Knight News Challenge Grant application
From Banyan Project
The Banyan Project filed the following on December 15, 2009, as an open application for a Knight News Challenge grant; due to a glitch in Knight's software, it was accepted instead as a closed application, meaning that it's not displayed on the Knight website. Knight's efforts to overcome this were to no avail, so we've posted the application here as it would have appeared on the Knight site had its software cooperated.
The boldface material represents questions Knight's Web template asked; our answers follow.
Posted below the application are two supporting documents filed with it.
Formal Application
Project title:
Banyan Project Community Pilot Sites
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:
$1,900,000
Expected amount of time to complete project:
3 years
Total cost of project including all sources of finding:
$2,000,000
Describe Your Project:
The Banyan Project's mission is to strengthen democracy through high-quality, Web-based journalism that engages the civic energy of people ill-served by mainstream media and often outside the public spotlight--regular folks who are neither affluent nor poverty-stricken, the bread and butter of American life.
Banyan seeks funding to develop software and launch community pilot sites in three cities.
Its mission and value proposition--that the public it serves will find its professional news and service journalism to be useful and relevant to their lives, respectful of them as people and worthy of their trust--flows from a sound nonprofit model that relies on six revenue streams and thus needs little advertising to thrive.
The public that Banyan aims to serve amounts to half the U.S. population, in communities from coast to coast; accordingly, its systems are massively scalable. As a foundation for this robust structure, Banyan will customize and synthesize proven ideas including a consumer co-op to own it and franchises to scale it.
Banyan will use the decentralizing power of the Web to pioneer a deeply relational approach to journalism that's firmly grounded in the needs of the public it serves. Only reader/users will be allowed to own a co-op share. This will make the editors accountable not to advertisers but to the reader/user/owners, ensuring the trustworthiness that's the source of Banyan's value.
Banyan's software will strengthen this integrity by inviting voluminous, rich feedback and ensuring strong public participation in the journalism the staff produces. The platform will feature an online community--a virtual public square--that provides easy-to-use Web tools that allow the public to organize in pursuit of its interests, thus amplifying its civic voice.
How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
• Banyan will deliver useful journalism to a huge, less-than-affluent population that's now ill-served.
• Its reader-centric approach will ensure that the news it delivers will be relevant to this public and this help its members make sound life and citizenship decisions.
• It will amplify the social value of Banyan news through software that nourishes civic vitality among its readers, feeding them news and providing space and tools to engage, learn and organize. This online community will mirror the readers' geographical community.
• Banyan's structure provides scalability through turnkey franchises that make it easy for journalists to form and operate community sites as well as service journalism and investigative efforts.
How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)
• Banyan's relational approach to news yields professional coverage from the public up rather than from institutions and elites down. In a co-op owned entirely by readers, the editors must be accountable to and work with the reader/user/owners as co-creators of the journalism.
• The business model 1) works at the community level but is replicable through turnkey franchises in communities throughout the country, and 2) thrives due to six revenue streams, with advertising secondary after payments from co-op reader/owners.
• Socially, Banyan innovates by serving a public now discarded or exploited by legacy media. It delivers news tailored to be useful to this public's life and citizenship needs through civic-networking software.
What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
Tom Stites, founder and president of the Banyan Project, is a veteran newspaper and magazine editor and entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur he has been the founding publisher of two print magazines, a newsletter, and an online magazine; as an editor he has held ranking positions for magazines and newspapers ranging from a county seat weekly to The New York Times and has supervised reporting that has won an array of major journalism awards including the Pulitzer Prize. Positions Tom has held include night national editor of The Times, associate managing editor for project reporting at The Chicago Tribune, and managing editor of The Kansas City Times.
The 26-member Banyan Board of Advisers includes senior journalists, including several who are working at the growing edge of journalism's digital future, as well as academics, Web developers, sociologists and researchers, business and financial strategists, and advocates for strengthening democracy. Six have launched and/or been early-stage investors in Web start-ups; five have started other kinds of ventures. Advisory board members are listed on the Banyan website, with links to their bios. Stites's full resume is attached.
Guide to Support Materials
Easy Guide to Banyan Application Support Materials
Attachment No. 1 to Banyan Project application for a Knight News Challenge Grant December 15, 2009
The Banyan Project’s website expresses more than three years of conceptual work by Banyan’s founder and its board of advisors. This document directs you to several pages on the website that are particularly relevant to this application.
Executive summary and overview of news and business approaches: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
The public Banyan seeks to serve: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=The_Banyan_Public
Banyan’s approach to news: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=News_report
The online civic-networking community: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=2.0_community
Community pilot project concept: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=Pilot_sites
The consumer co-op that will own Banyan: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=Co-op_Ownership
The six sources of revenue: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=Sources_of_Revenue
The franchise plan that will scale Banyan: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=Franchisee/Licensees
Outline of software development needs: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=Software_Platform
Pages that lay out Banyan’s intellectual underpinnings.
Our perspective on the state of democracy: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=Democracy
Integrity Economy theory, grounding for the entire project: http://www.banyanproject.com/index.php?title=Integrity_Economy
Tom Stites’s keynote address to 2006 Media Giraffe Conference that established the ill-served public that Banyan now seeks to serve: http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/07/03/guest-posting
Launch Strategies and Allies
Launch Strategy and Allies
Attachment No. 2 to Banyan Project application for a Knight News Challenge Grant December 15, 2009
The Banyan Project’s initial operational phase will be launching pilot sites that provide local and service journalism to distinctly different communities in three cities with differing laws and cultures. With improvements based on wisdom gained from the pilot experience, Banyan would then offer turnkey franchises to journalists in communities from coast to coast.
The initial site is planned for Boston, where Banyan’s president lives, with a second launched a year after the first and a third launched six months after that. The target cities for Sites 2 and 3 are Chicago and Kansas City. Boston offers an ethnically diverse population; in Chicago the community to be served will be the African-American South Shore neighborhood, and in Kansas City the community to be served will be white. Banyan will recruit local boards of advisors from all three communities to be served.
Banyan’s president has established contact with potential allies in all three target cities and although none have made specific commitments he is confident of significant community support. In the event that unforeseen obstacles block the Chicago or Kansas City plans, Banyan also has allies in Pittsburgh; Lansing, Mich., and several other cities.
Banyan also envisions seeking separate funding to set up coverage of issues from a national perspective that will add value to the reader experience at the community level. Ideally this will be accomplished before franchises are offered.
Allies
Banyan’s Board of Advisors, listed on the banyanproject.com website, have been a vital force in shaping the Banyan concept over the last three years and will play important supporting roles in establishing its pilot sites.
In addition, Banyan has an array of allies beyond the advisory board in the target cities (listed below). It will also form local advisory boards consisting of members of the communities the pilots will serve.
Further, Banyan has significant support from institutional allies including the Online Media Law Network, part of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, which has agreed to seek pro bono legal work to incorporate Banyan as a nonprofit and set up its co-op ownership structure.
Tom Stites is applying to be a Berkman fellow in the hope of gaining deeper access to the Center’s wisdom and using Berkman as his base while launching the Boston pilot site. Since 2006 he has been a regular at Berkman meetings and was invited to contribute an essay on the future of editors in the digital age that Berkman published in its Media Re:public Project report. Colin Maclay, Berkman’s managing director, has opened Berkman facilities for Banyan meetings and offered access to fellows as Banyan unfolds. Three present and former Berkman fellows are members of the Banyan Board of Advisers; other fellows have been supportive of the project.
Two other institutional allies that support Banyan at the core level:
The ICA Group, which provides consulting and other support for nonprofits and has expertise in co-operative businesses. Its president, Newell Lessell, an Advisory Board member, has contributed pro bono consulting and has agreed to serve on the Banyan corporate board.
Knowledge Networks, the survey research firm. The sociologist Dr. Bill McCready, KN’s vice president for academic and nonprofit research and an Advisory Board member, has contributed significant understanding of the public Banyan seeks to serve.
Here are alphabetical lists of the people who have expressed interest in Banyan pilot sites in Boston, Chicago and Kansas City. Those marked with bullets are members of the Banyan Board of Advisors.
Boston
• Chuck Collins, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies who directs its Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He has ties to many of Boston’s community-based organizations and leads the Common Security Clubs movement, which brings people together at the community level to help each other through economic struggle.
Jack Driscoll, former top editor of The Boston Globe and journalist in residence at the MIT Media Lab. Driscoll founded two of the earliest online community news sites.
Tom Fiedler, dean of Boston University’s School of Communications, and Lou Ureneck, chair of its journalism department. They’re interested in exploring internships for student journalists at the Banyan pilot site and in having other students work on community-level investigative reporting projects through the site.
• Newell Lessell, president of the ICA Group (see above). He ties to many nonprofits and community-based organization in Boston.
Mary Jo Meisner, vice president of the Boston Foundation, former editor of The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and president of Community Newspapers of Boston. Banyan would seek to work with community-based organizations the foundation supports.
Mary Thang, the editor of New England Ethnic Newswire. She has strong relationships in Boston’s ethnic communities and has been consistently supportive of Banyan.
• Ralph Whitehead, University of Massachusetts professor of journalism and expert on politics and the working class.
Chicago
• Fran Grossman, executive vice president of ShoreBank. This pioneering community development bank is a crucial institution in the South Shore neighborhood, which we envision as a Banyan pilot site. Grossman has extensive ties to community based organizations and nonprofits not only in South Shore but throughout Chicago.
• Dr. Bill McCready, vice president for academic and nonprofit research at Knowledge Networks (see above) and a Chicago resident and native with deep roots in its South Side.
• Ralph Whitehead of the University of Massachusetts department of journalism, is a native of the South Shore neighborhood and retains many Chicago relationships that could be important to a Banyan pilot’s success.
Kansas City
• Dalene Bradford, consultant to foundations and nonprofits and former executive of the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation.
Michael J. Kelley, formerly an editor and chief political writer for the Kansas City dailies, a staff member for Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, and a retail business owner. Kelley is returning to Kansas City after stepping down after a decade editing The Las Vegas Sun; he directed the staff that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Laura McKnight, CEO, Greater Kansas City Community Foundation.
Richard Ward, CEO of the Providence Business Group and publisher of community newspapers.
