The News Challenge plans to invest at least $25 million over the next five years to create digital experiments aimed at transforming community news.
Hurrah!
But where is the British equivalent creating incentives for innovation and giving developers the space and cash needed to create the technologies that will connect people to news in the future?
Well... It doesn't exist.
Innovation for community journalism in the UK is at best poor and at worst non-existent.
The main regional publishers offer sporadic, piecemeal experiments but you could count the number of noteworthy creations on one hand. And then you would be hard pressed to call any of them truly innovative.
Local and regional publishers are trying to foster innovation at the grassroots - nothing wrong with that - but they are doing so without the necessary investment to create anything groundbreaking.
The result is that most regional or local newspaper websites are about as user-friendly to your average British Joe as a guidebook to handball in Swahili.
Question: How many of the senior staff working in those institutions would have heart failure at Loic Le Meur’s idea of how news is absorbed across the web?
Probably more relevant to ask how many would recognise it as a threat at all?
Amongst this year’s KNC finalists are two projects from the UK from Birmingham City University Journalism lecturer Paul Bradshaw and former BBC journalist Nick Booth. In just a few hours time, they will find out if they have been successful.
"Comparing this year's list [KNC finalists] with last year's winners shows that there's been a real quantum leap in thinking about news online, with many more imaginative proposals - and this bodes really well for journalism as a whole," Bradshaw told Journalism.co.uk at the time of his nomination.
"Unfortunately, the fact that we - and many others - applied to an American foundation highlights the need for similar funding in Britain.
"If UK publishers are serious about adapting for a new media world they should think - quickly - about setting up similar funds for innovative programs in the UK.
"The internet is a global market, with fewer barriers to international publishers creating products for UK markets. UK publishers need to wake up to that now."
It is not just a shame that our innovators have to go cap in hand across the Atlantic to look for development money, as Bradshaw suggests, it is also to our great detriment that no such organisation exists in the UK both for reasons of philanthropy and business.
Last year the News Challenge handed out $5 million to create the Center for Future Civic Media, a project designed to sustain and evolve community news experiments, new technologies and practices.
It also gave $1.1 million to Everyblock, open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of large US cities to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighbourhoods.
The Knight Brother Foundation could be seen as the glorious white elephant, the exception rather than the rule, when comes funding innovation projects. It's a legacy fund from the private estate of a wealthy and interested family rather than the development wing of a newspaper company.
However, that benevolence fund isn't alone in recognising the need for journalistic innovation. City University of New York now runs a course in entrepreneurial journalism and graduate students have pitched their ideas to a dozen jurors drawn from New York's stellar media community in the hope of funding. And several of them got it.
As the UK's Meld project proved, there is a strong case for a development fund in the UK to hothouse our latent innovation. The only thing lacking is the money.
So we may not have a Knight Foundation but could a spirit of détente - or at least mutual interest - grab news publishers in the UK? How about big regional companies in union with a few nationals coughing up some cash to save their industry for another generation?
There is precedent of sorts; Northcliffe, Newsquest, Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press collaborated to hold an equal share of Hold the Front Page in order to cut their recruitment bills (damaging their trade journal the Press Gazette in the process).
Would it be too hard to get a little innovation going here?
My guess is probably, but if you don't ask you don’t get.
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