We’ve been absolutely blown away by the interest and excitement around our AI and the News Open Challenge. After several months and the efforts of a small army of amazing reviewers to sift through the 500+ applications we received, we’re excited to finally announce the winners of the challenge today. 

We have never had a bigger opportunity – or greater need – to build the future of local news. That was at the heart of discussions at the Knight Media Forum, a gathering of leading journalism funders and practitioners held last week in Miami. 

How can local journalists make the connection between the issues they report on and international events? “You have to find the connection between international affairs and people’s lives and build out from that,” said CNN GPS host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria.

The warning lights are flashing. The challenges of the digital age are posing fundamental challenges to our democracy. To capture the benefits of digitization, without enduring intolerable costs, we suggest it’s time for a new paradigm—one similar to how we treat other forms of pollution from industrial progress.

In 2011, I came to the stark realization that I was one of the last reporters left in North Carolina focused on covering health care. It shocked me then — and continues to shock me now — that even as our medical system grows more complicated and political, many news outlets have eliminated their health reporters.

As journalists, we understand that robust local journalism requires time and resources. It demands patience and a sense of where to look for a story.

Olivier Kamanda is director for learning and impact strategy at Knight Foundation. 

High school may be a tumultuous time, but it’s also when many of us first start to define not only who we are but also our beliefs about our community and our country. Understanding high school student views on the First Amendment, and, in particular, the essential freedoms of free press and free expression, is then vital to anticipating how future generations may interpret and support these rights.

As concerns over free speech, declining trust in news and the impact of misinformation surge, a new report explores how high-school students’ attitudes about the First Amendment are evolving and what that means for the future of our democracy.

Becca Lewis is a Ph.D student in communications working at Data & Society. Below she writes about findings from a recent Knight report that explored how misinformation spread during the 2016 presidential election. 

If you start paying attention to the issue of online disinformation, you will start to hear a lot about the role of “influence.” Most notably, media outlets have done widespread reporting on Russia’s so-called “influence campaigns,” meant to impact U.S. elections. But “influence” is an important online phenomenon more generally. If you use Instagram, for example, you almost certainly have encountered “brand influencers,” who build devoted audiences and then attempt to sell them products and services. Influence, then, is a crucial phenomenon online: it means having a powerful voice and using that voice to have an impact, whether political or commercial.

Karen Rundlet is director for journalism at Knight Foundation. Below she writes about NewsMatch, the annual national matching gifts campaign for nonprofit news organizations, which is accepting donations today through Dec. 31. 

This is the third year for NewsMatch, the national matching-gift campaign that supports nonprofit organizations across the country. The campaign’s participants, all of them nonprofit newsrooms, produce rigorous journalism in service of the public. It is in all of our interests to support them, now more than ever. As misinformation runs rampant, and trust in media fall to all-time lows, these organizations are delivering the investigative, accountability and civic reporting that highlight pressing community issues and hold our leaders in check. While the tools of information creation and delivery have changed dramatically in the last decade, there are some constants: quality journalism remains a powerful tool for change and a free and independent press is vital to a healthy democracy.

Even as local newspapers steadily close, the audiences and profits for some local TV stations are growing. That’s in part because local stations are tailoring news packaging and delivery to the preferences of younger and other digital-first news consumers, said newsroom leaders at this week’s “The State of Local News“ forum in New York City.

If news and information are part of the fabric of democracy, then the fabric of U.S. democracy is in tatters. That’s the conclusion that leaps off the map in the 2018 The Expanding News Deserts report, which shows that 171 U.S. counties do not have a local newspaper, and nearly half all counties – 1,449 – have only one newspaper, usually a weekly.

The report by Penelope Muse Abernathy, Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina, shines the light on a silent phenomenon, the disappearance of 1,800 newspapers since 2004, and drop by half of the number of reporters covering local news. 

Concerns about the spread of misinformation online have raced into crisis mode.