The Knight Foundation is directing almost a third of its $4.7 million in News Challenge grants this year to help journalists and the public organize and analyze data and documents.
In different ways, several of these projects seek to solve the persistent challenges of journalists working on investigative and daily stories: how to make sense of vast amounts of data and find the stories within.
“Journalists are now drowning in documents and data,” said Jonathan Stray, interactive technology editor for The Associated Press. “The tools we have to deal with this are actually pretty primitive.”
Stray’s project, Overview, will develop advanced, open-source tools to help journalists tackle these real-world problems. Overview will use data visualizations to help journalists explore data, discover relationships among them and zoom in for a closer look.
Other projects will enable public commenting of documents stored online; build simple, Web-based tools to clean and organize data; and figure out how to bring data-driven, hyperlocal news to rural communities.
The five winning projects aimed at data and documents are:Overview: The Associated Press will receive $475,000 to develop visualization tools to help journalists explore data.
- PANDA: This project headed by two developers from the Chicago Tribune and one at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., will use $150,000 to create simple, Web-based tools to help journalists analyze data and organize it centrally for a newsroom.
- DocumentCloud Reader Annotations: Knight will give IRE, which now runs the DocumentCloud document hosting service, $320,000 to enable the public to add notes to documents.
- OpenBlock Rural: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will receive $275,000 to help rural news organizations adopt a data-oriented approach to presenting public records, in the model of EveryBlock.
- ScraperWiki: A $280,000 grant will build out a “data on demand” service to this existing website so that journalists can request data and stay apprised of potentially newsworthy changes.
- http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/136661/knight-news-challenge-gives-1-5-million-to-projects-that-filter-examine-data
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