Getting a Knight award is cool. Having a Knight award positioned as creating little clones of yourself is doubly cool. So double congratulations are in order for Adrian Holovaty, who has received a $1.1 million Knight grant to extend/polish up/liberate his data-mashup software (as seen at ChicagoCrime.org ).
Knight is granting another $639,000 to Northwestern University for scholarships aimed at taking Web developers and training them to be journalists, effectively creating Holovaty-alikes. (Adrian actually is a Mizzou journalism grad who taught himself to be a Web developer.)
Today is a big day for foundation grants aimed at improving journalism, with the Knight News Challenge announcing its first $5 million round and the Nieman Foundation announcing 30 Harvard University fellowships.
Congratulations to all.