an immersion into the Internet you won’t be experiencing soon
David Cohn from Spot.us has asked a number of people to take today to write a blog about the Knight Foundation News Challenge.
He is doing this under the aegis of something he is calling The Carnival of Journalism, and when we are all done, we are all going to link to that.
Well, it’s an interesting idea. Let’s see how it works.
As for the Knight News Challenge (which funded Spot.us), I have entered for three years.
And for three years I was a finalist.
I never won.
It is unlikely I am going to enter again – at least not unless there is a major change in the rules.
This is not sour grapes (OK, maybe it’s a bit of sour grapes), but it’s also an unpleasant experience with The Knight Foundation.
Last year, I submitted an idea called A Thousand Flipcams To Newark.
It was a pretty simple idea. I wanted to distribute a thousand flipcams to the people of Newark, NJ. Not the ‘journalists’; the people.
Then I was going to teach them how to shoot and cut (on iMovie) a 2-minute story about themselves and their town.
The 1,000 stories were then going to be put through a video wall – a thousand stories, but only 1 audio track at a time.
I called it Art Meets Journalism. It was a kind of physical representation of the reality of the web and the explosive democratization of journalism.
Art and Journalism have, until recently, gone hand in hand – since Daniel Defoe, the first journalist wrote London in the Year of the Plague.
But that’s another story.
In this story, I submitted my idea.
My wife, ever the hard nosed realist said, ‘this is far too radical. They’ll never get it Submit something boring and predictable that they’ll like.’
So in the last minutes I dashed off a rather banal proposal to train people to make better community journalism. Really. Blag…
When the semi-finalists were announced, both my projects, 1,000 Flipcams to Newark and Better Community Journalism made the cut.
Then came the ‘pubic voting’ round.
Remarkably, 1,000 Flipcams shot to the top and never moved. It was the solid #1 choice of the people. Better Community Journalism languished at the bottom. Even I wasn’t interested in that one.
But… when the public response time was over, and the Knight Foundation went to the finals round, I got an email from the Foundation
They wanted a budget for…. Better Community Journalism.
Despite the massive (should I say overwhelming) votes for 1,000 Flipcams, it had, in fact, proven too scary, too radical, for the Knight Foundation. My wife, as usual, was right.
So I did all the budgeting for Better Community Journalism.. and then I sat and waited… and waited.. and waited…
and waited.
And finally I got a very perfunctory email telling me that I had not been selected.
Fine.
But here is what really annoyed me.
What was the point in all the ‘public feedback’ and ‘public voting’ anyway, if the Mullahs of the Knight Foundation were going to make the final choice anyway?
While they pay lip service to radical ideas like crowd sourcing, in the end, they are afraid of it.
The Knight Foundation reminds me of the Majlis of Saudi Arabia.
Democracy that has no purpose.
In the end, regardless of what the people want, the King decides.
So no more applications from me.
At least not until there is some real ‘democratization’ of the process….
……which is unlikely, I think…..
Those in position of power always love ‘democracy’, until it effects them.
2 Comments
invitedmedia March 31, 2011
this all sounds very familiar these days… like the corporate line “we want the audience to be able to watch what they want when they want”.
except when your cable company decides to stream it to your ipad.
Mr Paul J Bradshaw March 31, 2011
I’ve made the final shortlist twice too, and likewise it was the dashed-off-in-a-minute proposal that seems to beat the really radical, well thought-through ideas that seem to succeed more.
Agreed on the public voting – it’s never been made clear what the point is of that aspect of the process: it doesn’t appear to count for anything and at the very least some transparency on what it does count for would go a long way, something I learned from my own crowdsourcing project which Knight rejected (but Channel 4 funded).