Knight Foundation

Recent research from Gallup and Knight Foundation investigated how the use of opinion- or behavior-based metrics influenced study participants’ level of trust in the media.  Each participant was randomly assigned to an experimental group that viewed a news article and certain average historical trust ratings of the news source.

The future of local television as a vital source of news and information likely depends on the medium’s ability to transcend media fragmentation. This four-part Knight Foundation report looks at the state of the industry, how newsrooms are innovating, and what the future may hold for both TV local news and streamed video. Among the authors’ recommendations:

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Its charge was to conceive, develop and expand noncommercial broadcasting and it led to the creation of the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. This anniversary is a fine moment to recall and commemorate values imbued in the Public Broadcasting Act, and the vital contributions to our national discourse and culture that followed. It’s also a useful prompt to look critically at the present and imagine a better future.

Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Rita Allen Foundation believe informed communities are indispensable to a healthy American democracy. We are launching an open call for ideas to address concerns about the spread of misinformation and build trust in quality journalism. Knight Foundation will run the call through the Knight Prototype Fund, which specializes in quickly developing and testing early-stage ideas.

We recognize that no single solution will fit all contexts and communities, and by prototyping we hope to quickly learn which ideas have the most potential to improve our news and media ecosystem. We’re looking for technologists, journalists, designers, teachers, researchers, and others who are eager to develop ideas to help ensure all people have access to accurate information. We understand issues of trust and misinformation are nuanced and complicated, and we are looking for ideas and collaborations that can help bring new voices and vision to these debates. We expect to award up to $1 million and for the average grant size to be $50,000. The deadline to submit your idea is 5 pm ET on April 3, 2017. Winners will be announced in June.

The promise of virtual reality has been with us for decades, but it is only in the past few years that technological advances in this space have made us pay closer attention to the opportunities for journalism and wonder whether society is finally poised to broadly adopt the technology. The Knight Foundation is joining Google News Lab and the Online News Association (ONA) to help create an international network of journalists to explore and share knowledge about their work with immersive storytelling. It’s called Journalism 360, and in its first year, Knight and Google News Lab will invest a combined $500,000 for grants, events, workshops, webinars, and an online resource hub on Medium.

Knight and Google News Lab joined together in a collaboration with the Online News Association after discovering that we were both hearing from many of the same journalists about a need to support learning and experimentation in VR journalism. We’re all still learning, but with analysts predicting a $150 billion virtual and augmented reality market by 2020, we’re excited to work with our colleagues at Google, ONA and the vibrant network around this project, to move forward towards new ways of doing journalism.