Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust, working with web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Web Science Research Initiative are among the winners of the 2008 Knight News Challenge.
The group won a $350,000 (£179,000) award to fund “Transparent Journalism“, a project to help the public find “fair, accurate and contextual news” online by improving the metadata in online news stories.
The project aims to “design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of ‘source tagging.'”Filters could then be used to help identify high-quality journalism online using this meta-data. Sir Tim, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are already working with the BBC and Reuters on integrating tagging into journalists routine workflow.
The Media Standards Trust also already runs Journalisted, a website that aggregates UK national news stories and tags it with information about individual journalists.
The Knight News Challenge, funded by the US-based Knight Foundation, annually provide grants of up to $5 million towards the development of digital news innovations that benefit a specific geographically-based community.
Other winners this year include a system for distributing news by telephone in Zimbabwe; a system for creating ad-supported personalised local newspapers, a system for disseminating local news on mobile phones in a South African township; a web project for tracking the local impact of the 2014 Winder Olympics in Sochi, Russia; a system to let public access TV stations create video web sites, a system for funding local investigative journalism through micropayments from the community; a Drupal-based web site for radio news organisations; a system for making news feeds accessible on older mobile phones; a citizen journalism video-training programme in rural India; a mobile editing tool for a student newspaper; a project to connect rural radio stations in India to the Internet; a game that tracks users’ environmental impact; a social network for reporters working on similar stories; a blog aiming to empower deaf people to become citizen journalists, and a blog about alternative ways of providing digital news to rural areas without internet access.
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