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.

Press release from Marc Fest to The Communication Initiative on September 2 2008.