The first set of Knight News Challenge winners was announced in May 2007, and among the larger awards sat two smaller grants worth more attention than they got.
The first funded scholarships for computer programmers and web developers to take a master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The idea came from Professor Rich Gordon, on the reasoning that journalism in a digital age needs people who understand both journalism and technology. That did not mean every journalist had to write Perl — but the industry needed enough people fluent in emerging technologies to build new forms of journalism at all. Adrian Holovaty, who took a US$1.1m Knight Foundation award in the same round, welcomed what he called “journalism scholarships for geeks” at Medill.
The second was Playing the News, a news simulation developed by Nora Paul at the University of Minnesota, which in its own description “lets you play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers”.
Both grants pointed at the same gap: the newsroom skill that was scarce in 2007 was not reporting or coding on its own but the combination of the two. The programmer-in-the-newsroom hire that the Medill scholarships were built to produce is now an ordinary newsroom role.