KNC report

KNIGHT NEWS CHALLENGE
A look at what
we’ve learned
A review of the 2010 and 2011 winners
Commissioned by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation • Prepared by Kenneth Dautrich, The Stats Group

ABOUT THE JOHN S. AND JAMES L. KNIGHT FOUNDATION
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation advances journalism in the digital age
and invests in the vitality of communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers.
The Knight Foundation focuses on projects that promote informed and engaged
communities and lead to transformational change.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License.
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Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
1 Knight News Challenge Findings Report

Table of contents
Executive summary 3
2011 News Challenge Winners 6
2010 News Challenge Winners 8
Lessons Learned 10
Lesson one 11
Lesson two 13
Lesson three 14
Lesson four 16
Lesson five 17
Lesson six 18
Lesson seven 20
Lesson eight 22
2010 KNC Winner Profiles 23
2010 KNC Winner Profiles 62
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 2

Executive Summary
Disruption and innovation
have become regular features
of the news and media
landscape. Social media feeds and
newsreaders are replacing printed
words and pages. Ordinary citizens
with smartphones and Twitter or
Instagram accounts increasingly
stand in for trained reporters. Hacker
journalists—wearing the hats of
both journalist and coder—crunch
massive data sets to find the insights
buried within, as major news media
organizations struggle simply to keep
up with the crowdsourced pace of
social media.
That’s where the Knight News Challenge comes in. Launched in September 2006 by the John
S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the News Challenge invests in people who are testing
new ideas for engaging citizens with news and information. It is an open contest designed to
accelerate innovation in the ways that we create, consume, and share news and information
by developing new ideas to reach more people more effectively. In each round of the News
Challenge, Knight Foundation trustees approve the winners as recommended by Knight
staff, with the advice of outside advisers. Since its inception, the Knight News Challenge has
provided more than $37 million to fund 111 projects in the United States and around the world.

KNC
AT A
GLANCE
5YEARS
27 MILLION
DOLLARS IN
FUNDING
76 PROJECTS
SERVED
In 2010 and 2011, the Knight News Challenge supported a diverse set of
media innovations—from a platform to help local newsrooms use and analyze
municipal data to a tool to help journalists make sense of vast amounts of
social media activity. In Vermont, 2010 News Challenge Winner Front Porch
Forum uses an online platform to strengthen the sense of offline community
in towns and cities across the state. When Hurricane Irene produced record
flooding in 2011, Vermonters used the platform to organize community
response and to connect towns in need with volunteer help. Across the world,
in Indonesia, palm oil farmers use FrontlineSMS—a 2011 News Challenge
winner that uses mobile technology to share and disseminate community
information—to organize collective efforts to challenge encroachments on their
rights by big palm oil corporations.
Knight Foundation hired evaluation firm Arabella Advisors to explore the
innovations and impact of these winners. Arabella reviewed grant materials,
analyzed Web metrics and social media data, surveyed the winners, and
interviewed both winners and key informants in the field. Through that
research Knight discerned lessons about what contributes to a successful
media innovation. These include:
• Measure success based on how funding improves the field, not just on
the adoption or impact of individual projects: Innovators and their sponsors
often view wide-scale adoption and sustainable organizations as critical
measures of success, but these are not always the best barometers. Building
the capacity of innovators as leaders in their fields and strengthening their
networks of supporters and collaborators can be just as important.
• Target users with “a need you can feel”: Projects that have scaled based
their innovation on a core audience and proven need. However, a large
number of projects faltered because they developed a tool without first
identifying target users. Unless a media innovation addresses a proven need,
news organizations often cannot spend money and time on projects or invest
in the technical capacity to take full advantage of new tools.
• Be open to the idea that your project may appeal to a different audience
than you imagined: Some projects designed to help the media analyze and
visualize data struggled to find journalists and news organizations that would
pay for the products. Instead, the products have gained traction among clients

in other industries. Small budgets in journalism and a lack of technical understanding
among journalists can inhibit adoption.
• Spend the time to get the user interface right: An intuitive user interface is vital for
attracting and retaining users. But a simple interface can mask a high degree of planning
and technical complexity. Innovators should not underestimate the time and expense
behind developing such deceptively simple interfaces.
• Provide substantial support to grantees beyond money, such as creating a cohort
of peers and providing access to influential networks: News Challenge winners
expressed a desire for support that comes from access to advisers who operate within
the foundation’s network and a desire to share their experiences with other winners
through in-person convenings that encourage the development of new connections.
• Anticipate resistance to innovation and the disruption it will cause, and plan
around it: Innovations frequently shake up their fields and meet with entrenched
institutional resistance. Successful innovators anticipate such resistance and plan
accordingly.
• Identify the elements of a project that require full-time staff and those that
can be entrusted to volunteers—and invest resources accordingly: An active
community of users and evangelists can perform certain functions that are critical for
the development of a media innovation. Other functions can only be performed by
dedicated, compensated, full-time staff. Innovators should identify who can accomplish
which elements early in their project, and invest accordingly.
• Recognize the benefits and challenges of open source code: The News Challenge
requires winners to use open source code and to publicly release it. This approach
encourages iteration and improvement, but the benefits may be to the wider community
instead of the challenge winner, who may bear the cost of development.
The Knight News Challenge has evolved significantly since its inception. Knight
continues to review the challenge and learn from the winners to help news and
information industries navigate the disruption in traditional strategies and uncover new
models of sustainability.
In the pages that follow we provide additional detail on these lessons, ideas and
insights—as well as on the progress of each of the winners of the Knight News Challenge
from 2010 and 2011.

2011 Knight News Challenge winners
Project Grantee Innovation Current
Status
Grant
Awesome
Foundation News
Taskforce
The Institute on
Higher Awesome
Studies Inc.
A vehicle for issuing micro-grants
to support innovative
local journalism and civic
media projects
Active $244,000
DocumentCloud
Reader Annotations
Investigative
Reporters and
Editors (IRE)
A new DocumentCloud
feature designed to engage
readers by allowing them to
add notes and comments to
original source documents
Active $320,000
FrontlineSMS Social Impact
Lab Foundation
(formerly The
Kiwanja Foundation)
A platform that enables
journalists to more effectively
use text messaging to inform
and engage rural communities
Active $250,000
iWitness Adaptive Path A Web-based tool for
aggregating and cross-referencing
news events with
user-generated content
Closed $360,000
NextDrop NextDrop An interactive voice response
and text message-based
service that notifies residents
of Hubli-Dharwad, India, when
their water is available
Active $375,000
OpenBlock Rural University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill
A standard process and
structure for scraping public
records that allows rural
newspapers to gather, format
and publish municipal data
through the OpenBlock
platform
Closed $275,000
Overview The Associated
Press
An open source tool that can
make patterns within large
document sets visible, helping
journalists find stories in large
amounts of data
Active $475,000

Status
Grant
PANDA Investigative
Reporters and
Editors (IRE)
A set of open source, Web-based
tools that make it easier
for journalists to clean and
analyze data
Active $150,000
Poderopedia Miguel Paz A crowdsourced database that
visualizes relationships among
the political, civic and business
elite in Chile
Active $200,000
The Public
Laboratory
The Public
Laboratory for Open
Technology and
Science
An online community and set
of toolkits that enables citizens
to gather environmental data
about their communities
Active $500,000
ScraperWiki ScraperWiki New journalist-specific
features within an existing tool
to collect, store and publish
data from across the Web
Active $280,000
Spending Stories Open Knowledge
Foundation
A tool for contextualizing
government spending data
and improving fiscal literacy
among journalists and the
public
Active $250,000
The State Decoded The Miller Center
Foundation
A digital platform for parsing
and displaying state codes,
making laws readable and
accessible to the average
citizen
Active $165,000
StoriesFrom The Tiziano Project A storytelling platform for
combining user-generated
content with professional
sources
Closed $200,000
SwiftRiver Ushahidi An open source platform
that helps identify trends and
verify user-generated content
emerging from mobile phones
and social media
Active $250,000
Zeega Media and Place
Productions
A platform to empower
citizens and local news
organizations to create
multimedia stories about their
communities
Active $420,000
Total $4,714,000

2010 Knight News Challenge winners
Status
Grant
Basetrack November Eleven An online journal and social media
resource center providing contin-uous
coverage of the entire de-ployment
of a U.S. Marine battalion
to southern Afghanistan
Active
$202,000
CityTracking Stamen Design LLC A Web service and open-source
tools to display public data in
easy-to-understand, highly visual
ways
Active
$412,000
Front Porch
Forum
Front Porch Forum
Inc.
A network of online neighborhood
forums in Vermont that allow users
to read and share posts with their
neighbors
Active
$220,000
Game-O-Matic Georgia Tech Re-search
Corp.
A free, easy-to-use tool that al-lows
journalists to build cartoon
arcade games based on their news
content
Active
$378,000
LocalWiki WikiSpot An easy-to-use, open-source
“wiki” platform tailored to the
needs of local communities
Active
$360,500
NowSpots Windy Citizen Open-source software allowing
“real-time” advertising that can be
updated at any time by local busi-nesses
using social media
Active
$257,500
OpenCourt Trustees of Boston
University
A pilot project to demonstrate
how digital technology can in-crease
public access to the courts
Active
$250,000
PRX Story Ex-change
PRX Inc. A crowd-funding platform that
allows local public radio stations,
producers and listeners to find and
help fund stories
Closed
$75,000
SeedSpeak Arizona State Uni-versity
An application with mobile, Web
and widget components that
provides citizens an easy way to
suggest community improvements
to local leaders, volunteer groups
and each other
Active
$93,600

SocMap Society Technolo-gies
Foundation
A map-based social network
where users can browse news and
engage in civic action through an
online local community map
Status
Active
Grant
$265,000
Stroome Stroome An online video editing commu-nity
which allows users to upload
content and collaboratively edit
Active
$230,000
TileMill Development Seed A suite of open-source tools that
local media can use to make
custoim, embeddable hyperlocal
maps
Active $76,960
Total $2,820,560

Lessons Learned
The winners of the 2010 and 2011 Knight News Challenges
encompass a diverse range of approaches, audiences,
geographies, goals and technologies. However, the
progress and challenges the winners faced illustrate common
lessons which may apply to other innovators who seek to
improve the ways communities produce, disseminate and
consume news and information.
10

Measure success based on how funding
improves the field, not just on the
adoption or impact of individual projects.
The best barometer of success isn’t the outcome of
individual projects but the effects projects may have
on their sectors or industries. Funders should focus on
building the capacity of innovators as leaders in their
fields or strengthening their network of supporters and
collaborators for long-term impact—regardless of the
sustainability of particular projects.
For example, in developing The State Decoded, a 2011
winner, Waldo Jaquith hoped to build upon work in
Virginia to make state laws more readable and accessible
to citizens. The goal was to create a platform that could
be adapted to state codes across the country. In doing so,
Jaquith became a leader in the open government field.
His success is attributable to several factors. An active
community of users supports The State Decoded, and the
platform has been adapted for use in a number of states
and municipalities across the country. But Jaquith also
set very clear goals for the project, and most importantly,
he stuck with his original timeline. He outlined a clear
beginning, middle and end for his involvement in The
State Decoded, and eventually handed off its development
to the community of open government activists and
hackers. This has contributed to Jaquith’s leadership within
that community. He continues to use his prominence
to advocate for greater governmental transparency. As
his involvement in The State Decoded was concluding,
Jaquith launched—with Knight Foundation support—the
Funders should
focus on building
the capacity
of innovators
as leaders in
their fields or
strengthening
their network of
supporters and
collaborators
for long-term
impact—
regardless of the
sustainability
of particular
projects.

U.S. Open Data Institute, which replicates a British effort
to encourage governments and businesses to adopt open
data standards as a way to promote economic growth,
innovation and social change, demonstrating his ongoing
leadership in the open government field.
Investments in leadership sometimes pay off significantly
even when products are not particularly successful or
widely adopted. Brian Boyer developed PANDA as a set
of Web-based tools that could serve as a newsroom’s
data library. As conceived, PANDA would help journalists
import, search, share and work collaboratively with
large public data sets. Although PANDA has received
praise for its technical sophistication and its usability,
newsrooms have not adopted it as widely as hoped.
The underwhelming adoption rate is partly attributable
to the fact that Boyer and his project team were not
able to dedicate themselves full time to developing and
marketing PANDA. However, as he developed PANDA,
Boyer’s stature in data journalism rose. Based on his work
at The Chicago Tribune—and, presently, in his role as
news applications editor at NPR—Boyer became a leader
in the field, someone who could help bridge traditional
journalism with the more technically sophisticated
aspects of data analysis and visualization. Today, PANDA
is no longer in active development, and by conventional
measures, it failed the test of sustainability. But the project
strengthened Boyer’s position as a leader and advocate in
the field of data journalism—an outcome with potentially
farther-reaching implications than that of a single tool,
even if the tool had been widely adopted.
Although
PANDA has
received praise
for its technical
sophistication
and its usability,
newsrooms
have not
adopted it
as widely as
hoped. The
underwhelming
adoption
rate is partly
attributable to
the fact that
Boyer and his
project team
were not able
to dedicate
themselves
full time to
developing
and marketing
PANDA.

Target users with “a need you can feel.”
Many News Challenge winners develop innovative tools or approaches that
target journalists, their employers and other media organizations, but selling
innovations to news organizations is extremely difficult because they may
lack the money and time to spend on innovative projects or the technical
capacity to take full advantage of new tools. The innovation may also be
entering a market guarded by institutions that may be resistant to change.
Fundamentally, unless an innovation addresses a pressing need, journalists
and news organizations will not adopt it. In fact, innovators need to anticipate
resistance, and create development and marketing plans that address it.
Innovators may need to diversify their user bases beyond journalists and news
organizations to promote wider adoption and project sustainability.
In many cases, media organizations—especially in small or medium markets—
lack not just the need for innovative tools, but also the resources and capacity
to support ambitious technology development. One of the 2011 News
Challenge winners, Zeega, aimed to build a platform that enabled local news
organizations to create multimedia stories about their own communities. By
developing an easy way to combine video clips, audio clips and images from
a variety of sources, Zeega would make it easier for news organizations to tell
stories in different and compelling ways. Initially, the project team provided
consulting services to local media organizations to help them produce
customized multimedia experiences with the Zeega tool. But they quickly
13

found that providing custom consulting drained limited
staff time and resources and detracted from their ability to
develop Zeega as a product that could have appeal to a
general audience. The local news organizations that Zeega
had identified as its target users were not willing to pay for
the tool. Zeega ultimately changed both its product and
its business model. Zeega’s leaders now view the target
audience as the wider tech-savvy population equipped
with smartphones and tablets.
In other cases, a real need for a new tool might exist, but
the barriers to its adoption might simply outweigh that
need. This is especially true in data-driven journalism.
ScraperWiki, for example, a 2011 News Challenge winner,
received funding to adapt its tool to help journalists collect,
store and publish data from across the Internet. But the
project team found that news organizations were either
unwilling to pay for the tool or that the learning curve
was too steep. ScraperWiki has since developed a more
user-friendly version of its tool, but adoption rates among
journalists remain below expectations, and ScraperWiki is
still dependent upon non-media corporate customers to
support development costs.
Be open to the idea that your project
may appeal to a different audience than
you imagined.
In some cases, a project’s ultimate audience or user base
can differ dramatically from that for which it was originally
conceived or designed. Several 2010 News Challenge
winners made significant changes to help their projects
In other cases,
a real need for a
new tool might
exist, but the
barriers to its
adoption might
simply outweigh
that need. This
is especially true
in data-driven
journalism.

gain traction. While developing their respective tools, the
project teams behind Stroome and Game-O-Matic tried to
broaden their original audiences from journalists and editors
to include citizen journalists and casual users. CityTracking
moved in an opposite direction: Finding that journalists
were too broad of an audience, it now focuses on serving
the need of more technically proficient developers.
Overview, a tool to help journalists visualize patterns
within large sets of documents, also faced a choice about
whether to continue serving its intended audience or to
shift to a new model. However, the project leaders also
had to weigh their own values about what they hoped to
achieve within their own innovation, even if those values
might steer them away from models that made more
financial sense. From the outset, Overview’s target audience
was journalists, and its mission was to empower them to
tell stories that might otherwise remain hidden in large,
inaccessible or disorganized document sets. As the tool
was being developed, Overview received an increasing
amount of interest from potential customers in finance,
business consulting and the legal profession. Pursuing these
clients, however, would have required a shift of emphasis,
a shift of resources, and a shift in organizational structure.
The project team considered reincorporating Overview
as a for-profit venture, but they kept coming back to the
same conclusion: Although they might be able to develop
a for-profit venture to attract funding to finance additional
development costs, this would necessitate a shift away from
their original target users—journalists. The Overview team
determined that they didn’t want to become “just another
startup.” They wanted to focus on their original social-driven
mission and their original users.
As the tool was
being developed,
Overview
received an
increasing
amount of
interest from
potential
customers in
finance, business
consulting
and the legal
profession.
Pursuing these
clients, however,
would have
required a shift of
emphasis, a shift
of resources,

Spend the time to get the user interface right.
User interface can play a major role in determining whether a media
innovation is actually adopted by its audience—an interface that’s fun
to use or saves the user’s time can make the difference between a tool
that’s used and one that gathers dust. Among the innovations developed
by News Challenge winners, the most effective interfaces frequently
have been those that appear simple or straightforward. But such user-facing
simplicity is hard to build. The user interface of Front Porch Forum,
for example, was deliberately designed to be clean and straightforward,
unadorned with extraneous features. Although it is an online tool, Front
Porch Forum’s end goal is to strengthen the sense of offline community
in Vermont towns and cities. The project team has designed the site’s
features and functionality around this social formula by keeping the
interface deliberately sparse. This allows users to get what they need from
the site and build their offline community, while discouraging them from
spending “all day in front of a computer.”
If media innovators aspire for wide adoption of their tools, they cannot
overlook the development of an effective user interface; it’s often more
important than the features or functionality of the tool itself. Indeed,
according to Ian Bogost of Game-O-Matic, developing features and
functionality may represent 80 to 90 percent of the effort in developing
an innovative media tool. But that last 10 to 20 percent entails developing
usability and polish, and that’s often the hardest part of bringing a tool to
market. Given the fast pace of innovation in the media marketplace, News
Challenge winners may only have one opportunity to release their tool for
wide use.

Provide substantial support to grantees beyond
money, such as creating a cohort of peers and
providing access to influential networks.
Many 2011 News Challenge winners expressed a desire for a greater
degree of support in building strong and resilient project teams with the
skills necessary to develop and scale their innovations; in developing
effective marketing strategies to find new users; and in planning for
sustainability beyond the period of the News Challenge grant. While
Knight may be capable of providing some of this support, access to its
networks of thought leaders and advisers can be invaluable for grantees
negotiating these issues.
Just as important to the News Challenge winners, however, was
the expertise of other winners. The 2011 winners reported that the
opportunities to interact directly with fellow News Challenge winners—
such as events held in Cambridge, Mass., Palo Alto, Calif., and Miami—
proved to be extremely valuable, especially sharing information
with projects that were either in different stages or had experienced
similar challenges. Several winners expressed the desire for additional
opportunities to interact with, and learn from, their fellow News
Challenge winners. The opportunities that were most valuable were
the in-person events in which winners could build connections with
one another, and discover new connections with winners working in
seemingly different arenas.
The value of these in-person convenings of News Challenge winners
extends beyond individual cohorts. The 2011 winners valued their
interactions with News Challenge winners from other years, and would
have welcomed greater opportunities to nurture those relationships.
Winners said they were more likely to seek support and advice from

other winners via e-mail and other means if they first met
in person and developed some degree of familiarity.
Anticipate resistance to innovation and
the disruption it will cause; plan around
it.
Whether it takes the form of a new product or tool to
empower citizen journalists or a new process to engage
consumers of news and information, a media innovation
often enters a space that is already occupied by time-tested
methods and approaches, and one that often is
guarded by institutions that may be resistant to change.
These institutions may not react kindly to new innovations
invading their space, because the innovation disrupts their
normal course of operations. Innovators need to anticipate
this resistance, and create development and marketing
plans that reckon with it.
The 2010 News Challenge winners were no strangers to
resistance. OpenCourt, for example, sought to change the
way that citizens of Massachusetts were connected to
their judicial system by live-streaming court proceedings
These institutions
may not react
kindly to new
innovations
invading their
space, because
the innovation
disrupts their
normal course
of operations.
Innovators need
to anticipate
this resistance,
and create
development and
marketing plans
that reckon with
it.

and trials in Quincy. But this represented a fairly radical
change in how the court system in Quincy interacted
with the media and with citizens at large, and OpenCourt
faced numerous lawsuits that attempted to prevent it from
streaming trial footage. Ultimately, OpenCourt prevailed
on appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, setting
the precedent that OpenCourt—or other innovators in
Massachusetts—could install cameras in courtrooms and
broadcast their proceedings on the Internet. It succeeded
in part because John Davidow, the project director,
anticipated the strong institutional resistance he would
face, prepared for it and had the support to persevere in
the face of litigation and delays. Perhaps most importantly,
the project had the benefit of an established home—
Boston University—which paid for OpenCourt’s legal
expenses as it fended off resistance.
Basetrack represents another example of a News
Challenge project that sought to shake up institutional
norms. In its effort to create an online, social media
reporting network, it embedded a team of reporters
and photojournalists with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine
Regiment during its deployment to Afghanistan. The
military has strict rules governing how journalists can
embed with deployed units in combat zones, and it was
no small achievement that the project was able to embed
with the Marine unit in the first place. Only a few months
after deployment, however, the Marines asked Basetrack
to cease its project, due principally to concerns that the
project’s location-based reporting was revealing sensitive
information about the position of U.S. forces. If the Marines
were uncomfortable with the location data that Basetrack
was providing, however, they could have worked with the
project to remove the potentially dangerous information.
But fundamentally, the military was extremely wary about
Certain important
elements of a
project—such
as product
promotion
and content
creation—can
be outsourced
in some cases
to users,
evangelists, and
the open source
community. But
other critical
elements—such
as core software
development,
business
development,
and fundraising—
should generally
be entrusted to
dedicated, paid
project staff.

unconventional efforts to report news from the battlefields and there was a
limit to how far Basetrack could push the military’s standard practices regarding
journalists.
Identify the elements of a project that require full-time
staff and those that can be entrusted to volunteers—
and invest resources accordingly.
Many projects plan at the outset to rely upon a dedicated user community to
refine and promote an innovation, and upon vocal evangelists to drive wider
adoption of their tools. In many cases, user communities and evangelists can
become indispensable (and inexpensive) cornerstones of a project, especially
when a project is dependent upon open source development. But without a
core group of paid staff with the skills, the time, and the incentive to devote
themselves full time to a project, development of a tool can suffer. Certain
important elements of a project—such as product promotion and content
creation—can be outsourced in some cases to users, evangelists and the
open source community. But other critical elements—such as core software
development, business development and fundraising—should generally be
entrusted to dedicated, paid project staff.

When it comes to staff, passion alone is not sufficient—
full-time commitment is often necessary, along with
the money to make that a reality. The Tiziano Project,
for example, won 2011 News Challenge funding to
develop and refine its proprietary storytelling platform
into StoriesFrom, which would combine user-generated
content with content from professional journalists to
tell news stories in more compelling ways. Relying
on the strong reputation of its existing platform and
on the enthusiasm of the founders, the project team
experienced initial success in terms of developing
partnerships and launched its platform ahead of
schedule. But it quickly faced challenges related to its
staffing model. Prior to winning the News Challenge,
the Tiziano Project team consisted of highly motivated
volunteers. The team dedicated a portion of its News
Challenge award to paying for a full-time project
manager and to providing part-time compensation
for other team members. But this ultimately proved
to be a significant underinvestment. The part-time
team members lost the sense of commitment and
excitement they had possessed as pure volunteers,
while not being compensated to a degree sufficient to
capture their full attention and energy. In addition, the
team did not invest in staff dedicated to fundraising or
business development. They had assumed that once
the initial partnerships were forged, users would find
StoriesFrom, use the platform and organically raise the
visibility of the platform. As it happened, without a full-time
staff member dedicated to business development
and partnership management, momentum behind the
project quickly slowed. The initial enthusiasm that users
and partners expressed for the project faded as well,
and without the investment in full-time staff to carry the
work forward, the project faltered.
It is entirely
conceivable that
the winner might
bear the cost of
developing open
source code,
without receiving
an equivalent
or offsetting
benefit, which
might accrue to
someone else
entirely.

Recognize the benefits and challenges of
open source code.
The requirement that News Challenge winners use open source
code and publicly release any code they create has definite
advantages. It encourages iteration and improvement, and it can
magnify the impact of the winners’ work. DocumentCloud—
which first won the News Challenge in 2009—produced
Backbone.js, an open source JavaScript library that has since
become a fundamental and widely used component for building
Web-based applications, and in the words of one key observer,
has proven “sufficient to justify the entire cost of the News
Challenge.” But the open source requirement is not an absolute
good, especially for News Challenge projects that include the
scaling of an existing product or tool and that already have an
established method for code development and dissemination.
Front Porch Forum, a 2010 winner, represented such a case, with
the project team reporting that the open source requirement
was a drain on valuable time and resources, and that it provided
little—if any—value to the project.
It is also important to consider where the benefits of open source
accrue. In some cases, the News Challenge winners themselves
benefit from using and sharing open source code. In other cases,
it is the wider community of developers that benefits most. It
is entirely conceivable that the winner might bear the cost of
developing open source code, without receiving an equivalent or
offsetting benefit, which might accrue to someone else entirely.
It is important to consider such implications on a winner-by-winner
basis, and to be flexible with grant terms and conditions
to create an arrangement that will be most supportive of
innovators’ efforts. The open source requirement could also be
improved and implemented in a way that grants more flexibility
in the types of open source licenses that winners can use.

2011 KNC Winner Profiles
Awesome Foundation 24
DocumentCloud 25
Frontline SMS 28
iWitness 31
NextDrop 33
Open Block Rural 36
Overview 38
Panda 41
Poderopedia 43
The Public Laboratory 46
ScraperWiki 49
Spending Stories 52
StoriesFrom 55
Swift River 58
The State Decoded 60

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
1
Awesome Foundation News Taskforce
PROJECT GRANTEE INNOVATION GRANT
Awesome
The
Institute
on
A
vehicle
for
issuing
micro-‐grants
to
support
Foundation
Higher
Awesome
innovative
local
journalism
and
civic
media
News
Studies,
Inc.
projects
Taskforce
$244,000
The
Awesome
Foundation
establishes
autonomous
chapters
of
trustees
in
cities
around
the
world
that
distribute
monthly
micro-‐
grants
to
compelling
projects
in
their
communities.
The
foundation
received
Knight
News
Challenge
funding
to
apply
its
model
for
community-‐based
financing
to
the
field
of
journalism
and
to
open
chapters
with
an
exclusive
focus
on
local
news
projects.
THE INNOVATION
Each
chapter
of
the
Awesome
Foundation
awards
one
$1,000
micro-‐grant
per
month
to
an
exciting
local
project
or
organization.
Chapter
trustees
are
given
full
autonomy
over
grant-‐
making
decisions,
a
structure
which
empowers
them
to
use
their
local
expertise
to
determine
which
projects
would
be
most
useful
for
their
communities.
The
small
scale
of
each
grant
also
encourages
effective
and
efficient
projects
that
might
be
otherwise
overlooked
by
larger
foundations
that
typically
give
out
larger
grants.
The
Awesome
Foundation
has
started
two
chapters
dedicated
to
journalism
innovation
so
far,
in
Detroit
and
New
Orleans.
Early
micro-‐
grants
have
been
awarded
to
a
wide
range
of
media
projects,
including
photo
documentaries,
print
shops,
and
city
guides.
Ultimately,
the
Awesome
Foundation
aims
to
foster
local
news
communities
by
scaling
its
News
Taskforce
model
to
more
cities
around
the
United
States.
IMPLEMENTATION
The
first
News
Taskforce
chapter
was
established
in
Detroit
in
January
2012
and
awarded
its
first
grant
in
March
2012
to
the
Detroit
Journal,
for
a
short
film
series
featuring
everyday
Detroit
citizens.
Because
the
Awesome
Foundation
is
headquartered
in
Massachusetts,
a
Detroit-‐based
staffer
(referred
to
as
“the
Dean
of
Awesome”)
was
hired
to
oversee
trustee
recruitment
and
manage
the
logistical
aspects
of
building
a
chapter
from
scratch.
With
only
one
journalist
on
the
inaugural
trustee
team,
the
Detroit
News
Taskforce
spent
much
of
its
first
six
months
consulting
with
area
journalists
to
set
parameters
around
what
would
qualify
as
a
journalism-‐related
project
for
the
purposes
of
their
grant
making.
Ultimately,
the
trustees
opted
to
broaden
the
scope
of
grant-‐eligible
projects
beyond
newspaper-‐
and
magazine-‐
centric
proposals
to
include
any
project
focused

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
2
on
providing
information
to
the
Detroit
community.
Nevertheless,
building
relationships
with
local
media
organizations
proved
more
challenging
than
originally
anticipated.
The
recruitment
of
Detroit
News
Taskforce
trustees
represented
a
change
from
how
earlier
Awesome
Foundation
chapters
had
been
founded.
Typically,
Awesome
Foundation
chapters
form
organically,
when
community
members
come
together
around
a
common
idea
or
interest.
In
creating
the
Detroit
News
Taskforce,
the
Awesome
Foundation
team
adopted
a
more
top-‐down
approach,
actively
recruiting
people
willing
to
serve
as
trustees
for
a
chapter
with
a
predetermined
topic
focus.
As
a
result,
trustee
engagement
and
retention
has
been
a
particular
challenge
for
the
Detroit
News
Taskforce,
with
some
trustees
who
were
less
engaged
from
the
start
leaving
the
organization
once
they
realized
how
much
effort
they
would
need
to
put
in
to
sustain
the
organization.
The
funding
structure
of
the
Detroit
News
Taskforce
may
have
also
contributed
to
that
chapter’s
difficulty
with
retaining
trustees.
At
other
Awesome
Foundation
chapters,
trustees
pay
$100
per
month
to
participate,
and
those
trustee
contributions
make
up
the
source
of
all
micro-‐grant
funds.
However,
the
Awesome
Foundation
has
used
some
of
its
Knight
News
Challenge
funding
to
cover
the
full
amount
of
the
Detroit
News
Taskforce’s
-‐-‐grants,
so
trustees
aren’t
required
to
make
any
contributions
themselves.
Although
this
strategy
has
removed
financial
barriers
to
trustee
recruitment,
it
has
also
had
the
unintended
effect
of
producing
trustees
who
have
been
less
invested
in
the
organization
over
the
long
run.
The
Awesome
Foundation
is
currently
exploring
new
fundraising
methods
to
ensure
the
long-‐term
financial
sustainability
of
its
Detroit
News
Taskforce.
One
such
method
is
the
“Awesome
Tax,”
a
form
of
crowd-‐funded
investment
in
which
the
News
Taskforce
solicits
contributions
from
non-‐trustee
community
members
on
a
recurring
monthly
basis.
Another
challenge
that
the
Awesome
Foundation
encountered
was
the
degree
of
hands-‐on
support
and
engagement
that
the
News
Taskforce
required.
Typically,
the
Awesome
Foundation
applies
a
very
decentralized
model
to
its
local
chapters,
with
little
direct
engagement
in
local
operations
or
funding
decisions
by
the
core
Awesome
Foundation
team.
But
the
News
Taskforce
in
Detroit
required
a
greater
degree
of
support
from
the
core
Awesome
Foundation
team
than
they
had
anticipated.
The
chapter
struggled
with
how
to
reconcile
the
foundation’s
typical
boundary-‐less
model
with
the
specific
issue-‐
area
focus
of
the
News
Taskforce.
As
a
result,
the
Awesome
Foundation
had
to
invest
more
time
in
providing
hands-‐on
support
and
clearer
operating
parameters
for
the
News
Taskforce.
In
January
2013,
the
Awesome
Foundation
created
a
second
media-‐focused
chapter
in
New
Orleans.
The
foundation
applied
many
of
the
lessons
learned
during
the
Detroit
News
Taskforce’s
challenging
first
year
to
build
a
more
optimal
chapter
structure
from
the
outset.
New
Orleans
chapter
trustees
contribute
to
the
organization
on
a
sliding
scale,
paying
anywhere
from
$5
per
month
to
$100
per
month
depending
on
financial
ability.
This
trustee
funding
model
has
the
benefit
of
nurturing
ownership
and
responsibility
among
trustees
while
not
limiting
participation
from
less
affluent
members.
In
addition,
in
an
effort
to
increase
trustee
retention
and
engagement,
the
New
Orleans
chapter
funds
civic
media
projects
only
eight
months
out
of
the
year,
leaving
four
months
per
year
for
trustees
to
award
grants
to
projects
that
align
with
their
personal
passions
but
fall
outside
the
realm
of
civic
media.
By
allowing
trustees
to
fund
projects
of
personal
interest
for
a
portion
of
the
year,
their
commitment
to
finding
and
funding
civic
media
projects
for
the
remainder
of
the
year
will
be
deepened
and
strengthened.
REACH AND OUTCOMES
Despite
its
trustee
engagement
challenges,
the
Awesome
Foundation
has
succeeded
in
establishing
two
active
media-‐focused
chapters
with
strong
early
patterns
of
grant
making.
Since
its
2012
launch
the
Detroit
News

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
3
Taskforce
has
awarded
$24,000
in
funding
to
24
Detroit-‐area
media
projects.
The
Awesome
New
Orleans
chapter
has
awarded
$9,000
to
nine
projects
since
its
first
grant
in
April
2013,
six
of
which
have
had
a
significant
media
element.
Examples
of
funded
projects
include
an
initiative
to
raise
awareness
about
the
importance
of
voting
in
local
elections,
a
newspaper
supplement
written
by
children
and
young
adults,
and
a
literacy
and
arts
festival.
The
Detroit
and
New
Orleans
grant
recipients
have
thus
far
met
with
mixed
success.
Some
have
won
funding
from
other,
larger
foundations.
Other
project
creators
have
had
compelling
ideas,
but
have
ultimately
lacked
the
necessary
resources
to
scale
their
projects
beyond
the
local
level.
Finding
projects
to
support
that
are
both
relevant
to
a
local
community
and
have
the
business
capacity
to
expand
regionally
or
nationally
has
proved
more
difficult
than
the
Awesome
Foundation
team
initially
anticipated.
The
Awesome
Foundation
team,
however,
has
discovered
that
$1,000
awards
have
benefitted
winners
beyond
the
value
of
modest
grant
amount
itself.
The
Awesome
Foundation
model
has
shown
promise
as
a
method
of
identifying
innovators
who
are
likely
to
do
good
work
in
the
future,
regardless
of
whether
their
winning
project
succeeds
or
fails.
As
its
winner
list
grows,
the
foundation
has
also
made
a
greater
effort
to
connect
winners
with
one
another,
and
in
some
cases,
this
has
resulted
in
winners
sharing
resources
and
offering
mutual
support.
In
2014,
the
Awesome
Foundation’s
main
goal
for
the
News
Taskforces
is
to
sustain
the
Detroit
and
New
Orleans
chapters
without
grant
funding
with
a
combination
of
trustee
contributions
and
local
business
sponsorship.
The
Awesome
Foundation
team
also
intends
to
be
more
deliberate
about
facilitating
relationships
between
particularly
promising
winners
and
larger
funders
like
the
Knight
Foundation.

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
1
DocumentCloud Reader Annotations
Document
Cloud
Investigative
Reporters
and
Editors
(IRE)
A
new
DocumentCloud
feature
designed
to
engage
readers
by
allowing
them
to
add
notes
and
comments
to
original
source
documents
$320,000
DocumentCloud
won
a
Knight
News
Challenge
grant
in
2009
to
build
a
tool
that
helps
journalists
analyze,
annotate,
and
publish
original
source
documents.
The
project
has
experienced
a
great
deal
of
success:
it
continues
to
gain
adoption
in
newsrooms
and
grow.
DocumentCloud
was
also
instrumental
in
the
development
of
Backbone.js,
which
is
one
of
the
most
important
Javascript
libraries
used
in
web
development
today.
In
2011,
DocumentCloud
again
won
the
News
Challenge,
this
time
to
incorporate
the
ability
to
add
reader
annotations
to
source
documents—a
new
feature
that
would
allow
newsrooms
to
invite
the
public
to
annotate
and
comment
on
source
documents.
THE INNOVATION
DocumentCloud
is
an
open
source,
web-‐based
platform
that
helps
journalists
analyze,
annotate,
and
publish
original
source
documents.
To
date,
almost
1,100
organizations
use
DocumentCloud
to
store
and
share
source
documents
with
readers.
Journalists
can
already
annotate
documents
using
the
tool,
and
many
users
have
requested
a
similar
feature
that
would
allow
them
to
add
notes
and
comments
to
documents
as
well.
Adding
a
reader
annotations
feature
would
allow
DocumentCloud
to
be
used
not
only
to
link
stories
to
raw
documents,
but
also
to
crowdsource
document
annotation,
allowing
journalists
to
review
massive
amounts
of
documents
faster
with
help
from
the
public.
The
feature
will
help
journalists
involve
their
readers
in
the
process
of
reporting
and
analyzing
news
events
and
will
improve
DocumentCloud
as
a
tool
and
resource
for
investigative
reporting.
IMPLEMENTATION
DocumentCloud
began
through
collaboration
between
journalists
at
The
New
York
Times
and
ProPublica.
Following
the
announcement
of
their
second
News
Challenge
award,
the
project
changed
hands
when
DocumentCloud
was
acquired
by
Investigative
Reporters
and
Editors
(IRE),
a
nonprofit
membership
organization
based
at
the
University
of
Missouri.
As
of
early
2014,
DocumentCloud
has
yet
to
deploy
its
public-‐facing
reader
annotations
feature.
It
is
still
in
the
process
of
developing
and
beta
testing
the
feature
with
several
newsrooms.
Several
factors
delayed
its
release,
the
most
notable
of
which
was
the
challenge
of
trying
to
accomplish
three
discrete
tasks
at
the
same
time:
maintaining
the
platform
at
its
current
level
of
functionality,
managing
growth
of
the
user
base,
and
adding
new
features
and
functionality.
DocumentCloud
struggled
with
whether
to
allow
readers
to
comment
anonymously
and
with
determining
the
best
way
to
integrate
reader
comments
into
news
organizations’
content
management
systems.
Like
many
commenting
features,
it
decided
to
link
readers’
comments
to
their
social
media
accounts
(Facebook
and
Twitter)
so
they
could
not
remain
anonymous.
The
project
team
created
a
test
version
of
the
annotations
tool
early
in
its
two-‐year
grant
period
and
used
journalists’
feedback
to
help
shape
further
development.
User
feedback
pointed
out
additional
improvements
and
modifications
needed
to
improve
the
functionality
of
both
the
public
annotation
tool
and
other
elements
of
DocumentCloud.
Feedback
indicated
that
the
team
needed
to
rebuild
its
document
viewer
so
that
public
annotations
could
be
stacked
in
a

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
2
legible
and
uncluttered
way,
and
that
the
project
team
needed
to
improve
DocumentCloud’s
mobile
version
to
allow
for
easier
viewing
of
reader
comments.
Meanwhile,
DocumentCloud’s
rapid
growth
placed
additional
demands
on
its
technical
system
and
on
the
capacity
of
its
project
team
at
IRE.
With
more
users
came
technical
challenges
of
needing
to
improve
the
platform’s
speed
and
its
capacity
to
hold
larger,
more
complex
document
sets.
DocumentCloud
will
be
working
on
its
sustainability
planning
with
help
from
outside
consultants
throughout
2014
and
is
considering
various
models
for
generating
revenue
into
the
future.
As
of
March
2014,
it
was
still
in
the
process
of
beta
testing
the
reader
annotations
with
partnering
journalists
and
planned
to
release
the
feature
later
in
2014.
Once
released,
IRE’s
executive
director,
Mark
Horvit,
believes
reader
comments
ideally
will
be
project
specific,
and
used
in
cases
where
news
organizations
would
gather
facts/analysis
from
readers
or
the
readers’
opinions.
For
example,
a
newsroom
may
use
the
tool
to
allow
readers
to
comment
on
the
collection
of
Sarah
Palin’s
leaked
emails,
or
to
allow
readers
to
flag
items
within
public
expenditure
data.
REACH AND OUTCOMES
DocumentCloud
underestimated
the
challenge
of
managing
rapid
growth
while
adding
the
functionality
for
reader
annotations.
As
a
result,
it
experienced
major
delays
in
launching
a
public-‐facing
version
of
the
feature.
The
project
team
believes
the
development
and
testing
process
has
been
beneficial
overall
as
it
helped
to
identify
several
modifications
needed
to
improve
the
tool
as
a
whole.
DocumentCloud
still
plans
to
release
a
new
version
of
its
platform,
complete
with
the
reader
annotations
feature,
in
early-‐
to
mid-‐2014.
The
distinction
between
DocumentCloud
as
a
project
and
the
team’s
effort
to
develop
a
reader
annotations
feature
is
important
to
keep
in
mind.
The
reader
annotations
feature
is
behind
schedule
and
has
not
yet
met
expectations.
But
the
same
cannot
be
said
for
DocumentCloud
as
an
overall
platform.
DocumentCloud
is
poised
to
become
a
standard
tool
for
newsrooms
around
the
world.
By
March
2014,
DocumentCloud
hosted
more
than
990,000
documents,
comprising
almost
13.5
million
pages,
for
more
than
1,000
organizations.
The
project’s
website
routinely
receives
over
a
million
document
views
per
week,
with
peaks
of
more
than
a
million
per
day.
With
support
from
the
Open
Society
Foundation,
DocumentCloud
is
looking
to
scale
globally,
and
is
modifying
the
platform
to
work
with
additional
languages.

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
3
Even
with
its
success,
planning
for
long-‐term
sustainability
is
a
key
challenge
for
DocumentCloud.
The
project
received
a
separate
grant
to
fund
its
strategic
planning
work
with
a
group
of
outside
consultants.
Planning
is
still
underway,
and
the
team
is
considering
options
for
generating
revenue
which
might
include
the
creation
of
paid
add-‐on
features
or
the
creation
of
a
paid
platform
targeted
toward
other
industries.

FrontlineSMS
FrontlineSMS Social
Impact
Lab
(formerly
The
Kiwanja
Foundation)
A
platform
that
enables
journalists
to
more
effectively
use
text
messaging
to
inform
and
engage
rural
communities
$250,000
Mobile
phones
are
increasingly
common
even
in
developing
countries
with
low
literacy
rates
and
large
rural
populations.
SMS
and
MMS
messaging
(text
messaging)
are
similarly
popular
and
are
among
the
most
effective
ways
to
quickly
reach
large
numbers
of
people
in
many
communities.
Although
many
tools
for
communicating
with
people
via
mobile
phones
exist,
few
SMS
management
systems
are
designed
specifically
for
journalists
and
news
organizations.
FrontlineSMS
was
awarded
News
Challenge
funding
in
2011
to
expand
and
improve
its
existing
platform,
which
enables
users
in
developing
and
rural
areas
to
organize
interactions
with
large
numbers
of
people
via
SMS,
and
to
tailor
this
platform
to
the
needs
of
journalists
and
news
organizations
around
the
world.
THE INNOVATION
Introduced
in
2005,
FrontlineSMS
is
an
open
source
platform
that
enables
users
in
areas
with
poor
communications
infrastructures
to
disseminate
and
exchange
information
with
large
numbers
of
people
over
cell
phone
networks
without
the
need
for
the
internet.
The
first
version
of
FrontlineSMS
was
a
free
desktop
application
that
allowed
users
to
reach
large
groups
via
text
messages,
using
just
a
laptop
and
a
mobile
phone.
FrontlineSMS
was
awarded
News
Challenge
funding
to
further
develop
its
software
for
use
by
journalists
and
to
work
with
community
news
organizations
and
radio
stations
to
more
effectively
use
text
messaging
to
inform
and
engage
rural
communities.
The
project
later
developed
FrontlineCloud,
a
similar,
web-‐hosted
platform
that
allows
users
to
log
in
wherever
they
have
internet
access
and
to
run
projects
remotely.
IMPLEMENTATION
At
the
outset
of
its
News
Challenge
grant,
the
FrontlineSMS
team
intended
to
expand
its
original
application
and
release
a
specific
plug-‐
in
for
use
by
journalists
and
community
news
organizations.
The
team
hired
Trevor
Knoblich
as
its
media
project
director
and
revised
its
original
plans
to
include
a
research
and
consultation
phase
to
gather
feedback
on
the
needs
of
rural
media
outlets
and
organizations
already
familiar
with
FrontlineSMS.
After
surveys
and
extensive
interviews
with
members
of
media
outlets
from
around
the
world,
FrontlineSMS
found
that
news
organizations
hoped
to
use
the
tool
in
three
ways:
• To
disseminate
news
headlines,
tips,
or
follow-‐ups
to
long-‐form
pieces
to
large
subscription
lists
• To
coordinate
staff,
freelancers,
photographers,
and
citizen
journalists
• To
solicit
requests
for
information
via
a
dedicated
phone
line
(“Text
us
if
you
see
harassment
in
your
neighborhood,”
for
example)
FrontlineSMS
released
the
second
version
of
its
original
modem-‐based
platform
in
June
2012
using
its
News
Challenge
funding.
Within
the
first
fourteen
months
of
its
release,
version
two
of
FrontlineSMS
was
downloaded
more
than
150,000
times.
The
original
FrontlineSMS
tool
used
a
modem
that
allowed
a
user
to
send
only
eight
messages
per
minute.
In
speaking
with
journalists
and
other
potential
users
about
their

FrontlineSMS Users
15000
12000
9000
6000
3000
The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
1
needs,
however,
the
FrontlineSMS
team
realized
that
media
outlets
preferred
an
online
mechanism
for
managing
their
mobile
communications.
News
organizations
also
needed
a
tool
that
would
allow
them
to
send
urgent
news
alerts
to
a
larger
audience
more
quickly.
In
response,
the
team
began
developing
FrontlineCloud,
the
web-‐based
version
of
FrontlineSMS.
Unlike
FrontlineSMS,
FrontlineCloud
requires
internet
access.
But
it
provides
news
organizations
and
journalists
with
a
more
flexible
option
for
disseminating
news
headlines
and
information.
In
early
2014,
FrontlineCloud
was
still
in
the
beta
testing
phase.
The
team
was
also
working
to
build
an
interoperable
product
set
that
would
allow
users
to
smoothly
transition
between
online
use
with
FrontlineCloud
and
offline
use
with
FrontlineSMS.
FrontlineSMS
continues
to
offer
a
range
of
premium
user
support
and
paid-‐for
consulting
services
to
provide
an
additional
revenue
stream
to
support
its
work.
These
services
include
mobile
integration
and
program
design
assistance,
staff
training,
software
customization,
dedicated
technical
support,
and
evaluation
support.
REACH AND OUTCOMES
As
of
January
2014,
the
second
version
of
FrontlineSMS
had
been
downloaded
more
than
177,850
times—more
than
seven
times
the
number
of
downloads
of
version
one.
FrontlineSMS’s
downloads
continue
to
grow
at
a
steady
pace,
with
an
average
of
about
730
monthly
downloads
by
journalists
and
others
in
the
media.
An
estimated
14,500
journalists
are
using
FrontlineSMS
in
76
countries
across
the
world,
including
Eastern,
Central,
and
sub-‐
Saharan
Africa;
Southeast
Asia;
Pakistan;
Indonesia;
the
United
States;
and
the
Philippines.
News
organizations
using
the
tool
include
rural
radio
stations
in
Uganda
and
Kenya;
larger
media
outlets
like
the
Kenya
Star;
and
multinational
news
outlets
such
as
the
BBC,
The
Guardian,
and
Al
Jazeera.
In
Indonesia,
rural
farmers,
journalists
from
Internews,
and
environmental
advocates
are
using
FrontlineSMS
to
report,
connect,
and
raise
awareness
of
palm
oil
corporations’
destructive
environmental
practices.
After
one
story
by
Ruai
TV,
the
local
palm
oil
company
agreed
to
repair
a
road
that
had
long
been
a
source
of
contention
with
the
community.
Although
the
focus
of
FrontlineSMS’s
News
Challenge
grant
was
to
release
a
plug-‐in
specifically
tailored
for
journalists
and
community
news
organizations,
the
tool
is
actually
used
by
both
news
organizations
and
the
nonprofit
community.
Organizations
working
to
combat
malaria
have
used
FrontlineSMS
to
connect
people
to
health
services
in
the
Democratic
Republic
of
the
Congo.
In
December
2013,
the
project
received
a
$1.5
million
Google
Impact
Award
for
a
three-‐
year
partnership
with
the
nonprofit
Landesa
to
help
secure
land
rights
for
over
80,000
families
0
Esgmated
Increase
Media
Users
(Aggregate)
Linear
(Esgmated
Increase
Media
Users
(Aggregate))
Trend
line
(Aggregate
Media
Users)
Aggregate
Number
of
Media
Users

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
2
in
Odisha,
India.
FrontlineSMS
also
received
awards
from
the
Hewlett
Foundation
and
the
United
Nations
Democracy
Fund
to
train
civil
society
groups
and
governments
in
ways
to
use
SMS
to
create
more
efficient
service
delivery
mechanisms
around
the
world.
Looking
ahead,
the
project
team
plans
to
add
a
missed-‐calls
feature
that
provides
users
with
a
free
and
easy
way
to
call
organizations
through
their
FrontlineCloud
and
FrontlineSMS
accounts. The
team
continues
to
work
on
building
an
interoperable
product
set
to
allow
for
smooth
transitions
between
FrontlineCloud
and
FrontlineSMS.
And
through
the
course
of
2015,
Social
Impact
Lab
plans
to
support
Frontline
SMS
in
the
process
of
forming
its
own
independent
organization,
in
the
hope
of
attracting
even
greater
investment
in
the
platform.

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
1
iWitness
iWitness Adaptive
Path
A
web-‐based
tool
for
aggregating
and
cross-‐
referencing
news
events
with
user-‐generated
content
$360,000
For
media
outlets
looking
to
supplement
professional
news
coverage
with
citizen-‐
generated
content,
finding
relevant
content
can
be
a
challenging
task.
Keyword
searches
and
hashtags
fail
to
differentiate
between
first-‐
person
accounts
of
a
news
event
and
secondhand
observations.
Some
news
organizations
have
built
custom
systems
to
collect
crowdsourced
media,
but
these
tend
to
be
cumbersome
and
resource
intensive,
resulting
in
little
actual
use.
User
experience
firm
Adaptive
Path
won
News
Challenge
funding
in
2011
to
bridge
the
gap
between
traditional
and
citizen
media
through
iWitness,
a
web-‐
based
tool
that
aggregates
user-‐generated
content
from
social
media
during
big
news
events.
THE INNOVATION
iWitness
combined
time
indexing
and
geolocation
technologies
to
allow
users
to
search
for
citizen-‐generated
content
by
both
time
and
place.
A
date-‐time
selector
let
the
user
search
for
events
by
hour
and
minute,
and
a
map
location
box
let
users
enter
either
a
general
city
or
a
specific
street
address.
When
a
major
news
event
occurred
(such
as
Hurricane
Sandy
hitting
the
East
Coast
in
October
2012),
iWitness
could
show
users
Flickr
photos
and
Twitter
messages
posted
from
people
at
the
scene,
all
aggregated
into
a
single,
easy-‐to-‐
browse
interface.
Although
an
increasing
number
of
services
allow
their
content
to
be
geotagged
in
this
way,
iWitness
was
unique
in
focusing
on
organizing
data
about
news
events.
By
showing
the
same
scene
from
multiple
social
media
vantage
points,
iWitness
aimed
to
provide
a
new
way
for
people
to
explore
and
experience
the
news.
Its
ultimate
goal
was
to
make
it
easier
for
journalists
to
find
and
analyze
meaningful
citizen
content
about
world
events.
IMPLEMENTATION
Adaptive
Path
is
primarily
a
design
consultancy.
Identifying
a
need
for
a
different
kind
of
expertise
to
develop
iWitness,
it
partnered
with
New
Context,
a
software
development
company,
to
carry
out
the
technical
work
of
building
the
iWitness
tool.
New
Context
developers
recognized
that
in
order
for
iWitness
to
be
used
by
newsrooms,
it
needed
to
be
something
that
non-‐tech-‐savvy
journalists
could
easily
manage.
Additionally,
staffing
and
funding
constraints
meant
that
once
iWitness
was
released,
opportunities
to
perform
ongoing
maintenance
of
a
server-‐based
tool
would
be
limited.
For
these
reasons,
iWitness
was
built
as
an
entirely
browser-‐based
application.
The
initial
development
process
for
iWitness
was
fairly
smooth.
The
project
timeline
was
extended
four
weeks
beyond
what
had
originally
been
planned—two
weeks
were
dedicated
to
final
technical
iterations
refining
the
finished
product,
and
two
more
weeks
were
spent
on
marketing
and
promotion
activities.
The
team
worked
with
newsrooms
at
The

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
2
Washington
Post,
The
Wall
Street
Journal,
The
Seattle
Times,
The
Palm
Beach
Post,
and
the
Sacramento
Press
to
beta
test
the
application.
iWitness
was
released
to
the
general
public
on
June
12,
2012.
A
promotional
video
about
the
tool
posted
on
Adaptive
Path’s
blog
at
that
time
received
around
5,000
views.
The
visual
design
of
the
application
didn’t
lend
itself
to
a
mobile
display,
but
it
was
supported
on
Google
Chrome
and
Safari,
and
it
was
viewable
on
mobile
devices
such
as
the
iPad.
Unfortunately,
iWitness
hit
a
critical
roadblock
when
Twitter
changed
its
API
in
June
2013.
The
new
version
permitted
only
authenticated
Twitter
users
to
take
advantage
of
the
Twitter
API;
prior
to
that,
using
the
Twitter
API
wasn’t
dependent
on
a
user
signing
in.
As
a
result,
the
mechanism
by
which
iWitness
retrieved
information
from
Twitter
was
essentially
blocked.
In
its
News
Challenge
application,
the
iWitness
team
acknowledged
the
risks
that
potential
changes
to
the
Twitter
or
Flickr
APIs
might
represent,
as
well
as
the
tool’s
vulnerability
to
such
changes.
Unfortunately,
when
Twitter
changed
its
API,
the
iWitness
team
lacked
the
funding
to
execute
the
extensive
technical
retooling
of
the
application
needed
to
restore
full
functionality.
Such
retooling
would
have
involved
reengineering
the
product
to
support
a
server-‐based
solution
with
ongoing
maintenance
and
production
demands.
Consequently,
the
team
decided
not
to
overhaul
its
software
to
account
for
Twitter’s
new
API.
As
of
March
2014,
the
iWitness
tool
has
been
fully
disabled,
and
iwitness.adaptivepath.com
returns
a
user
to
Adaptive
Path’s
website.
REACH AND OUTCOMES
Before
the
change
in
the
Twitter
API
undermined
the
tool’s
technical
underpinnings,
iWitness
was
gaining
notable
traction.
Within
the
first
11
months
after
its
launch,
the
site
received
approximately
18,000
visits
from
13,000
unique
users.
The
professional
organization
Investigative
Reporters
and
Editors
reported
that
several
of
their
members
used
iWitness
to
support
their
coverage
of
events
such
as
the
2012
Newtown
shootings
and
the
2013
Boston
Marathon
bombings.
Currently,
iWitness
is
non-‐operational,
and
team
members
have
no
plans
to
return
to
update
the
project.

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
1
NextDrop
NextDrop NextDrop
An
interactive
voice
response-‐
and
text
message-‐
based
service
that
notifies
residents
of
Hubli-‐
Dharwad,
India
when
their
water
is
available
$375,000
One
million
residents
of
Hubli-‐Dharwad,
India,
have
water
piped
to
their
homes.
Water
is
only
available
through
those
pipes
for
a
few
hours
each
week,
however,
and
some
residents
must
wait
up
to
eight
days
between
water
deliveries.
Each
of
India’s
major
cities
faces
similar
water
scarcity,
affecting
more
than
100
million
people.
Project
lead
Anu
Sridharan
and
her
team
created
NextDrop
to
provide
an
immediate,
accurate
way
for
residents
to
know
when
water
will
be
available.
Leveraging
the
widespread
adoption
of
mobile
phones
in
India,
NextDrop
notifies
residents
when
water
will
be
available
in
their
communities.
THE INNOVATION
NextDrop
is
a
platform
that
uses
SMS
messaging
and
interactive
voice
response
(IVR)
technology
to
notify
residents
of
Hubli-‐
Dharward,
India
just
before
their
water
becomes
available.
Prior
to
this
service,
residents
were
forced
to
waste
hours
each
day
waiting
for
water
as
printed
newspaper
notifications
about
water
deliveries
were
often
too
outdated
and
inaccurate
to
be
useful.
NextDrop
partners
with
the
valve
men
who
control
a
community’s
infrequent
flow
of
water
and
trains
them
to
use
the
mobile-‐based
platform
to
notify
neighborhood
residents
via
SMS
when
the
water
is
turned
on.
NextDrop
asks
residents
to
respond,
confirming
that
the
water
has
arrived.
The
project
received
News
Challenge
funding
to
launch
NextDrop’s
work
in
Hubli
and
to
develop
the
platform
so
that
it
might
be
customized
and
implemented
elsewhere
as
a
way
of
distributing
other
types
of
real-‐time
community
information.
IMPLEMENTATION
NextDrop
launched
in
September
2011.
It
faced
its
first
significant
challenge
when
the
Indian
government
passed
regulations
that
same
month
restricting
companies
from
sending
bulk
messages
for
commercial
purposes
between
the
hours
of
9:00
p.m.
and
9:00
a.m.
The
project
team
faced
a
decision:
either
stop
sending
SMS
messages
between
9:00
p.m.
and
9:00
a.m.,
or
gain
an
exemption
from
government
authorities
that
would
categorize
NextDrop’s
messages
as
“transactional,”
rather
than
“commercial.”
Typically,
navigating
the
necessary
bureaucratic
hurdles
to
accomplish
this
would
have
taken
months.
NextDrop,
however,
had
developed
close
partnerships
with
its
SMS
provider
Netcore
and
the
Hubli-‐
Dharwad
water
utility.
Together
with
these
partners,
NextDrop
discovered
that
the
new
regulations
did
not
apply
to
SMS
messages
sent
by
government
agencies.
And
because
the
actual
senders
of
NextDrop
SMS
messages
were
valve
men
employed
by
the
Central
Water
Commission,
this
exemption
could
apply
to
NextDrop.
Working
with
Netcore
and
its
partners
at
the
water
authority,
the
team
gained
this
exemption
and
returned
to
service
after
being
shut
down
for
only
12
days.
The
project’s
success
was
similarly
threatened
by
a
sharp
increase
in
SMS
prices.
The
cost
of
sending
a
single
text
message
increased
five
times
in
NextDrop’s
first
few
years
of
operation,
forcing
the
team
to
rethink
its
business
model
and
find
ways
of
cutting
extra
costs.
NextDrop
decided
to
halve
its
text
messaging
by
sending
only
one
message
to
users
an
hour
before
their
water
became
available.

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
2
Despite
these
challenges,
NextDrop
was
able
to
continue
building
upon
its
work
in
Hubli.
One
of
the
team’s
key
discoveries
was
that
many
customers
preferred
to
use
IVR
technology
as
opposed
to
SMS
messages.
Although
many
of
NextDrop’s
customers
could
read
SMS
messages,
many
lacked
the
literacy
skills
to
write
an
SMS
to
confirm
the
arrival
of
their
water.
More
users
were
willing
to
pay
for
NextDrop’s
IVR
notifications
than
expected,
and
the
project’s
response
rate
among
residents
rose
from
10
percent
to
30
percent
after
introducing
a
“missed
call”
option.
Through
an
external
impact
analysis,
the
project
team
also
found
that
it
was
having
the
greatest
impact
on
those
who
could
not
afford
to
pay
others
to
collect
their
water
while
they
themselves
were
away
at
work.
As
a
result,
NextDrop
pivoted
toward
marketing
to
the
working
poor
(and
expanding
its
services
to
Bangalore,
to
better
target
this
group)
and
moved
to
a
freemium
model,
no
longer
charging
customers
for
its
most
basic
SMS
water
notification
services.
By
early
2014,
NextDrop
has
proven
the
value
of
its
service,
and
it
is
in
the
process
of
strengthening
its
team’s
capacity
to
build
relationships
with
government
officials
and
to
brand
and
market
the
platform
more
widely.
It
is
also
in
the
process
of
becoming
a
paid,
two-‐
way
platform
for
citizen-‐government
communications.
The
project
is
working
with
Karnataka
Water
Supply
and
Sewage
Board
and
the
Bangalore
Water
Supply
and
Sewage
Board
to
pilot
the
use
of
NextDrop
in
collecting
feedback
and
reports
of
pipe
damage
and
outages
from
NextDrop’s
users.
Although
the
project
team
is
still
early
in
the
process
of
developing
these
services
for
utility
companies,
NextDrop
believes
its
platform
will
prove
replicable
for
other
government
services,
and
it
is
pursuing
long-‐term
contracts
with
water
utilities
as
an
ongoing
source
of
revenue.
The
project
team
is
also
early
in
the
process
of
exploring
the
possibility
of
marketing
the
NextDrop
platform
for
politicians,
who
could
use
it
to
communicate
with,
and
gain
feedback
from,
their
constituents.
REACH AND OUTCOMES
NextDrop
aimed
to
be
in
use
by
at
least
half
of
Hubli’s
households—around
33,000—by
the
end
of
its
two-‐year
New
Challenge
award.
It
did
not
meet
that
target,
but
it
has
nonetheless
shown
strong
signs
of
growth.
By
March
2014,
about
17,300
households
in
Hubli
had
registered
with
the
service.
Since
transitioning
to
a
“freemium”
model,
the
project
expects
to
reach
its
target
within
in
the
near
future.
The
Karnataka
Water
Supply
and
Sewage
Board
and
Bangalore
Water
Supply
and
Sewage
Board
have
both
purchased
the
platform’s
utility
services,
and
NextDrop
is
in
talks
with
the
Hubli-‐
Dharwad
Municipal
Corporation
about
eventually
scaling
water
alerts
service
to
every
Hubli
household.
Other
cities’
commissioners
have
also
approached
the
project
team,
expressing
an
interest
in
replicating
the
NextDrop
model
for
other
government
services
such
as
power
and
sanitation.
Despite
encountering
various
technical
difficulties
which
resulted
in
instances
of
late
and
intermittent
water
notifications,
NextDrop
has
largely
been
successful
in
providing
reliable
notifications
for
water
delivery.
Its
external
impact
assessment
showed
that
when
used
correctly,
NextDrop
allowed
users
to
avoid
contaminated
groundwater,
assisted
them
with
rationing
and
water
planning,
and
provided
them
with
additional
free
time
and
relatively
greater
water
security.
In
addition
to
providing
water
notifications,
NextDrop’s
utility
services
stand
poised
to
improve
communication
between
citizens
and
the
Indian
government,
and
ultimately
improve
Hubli’s
infrastructure
for
water
access
and
distribution.

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
3
The
project
intends
to
sustain
itself
by
engaging
in
long-‐term
contracts
with
water
utilities,
using
its
platform
to
collect
feedback
and
reports
of
pipe
damage
and
outages
from
NextDrop’s
users.
NextDrop
also
received
funding
from
its
partnerships
with
the
Social
Capital
Partnership,
Unilever’s
Young
Entrepreneurs
Awards,
and
the
Global
System
for
Mobile
Association,
an
association
of
mobile
operators
and
related
companies.
Ultimately,
NextDrop
expects
to
eventually
serve
all
1.2
million
citizens
in
Hubli-‐
Dharwad
and
to
scale
to
the
entirety
of
Bangalore.
Project
lead
Anu
Sridharan
hopes
to
scale
to
the
entire
state
of
Karnataka,
India
by
2015,
and
to
scale
globally,
to
other
regions
without
continuous
access
to
water,
by
2018.

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
1
OpenBlock Rural
OpenBlock
Rural
University
of
North
Carolina,
Chapel
Hill
A
standard
process
and
structure
for
scraping
public
records
that
allows
rural
newspapers
to
gather,
format,
and
publish
municipal
data
through
the
OpenBlock
platform
$275,000
OpenBlock
is
the
open
source
software
of
EveryBlock,
which
won
the
2007
Knight
News
Challenge.
EveryBlock
was
an
online
platform
that
provided
citizens
access
to
hyper-‐local
news
and
public
data.
As
rural
news
organizations
often
lack
the
staff
to
make
public
data
available
and
digestible,
Ryan
Thornburg
of
UNC
Chapel
Hill
received
2011
News
Challenge
funding
to
tailor
OpenBlock
to
the
specific
needs
of
rural
communities
and
to
develop
a
blueprint
for
deploying
OpenBlock
in
rural
newspapers
across
the
country.
THE INNOVATION
Prior
to
OpenBlock
Rural,
few
tools
or
services
existed
to
help
smaller,
rural
news
organizations
efficiently
gather,
format,
and
publish
public
records
on
their
sites.
OpenBlock
Rural
aimed
to
increase
rural
communities’
access
to
local
information
and
to
strengthen
their
newspapers’
technical
expertise
by
providing
a
tool
that
would
allow
them
to
collect,
aggregate,
and
publish
public
data
such
as
crime
and
real
estate
reports,
restaurant
inspections,
and
school
ratings.
The
project
also
aimed
to
provide
rural
newspapers
with
a
new
way
to
generate
revenue
by
allowing
local
businesses
to
sponsor
data
categories
within
the
OpenBlock
platform.
IMPLEMENTATION
OpenBlock
Rural
set
out
to
standardize
the
process
and
structure
of
scraping
public
records
in
rural
communities,
allowing
these
communities
to
then
publish
this
data
through
the
OpenBlock
platform.
The
project
team
intentionally
focused
on
a
single,
smaller
partner—The
News
Reporter
in
Whiteville,
North
Carolina—as
it
built
and
deployed
its
prototype.
The
project’s
launch
was
delayed
by
several
factors,
the
greatest
of
which
was
the
difficulty
it
faced
in
acquiring
digital
public
records.
Rural
communities
often
lack
digital
public
records
that
are
online,
complete,
and
in
a
standardized
format.
Even
when
available,
municipal
data
often
suffered
from
misspellings
and
factual
errors,
and
changes
to
the
location
or
format
of
records
caused
OpenBlock’s
scrapers
(online
tools
used
to
extract
information
from
websites)
to
break.
In
response,
they
launched
open-‐nc.org,
an
online
catalog
of
digital
public
data
generated
from
state
and
local
governments,
in
November
2013.
Open
NC
was
released
as
a
free
and
open
source
Django
web
app
in
effort
to
assist
other
communities
in
making
their
data
sets
accessible
to
the
public.
In
addition,
the
project
faced
concerns
from
both
public
officials
and
newspaper
staff
that
citizens’
privacy
outweighed
their
interest
in
government
transparency.
Other
challenges
included
technical
difficulties
with
geocoding
news
in
rural
areas
(often
due
to
incomplete
data
from
the
US
Census
Bureau)
and
higher-‐
than-‐expected
costs
for
local
newspapers
to
host
the
application.
OpenBlock
Rural’s
first
year
focused
on
overcoming
technical
challenges,
most
of
which
it
did
successfully.
Its
second
year
focused
on
the
challenge
of
finding
ways
to
use
the
platform
to
build
a
sustainable
revenue
stream
for
The
News
Reporter
and
other
rural
newspapers.
Due
to
the
continuing
lack
of
available
public
records,
however,
OpenBlock
Rural
has
no
immediate
plans
to
launch.

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
2
REACH AND OUTCOMES
OpenBlock
Rural
has
yet
to
launch
with
The
News
Reporter
or
any
other
rural
newspapers
as
of
early
2014.
Facing
the
challenge
of
insufficient
digital
public
data,
the
project
team
instead
turned
to
the
mission
of
making
it
easier
to
find,
request,
and
share
digital
public
data
within
the
state
of
North
Carolina
by
launching
open-‐nc.org.
By
March
2014,
open-‐nc.org
featured
about
125
open
data
sets,
including
local
arrest
reports,
property
data,
GIS
files,
and
restaurant
inspections,
and
was
visited
by
1,065
unique
visitors
both
inside
North
Carolina
and
around
the
world.
By
providing
easy
access
to
the
state’s
public
data,
Open
NC
aims
to
support
the
transparency
of
its
state
and
local
governments,
to
lower
the
cost
of
watchdog
reporting,
and
to
increase
innovation
and
economic
development.
As
noted
above,
until
more
of
the
state’s
digital
public
records
are
available
online,
OpenBlock
Rural
has
no
immediate
plans
to
launch.

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
1
Overview
Overview The
Associated
Press
An
open
source
tool
that
can
make
patterns
within
large
document
sets
visible,
helping
journalists
find
stories
in
large
amounts
of
data
$475,000
As
demand
for
government
data
and
transparency
increases,
the
release
of
large
document
sets
is
becoming
more
common.
Whether
from
government
transparency
initiatives,
leaks,
or
freedom
of
information
requests,
journalists
have
an
increasing
need
to
discern
information
from
large
data
sets.
Jonathan
Stray,
project
lead
at
the
Associated
Press,
conceived
of
Overview
as
a
tool
to
help
journalists
explore
and
find
stories
within
large
data
and
document
sets.
THE INNOVATION
Several
existing
tools
allow
users
to
search
large
document
sets
for
names
and
key
words.
But
Overview
aimed
to
be
the
first
such
tool
specifically
tailored
to
journalists’
needs,
allowing
them
to
discover
new
stories
that
might
not
even
have
been
the
basis
for
their
initial
search.
Overview
helps
journalists
discover
stories
hidden
within
massive
document
sets
by
using
natural
language
processing
to
produce
semantic
maps
that
display
the
relationships
among
people,
places,
dates,
and
concepts.
For
example,
a
reporter
analyzing
large
sets
of
emails
can
use
Overview
to
sort
the
documents
by
topic,
automatically
grouping
messages
into
threads
and
threads
into
subjects.
Starting
from
a
huge
collection
of
unorganized
files,
Overview
can
automatically
group
documents
by
type
and
remove
duplicates.
Overview’s
interactive
system
allows
the
user
to
explore
these
visualizations
in
order
to
detect
patterns
and
reveal
stories
that
might
not
have
emerged
through
human
sifting
alone.
The
tool
provides
a
way
for
newsrooms
to
gain
a
detailed
understanding
of
the
content
within
a
large,
unstructured
database,
allowing
journalists
to
surface
more
original
stories
in
less
time.
IMPLEMENTATION
Overview
set
out
to
become
a
go-‐to
tool
for
newsrooms
seeking
to
explore
and
find
stories
within
large
sets
of
documents.
After
the
debut
of
its
first
prototype
with
journalists
at
the
National
Institute
for
Computer-‐Assisted
Reporting
(NICAR)
conference
in
2012,
it
became
clear
that
most
users
were
unable
to
install
the
software
or
were
unable
to
upload
document
files
into
the
system.
The
project
team
hired
a
designer
and
spent
months
creating
a
web-‐hosted
version
of
the
tool,
overhauling
the
user
interface,
changing
its
clustering
algorithm,
and
completely
rebuilding
its
document
list
based
on
feedback
from
early
users.
By
the
summer
of
2013,
Overview
had
addressed
many
of
its
largest
usability
problems
and
turned
its
attention
toward
marketing.
The
project
team
presented
Overview
to
journalists
through
webinars,
conferences,
and
blogs,
as
well
as
through
the
NICAR
mailing
list.
It
also
implemented
new
CRM
software
for
providing
customer
support.
Throughout
the
two
years
of
its
News
Challenge
grant,
Overview
received
interest
from
professionals
within
the
fields
of
finance,
business
consulting,
and
government
IT.
The
team
considered
two
main
options
for
developing
Overview
into
a
for-‐profit
venture:
selling
the
tool
for
use
in
monitoring
brand
conversations
over
social
media,
or
selling
it
for
law
firms’
use
in
document
review.
Though
these
options
increased
the
likelihood
of
sustaining
the
project,
Overview
ultimately
decided
against
them,
reasoning
that
this
would
divert
resources
away
from
developing
the
tool
for
their
core
audience
of
journalists.

Overview Page Visits
1500
1000
500
Page
Visits
Overview Viewed Document Sets
500
400
300
200
100
Page
Visits
The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
2
After
choosing
to
stick
with
journalists
as
its
target
market,
the
Overview
team
continued
to
customize
its
platform
to
fit
journalists’
specific
needs.
The
project
originally
anticipated
that
journalists
would
use
Overview
to
summarize
massive
document
sets.
Journalists
used
the
tool
for
a
host
of
other
scenarios,
however,
including
when
they
needed
to
look
for
something
specific
within
the
data
set,
needed
to
classify
and
tag
every
document,
or
needed
to
filter
out
irrelevant
material.
Overview
eventually
implemented
features
that
allowed
users
to
complete
these
tasks.
Today,
the
project
is
exploring
several
possible
avenues
for
sustainability,
including
consulting
to
news
organizations
(training
and
providing
support
as
they
use
the
tool),
selling
the
software
as
a
service,
and
source
licensing.
The
team
is
current
transitioning
to
a
paid
model,
which
will
charge
a
monthly
subscription
after
a
30
day
free
trial.
Overview
expects
this
to
cover
its
server
operating
costs,
but
will
continue
to
pursue
grant
funding
opportunities
to
cover
developers’
salaries
and
the
work
of
extending
Overview’s
API.
REACH AND OUTCOMES
Overview
encountered
a
tension
between
continuing
to
develop
its
tool
for
journalists
and
pursuing
other
markets
to
increase
the
likelihood
of
sustainability.
It
chose
to
focus
on
developing
its
tool
for
its
core
users:
journalists.
But
Overview
has
struggled
with
user
acquisition
and
creating
a
sustainable
business
model.
From
a
technical
standpoint,
the
project
has
been
successful
in
creating
a
web-‐based
tool
that
helps
journalists
successfully
map
the
relationships
between
names,
topics,
and
concepts
in
large
data
sets.
Overview
has
been
less
successful,
however,
in
gaining
wider
0
Trend
line
(Site
Visits)
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Visits
Linear
(Page
Visits)
0
Feb-‐13
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Trend
line
(Viewed
Document
Sets)
Viewed
document
sets
Linear
(Viewed
document
sets)

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
3
adoption
and
use
by
news
organizations.
The
project
team
noted
strong
levels
of
user
retention,
but
they
feel
that
they
have
yet
to
hit
a
critical
mass
of
users,
as
too
many
journalists
are
still
unaware
of
the
tool.
As
of
August
2014,
Overview
had
more
than
2,500
registered
users
on
the
web-‐hosted
version
of
the
platform
and
10
million
uploaded
documents.
On
average,
15-‐20
users
are
active
on
any
given
day.
Overview
estimates
that
about
half
of
its
users
are
journalists,
and
the
other
half
are
professionals
from
within
the
fields
of
law,
finance,
and
academia.
Overview
has
experienced
a
steady
increase
in
visits
to
its
website,
with
more
than
1,500
visits
in
March
2014.
Spikes
in
traffic
often
correlate
with
blog
posts
that
generate
active
discussions
and
that
are
reposted
on
outside
sites,
such
as
PBS’s
Idealab.
Stray
has
been
focusing
more
energy
on
producing
high-‐quality
blog
posts
about
Overview
and
the
state
of
data-‐driven
journalism
that
can
drive
traffic
to
the
site.
Overview
has
also
experienced
a
steady
increase
in
the
number
of
people
who
view
document
sets
on
the
site:
in
March
2014,
nearly
500
people
logged
into
Overview
to
view
document
sets.
Perhaps
the
most
important
metrics
of
the
project’s
success,
however,
are
the
number
and
quality
of
stories
being
produced
using
the
tool.
Stray
described
at
least
a
dozen
investigative
stories
developed
using
Overview,
including
a
Newsday
story
created
using
Overview,
which
received
a
2014
Pulitzer
finalist
award
for
Public
Service.
Another
story
from
the
Tulsa
World
used
Overview
to
investigate
$4
million
misspent
by
the
Tulsa
Police
Department
on
faulty
squad
car
computers,
via
8,000
emails
obtained
through
a
Freedom
of
Information
request.
In
another
case,
a
reporter
from
WRAL
News
in
Raleigh
Durham,
NC
used
the
tool
to
analyze
4,500
printed
pages
of
emails
from
various
government
departments
to
uncover
the
root
cause
of
technical
problems
that
delayed
delivery
of
food
stamps
to
nearly
70,000
North
Carolina
residents.
Overview
allowed
the
reporter
to
finish
this
analysis
in
an
afternoon,
saving
him
or
her
weeks
of
work.

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
1
PANDA
PANDA Investigative
Reporters
and
Editors
(IRE)
A
set
of
open
source,
web-‐based
tools
that
make
it
easier
for
journalists
to
clean
and
analyze
data
$150,000
Brian
Boyer
won
the
Knight
News
Challenge
to
create
PANDA,
a
set
of
web-‐based
tools
to
make
it
easier
for
journalists
to
work
with
federal,
state,
and
city
data.
Smaller
news
organizations
often
lack
the
staff,
knowledge,
and
tools
to
handle
complex
data
sets.
PANDA
sought
to
help
newsrooms
share
and
make
better
use
of
public
data,
enabling
more
data
reporting
and
stronger
journalism.
THE INNOVATION
PANDA
serves
as
a
newsroom’s
data
library,
making
it
easier
for
journalists
to
import,
search,
share,
and
work
collaboratively
with
large
public
data
sets.
The
application
also
integrates
data
cleanup
tools
like
Google
Refine
to
help
users
find
relationships
among
data
sets
and
to
help
improve
data
sets
for
use
by
others.
PANDA
was
designed
to
be
used
with
Microsoft
Excel,
and
to
be
easy
enough
to
use
to
allow
newsrooms
without
software
developers
to
integrate
it
into
their
work.
IMPLEMENTATION
While
working
as
a
reporter
at
the
Chicago
Tribune,
Boyer
and
his
project
team
needed
to
quickly
search
and
share
public
data
sets.
The
Tribune
had
its
own
tool
for
this,
but
it
was
difficult
to
maintain
and
reporters
were
required
to
update
the
site
every
time
they
found
new
data.
The
project
team
was
awarded
News
Challenge
funding
to
develop
PANDA
for
The
Chicago
Tribune
and
for
other
newsrooms
around
the
world.
In
an
effort
to
understand
and
design
the
tool
around
their
users’
needs,
PANDA
conducted
extensive
interviews
with
reporters
and
editors
and
distributed
a
survey
through
Twitter
and
the
National
Institute
for
Computer-‐Assisted
Reporting
(NICAR)
listserv.
The
survey
focused
on
determining
the
technical
aptitude
of
users’
newsrooms,
the
quantity
of
data
they
work
with,
and
possible
barriers
to
using
the
software.
In
February
2012,
after
six
months
of
research
and
initial
development,
PANDA
released
a
beta
version
of
its
platform.
Among
other
features,
PANDA
allowed
users
to
automate
data
imports,
to
search
data
sets
using
simple
or
complex
search
queries,
and
to
set
up
automatic
email
alerts
for
news
events
related
to
newsrooms’
data
sets.
The
project
team
aimed
to
market
PANDA
through
social
media,
the
NICAR
listserv,
and
by
conducting
outreach
and
trainings
at
conferences.
Because
all
four
members
of
the
project
team
held
other
full-‐time
jobs
while
working
on
PANDA,
turnover
and
time
constraints
were
among
the
greatest
hurdles
to
developing
and
marketing
the
tool.
Around
the
time
of
PANDA’s
release,
Boyer
left
his
position
at
the
Tribune
for
a
job
as
the
news
applications
editor
for
National
Public
Radio.
Developers
Chris
Groskopf
and
Joe
Germuska
also
left
the
Tribune
during
the
two-‐year
grant
period.
In
October
2013,
PANDA
revamped
its
website
and
marketing
materials
to
target
newsroom
decision
makers
and
to
make
a
more
focused
case
for
data
journalism,
rather
than
concentrate
its
marketing
efforts
on
data
journalists
themselves.
Early
users
received
it
with
excitement.
However,
PANDA
continues
to
struggle
to
gain
greater
adoption
in
newsrooms.
By
early
2014,
it
has
not
received
additional
funding
and
is
no
longer
in
active
development.
Members
of
the
original
project
team
occasionally
collaborate
to
fix
bugs,
and
the
open
source
community
of
PANDA
users
plans

The
Knight
News
Challenge:
A
Review
of
the
2011
Winners
2
to
release
translations
of
the
software
in
additional
languages
within
the
coming
months.
REACH AND OUTCOMES
Without
the
dedicated
time
to
promote
the
tool
or
a
sufficient
marketing
budget,
PANDA
struggled
to
gain
the
level
of
newsroom
adoption
it
had
originally
envisioned.
Although
the
project
team
is
unaware
of
the
exact
numbers
of
PANDA
users,
Boyer
estimates
that
journalists
from
around
two
dozen
newsrooms
had
downloaded
the
tool
by
late
2013,
representing
about
a
tenth
of
PANDA’s
target
adoption
rate.
At
least
four
newsrooms
are
making
heavy
use
of
PANDA,
including
the
Chicago
Tribune,
Tampa
Bay
Times,
San
Antonio
Express
News,
and
Dallas
Morning
News.
San
Antonio’s
news
team
uses
PANDA
to
store
data
sets
such
as
public
employees’
salaries
and
campaign
finance
reports.
In
one
instance,
San
Antonio
Express
News
reporters
used
PANDA
to
quickly
access
state
campaign
finance
records
for
a
breaking
news
story,
allowing
them
to
produce
a
more
detailed
and
time-‐sensitive
piece
than
they
would
have
been
able
to
produce
otherwise.
Despite
its
slower
uptake
in
the
United
States,
PANDA
has
received
interest
from
the
international
community,
and
the
project
team
ultimately
released
versions
in
Spanish,
German,
Italian,
and
Portuguese.
PANDA
maintains
an
active
online
community
through
its
Google
group,
though
adding
additional
features
or
further
developing
the
software
would
require
additional
investment.
Independent
of
the
original
project
team,
one
dedicated
PANDA
user
from
the
Tampa
Bay
Times
has
sought
funding
to
continue
marketing
the
tool
through
videos
and
case
studies
that
demonstrate
its
value.

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