You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.       

“The Gambler”, Kenny Rogers, 1978

               Most people go to Las Vegas and lose a fortune. Six extremely talented young inventors made one at the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino   without playing a single hand of poker.

               The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation  announced the winners  of their annual Knight News Challenge  at the Editor and Publisher Interactive Media Conference  in Las Vegas on Wednesday, May 14, 2008. The Knight News Challenge awards $5 million in grants for ideas that fit just three simple rules according to the Knight News Challenge website:

1.      Use digital, open-source technology

2.      Communicate news or information in the public interest.

3.      Apply your idea in a specific geographic community.

Six of this year’s winners are 26 years old or younger, part of the Knight News Challenge’s Young

Creators Award. According to their website, Knight Foundation takes high priority in engaging young people in their own futures. That said, they set aside at least $500,000 for people under the age of 26, and partnered with MTV to promote the contest. All six winners, working on four different projects, were eager to sit down with me to talk about their ideas and their lives after winning grants to make their proposals a reality.

David Cohn is a 26-year-old from California who has written for Wired, The Columbia Journalism Review, and The New York Times. He just barely met the age requirement, turning 26 shortly after the application deadline. His website, Spot.us, will let people propose stories that they want to see reported on, and will use the Internet to find micro-loans to support journalists who will work on those stories. Where did he get the inspiration? “Part of it is my experience as a freelancer. I’ve been freelancing as a journalist since 2004. I’m constantly pitching editors the stories that I want to work on. They say whether or not the story happens, but in the end I’m trying to serve the readers. [Spot.us] gives journalists a chance to literally pitch the readers.” David also told me that Spot.us should help create awareness on local issues, which is declining as newspapers lose revenue and lay off workers. “Journalism plays an important role in how communities stay informed and engaged. So this is a way to make sure that issues that need to be told get reported.”How does he feel about winning a $340,000 grant? “I feel like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, at the end when Willie Wonka gives him the keys to the glass elevator and says, ‘Whatever your vision is, try and make it happen’”.

Dharmishta Rood and Anthony Pesce are students at UCLA  and editors at the school’s newspaper, the Daily Bruin. They were awarded $275,000 to create the Community News Network, online news publishing software with a twist: Their system will allow users to edit and assign stories, videos, and photos using mobile devices. This should be a dream come true for the busy student journalist, who can now file his or her advice column while sipping a Starbucks  on the way to a midterm. “Basically we want to help other student journalists plan and organize content on the Internet,” said Pesce. “Right now we use whiteboards and some Filemaker Pro  software that is really bad and outdated. We want to give [ourselves] and other student editors the tools they need to plan content anywhere.”

Pesce went on to say, “We want to give our community at UCLA the tools they need to sort of organize themselves.” Rood elaborated, ”It’s like a digital town square. You get your own user profile, and get to customize the way you use news and the way you read news. You can generate things on your profile like having a blog and you can also create or join groups, which will integrate with the community as a whole.”

So why will college students use Community News Network and not stick with existing technologies like College Publisher? Pesce said, “College Publisher is great, but they don’t offer a lot of the tools and the flexibility student newspapers need. They’re just a content management system. We’re going to do a lot more. We’re going to give every student at UCLA a website, hopefully under our domain name.”

Some of the winners got more green than just cash. Angela Antony and colleague Sandra Ekong are undergrads at Harvard. They will be using a $40,000 grant to work on The Beanstockd Project, an online game that will make environmentalism not only fun and competitive but hip. But isn’t green the new black? “We think over the years the environmental movement has gained this negative stigma,” Antony told me. “It’s kind of seen as hippie or granola. We really see the need to rebrand the movement and sort-of modernize it. Really up the entertainment aspect of the environmental movement as well.” Ekong chimed in, “Even now, with this huge Green media wave, when we told our friends we were starting a Green company they laughed at us. We think there’s still work to be done.”

Antony and Ekong also said that they use funky pop culture questions to get young people thinking about the environment. When I requested an example, Ekong asked me, “What is the environmental impact of Jamie Lynn Spears baby?” I still don’t know the answer.

               So how does their game work? Antony told me, “Basically what the Beanstockd game does is create an incentive structure around making really small changes in your everyday life. So when you take a shorter shower you get credit for it. If you buy a Green product or use a Green service you get credit for it.”

               Young Creator Alexander Zolotarev is a Fulbright Scholar  at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. His idea, the Sochi Olympics Project, was awarded $600,000 to document the changes that will occur in Sochi, Russia, as they prepare to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. Zolotarev told me how the city might change and how the project might work. “This town will become one of the business and financial centers for the whole country in two or three years. You can imagine that everything will be rebuilt. The whole infrastructure will be modified. I want the citizens of this city to actually talk about how the preparation for the Olympic Games changes their neighborhood and their city.” Alexander also said that the coming Summer Olympics in Beijing  will give him and Sochi a chance to learn from their experience.

Applications for the 2009 Knight News Challenge will be available beginning September 1, 2008.