The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has launched the third year of the Knight News Challenge, a contest awarding as much as US$5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news and information exchange.

The contest is open to community-minded innovators worldwide, from software designers to journalists to citizens and students of any age with an idea for informing and inspiring a geographic community using social media, Web 2.0 tools, or OpenID; or exchanging information via video, photos, or text messaging; or a way to integrate game theory with web browsing to support local community engagement.

The deadline for application is November 1 2008.

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.

Click here for information on submissions. The information is available in 9 additional languages through this link.


To support applications, Knight has created a new incubator – the News Challenge Garage – where prospective applicants can receive peer reviews and mentoring from screeners and awardees from previous years. A diverse group of developers, online journalists, video bloggers, and social media experts are on hand to coach.


Click here for access to coaching.


Click here for the news incubators' blog.