The Crunchberry Project -- the innovation class that includes the first two Knight News Challenge programmer-journalists -- is moving forward rapidly.

The six journalism master's students involved in the project started out exploring "conversations around news." As their instructor, I challenged them to build some kind of site or service that connects people to one another and to community news and information. After meeting with the staff of Gazette Communications (which, among other businesses, owns the daily newspaper and ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa), the class decided to target its work toward young adults, ages 20-35 in the Cedar Rapids area.

The decision to target young adults was sensible, given their heavy use of digital media. Still, I think it also increased the "degree of difficulty" for the Crunchberry team's work. Local media companies have had some success creating online products geared to this audience, but they have usually revolved around entertainment (for instance, Metromix in Chicago, TBO Extra in Tampa, or Juice in Des Moines)