The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, among many other philanthropic initiatives in culture, community, and journalism generally, has been running the Knight News Challenge since 2007. Its basically a grant competition, in which various digital journalism initiatives compete for a pool of grants amounting to $25 million total over five years.

One aspect which makes the Knight News Challenge unique – other than the size of the grant pool – is that the winning grantees are required to:

1. Use digital, open-source technology.
2. Distribute news in the public interest.
3. Test your project in a local community.

It looks like a fantastic strategy: encourage innovation, provide funding without forcing the grantees into short-term, must-build-immediate-ROI type thinking, and share the results with the broader community through open source.

Knight - Photo by Ruth L., cc-by-nd license

Two recent successful projects from Knight Foundation grantees – EveryBlock and Village Soup (which I’ve written about before in this blog), however, suggest there might be some gaps in the Foundation’s overall plan.

The core of the issue is this question: once the Knight Foundation funding is expended, what happens to the open source project the grant process mandates?

Do the creators truly create, engage with, and sustain an open source community around the code they release, contributing to and supporting the open source version, or do they “take it private”, leaving the open source seed to either take root and grow (or wither) on its own?

First, Village Soup. When I wrote about them back in May, it was unclear what exactly would be released and in fact whether or not they were compliant with the terms of the grant:

As one of the commentators on [founder Richard M.] Anderson’s recent blog entry on making hyperlocal pay pointed out, however, that doesn’t seem likely to be what the Knight Foundation expected when it funded creation of an open source project. Perhaps we’ll hear more as the end of the grant period (June 2009) approaches?

Anderson himself later commented on that same post, clarifying:

In accordance with the terms of our Knight Foundation News Challenge Grant, we are using the funds to create an open source version of VillageSoup’s software, which combines blogs, citizen journalism, online advertising and reverse publishing from online to print. The Knight Foundation will sublicense the open source publishing system software to third parties under the GPL and Creative Commons License.

In fact, that code is now available from this google code project: vsce (Village Soup Community Edition). It’s GPL (v2) licensed, with content (the user manual?) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

There’s a 1.0.0 release, dated July 15, 2009, as well as a 63-page user manual which covers installation, configuration, and operation of sites based on the platform. The platform components are pretty standard in the open source world: Java (specifically Java Server Faces), JBoss Application Server, JBoss Seam, Hibernate, MySQL, Maven, and JQuery.

Fighing Knights - Photo by threlkelded, cc-by-nd license

What’s missing, though, is any real sense of an open source community around the platform. Issues? none. Wiki pages? none. There’s only one check-in to the subversion code repository, with no changes since then. The only “person” attached to the project at Google Code, and also the project owner, is identified as “helpd…@villagesoup.com” (no great imagination necessary to suggest that this parses to helpdesk@villagesoup.com).

In other words, an open source project has been released, to comply with the terms of the Knight Foundation grant, but is it an open source project likely to succeed?

There’s nothing in GPL v2 nor in the Knight grant itself, so far as I can tell, that would prevent (or even, for that matter, strongly discourage) VillageSoup® from continuing to iterate on, improve, develop, and maintain the Enterprise (hosted) version, Village Soup Common, without contributing those fixes to the open source community edition, and simply let the VSCE project wither on the vine.

EveryBlock, another Knight Foundation News Challenge grant recipient, has received considerably more press coverage (the acquisition of EveryBlock by MSNBC this week was covered by the AP and the NYT) but is potentially in a similar situation: there is an open source project release, in accordance with the terms of the grant, but will it be sustained long term?

A few pointers to other blog posts laying out some of the issues:

• EveryBlock.com Sale Shows Impact of Knight-Funded Media Innovation
• The Trouble with Taking Charity
• Is this legal? Is it ethical?
• The Nuances of the Everyblock Sale to MSNBC
• In Detail: The Nuances of the Everyblock Sale to MSNBC
• Interview: MSNBC.com Likely Will Add EveryBlock Feeds To Its Local Section in ‘Next Few Months’

The emerging consensus seems to be that EveryBlock has fulfilled its obligation to the Knight Foundation, releasing the project under the GPL (v3 in their case) at the end of the grant period. It also seems clear that neither the GPL itself nor the Knight Foundation grant will require that MSNBC continue to make its changes to the project available as open source.

So MSNBC could continue to improve the code, starting from the GPL code base, without releasing those improvements to the open source project. Since whatever platform they offer will almost certainly be a web service, they will not be distributing the modifications and can keep them private.

Whoa! You Totally Conquered Him, Dude! Photo by Sister72, cc-by license

But here’s the rub: so can anyone else. I could also take the GPL’d EveryBlock platform, improve upon it by adding additional features, and run a hyperlocal site for Salem MA, without being obligated to redistribute my version. That’s how the GPL works.

What, precisely, did MSBC buy, then? Presumably, the people involved in the project, the name and domain, and perhaps the existing data (it isn’t clear to me what license the data itself is under).

Will MSNBC take EveryBlock private, or will they learn to value the benefit of working with an open source project, and sustain a real community around the codebase?

I was initially more optimistic about EveryBlock, since the ebcode site has some activity: code updates, individuals named as owners, a mailing list). ebcode is also built on top of Django and Python, which will connect them more clearly to other communities of open source developers working on journalism. But in the paidContent interview EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty reportedly said:

others will only have access to the code as it existed on June 30—when it was initially released—meaning MSNBC.com will likely have an edge over any competitors. “What happens after that we’re not obligated to make that open source,” Holovaty says, adding that so far only a handful of sites have actually adopted the code.

He goes on to say, in the same interview:

The Knight Foundation funded EveryBlock via its Knight News Challenge program but the foundation did not have equity in the startup. “Basically the grant was paying for development of the open source code and we fulfilled the obligation,” Holovaty says. Asked whether he was now considering returning some money to the group, Holovaty says he is “planning on pointing everyone I know to the News Challenge. That’s what they’ve asked me to do.”

This doesn’t bode well for the long term future of an open source project derived from that code.

Ritterrüstung - Photo by marfis75, cc-by-sa license

What does this trend (if two can be called a trend) begin to suggest a flaw in the News Challenge approach?

If the grantees are required to release an open source version of the code written during the grant period (and maybe only the subset of the code specifically funded by the grant money), but have no real investment in the community model, and no real open source community of contributors around that core, is there any real benefit?

One could argue that if these platforms prove valuable enough, the GPL’d core that comes out of the grant period could be taken by a community and “forked” to create a real vibrant open source project around them – but generally code dumps (significant sets of code that were created by others and then thrown over the wall into an open source community) lead to less successful open source projects than those which actually develop organically from the beginning. It’s difficult to find a group of developers interested in making a community around existing source code – you’re more likely to find a community of developers willing to contribute to creating a code base.

Put differently, communities are great at creating (and maintaining, supporting, extending) code: code is not great at creating communities.

Should the Knight Foundation, and the News Challenge in particular, be doing something else to encourage or require real communities to form around the open source projects? It’s difficult, even with the purest intentions, to ensure that a real community will evolve around any open source project – though getting the community involved throughout might go a long way in that direction. How would open source developers contributing to the effort but not partaking in the grant funding feel?

On the other hand, is this a case where everything is actually working as it should be? If communities evolve around the open source projects that’s great, and if they don’t then perhaps there was no need to release the open source version, but there was no harm in doing so either.

While Times Reader focused on creating a desktop experience that had some of the richness of the print edition, this one is focused on the kind of rapid update stream of information made popular by Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, et al.

Times Wire (Click for Full Size)

The best description I saw was Nicholas Carr, who quipped:

The news scroll updates every minute, as fresh stories flicker into consciousness and old ones flicker out. Times Wire doesn’t just give the Gray Lady a facelift; it jabs an IV into the ashen flesh of her forearm and hooks her up to a Red Bull drip bag. It’s Times Wired.

It’s interesting, certainly, to consume the NY Times the same way one consumes updates from long-lost high school buddies on Facebook, but it isn’t clear whether this experience plays to the NY Times strengths, which might be closer to in-depth substantive reporting, investigative journalism, and reasoned opinion, not the latest breaking celebrity gossip or tech scoops. As Tech Crunch put it:

Overall, it definitely seems like a step in the right direction for the organization, as real-time is a hot trend right now. And it’s useful as a live overview of the entire site. But for people only interested in certain topics, it’s probably fine to stick with RSS because the real-time river isn’t flowing fast enough to necessitate keeping the page open.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb was even less sanguine:

This particular product probably won’t be hugely useful for the general public, it seems more like a product that info junkies (like bloggers) and newshounds would enjoy. But it’s definitely a worthwhile experiment.

Increasingly, I think we’re seeing an openness to experimenting in public. Rather than assuming that “they” (whether you read that “they” as large scale media companies, or as referring to web application designers and developers) know what users/readers want, the developers at the NY Times are experimenting: trying out new approaches, based on hypotheses gathered from experiential data, and then seeing what happens when those experiments are released to the wild.

Check out this 7-minute video from Creativity Online with Nick Bilton and Derek Gottfrid, both part of the overall R&D / Development team at the NY Times, where they discuss how technology relates to journalism and the public experiment that is the NY Times APIs:

(Creativity Online doesn't allow embedding, so click through to view the video)

I love the concept of moving (or helping enable the evolution of) readers into users and ultimately creators, and the idea of journalists who code. Getting a better, deeper and broader understanding of digital technologies infused throughout large media organizations is clearly movement in the right direction.

I wonder, though, if it isn’t better to focus on journalists (and managing editors) with a better understanding of digital media overall, paired with smart programmers who have a broad understanding of journalism.

In other words, rather than journalists who have learned to write code, I think we need journalists who really use the Internet and have a broad understanding of what digital media make possible; they can set the hypothesis for the kind of public experimentation we need, and be paired with coders (and user experience folks) who broadly understand journalism but have a depth of focus on application design and development to implement those experiments well. Which, it seems to me, is exactly the approach the NY Times is taking.

Hope. Which Way? (Photo by bixentro, cc-by license, click through for details)

Mass High Tech, which I still read in print, featured on its front page Richard Anderson from Village Soup and Alan Baker of the Ellsworth American. (The article is online here: Two Maine newspapers test the future of newspapers’ plans). Additionally, there were a number of articles about Amazon’s new Kindle, and how e-Readers in general might represent new hope for publishers.

Approach one: hyperlocal, shared platform, business-sponsored

Village Soup sign in Belfast, ME (Photo by Timoth Valentine, cc-by-nc-sa license, click through for details)

Anderson’s model, which you can experience in a number of communities linked from VillageSoup.com, is essentially a hyperlocal model, in which a significant portion of revenue is driven by sponsored blog posts, which VillageSoup calls bizOffers:

The most distinctive component of our model are the sponsored postings . . . that businesses can buy. The posts, which run right next to the ordinary editorial content, are not controlled by us. No fetters, no filters.

In the two most mature of the four markets we serve, the sponsored blogs help generate a large portion of the online sales that collectively generate 19% of our $2.5 million in annual advertising revenues.

(You can see the bizOffers in action in the right column of the Knox County Village Soup site).

VillageSoup also received a Knight Foundation News Challenge grant in 2007 to

create an open-source version of VillageSoup’s successful community news software, combining professional journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, online advertising and “reverse publishing” from online to print.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to locate a meaningful update on their progress in that direction. There is some discussion of code access under the name “Village Soup Common”:

How does this model work?

VillageSoup handles the technical stuff. While a version of the platform code is available free, the installation, maintenance and improvement of the code is not. Software engineers and connectivity costs can be shared among all members of the Common. VillageSoup also allows provides the brand and its promotion. This promotion goes in two directions. To the public, we promote theSoup as a trusted source for hyper-local information around the globe. To the major product brands, we promote theSoup as a direct connection to the hyper-local residents as they head to their local retailer. Finally, a VillageSoup Common wiki provides a repository of experiences and ideas which empowers small operators to learn and advance in ways not achievable as stand-alone entities.

As one of the commentators on Anderson’s recent blog entry on making hyperlocal pay pointed out, however, that doesn’t seem likely to be what the Knight Foundation expected when it funded creation of an open source project. Perhaps we’ll hear more as the end of the grant period (June 2009) approaches?

Regardless, it stretches credulity to think of hyperlocal as a new strategy in 2009. Hyperlocal undoubtedly plays a role in the future of news publishing, but it is unclear whether it will produce the kind of revenue necessary to significantly impact the large publishers who are in trouble.

Approach two: rebuild the online paywall / make users pay for content

Not free (photo by ol slambert, cc-by license, click through for details)

Users are offered, on the landing page of the Ellsworth American, a choice: go to the free limited edition of the paper, a site called FenceViewer which offers summaries of stories from the paper, or subscribe:

The full Ellsworth American is available weekly as a PDF download to those willing to pay a $32 annual subscription.

While paid subscription to online newspaper editions is something the rest of the industry has struggled with – famously only the Wall Street Journal has been able to maintain a paywall over time – the paper is hopeful in the case of this small Maine community, perhaps due to its niche presence:

The Ellsworth American’s payment strategy serves an even narrower niche. From 12 percent to 15 percent of its subscription revenue is in mail subscriptions — typically snowbirds who get the paper by mail during winter months. Problems with the postal service have taken their toll.

So far, about 100 readers have subscribed online, said Chris Crockett, the paper’s IT manager, but it’s still early in the process. There have been “some comments,” about the new model, he said, but many people have been satisfied to be pointed to the paper’s trimmed-down free site.

Is 100 readers subscribing only a sign of hope, or yet another sign that users don’t want to pay for access to content online? While it may be too early to tell for Baker and Crockett, the rest of the web seems to have pretty clearly voted on this one already, and recreating an information scarcity economy seems unlikely.

Approach three: sell content on new devices

Kindle (Photo by Brian Vallelunga, cc-by-nc-nd license, click through for details)

While new devices can certainly reset user expectations – look at the influence of the iPhone on mobile web applications in the U.S. – it is difficult to imagine that such devices will create a market for paid content that replaces the drastic decline in traditional subscription revenue.

Additionally, while the gadget sites and tech press have been quite excited about the new e-reader formats, it’s hard to imagine proprietary format readers ever becoming nearly as ubiquitous as mobile phones and netbooks using existing open formats. As Alan Mutter puts it:

Instead of trying to persuade consumers to adapt to an expensive, awkward and idiosyncratic gizmo like the wide-body Kindle, newspapers would be wiser to spend their time and resources optimizing their existing offerings for the interactive formats already in popular use. Netbooks are already here, growing in popularity, and much more likely to find broad acceptance than dedicated readers.

While some users will adopt, and evangelize for, e-readers of various styles, they’ll never match the audience of the web (and the mobile web). If developing for those formats requires significant investment in proprietary formats (and associated DRM technologies to enable paywall and prevent piracy), publishers risk again missing the bulk of the audience. (See also MG Siegler’s excellent Tech Crunch post “The Big Screen Kindle Hail Mary To Newspapers Will Fall Incomplete“).

Users in the assembled web expect to be able to consume (and share, and interact with) content where they are – in social networks, on community sites, and throughout the web. Content I can’t share is inherently less valuable than content I can. In other words, what makes the e-reader story so attractive to publishers – relatively closed (non-generative) platforms which enable paid content subscriptions – is exactly what makes them unattractive to most readers. (Or, to put it another way, piracy of paid content will be what makes them attractive).

Will the short-term gain (a bump up in revenue as the initial readers roll out) be worth the long-term loss of taking focus off making the web work?

No silver bullet

Ultimately, all of these strategies (hyperlocal sponsorship, paywalls for niche web content, and new devices/new formats) can contribute to the evolution of existing publishers into new media, but none of them represents a silver bullet. Publishers need to focus on reigning in costs and eliminating unnecessary duplications of effort, while at the same time generating compelling content which will attract audiences that advertisers desire, and even potentially be worth paying for.