What the Knight News Challenge is about

Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation recently talked at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society about what the Knight Foundation is trying to accomplish with the Knight News Challenge. This is a $25 million contest with awards that will be given over 5 years. It's into its second year now, and winners will be declared in early 2008.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm involved in two entries, one directly and one indirectly. That's not why I'm passing this on, and I don't want anyone to think that I'm trying to stack votes.

Regardless of who wins in the next round, I'm genuinely inspired by the objectives of this initiative and others like it. I want to see the best ideas get funded that have the most potential to sustain the practice and values of journalism in the future. If that wasn't my goal, given my background and connections, there are plenty of other things I could be doing today that would be easier paths to money than working for an independently owned local newspaper. I do what I do today because I care deeply about journalism, its values and its benefits to society. That's totally independent of the outcome of this particular contest.

What Gary outlined at the Berkman Center is what all journalists should strive for in the digital era. And truthfully, in the long run we shouldn't need to rely on awards and grants to make this happen (although that is one great way to jump-start innovation without relying on traditional venture capital, which has its own price).

Here's the quote from Gary that struck me:

"We really hope that the people who are inventing the latest digital information technologies care about things like ethics, and principles, and freedom of speech and press, and fairness, and separation of advertising from news, and news from opinion. These are vital to journalists.

And if journalists aren't involved in the creation of tools that everyone is using, and instead the tools are being created by technology companies that frankly don't understand, don't know about or perhaps don't care about those things, that gives us pause. So we're hoping that we can lead the news industry into the digital revolution to help them gather new audiences, keep new audiences, and keep not only their perspective, but their important position.

If newspapers die, that's one thing. If the news and information function in a community dies, that's a horribly different thing. And that's something I think that we should ... work to make sure does not happen."

Yes! That's why I work in journalism, and came back to it after 6 years at a pure tech company. I hope there are more and more of us in that boat over time and that together we create a flotilla, and then a proud armada, that collectively preserves democracy and free speech around the world.

I know there are people with similar aims at non-news companies. Call me quaint, but I just feel like an industry that has consistently upheld these values for two centuries is best equipped to carry them into the digital world. But we can't assume that this will happen on its own. If you're reading this blog and others like it, it's your responsibility as well as mine to make sure that happens.

You can view the Gary Kebbel's entire speech on the Berkman Center's web site.

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