With the Knight News Challenge there are no excuses. For those not in the know, the Knight Foundation is in its third year of funding innovative ideas in news reporting and delivery. This year the pot is $5 million. There are just three rules:

1. Use or create digital, open-source technology as the code base.
2. Serve the public interest.
3. Benefit one or more specific geographic communities.

Not sure if your idea qualifies? Visit the Knight News Challenge Garage, where prospective applicants can talk about their ideas before they apply. Here are some applicants who have already applied.

My favorite past winner of Knight funds is Spot.us:

“Spot Us” is a project of the nonprofit Center for Media Change that allows an individual or group to take control of news by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists.

Other past winners here.

Hurry, that idea floating in your head has to be on paper by Nov. 1.

Journalism is having a rough time with the transition to online content. As a result, Matt King argues that reporters are becoming less specialized and have less time to create quality content. King makes a compelling argument why we should cut back mundane tasks in newsrooms everywhere:

Overwork and unreasonable expectations = stenography. Stenography of some sorts (the sentencing of the principal child molester, the city council vote, etc.) is very important, but we need to stop doing so much of it. It’s important but it’s also about the easiest thing a reporter does, and there are people willing to do it for us for free.

King gives us a three-step program to cut the mundane work out of our day to give us more time to innovate and create (highly condensed, my emphasis):

1. It’s past time to understand 99 percent of car accidents, fires and arrests are the mundane details of life and people really don’t care, despite what page views say. In almost every instance these stories are cupcakes, eaten because they’re there, but wouldn’t be missed if they were not. Ever hear anyone crave a cupcake? This applies especially in non-competitive markets. …

It’s tantamount to flushing 10 hours of reporter time that could be spent talking to sources in cafes, or editing a cool video project, or writing a really strong narrative piece, or, in my case, playing with a spreadsheet.

2. In most cases, kill the early a.m. cops and traffic update shifts that’ve popped up like mushrooms in the last couple of years. These shifts are poison mushrooms and do nothing but eat a reporter’s time. There is no more useless exercise in all of reporting than an early morning round of cold calls to cop shops asking “anything goin’ on?”

3. We need to spend a lot less time at meetings. I spent seven hours at a meeting in Tuxedo Park last night. Got home at 2 a.m. had to be at work at 7. Got three hours of sleep. You can imagine how productive I was today.

I can only say I really agree with this. Before you object, please continue reading:

But I didn’t have to, for two important reasons.

* Almost every public meeting is a show trial. Real decisions get made in back rooms through back channels, no matter how much integrity sits on a particular board, council, whatever. Show me an official who says he didn’t know how he would vote when he got to a meeting and I’ll show you a liar.

After I know the players, I would prefer not to cover meetings if I can preview them instead, or there’s a controversial decision or I will learn new information. So much of meeting coverage is reporting on rubber-stamp decisions. Work sessions are far more interesting and give better insight to what the board is going to decide later on.

If reporters don’t cover the meetings, who will? King has an answer for that too:

The world is full of citizen journalists.The people who write for those sites are hugely important to other people in Tuxedo Park and me. I barely bother with the official Web site because these sites have much more of what I want to know. I get reports of every municipal meeting, architectural review board included, updates on community events, births and deaths and some really helpful political commentary.

Unfortunately not all of us have a bevy of CJs waiting in the wings. Fortunately reporters are good at other things: Cultivating relationships.

There are lots of smart people in the world who are interested in citizen journalism and just as capable as reporters of covering a meeting or a traffic jam. Building relationships with these people is the solution to free up reporters to do the substantive work of real value to the people who don’t have time and/or expertise to do it.