Never since the creation of Knight Foundation in 1950 have the challenges facing journalism been greater. Never has the opportunity for innovation been more apparent. 

Over time, we’ve invested more than $400 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. But perhaps the most telling figure, the one that best describes our current course, is the $100 million we have committed to media innovation initiatives in the past three years.

The question we ask is not, “How do we save newspapers?” The question is, “How do we help save the communications that communities need to manage their affairs in this democracy?” In other words, how do we save journalism – with the values we know and trust – in the digital age?

Nowhere has it been easier to see innovation as a common thread than in our media grants. In June, nearly 50 Knight News Challenge winners gathered at MIT’s remarkable Media Lab (see NewsChallenge) to see demonstrations of digital works-in-progress, including place-based, locative games and smart polling devices using social networking. And we honor our founders’ entrepreneurial spirit by engaging with breakthrough ideas wherever they emerge, including our work with Ashoka, a global organization that identifies and invests in leading social entrepreneurs. Grants from Knight allow Ashoka to seek and support just such entrepreneurs in our communities and in journalism (see Ashoka).

Our goal is to bring communities together through information, consistent with Jack Knight’s definition: A great newspaper should inform and illuminate the minds of its readers, define and expand their understanding of the world and allow them to pursue what he called “their own true interests.”

We’ve launched four initiatives to find digital innovations and new policies that better inform geographically defined communities. The first of these, the Knight News Challenge (www.newschallenge.org), is a contest investing $5 million per year in original ideas that leverage the power of digital technologies to deliver news to real geographies.

• This year’s winners include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Now an MIT professor, Berners-Lee and his colleagues are concerned about the integrity of content on the web. We will support his team’s development of technology that will allow writers to disclose sources – and readers to verify information quickly. This takes a technological step in the direction of authenticity and verification on the web (www.mediastandardstrust.org).

• Other winners include David Cohn, a young Californian who will test the notion that audiences will contribute to the costs of journalism in their communities. Another group will deliver news and information to cell phone users in Zimbabwe. And we’re supporting technology that will enable citizens at a virtual town meeting to discuss changes in Sochi, Russia, as it prepares for the 2014 Winter Olympics (see Sochi).

A $25 million commitment in the Knight Center of Digital Excellence kicked off our second media initiative. These days, if you’re not digital, you’re marginalized as a second-class citizen – socially, economically and politically. We find that unacceptable. As a first step toward digital unity, we have established a goal of universal digital access in each of our Knight communities.

The Knight Center of Digital Excellence in Akron is a pro bono consulting organization whose services are available to any of our communities. The center will bring in the expertise necessary to level the playing field between the public and the marketplace as they negotiate tough digital access issues (www.knightcenter.info).

A third thrust, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (www.knightcomm.org), is operated in partnership with the Aspen Institute, one of the nation’s outstanding institutions devoted to the discussion and development of public policy.

Co-chairs Ted Olson, the former solicitor general of the United States, and Marissa Mayer, the vice president of search products and user experience at Google, lead the commission. They and their fellow commissioners will a) articulate the information needs of communities in this democracy, b) take a snapshot of where we are today, and c) propose public policy that will encourage market solutions to get from where we are to where we should be.

Finally, even as we are investing in the development of high-level policy, we also want to seed grassroots experiments. We believe community foundations are ideal partners in this enterprise.

After all, community foundations were created to meet the core needs of local geographies. In a democracy, information is among those core needs. And in a media environment in which the marketplace is no longer providing sufficient civic news and information, we believe that grassroots nonprofits may have a new and important role to play.

The Knight Community Information Challenge is a five-year grant challenging community foundations to meet the information needs of their communities. Foundations willing to participate can tap in to an annual $4 million fund (www.informationneeds.org).

Moving digitally hasn’t been only a matter of experiments. We’ve also partnered with the Carnegie Corporation of New York to fund the Carnegie-Knight initiative to improve journalism education (www.newsinitiative.org/initiative). We’ve also collaborated with NPR to send its staff to the University of California at Berkeley for new-media training; funded digital media programs for journalists at Berkeley, USC and Arizona State; and we continue to support J-Lab’s innovation in interactive journalism (www.j-lab.org), now at American University.

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