The Knight Fellowships program got a nice shout-out from the start-up Apture when it got a round of financing in March. PRODUCT DESCRIPTION ALERT: Apture is a technology tool that enables multi-media publishing on the websites of journalism companies like the Washington Post. Journalists can use the tool to more seamlessly publish deeper, multi-layered stories online by allowing them to find and incorporate related material in all forms — video, text, audio, photos — directly into their pages. Journalists decide which material, both original and existing, to add. Readers access this material without ever leaving the page or website.

Anyway, this is what Apture said in its release:

Apture was created out of conversations with the Stanford Knight Fellows, a group of distinguished journalists from all over the world, about how to improve online news. Those conversations led the Apture team to develop a rich communication platform that allows people for the first time ever to fully immerse themselves in the ideas they are reading about without ever leaving the page.

I knew that Knight Fellows Pam Maples, now of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Martin Turner, of the BBC, had been in those conversations, so I asked Pam for the background. Here’s her account:

In the winter of 2006, Stanford senior Tristan Harris started talking to some Knight fellows about online news. Harris was a computer science major, focused on human-computer interaction. He was also a news junkie. And he and a couple of his friends, also CS students, were frustrated with online news. It was a clunky, click-click-click process that often didn’t even yield much information. Harris and his friends believed there had to be a way to allow users to dig deeper into stories/topics that interested them and pull from multiple sources without surfing endlessly. Harris believed that if this were easier, people would consume more news and be more informed. Online news should be more dynamic and interactive. But could such an experience be created entirely through automation? Harris didn’t think so. Although he wasn’t a journalist, Harris understood that editors played a role that couldn’t be replaced by a computer. But he had no idea how, or why, they made news judgments or how a typical mainstream newspaper or broadcast organization produced and edited its stories.
He turned to the Knights. And over the next few months, Harris and his friends got a crash course in all of these questions. The Knights, meanwhile, were exposed to new ideas about how to enrich/deepen online news.
When the conversations began, Harris and friends were drawing ideas on paper for the Knights. But soon, Harris was showing a couple of the fellows his first prototypes for critique and testing.
The “news project,” as it was called then, became his senior Computer Science project.
A couple of the Knights [Maples and Turner] have remained volunteer advisers to Harris and Apture. Beginning in late summer 2006, they helped open doors for him with major news organizations, including the BBC and Washington Post/Newsweek, leading to opportunities for him to show the beta and begin to build relationships that eventually led to the use of Apture by those sites. Harris says those early demos provided vital feedback… Since it launched in late spring 2008, Apture has received a lot of positive reviews from some of the most important tech and innovation journalists and bloggers. Tristan has been asked to speak at several major journalism and tech conferences, including the Online News Association, the national APME convention. In December 2008, Apture was one of about 30 start-ups from around the world asked to present at the LeWeb conference in Paris.

I would say that this is the kind of collaboration that we intend our program to encourage, and this anecdote demonstrates that it’s already been occurring.