Are journalisms start-ups being appropriately funded?

Good piece, but the Knight Foundation is offering relatively huge investments to teams that can, generally, provide most or all of their funding for a year, with very few strings attached. The open source string is a very major one, but I think it also offers a great reminder of one fundamental media truth:

Technology will not save you.

Look at the newsy startups recently profiled, like Swivel and Verifiable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788264 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786982

Both bet big on proprietary newsy technology, and both busted out. Meanwhile, what does TechCrunch use? Nobody cares. CrunchBase is their proprietary technology, and while I think it is a really cool asset, it probably drives very, very little of their value.

Look at WordPress, which is now driving some huge percentage of the world's media, both mainstream and particularly user-generated. They open sourced and gave away all their valuable assets, but their commercial side is very profitable.

Same can be said for TechMeme to an extent, where the technology isn't so much the value as the people driving it, and that's an aggregator, where personalities aren't supposed to have as much a part of play.

With Knight Foundation, you're given a huge experimental bucket of money and a year's head start to innovate with it. By the end of that year, if you lose because you open source, you probably would've lost with a proprietary product, too.