Tag Archives: Hardly Strictly Young

The following is guest commentary from Will Mitchell, one of the collaborators who helped bring our Knight News Challenge survey together.

Reading through the surveys, it really seems like a lot of the grantees “scaled back” from building software to simply using existing tools or just community organizing. This response was representative:

The technological capacity of the organizations… whom we were encouraging to use our tech was lacking and therefore hindered adoption of [it].

This is a good example of the kind of thing that needs to be worked out prior to applying, or vetted during the application. Sure, no matter how much vetting you do, some projects are going to fail, but the rubric for success can’t be “throw them at the wall and see what sticks.”

I think in the future incarnation of this deal, whatever it is, people need to be more accountable to what they’ve proposed to achieve — not the scaled back “oh shit, this is hard, what can we do with existing tools instead” end product. To me, the word “innovation” connotes a certain focus on new technology. There should be at least one component of the proposal that is a new tool and will be built by the end of the proposal, or else there had better be a really brilliant reason for a proposal that just introduces existing tools into some organization or community.

There’s a ton of emphasis in the application on what you want to achieve and how it will impact a community, but not very much on how, specifically, you’re going to achieve it, and who’s on board to get it done. Compare with Y Combinator where they really make you sweat about the team and the technology, and demonstrate what you’ve already built.

The other thing that is more and more disconcerting to me is the “Knight News Challenge is an experiment” vibe that I get from a lot of the responses. Making it a grand experiment kind of screws up the incentive to stick to your plans, because failure to launch is justified, in retrospect, as an interesting outcome of the experiment. There seems to be a little bit of broken window syndrome (or whatever you would call it) going on. The less accountability people see for the other grantees, the less pressure they may feel to achieve their original goals. This critique isn’t point at any individual: doing this stuff is hard, and scaling back near the deadline often makes sense. But perhaps it makes a little too much sense in the context of the current KNC. Scale the project back during the application phase, so that the grant matches what can realistically be achieved.

I think it would be worthwhile to look at the responses (and concrete results) from “News Games” and “Playing the News.” Two projects about games, both granted around $250k.

One thing that stood out was the outliers in the number of KNC apps submitted. The Ideas Factory submitted 11. MobileActive submitted 48 other applications? Not, say, 4-8? Sup with that?

It seems weird to me that that it’s so hard to find this kind of information News Challenge website. If we’re serious about developing story forms and information repositories that go beyond narrative journalism and hub-and-spoke or blog navigation, we should see some of that in the contest itself.

The following is guest commentary from Lauren Rabaino, one of the collaborators who helped bring our Knight News Challenge survey together.

The Knight Foundation has an important role to play encouraging innovation and experimentation within the news industry — because let’s face it, not many people in news media have that kind of money to throw around these days (KNC has granted about $22 million over the past four years). Knight has a responsibility to the projects they’re funding, the communities that rely on those projects, and the journalism community as a whole to see that their money is put to good use.

What I’ve gleaned from breaking down the numbers, reading the various survey responses and generally observing KNC practices over the past few years is this:

• Knight appears to “play favorites,” awarding money to people who have applied multiple times or to people they have previously known and met in person. One survey respondent even commented that only the projects that would sound good in a NYT article are selected.
• After projects are funded, adios! No communication with Knight commences, which shows an incredible lack of accountability and makes it easier for projects to fall by the wayside.
• There are inefficiencies in the processes related to applying for and obtaining money from Knight.

We can take a hint from one project, TileMapping, that according to their survey response is having “a great experience so far!” This project was already in the process of being actively built before the grant money was attained. TileMapping used the funds for a second iteration of their project, so they had a clearer scope of what they were trying to accomplish and what resources were required to do it.

So many of the respondents who haven’t had such a good time as TileMapping said they changed course because they realized that they:

1. Just didn’t have the technical capacity
2. Vastly underestimated the amount of time it would take to build something
3. Couldn’t get the industry connections or user base to pull off what they desired.

I think many of these problems can be tackled by the solutions Daniel poses, that I need not repeat (shorting funding cycles, milestone-based funding, smaller amounts of money). Related back to TileMapping, projects need to have a clearer plan of execution and sustainability, beyond simple speculation. The Knight News Challenge should be an investment in the future of news, not a gamble.

And while, yes, some projects will most certainly fail, they shouldn’t fail quietly and unacknowledged. There should be clear transparency, enforced through Knight, that requires grantees to explain why projects failed and how future projects can learn from those failures — because what’s the point of experimentation if there are no clear takeaways? Otherwise, it’s just lost time, money and effort. And that’s not how you shape the future of news.