On 9 February the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the 2012 News Challenge. The annual contest in media innovation, which "seeks new ways to meet community information needs in the digital age", has been renewed, expanded and narrowed, as John Bracken, director of the journalism and media innovation at Knight, explains.

After an initial programme of 5 years during which $27 million have been granted and 12,000 applications made, the new contest has been broken up into three different challenges.
The theme of the first contest is "leveraging networks" and applications will open on February 27th.

The aim of the contest is not to invent a new network, Knight's vice president for journalism and innovation, Michael Maness, explains in a video, but to use existing platforms and tools to make new models or apps that benefit story-telling, investigative reporting and boost innovation in journalism.

Knight News Challenge 2012 from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Applications will close on 17 March and winners will be announced at MIT on 8 June. A second competition that will broadly look for new ideas will be launched later this year, and a third contest after that.

The challenge has been split into three shorter topic-focused contests to "try to bring the work closer to Internet speed."

Source: Knight Foundation