Media Street, the hyper-local web application project being developed by the people behind King's Road , which covers the famous street in London's Chelsea, is seeking $90,000 funding from the Knight Foundation.
The Knight Foundation runs the Knight News Challenge which awards up to $5 million a year for innovative ideas that develop platforms, tools and services to inform and transform community news.
In its bid application, Media Street is described as a project that has focused on developing a new approach to supporting local news and "was started to better serve the local community of King’s Road and to develop a sustainable business model for local news."
The bid application states: "We have recruited over 40 paying customers for Kingsroad.co.uk and have generated nearly £15,000 GBP in revenue over the last quarter of 2010...We are confident that after six months, Media Street and our case study site, King’s Road, is providing a new way to support news and information in geographically defined areas.
"Our application for the Knight News Challenge is intended to help jump-start the completion of the Media Street software and to fund the launch of other sites such as Fulham Road with the recruitment of a local community editor. At present, we can also plug in any domain we want so Media Street has the potential to scale and support other English speaking communities.
"With the Kingsroad.co.uk project, we are testing whether Media Street can support a road but there is no reason why is can’t support other communities; from roads and streets to wider areas such as cities and towns - whether they're in the US or UK. It has the potential to be a global product which runs local sites around the world."
Media Street, co-founded by Jack Rutter and Jonathan Lloyd, says it aims "to bring interest back to local communities and the high street. By having a focus on local business, start ups like Media Street are in a position to better serve local online news."
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