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The Chicago Community Trust has created a new grant program, Community News Matters, to spur the growth of new sources of local news and information about the Chicago region, in conjunction with the Knight Community Information Challenge. Through September 15, the Trust is soliciting proposals from nonprofits, for-profit businesses and individuals for new activities and projects. Awards may be as high as $100,000 but most are likely to be in the $25,000 to $50,000 range, according to the RFP.
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Ubi est mea? (Where's mine, asks www.windycitizen.com contributors.)
Well this is interesting. The Knight Foundation gave some cash to the Chicago Community Trust to hand out to other organizations on its behalf.
Patrick, are you guys licking your chops over there? I would be.
The ChiTownDaily News folks have probably already started budgeting for the windfall. Ha. Congrats community news people!
I've learned from previous grant turn-downs not to get too excited too early. But still, this certainly could be a very good thing for local media innovators, including many who read Windy Citizen. Let the games begin!
Actually, it isn't just a case of Knight giving the Trust some cash to "hand out." The Trust competed with other community foundations around the country to get the Knight grant, which the Trust has matched with an equal amount of its own money.
I just posted a comment on my blog http://www.sallyduros.com/?p=126
actually, Knight has a community news challenge that only works in conjunction with a Community Trust. This might be an innovative use of existing CCt/Knight money- I hope to learn more tomorrow.
With more people reading Chicago Now or Windy Citizen than their local paper it's about time to support the media and news outlets that real people actually use. Can't wait to see how this all shakes out.
Over on your blog you say "oh please, let's see some collaboration here" or something to that effect. What did you mean by that? Isn't this a competitive process to see who scores the most funding from this new program?
Honest question: What are the sorts of things that a community news organization could do with $50,000?
Also, how many orgs are out there who might go for this? 10? 5?
Yes, it's true, that groups will be competing for one of these grants. But of the many types of things these grants could fund, one is collaboration -- such as two or more entitities merging or combining their efforts on a project in order to improve the quantity, quality or viability of news and information. For example, two neighborhood-targeted blogs could share one reporter who looked for the "local angle" on major stories. Or two outfits could collaborate on a big story, with one using the funds to tackle one part of it and the other using the funds to tackle a different part of it. Or several news sites could join together in an effort to attract more ad revenue. For more details, see the Request for Proposals on the Trust's Web site (www.cct.org) or come to the information meeting August 21.
Vivian Vahlberg, project director for Community News Matters
"The New News" report commissioned by the Trust from Community Media Workshop identified about 200 Chicago-oriented news and information sites -- and more crop up every day. And they didn't catch everyone. So there are plenty of organizations and people who might qualify. The process is open to non-profits, for-profits and individuals.
As for what a grant might be used for, it's basically anything that would increase the flow of trusthful, accurate and insightful local news and information, that would engage citizens in those issues, help people make sense of things, help them work together -- plus activities that would help cutting-edge innovators become more sustainable models. So the possibilities range from more reporting to new social networking applications to development of different kinds of sites or methods of financing them. There's also money for activities that would help the whole new-media-innovators sector in Chicago -- such as training sessions or research. A very extensive list of possible things that could be funded is available in the Request for Proposals on the Trust's Web site (www.cct.org).
For information, I recently judged the New Media Women's Entrepreneurship contest from J-Lab which awarded three $10,000 prizes; we got more than 400 fascinating applications. Sometimes, particularly for start-up businesses trying to get to scale, a relatively small amount of money can help an organization leap to the next level of effectivenss.
Vivian Vahlberg
Community News Matters Project Director
Thanks for the rundown. Didn't know there were so many groups out there like that. This sounds like it shoudl be an interesting program. I guess the tricky part is figuring out how to judge the applicants. Have you guys lined up your judging committee yet? Will it be the CCT board?
I think it will be! Exactly how we're going to judge the applicants hasn't yet been decided. Stay tuned!
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