Crowdsourcing Project Makes Grant Shortlist

A UK community news initiative has reached the final round of America’s Knight News Challenge.

The foundation has up to $5.5 million (£2.78 million) available for digital news projects and among the contenders is a crowdsourcing idea from lecturer and blogger Paul Bradshaw and former BBC journalists Adrian Goldberg and Nick Booth.

Bradshaw is seeking £200,000 for Citizen Investigation, which aims to enable people within a community to decide the issues they want investigating and then do their own research and reporting.

The Birmingham City University teacher says the crowdsourcing project is designed to give participants “a stake in the issues involved”.

Bradshaw and Booth also have another proposal in contention, entitled the Conversation Toolkit.

The initiative aims to improve user engagement via a series of bolt-ons to online stories, such as maps, social bookmarking tools and links to additional resources.

Further details on the other finalists and their proposals can be viewed here.

In 2007, a total of 25 individuals, companies and public agencies received awards from the Knight News Challenge to fund their digital experiements.