This month’s Carnival of Journalism is about “driving innovation” – in the wake of the end of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge five year run, among other things. Here’s my take:

Driving innovation needs to be quick

Any innovative idea needs to be able to deploy and iterate quickly – and any scheme to fund innovation needs to support that.

Having been through the Knight News Challenge three times, and reached the final shortlist twice, I was struck each time by how much changed in the online world between the initial submission and final award: If an internet year is worth 4.7 normal years, this process was taking over 3 ‘years’ in internet time. So much changed during that period that by the time I had reached the second or third stage, I wanted to re-write the whole thing.

In contrast, when I entered Channel 4′s 4iP fund (far from perfect, but certainly faster), the time from application to approval was swift. This allowed us to spend a few months working with the funders in addressing the issues the project raised (in Help Me Investigate’s case, largely legal ones) and still being able to start work before the Knight awards had even been shortlisted.

Why the difference? Perhaps because of the next point.

Innovation thrives on limitations

One of the reasons the internet has been so disruptive is that it has lowered the barriers to entry. Multinational media organisations have thrown millions at their own solutions, and yet most of them fail. One of the problems that funds such as Knight’s and Channel 4′s aim to solve is of access to funds – but those funds don’t have to be large.

The median value of a News Challenge award has ranged from $200,000 to $326,000 during its four years of existence, and I suspect one of the problems with Channel 4′s 4iP fund was that its £50m pot was based on television-scale budgets.

You don’t need a large amount of money to innovate online, and the best research and development comes after launch, because you can see how users are using it, and what they tell you they want it to do, or indeed what they build themselves for you.

So instead of funding to the hilt a dozen or so ideas that have to jump through several on-paper hoops to prove their theoretical viability, I would suggest this: spread small amounts of innovation funding wider across 100 pilot projects, and see how they jump through real-life hoops instead.

Projects that jump through those hoops could perhaps then apply to a second fund specifically aimed at the separate problem of scalability. I can speak from experience that running a pilot project gives you a much stronger sense of what you’ll need to do to scale up, than doing the same exercise on paper.

This second fund could even provide rapid access to servers or customer support staff or legal advice while the application is being considered (otherwise the customer experience becomes so bad that by the time funds are released, the project has no users left).

Separating funding innovation from funding scaling allows you to first fund projects that take bigger risks, and generate a bigger pool of innovators with experience of launching and managing an innovative product. And that leads on to the third point:

Support innovation, not projects

Every fund that I’ve been involved in neglected what could have been potentially their biggest value: the process itself of vetting applications and monitoring progress.

(It’s also the biggest source of resentment: there will always be accusations that funds are given to the ‘in-crowd’)

“Driving innovation” should go beyond “funding innovative projects”. Simply opening up the application process so that everyone can see how ideas develop – and what the ‘experts’ think about the detail of proposals – can help contribute to a culture of innovation. Seeing other great ideas being developed makes people feel a whole lot more innovative – and produce better ideas – than getting an opaque email saying “Proposal not accepted” and seeing a disappointing-on-the-surface winners’ list 5 months later.

For the funders this represents a lot of admin, but tough: that’s their job. And there are creative possibilities here: when you move the focus from funding innovative projects to supporting innovation you can start to broaden the focus towards building a network of innovators and aspiring innovators, towards creating a supportive ecology. That also spreads the costs, lowers risk, and increases benefits.

Ultimately, just as networked models are allowing us to revisit ways of doing things without physical limitations, the funding process should reflect that change too. It should be quicker, smaller scale, and more transparent.

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Last year I had surprising success with the Knight News Challenge, making the final shortlist of 29 before the winners were announced.

This year I’m at it again, with Help Me Investigate.com – a platform for ‘open source investigative journalism’, to be actively piloted in Birmingham, UK, but usable by anyone in the world. You can vote for it here, and read more about it.

Once you’ve done that, any ideas, useful articles or funds you could suggest would be very much welcomed.

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Alex Gamela talks to Dave Cohn, founder of the non-profit, crowdfunding journalism project Spot.us, winner of a Knight News Challenge grant, and a suggested new model for the news business. On the eve of launching the Spot.us official website, Dave told OJB how he is putting his ideas into practice, and his views on the current state of journalism.

Four months after winning the KNC grant, Dave Cohn is a happy man. He started with a wiki where he presented and tested the different sides to his project, and he quickly managed to fund three stories. Now it is on its way to fund a fourth one. All of this even before having an official website.

The way it works is quite simple: someone – a journalist, a citizen, a community – pitches a subject to be investigated journalistically; the story is then open for funding, and whoever wants can contribute with a small sum; if the target amount is reached, a journalist takes the story on; finally it gets published.

So far this model has worked well:

“We’ve raised 3000 dollars from about 100 donors, about an average of 33 dollars each.

“It’s like digital poetry”

Dave Cohn has been doing his share on networked journalism for a while now, working with the likes of Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis.

He has strong beliefs on the possibilities that the web brings to journalism, the immense power of communities, and also in a change of attitude on the journalists part.

“Journalists and journalism right now is a diaspora, we’re sort of been kicked out of the homeland of newspapers, and we need to figure out where we can go from here”.

So he has been thinking about all this for a long time now, but the concept underlying Spot.us is rather recent for him: “I’ve been working on Spot.us as an idea for little over a year.”

Although it sounds simple, the task of building a platform has been complex, with all its nuts and bolts.

“Building a website in general is complex, and this is also building an organization. I have to remember this is a non-profit, so there’s a lot of framework behind that, to which I’m new to”.

But Dave Cohn is enthusiastic about it:

“I love every minute of it, because it’s like digital poetry. I have the opportunity to build this website as i envisioned it, and granted there are things that come up along the way that force me to put out some fires and do certain things, but they’re all part of this process, of , again, digital poetry.”

And who can participate? Spot.us “is not a news organization”, so he says he’s not considering hiring anyone. It’s “a marketplace, a platform that independent journalists can use to crowdfund for themselves”.

“It’s for freelance journalists, and it works on a pitch by pitch basis. We encourage everybody to do a pitch, everyone who wants to do this professionally.”

However, he recently announced that he is looking for journalists and communities to work with him.

The project has been promoted in two distinct ways: one, more traditional with the help of a marketing company. The other, based on a grassroots approach to the organized communities.

“It’s not really about marketing, but partnering with people that already have communities organized, and say: Look, you are a community, you have invested interested on something, you want something covered by a professional journalist, what is it? Lets find out what it is and how a professional journalist can cover it”

And what is Dave Cohn’s role in all of this?

“I’m an entrepreneur, strictly interested in the issues of journalism. What I’m passionate about and what motivates me is figuring out how journalism can continue to thrive, despite the death of its institutions. So I’m a journalist/entrepreneur in that sense where I’m trying to figure out how journalism can rethink itself and redefine itself so it can continue.”

Crowdfunding as a new business model

One of the most discussed issues on the new media blogosphere is how to find a sustainable business model for the news industry. Spot.us’ crowdfunding model raised some doubts over the possibility that groups with their own agenda might fund specific stories, thus skewing the journalistic goal of the project, in contrast with traditional media that appeared as the gold standard.

Dave Cohn is very clear about this:

“There’s no such thing as clean money. It’s a myth that newspapers’ money is clean. And anybody who is working in journalism knows the story of a publisher who killed an investigation because it would have threatened some advertising dollars.”

He argues that the process must be transparent every step of the way, and show “where the money comes from, limit donations.”

Besides, the names and the reputation of the professionals involved are at stake – the journalist who proposed to write the story, the editor, and the media who will publish it.

Cohn believes the role of the community is crucial, and everything changed when people got access to the new web tools:

“Maybe in the 1960′s community organizing meant gathering a bunch of people picketing, but now young people when they want to do community organizing they create media: they create a YouTube video, or a Facebook cause.

“And I think more and more you will get successful citizen journalism projects, and they’re usually led by civic leaders or community leaders, who have taken responsibility and said: look, this is an issue of my community, how can I help benefit it? Well I’ll take it online, organize online, by making media”.

One of the major shifts in the news paradigm is the growing need – and ability – that people have to claim issues that are close to them in the news agenda. And this raised questions about the effectiveness and the role of journalism, and how it served that need.

“People have serious information needs,” and “that’s what journalism should be: serving the information needs of people.

“It’s not producing a newspaper. A newspaper is a packaged product that is delivered to your door. What journalism does is to inform people, and i think people will always want information, especially about their local community.”

And now people can demand for the information that affects them and their communities, and in depth. Now that the communities know they can have their voice heard, nothing will ever be the same.

“As long as we are tied to geographical locations we’re going to want to know what’s going on in our geographical location. So that is not going to disappear, people want in depth stuff.”

Journalism on the spot

Dave Cohn has an analogy to explain what has changed in the relationship between users and media.

“If you walked into a restaurant and the waiter told you what you were going to eat for dinner, you’d walk right out. But that’s the way news has traditionally been served.

“When you look at it historically, we came out of a time where it was top-down communication, so that made sense: here’s your news, here’s what’s important.”

Now the people can order the information they want off the vast menu called the web, and the definition of what is news or not is no longer decided by a restricted number of people.

“Traditionally, 0.001% of the population determined the news agenda, and they were called editors, and the reason they were able to determine the news agenda is because they were the only ones with a freelance budget.”

Cohn has written and debated profusely about what needs to be done to improve and renew the trust in traditional media. And to him, background changes must occur.

“The way news media are structured need to be rethought or re-tooled, so it can respond more, and be more open, but it’s not their fault, it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way those organizations are structured, because it came out of this history, and it literally is history now, what worked 30 years ago doesn’t work anymore.”

The trust relationship between audience and journalists isn’t rock-steady. I asked Dave Cohn if the view of the world given by journalists wasn’t too narrow. He says it’s not about the journalists.

“I strongly believe that journalists in general, when you talk to them one on one are in general really good people, and they have strong beliefs. They’re doing what they’re doing because they believe in it, and they’re passionate about it. Individual reporters and journalists, their view is not too narrow.

“I think the problem comes in that, the institutions they’re part of – the newspapers or the news organizations – are structured in a top-down way, where orders come from the top, individuals can’t make necessarily decisions on the fly, and that caused them to be somewhat narrow, or unable to pivot rapidly or in response to the community, that now has a voice in result of the internet.”

Although he is critic about the slow evolution of traditional media, Dave Cohn is not extreme in his opinions.

“I think a lot of times in this traditional or new media debate we cast things in black and white a little too often. It’s always more complicated than that.”

The future and some advice

For now, Spot.us is based in the San Francisco Bay area. But Dave Cohn is interested to expand his project to other regions and cities, like New York, Los Angeles or Seattle, while he is probing the acceptance the project might have in other countries.

“The web code application is open source, so if you want to use it and start it in your own country or in your own city, I would be so happy and honoured. I want people to take this, it’s open source for a reason, take it and use it in your own city.”

And to those who want to start their own ventures?

“Start small, start realistic, and iterate.”

He reinforces the idea that the true power is not in technology, but in people:

“Community trumps technology any day of the week.”

That is the true spirit behind Dave Cohn’s work. He leaves one final piece of advice, both for journalists and entrepreneurs:

“Be passionate.”

And he knows what he is talking about.

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Following my research into investigative journalism I’ve been thinking about its future. One path clearly lies in tools of crowdsourcing and community being applied to local investigative journalism. It’s not a new idea, but it’s not happening nearly enough. So here’s the twist I’ve put on it as I seek to get funding to test it out: hand over the agenda to your public, and you have a potentially bigger, and more committed, workforce.

The idea – which I imaginatively called ‘Citizen Investigation’ - is through to the second round of bidding for Knight News Foundation funding (along with 5W+H). Here is how I described it:

“Citizens identify the stories they want investigating, vote on a ‘winner’, then pursue the story with editorial support from professional journalists and community managers.

“Addressing the lack of investigative journalism in mainstream media, as well as issues of public engagement with the news, this project seeks to hand over the editorial agenda to the public, giving them ownership of the story and therefore increased motivation to pursue it.

“In the model, a website allows users to propose a story/issue they would like investigated, with a community manager seeking out offline or otherwise disengaged members of the community for additional proposals. Proposals can be made in any form, but video is encouraged, and a facility will exist to upload directly from mobile phone. This will then be seeded on YouTube and other social media.

“A regular vote decides which story is pursued, and the project community work together to gather and analyse information through blogs, wikis, databases, and repositories of raw material such as audio, video and documents. Because ‘your’ story could be next (the leaderboard is public), it is hoped a wider community will contribute. A ‘karma’ points system will help encourage this behaviour, while alerts help keep contributors in the loop and engaged.

“Central to the process is the editorial support provided by professional journalists, who will work with community members to identify sources, filter information, provide journalistic training, address legal issues and assist in structuring resulting stories. This also seeks to provide the ‘self-actualisation’ that is often identified as a key ingredient of successful citizen operations.

“Examples such as the Florida News-Press’s investigation of utility rates have already demonstrated how such a crowdsourcing approach can empower and engage an otherwise disinterested community, while the pet food poisoning investigation carried out by blogs this year demonstrates how important stories can be overlooked by mainstream media but taken on by a committed body of people.”

I’d welcome any help that anyone can provide. Here are some particular areas that I’d welcome support on:

1. Help improve the proposal document by adding information or improving the argument (it’s a wiki)
2. Point out similar projects or people we could contact for advice
3. Volunteer your own skills, experience or contacts – technical, journalistic, organisational, community, etc.
4. Or just help improve the idea – how could it be better? What flaws does it have? What gaps?

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I felt so strongly about the Five W’s and a H that should come *after* every story that I pitched an idea based on it to the Knight Foundation. It’s called the ‘Conversation Toolkit’, and it’s through to the second round of the Knight News Challenge. Think it sounds like a good idea? Have any improvements? Want to help make it happen, or test it out? Then log on to the idea wiki at http://bidideas.pbwiki.com/conversationtoolkit (password: idea) and add what you can, or contact me directly.

Here’s the text so far:

Describe your project: * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)
A series of plugins or bolt-ons that enables publishers to facilitate more productive conversation around a news issue. Based on ‘Five W’s and a H’, this allows users and journalists to address the following questions with a simple user interface:

• Who can I connect with? (e.g. social networking, etc.)
• Where did this happen? (e.g. Google Maps)
• Why should I care? (e.g. personalisation, databases, how international events affect us)
• When are events coming up that I need to be aware of (e.g. Calendar, Facebook Events)
• What did the journalist read to write this?/What have people said about this article? (e.g. links, documents, Trackback)
• How can I make a difference? (e.g. petitions, changes in personal behaviour or consumption, automatic email to politician)

Who would want to use it, and why? * (830 characters maximum, approximately 125 words)

Any news organisation or online content-based organisation. The toolkit would help facilitate user interaction, generate material and engender community around the issues in question. From a business perspective, UGC is known to be sticky and therefore attractive to advertisers; from a community perspective, it helps make information useful, and therefore attracts users.

5. What potentially bigger thing might happen if everything went perfectly and the stars all aligned? * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

The plugins become an element in a majority of blogging platforms and news content management systems. Programmers mashup the technology to improve and build on it. Citizens are empowered and engaged with issues in the news, and work together to address problems.

6. How will you be able to measure whether or not your project has really made a difference? * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

An open source download site will be able to measure downloads and contributions by developers; pilots using existing news websites and blogs will measure contributions by users. Discussion across the online journalism community will indicate how it is affecting newsroom cultures.

7. What unmet need does your proposal answer? * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

An answer to the question what is news for. Until know we have rather complacently believed it contributes something to democracy. Providing tools which allow the audience to extend the news thriugh action as well as conversation will create a more direct link between the deomcratic intent of news and the reality in terms of actions. The need to move beyond the conversation; the need for empowerment and engagement in an increasingly disengaged and disillusioned public. For newsrooms, this fulfuls a need for technologies that facilitate user engagement – ‘stickiness’ and loyalty.

8. What specific, unique opportunity do you see that will make this project more successful than others trying to fill that general need? * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

Other attempts tend to address specific issues, or provide generic ‘blank pages’ for people to contribute ‘comments’ or improvements. This brings an editorial focus to the questions raised by issues in the news, and helps users to frame their responses in terms of particular, action-based routes of enquiry. It also brings together a number of technologies with potential for news: social networking; mapping; calendars; databases; social bookmarking; and automation – building on off-the-shelf solutions rather than trying to build from scratch.

9. How will people learn about what you are doing? * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

The process will be covered on the Online Journalism Blog, which has a global readership across all five continents. I also write for Poynter in the US; Press Gazette and Journalism.co.uk in the UK, and Indian Online Journalism. From those it should be disseminated more widely through other bloggers, academics and journalists. The project should also attract some research coverage.

10. Do you have any other funding or investment? We’re interested in knowing who else is interested in your project. * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

No.

11. Are you working with anyone else to complete this project? If so, please give names and what they would do? * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

Nick Booth (details above) would be involved in conceptualising the project and liaising with pilot organisations. There is also potential to involve the BBC interactivity unit and any number of interested parties through the Online Journalism Blog.

12. Who else is working in this area? How does your work fit into the larger context of work in this area? * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

Although a number of people are working in the wider field of social media – Steve Outing, Jay Rosen – this project is relatively unique in its focus on action and utility.

13. What do you guarantee will happen if you complete the activities in this proposal? * (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

A prototype plugin that addresses at least one of the six questions identified above, and facilitates user engagement and contribution through work-saving technologies. Along with this, a pilot study that attempts to test such a plugin. And ongoing reports and analysis via the Online Journalism Blog

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Valerie Kirshner has asked me to spread the word about the Knight News Challenge – here’s the info:

“It is open to community-minded digital news innovators worldwide — journalists, software designers, bloggers, and students of any age.

“This competition is sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, who fund excellence in journalism and freedom of expression worldwide. They are offering up to $5 million this year alone to winning participants. It’s something that can really change a person’s life.

“Applications will be closing Oct. 15.”

Here is a link with all the information you need. Also see http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070604colombo/ and http://journalism.wikia.com/wiki/Knight_News_Challenge

And even if you don’t enter, help improve the entries by visiting the Read & Comment page of the site.

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