The Knight News Challenge and Digital Innovation
Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation
The Knight News Challenge and Digital Innovation: Challenges Posed by Intellectual Property, International Giving, and Grant Administration
If you do it right, giving away $25 million for digital innovation isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The Knight News Challenge is a $25 million, five-year quest for innovations in digital news and information that help build and bind community in a specific geographic area. As the Challenge ends its second year, the contest was revised to meet new goals, such as making grants to individuals in foreign countries or focusing the wisdom of the crowd on weak applications so that they could be strengthened and resubmitted. Additionally, $500,000 was set aside for the ideas of people 25-years-old and younger. These changes create new problems of grant administration, intellectual property and having a minor win a monetary award.
In this year’s open submission process, we encouraged people to rate and comment on, and thereby try to improve, initial applications. We allowed the applicant to take elements of public comments and incorporate them into a revised and resubmitted application. What if that application wins a grant? To whom should the grant be given? Who owns the intellectual property in that idea — the applicant only, or the applicant and the four or five people whose comments were incorporated to create the winning application?
About Gary
Gary Kebbel is the journalism program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami, Fla. In that role, he administers the Knight News Challenge, a $25 million contest to find digital news innovations that are used to create community in a given geographic area. At Knight Foundation, he also helped create the Knight Citizen News Network and the Knight Digital Media Center.
He directed the growth of AOL News into one of the largest news sites on the Internet, with an audience of up to 24 million people each month.
Kebbel just returned from South Africa where he was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in online journalism. He taught classes and helped with the creation of a digital media curriculum in the Journalism Department at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa. He has been a trainer at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, teaching public affairs officers how to better use the Internet in public diplomacy.
At AOL he also was the director of the largest election and politics site on the Internet and the largest government consumer portal, Government Guide.
He is a founding editor of USA TODAY.com and Newsweek.com, and was the night graphics editor at USA TODAY during the Gulf War, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Kebbel was an adjunct journalism instructor at the University of Maryland.
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