Tag Archives: Funding

European Journalism Centre to offer grants for innovative development reporting

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By CoreMedia Product on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Journalists can now apply for grants to help them produce innovative and in-depth coverage of “issues related to global development and the United Nations’ Millenium Development Goals”.

According to a release from the European Journalism Centre, it recently received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which will help it offer up to 30 grants this year.

The press release adds:

The Centre will provide a selection of innovative reporting projects with the necessary funds to enable journalists, editors, and development stakeholders to perform thorough research and to develop entirely new and experimental reporting and presentation methods.

They will also be able to use multi-platform approaches and to think laterally across disciplines and techniques of journalistic storytelling.

Applications for grants should start from at least €8,000, with the centre expecting to give out grants of €20,000 on average. The deadline for applications is 15 March. More details on how to apply are on the grants website.

Hannah McLean, community manager at the European Journalism Centre said it is “looking for new ways of reporting that break outside the lines of the usual story”.

We encourage applicants to use multi-platform approaches and to think laterally across disciplines and techniques of journalistic storytelling.

We want applicants to experiment with new reporting and presentation methods. One of the ways they could accomplish this would be through digital storytelling.

Charity offering £1m funding to hyperlocal sector

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A major report into the advancement of the hyperlocal press was published earlier this month, alongside a £1 million investment to stimulate the sector.

Destination Local, a 15,000 word study, identifies the technologies, business models, and content opportunities for a successful hyperlocal media sector in the UK. The report states that new location-based technologies, such as mobile phones with GPS, “offer a potential revolution for very local – or hyperlocal – media”.

Author Damian Radcliffe analyses the challenges faced by the traditional media trying to access local people, and hyperlocal bloggers looking to widen their audience.

The report was funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), an independent charity providing grants to digital innovation research projects. NESTA is offering 10 organisations up to £50,000 each to develop next generation hyperlocal media services.

The Technology Strategy Board is running a parallel competition offering ten local cross-media platforms up to £56,250 of grant funding each.

A spokesperson for NESTA told Journalism.co.uk that although traditional business models are being challenged by the web, “the democratisation of media means that actually there has never been a better or easier time to set up and run a local media service.

Making it pay of course is another thing. The Destination Local programme aims to better understand the economics of delivering hyperlocal media at scale, in a sustainable way.

The application process closes on 17 May and successful bids will be notified by 29 June.

J-Lab: Four US women-led news ideas each win $12K funding

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Four diverse news ideas in the US – a mobile platform for hyperlocal news sites, a tech news site, a news magazine covering women’s basketball, and a rollout of a site for visualising economic data – have each won a $12,000 award to launch the projects in the coming year.

According to a media release from J-Lab, the award winners were selected from 378 proposals as part of the McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs, an initiative to address opportunity and innovation, recruitment and retention for women in journalism by highlighting their entrepreneurial abilities.

The winners are:

Mobile news platform for hyperlocal news – A proposal by Bo Hee Kim, a UC Berkeley graduate student to build a more user and geo-friendly mobile news site for the journalism school’s three hyperlocal sites that may ultimately be used by other local sites.

SiliconHillsNews.com – A nonprofit startup for technology and biotechnology news in the Austin-San Antonio region, focusing on entrepreneurs, companies and creative people to be launched by TechChi blogger and journalist Laura Lorek.

Visualizing Economics – To expand on VisualizingEconomics.com and create illustrated guides that contain infographic explainers using economic data that helps journalists, teachers, students, financial bloggers and citizens understand economic numbers and policy.

Inside Women’s Basketball – A proposal by Atlanta documentarian and photographer Kelly Kline to build out InsideWomensBasketball.com as the centralised news, entertainment and social networking site for some 12 million fans and participants of women’s basketball.

Runners-up included:

Carolina Public Press, an in-depth news site for western North Carolina.

Speak and listen mobile news reader, a spoken dialogue interface on mobile devices for listening to online news.

Rockies Rising, a site to connect and inform investors and entrepreneurs in the Rocky Mountain corridor.

I Am Young Nation, an online publication to attract and retain young urban doers.

The New Media Diversity Wire, an initiative to place women’s voices and ideas in high-profile online outlets, amplified by social media.

Related content:

Two British data projects win Knight News Challenge funding

Bastiat Prize Fund increases to £43,000

Award listings currently open for entries

Beet.tv: Video news start up raises $1.5m in funding

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US video news start-up site Newsy has raised $1.5 million in new funding, according to a report by Beet.tv of an interview with CEO Jim Spencer.

The funding will allow the site, which currently monitors, analyses and presents news coverage from across the world, to expand in terms of original programming, adding to staff and moving correspondents to different locations.

The company curates about 15 video segments a day which are compilations of clips from many news organizations. They are edited around a specific news topic. The segments are then introduced by a “host” in the Columbia studios. The news source of the videos are identified with links.

In the interview Spencer says the funding will help the site grow into a “true mobile news organisation”.

See the full video interview below:

Guardian: Hundreds of jobs at risk at BBC World Service

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Director of BBC Global News Peter Horrocks has warned that hundreds of jobs will “need to go” at the World Service following government funding cuts, the Media Guardian reported yesterday.

Horrocks told MPs on the Commons foreign affairs committee that the World Service would propose the closure of some foreign-language broadcasts in the face of the cuts, the report adds.

“We are a very staff-heavy organisation, most of our costs are in people,” Horrocks told MPs on the Commons foreign affairs committee. “So the reduction in staff numbers will be broadly in line with the level of savings that we need to make, ie more than 16 per cent. Our staffing is 2,000 so you can work it out relatively straightforwardly. It will be hundreds of jobs that need to go.”

Knight Foundation gives $3.14m to local media projects

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Niche and hyperlocal news sites in the US are to receive $3.14 million in funding from the Knight Foundation as part of its Community Information Challenge.

The money will be divided up into grants aimed at encouraging greater investment in media-related projects by community foundations, whose funding is matched by Knight.

Receivers of the grants this year will include the Alaska Community Foundation for the Alaska Public Telecommunications project which hosts hyperlocal blogs and virtual community ‘think-tanks’ on issues such as arts and culture; ACCESS News, a website for the deaf community and West Anniston Today in Alabama, which reports on industrial pollution in that area.

The full list of community foundations and supported projects can be found here.

Hatip: paidCotent

TheStar.com: Alternative funding avenues for investigative journalism

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The Toronto Star’s John Honderich looks at five options for funding investigative stories in Canada. These are already relatively well-known examples among journalist/media commentators and bloggers, but Honderich’s post is an interesting read.

  • Government funded or subsidised journalism
  • Independent non-profit newsrooms, a la ProPublica.
  • Using private foundations, such as Philip Stern’s the Fund for Investigative Journalism
  • Participatory investigative journalism, e.g Spot.us
  • Journalism students working in tandem with investigative reporters

Full story at this link…

Reuters: Murdoch’s online operation to miss ambitious targets

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The stressed state of the US economy is causing advertising budgets to shrink – causing News Corp to miss its ambitious online revenue target of one billion dollars by ten per cent, Rupert Murdoch said yesterday.

Reuters reported that the media tycoon claimed Fox Interactive Media – which runs the online part of his US empire, including MySpace – will however have “well over” $1 billion in revenue in the 2009 financial year.

Paid Content: Ning raises 60m dollars – worth 500m

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Social network in a box, Ning, has raised 60m dollars in a fourth round of venture capital money from ‘unspecified institutional investors’ taking valuation of the company to 500m, according to Paid Content.

The company raised raised 44m last summer, which then valued the company at $170 million – says PC.