Knight Knights New New Media Leadership

Money feeds change. There are lots of busy hands and fertile minds out there, building the next journalism, though their work is obscured by headlines of destruction. Those hands and minds need to be supported. Their food has so far come from the camaraderie of their colleagues, their own passion and a sense that the next journalism is worth building -- even if no one wants to pay you to do it. But the bills and the families come, and money has been a crucial missing ingredient. So it's great to see $12 million dedicated to feeding those mouths and fingertips of digital media change, as the Knight Foundation News Challenge announced its first annual awards. Yes, it's only $12 million, but it can sustain lots of good work, and as importantly send a message to others that it is time to fund innovation. I've been talking with lots of people out there, young, relatively inexperienced journalists to wizened veterans of the trade, and there's much readiness to see what can be created. It comes on the heels of the acknowledgement that the news business as it exists today is in for only more pain, and that it's time to seed journalism in new ways. The enthusiasm is palpable, and the Knight Foundation's example will only stoke it.

The money went to numerous relative veterans of the new media trade -- Jay Rosen, Amy Gahran, Lisa Williams, Rich Gordon, Nora Paul and Paul Grabowicz, -- and that's good. It also went disproportionately to academic institutions and about that I'm a bit more skeptical, but open. MIT scored the biggest prize -- $5 million -- for its Center for Future Civic Media, a four-year project of the well-known, but less-than-impactful Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. The word "future" itself makes me nervous. The future is now, both from scale of civic -- social, public, participatory, conversational, whatever -- media experiments borning. And applying the lessons of the work, transferring learnings and knowledge from academic to community settings, is hard. VillageSoup's $800,000 grant to develop an open-source platform is a good nod to the technological underpinnings of the new journalism. It's probably money well-spent, given Richard Anderson's work there. I just hope it doesn't reinvent a wheel well-produced by companies like Pluck, KickApps and Neighborhood America and others. For my money, what's missing in developing this new Pro-Am world is as much the Pro as the Am. Am, or engaging enlightened amateurs in the work of community coverage is cool, and that will find a place in our world. What's going to be increasingly missing is the Pro, paying experienced reporters to dig out, report and write the news. No, they don't have to work for one of the big old newspaper companies -- but somebody has to pay them. And that's going to take new companies, profit or non-, engaging these New Old Pros along with the Ams in ways that have scale, that make community coverage difference. And that inevitably will be increasingly supported by advertising. I'd like to see Knight and others placing some bets on these new Pro-Am businesses/organizations. Maybe that will be a logical next step in what might, unexpectedly, be a season of wildfire innovation.