Knight Dubs Eight New Projects Fund-Worthy

The Knight Foundation has handed out $4.5 million more in funding to eight more efforts to engage communities through new news technologies.

They are the latest grants marking the tenth anniversary of the Knight News Challenge, which was to recognize how technology has changed the way news is created and consumed and use digital technology to "connect people to the real world.

On the receiving end of that money are Code2040, Code for Science & Society, Columbia Journalism School, Data & Society, DocumentCloud, Emblematic Group, HistoryPin and mRelief.

Knight also released a status report on the program 10 years in. It found that 59% of the 139 winners (82 of them) are still working on those winning projects, but that 84% remain in journalism, technology or media.

Knight said that, overall, the grant winners said the award "helped them launch or scale their projects, enhanced their credibility in the field, and gave them a network of peers who helped them think differently about their work."

The newest recipients will be recognized at an event at the Paley Center for Media in New York Thursday (Nov. 16).

(Photo via Knight Foundation Flickr. Photo was taken August 1, 2012. Attributed using Creative Commons License 2.0. Photo was cropped to fit 16x9 aspect ratio)

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.