Knight Election Hub

The Knight Election Hub was a project that provided free resources and services to U.S. newsrooms covering the 2024 elections. These resources helped more than 500 news organizations across the country serve their communities by giving them the information they needed to make informed voting decisions, have confidence in the election process and results, and understand the role newsrooms play in providing reliable civic information.

The Hub served four distinct audiences:

✓ Newsrooms: Received free or subsidized access to practical resources, such as data, software, polling, training, and access to expertise that enabled them to do deeper, more data-rich coverage.
✓ Resource providers: Gained connections with newsrooms that needed their services, and financial subsidies that helped serve newsrooms — and ultimately, communities.
✓ Journalists: Became part of a network of peer support that shared expertise and tested ideas to make election reporting better and more collaborative.
✓ Voters: While the Hub was primarily a service for newsrooms, our ultimate goal — and therefore ultimate audience — was informed voters.

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The project had big impact:

It provided 537 newsrooms with more than $1 million in free resources.
Thanks to the Hub, 44 small newsrooms carried live results on election night through our relationship with Decision Desk HQ, or using Newspack’s election templates.
421 journalists were in an active Slack community called the “Experts Desk,” hosted by Votebeat. It provided a community hub that answered 111 queries from 56 newsrooms around Election Day.
18 journalism service organizations, such as INN and the NAB, took part in a working group we convened to collaborate on election coverage.
Dozens of newsrooms and journalists were aided by the Election Urgent Care Safety Helpline

Covering this election was a huge undertaking. That’s why we worked with the Hearken, Newspack, OpenNews, MuckRock, and others to build a network of organizations supporting newsrooms at an unprecedented moment in American history.

If you've got questions about the Hub, email project lead Scott Klein.

More About the Knight Election Hub

The Knight Election Hub was an initiative designed to empower local newsrooms across the United States to deliver robust, high-quality civic information for their communities during the 2024 elections.

The project came out of a recognition that small newsrooms around the country that provide outstanding and engagement-led coverage face significant challenges accessing and affording the specialized digital tools, data, and expertise needed for comprehensive election coverage. The Hub served as a central portal and funding source to match newsrooms with the resources they needed. In addition to dozens of curated free resources, the Knight Election Hub picked up the check for commercial resources such as data, software and even polling. The project enabled newsrooms to produce vital voter guides, investigative reports, and general election coverage that gave local communities the information they needed to make informed decisions and to have confidence in the democratic process.

Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and run as a project of The Miami Foundation, the Hub was a collaboration between several journalism service organizations:

Newspack, which was the home base of the project leader and which supported the WordPress plugin that 25 newsrooms used to publish voter guides.
OpenNews, which handled logistics and coordination, as well as convening a community of practice around election coverage.
Hearken, which provided engagement training and software, and facilitated a working group of journalism support organizations. Their Election SOS project was key to the Hub’s editorial strategy.
MuckRock, which designed, developed, and launched the Hub itself in six weeks. MuckRock’s team also verified newsroom eligibility through its MuckRock Accounts service and connected newsrooms to resources available through the Hub.

In addition to the core project teams, there were about 20 organizations that provided active resources in the Hub, and were essential collaborators. These included…

CHIP50, which ran public opinion polls for news organizations whose communities are rarely served by polling, including The Haitian Times and The Forward.
Sunlight Research Center, which supported newsrooms doing investigative candidate backgrounding.
OpenSecrets, which did campaign finance training.
The Algorithmic Transparency Institute Provided access to their Junkipedia tool for cross-platform social media monitoring.
Votebeat, which ran an innovative and successful “experts” resource via Slack on Election Day to help newsrooms cover voting.

As the election drew near, we launched a subsidiary project called the Election Urgent Care Safety Helpline to equip newsrooms to handle potential post-election harassment and violence. This included a group of organizations led by PEN America that provided coordinated response and gave newsrooms free access to data, legal support, and, significantly, vital digital safety resources. Participants in the Safety Helpline included:

As a funding mechanism, the project pioneered what we called a demand-driven philanthropy model. Instead of us dictating product needs, the Hub focused on meeting demonstrated demand from newsrooms. This meant supporting products and services that newsrooms actively applied for. The project paid providers directly for these resources on behalf of approved newsrooms, removing significant financial barriers while avoiding wasted effort and funds.

At its heart, the Hub was a powerful collaboration, bringing together funding, technologists, journalism support organizations, and resource providers to collectively address a systemic industry challenge and safeguard the information ecosystem around a critical election. Its focus, responsiveness, and collaborative model were key to its success in bolstering local election journalism nationwide.

Impact

The project strategy hinged on collaboration: We made an early decision to convene organizations rather than hire individual people for the project. This meant we were successfully able to leverage the best networks, experience and expertise possible without needing to worry about building a new nonprofit organization — and sustaining it after the project was over.

This collaborative approach also allowed us to tailor solutions directly to the identified problems. We knew journalists, especially those working for smaller newsrooms, were “fried and frozen” as they started to put together their election coverage plans. Because of that, we did our best to focus on giving them access to practical and durable tools and products.

This ended up being the right move, and resulted in double the reach we anticipated. When products were well-targeted, it was easy for journalists to see the role they could play in their newsroom’s election coverage. The Hub often served to identify existing free resources that might be helpful, and provided a way to amplify those. Doing this rather than creating new ones was a much better use of limited time and resources.

The demand-driven funding model was another key piece of our strategy. While philanthropy typically funds the execution of strong ideas based on hoped-for demand, we for the most part funded launched products, and rewarded demonstrated demand. This model worked: In the areas where we paid for the use of existing (or well-developed but pre-launch) ideas and products, takeup and impact were strong. And along the way, resource providers learned how to understand and serve real market demand.

The result was coverage that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible, created with agility and efficiency, and a proven model for follow-on projects in the future.