Knight to Give Away Millions for News, Cyberspace Projects
Here is important news shared at the Media Giraffe Project conference held while I was away in India:
Knight Foundation plans multi-million effort to seed innovation in web-based local news;
Here is more:
Since we’re talking about money, I’m Gary Kebbel from the Knight Foundation and I wanted to mention a lot of money that we’re going to be hoping to give away in the fall and it’s going to focus on news and community. How do you use news to develop community? And in particular we’re talking about real live community and improving the lives of people where they live.
“And this request for proposals is going to be, if we get everything approved by our board the way we hope to, a multimillion-dollar series of grants that we also hope to extend over several years.
“And the whole idea behind it is, particularly now that the Knight Ridder newspapers are gone, who is doing in the digital world what a Knight Ridder publisher used to do? Who is the glue of the community now in cyberspace? And doing the function that a publisher of a Knight Ridder newspaper used to do in real space? Who now is using cyberspace to improve the lives of people where they live and work? If you have the answers to that, we will have some money. And we’ll be announcing these proposals and rules most likely in September. And there will be a request that will extend through Dec. 31 and we hope to be awarding grants for this in 2007.
For those, who like me, missed the conference, videos of presentations are archived here. When I find some time, there are several I plan to watch.
