By intern researcher Colin Jones

Since its inception, the Internet has offered egalitarian promises of compressed distance and dissolved borders via a digital platform. These have been among the medium’s most salient, and most heralded, features.

But an American media company’s foundation aims to modify that promise. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s News Challenge has staked US$ 5 million through a grant program on a premise that the Internet can be localized.

The competition, which closed November 1, required that applicants meet only three criteria: Proposed projects must use or create open-source digital technology, serve the public interest, and limit their scope to one or more specific, geographic locations. The idea is to find ways to recast the Internet into something that can replace the imperiled local newspaper.

“We’re interested in what information gives the community,” said Alberto Ibarguen, foundation president and CEO. “What allows a district near Tsinghua (a university in Beijing) its sense of community and place? What makes it different than some neighborhood in the south of the city? It is a current of information relevant to people who live there.”

In the past, before the World Wide Web kicked circulation figures into a nosedive, newspapers were among the key nodes in that current, a critical medium that guaranteed neighbors knew about crime, elections, commercial deals and other community events.

But the print media in Europe and the United States, especially local newspapers, has withered with the advent of the digital age. Several major American publishers recently announced they would reduce staff. For example, the publisher of Time and Sports Illustrated magazines recently announced the elimination of 600 jobs. The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey, announced it would do away with 40 percent of its editorial staff.

These and other signposts gave rise to the News Challenge grant program.

“How do you move forward from what newspapers were? How do you provide news and discourse now? Those are the questions Knight wants to see answered,” said Susan Mernit, director of this year’s News Challenge.

Mernit and her staff recruited grant applicants from all over the world. Special attention was given to China, which until now has produced only a handful of entries.

One reason may be that, while China has a lively online community, its print culture is equally vibrant. Newspaper circulation in Asian nations such as China and India continues to rise by the year, as leisure time and salaries increase. China, in fact, has become the world’s largest consumer of newspapers; an average of more than 107 million copies rolled off presses every day in 2007, according to the World Association of Newspapers.

Still, while circulations are rising now, it seems only a matter of time before China’s newspapers experience something like what is happening in America and Europe. The most recent statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center, a research agency for the Ministry of Information, show more than 19 percent of the country’s citizens, or about 253 million people, were online as of June 2008, making China home to the largest number of netizens in the world. That nearly 60 percent of these Web users are under 30 years old may provide further writing on the wall.

To catch the ear of this new generation, News Challenge organizers contacted 20 internationally know Chinese bloggers and asked them to spread word about the contest. They also bought keywords for the Chinese equivalent of terms that resonate with the digital community such as “online news” and “startup,” as well as “Ruby on Rails” and “Python” – two types of open-source program tools.

Whether Chinese techies caught on will be evident after this year’s applications are reviewed and winners announced. If any receive grants, the Chinese will be helping the grant’s sponsors in their quest to increase international participation.

In 2006, News Challenge’s first year, about 15 percent of the applications came from outside the United States. Last year, the non-U.S. portion rose to about half, according to Ibaguen.

“What this contest allows us to do is say, ‘We don’t know the answers,’” said Ibarguen. Yet the grant sponsors appear confident that answers to questions about the latest information revolution can be found somewhere in the world – and probably somewhere with an Internet connection.