Two Local Projects Win Knight News Challenge

The Knight Foundation announced the winners of 2010 News Challenge this week, and two of the winners list Chicago as their home turf. The Knight Challenge awards $2.74 million to 12 grantees who are on target to help impact the future of news.

WindyCitizen’s Brad Flora is one of this years recipients and his work will revolve around real time ads. ChicagoTalks.org often promotes its stories on WindyCitizen. The real time ads are meant to provide a way for online start-ups to become sustainable. The real time ads are Flora’s original idea.

Teru Kuwayama, another recipient of the Knight awards, will create “One-Eight” which “will chronicle a battalion by combining reporting from embedded journalists with user-generated content from the Marines and their families who will be online steering, challenging and augmenting the coverage with their feedback.” This project will also study the impact of allowing soldiers to use social media on the military.

More about the awards:

WindyCitizen’s Real Time Ads
Award: $250,000
Winner: Brad Flora, WindyCitizen.com
Web URL: http://windycitizen.com
Twitter: @bradflora
Location: Chicago, Ill.
Summary: As a way to help online startups become sustainable, this project will develop an improved software interface to help sites create and sell what are known as “real-time ads.” These ads are designed to be engaging as they constantly change – showing the latest message or post from the advertiser’s Twitter account, Facebook page or blog. Challenge winner Flora helped pioneer the idea on his Chicago news site, WindyCitizen.com.
Bio: Brad Flora is a journalist and entrepreneur in Chicago. He is the founder and president of WindyCitizen.com, which gives Chicagoans a place to share, rate and discuss their favorite local stories, events and deals. His work has appeared in Slate magazine and Chicago-area newspapers. He was a 2008 Carnegie-Knight News 21 Fellow, and is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

One-Eight
Award: $202,000
Winner: Teru Kuwayama
Web URL: www.novembereleven.org; www.lightstalkers.org/teru
Twitter: @terukuwayama
Location: Chicago, Ill.
Summary: Broadening the perspectives that surround U.S . military operations in Afghanistan, this project will chronicle a battalion by combining reporting from embedded journalists with user-generated content from the Marines themselves. The troops and their families will be key audiences for the online journal steering, challenging and augmenting the coverage with their feedback. The approach will directly serve the stakeholders, and inform the wider public by bringing in on-the-ground views on military issues and the execution of U.S. foreign policy. The troops were recently authorized to use social media while deployed, and this project will also study the impact of that decision on the military.
Bio: Teru Kuwayama is a photographer who has spent most of the past decade reporting on conflict and humanitarian crisis. He has reported in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir and Iraq – traveling both independently and as an embedded reporter with military forces. His photographs have appeared in publications including: Time, Newsweek, Outside and National Geographic. Kuwayama is the co-founder of Lightstalkers.org, a Web-based network of media, military, aid and development personnel serving more than 40,000 members. He is currently a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Kuwayama received a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Albany.