Collaborative Video Project Wins Knight Grant

The Knight Foundation's 2010 News Challenge awarded a total of $2.74 million to 12 innovative media projects "that use digital technology to inform specific geographic communities."

Among the grant recipients ($200,000) was L.A.-based Stroome, the creation of Nonny de la Peña and Tom Grasty.

Essentially, Stroome is a "collaborative video editing community," meaning that users can upload videos, share clips, and edit them with chosen partners or teams.

To simplify the production of news video, Stroome will create a virtual video-editing studio. Correspondents, editors and producers will be able to upload and share content, edit and remix with friends and colleagues - all without using expensive satellite truck technology. The site will launch as eyewitness video - often captured by mobile phones or webcams - is becoming a key component of news coverage, generating demand for supporting tools.

Theoretically, Stroome participants will have access to thousands of clips and collaborators.

With Stroome, you can:

* Stream content to the site so that it’s immediately accessible to the community
* Grab clips from the largest collaborative, rights-cleared clip pool on the web
* Connect to other aspiring and established content providers, editors, and producers
* Edit and remix your content with your network of friends and colleagues in real time
* Publish those edits and remixes to all the popular social networks

Tom Grasty was head of creative development at Blaze Television, and has a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a master's from the University of Southern California (USC) program in online communities.

Nonny de la Peña is a senior research fellow in immersive journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. A graduate of Harvard University, she is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with 20 years of journalism experience.

And the name Stroome? They say it's derived from the Dutch word Stromen, which translates as "to move freely, which is exactly what we want our site to facilitate -- the movement of ideas, points of view and content freely between people. We played with the spelling a bit, but the name was perfect."

Can collaborative video work? Can a video story be compiled and edited like a Google document? The Knight Foundation is banking on it, and we're eager to see some results ourselves.

UPDATE (6/17):

Knight News Challenge: Meet Stroome, the collaborative FlickrWikiGoogleDoc for video

By Megan Garber (Nieman Journalism Lab)