News Challenge

You still have a few weeks to submit your ideas to the Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge. The philanthropic Knight Foundation will be giving out 5 millions dollars to folks who have ideas for using online news to positively transform local communities. According to the site:

We're looking for:

• New ways to understand news and act on it, including new ways to collect, prepare and distribute information, news and journalism that reveals hard-to-know facts, identifies common problems, clarifies community issues and points out practical courses of action.
• New ways for people to communicate interactively to better understand one another, to generate real passion in solving local problems and to share the know-how they need to improve their communities;
• New ways for people to use information, news and journalism to imagine their collective possibilities as communities, and to set and reach common community goals.

We want proposals that increase the clarity, not the cacophony. We’re looking for ways to increase a community’s capacity to both understand what’s wrong and to fix it.

The challenge is open to anyone, anywhere via a simple application.