Arguably the country’s most respected newspaper, the New York Times, along with non-profit site Propublica, have applied for a joint $1 mil grant for their “Document Cloud” entry in in the 2008 Knight News Challenge, according to a Nieman Journalism Lab article. For those not familiar with the aforementioned contest, it has three
core requirements, which you can read about on the official site.
My immediate reaction to the entry was of confusion. Why would a well-known media organization need to apply for a grant that funds good ideas? If you have resources, influence and reach then wouldn’t you already be paid to produce good ideas that would have a positive impact on journalism? NewAssignment.net founder/director Jay Rosen, who shared the article on his twitter feed wondered why the Times was asking for donating a million dollars instead of donating it.
Derek Willis, who works for the NYT, pointed out (via twitter ) that the company is well within the bounds of the contest rules, which do not prevent large organizations from applying. And while he and everyone involved in the Propublica/NYT entry are certainly among the forward thinkers of our profession, as a large company they risk altering the news challenge. I think it’s necessary to point out the differences of a large organization applying for the same grant money as a virtually unknown individual.
Money
So if the Times were to win funding, a fifth of the total dollars allotted would be given to a company who has yet to produce anything innovative enough to lead its industry. Instead it’s the technology companies that have paved the way for better tools. What I don’t understand about the NYT/Propublica entry is that if this was such a good idea, why didn’t the company get behind it in the first place? Also, why wouldn’t they push thru the idea because it will help reporting even if it wouldn’t make money? And if the technology is already built and about to be released as open source, what is the $1 mil in funding for? (I realize this would actually be fleshed out in the second round of the challenge).
To give some contrast to the situation, I asked for $75,000 in funding for my idea with the understanding that the open-source community would be essential in helping achieve the goal of my project. But even if I had requested a million to hire out an entire team of developers, I doubt it would be half as good. The community has to will it into existence along with the vision to improve something — (quality of journalism, life, the world). If I needed additional funding for my project, it’s going to be much more difficult to find it. However, the Times cannot necessarily say the same.
Influence
The chances that a good idea to improve local journalism will come from a single person is rare. But a good idea to improve local journalism from a large organization is really just about as likely. The key difference is that while the large organization has plenty of opportunities to get their own idea off the ground, a single individual can blog about it until their fingers fall off from typing too much and still not get nearly the same benefits as winning the KNC. Individuals NEED the news challenge funding and I’m not yet convinced the same is true for newspaper companies.
Reach
As individual I have laughable level of clout in comparison to the Times. This is somewhat obvious but, considering that I would have to approach several leaders of local media outlets with an idea to advance
journalism, it’s significant. If the Times approaches local media with an idea (any idea), they will almost certainly jump on board because they are the New York Times and it would be an honor to partner with a paper like that on anything at all. On the other hand, if I tried a similar measure without winning the KNC, I’d (probably) get laughed at and shown the door.
I’m not saying that the good folks working on the Document Cloud project for the Times are not capable of producing something that would actually help journalism move forward. It’s ridiculous to even consider that a posibility because (I assume) most of them are tech geeks in addition to being dedicated journalists (and vise versa) . Ultimately, I think they’d be more effective as individuals with lots of contacts through their day jobs than they are as a large organization because they’d get the best of both worlds. What we need out of this contest is more applied ideas, not necessarily more people involved in producing each idea.
