Finalists of this year’s Uutisraivaaja Innovation Contest visit the J-School and present their ideas to students, faculty and staff.

With the revolution taking place in journalism today, the profession needs innovation. Uutisraivaaja Innovation Contest seeks ideas for renewing distribution of information and creating sustainable business models for journalism.

The contest is sponsored by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. The model for the contest is the Knight News Challenge, the media innovation initiative sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in the United States, which funds ideas for advancing communication.

The finalists, that will be presenting at the J-School are Long Play, a platform for long-form feature journalism; Nearhood, a hyper-local information service; Infogram, an innovative data visualization tool; PalloPostia, a news service for children; and On Display, an application for displaying a weekly art dosage.

Each team will have 10 minutes to present followed by a couple of minutes for questions from the audience.

A piece about finalists in Social Brite:http://www.socialbrite.org/2013/05/01/media-innovations-from-europe-coming-to-stanford/

You can also check projects online: http://blogi.uutisraivaaja.fi/2013/03/11/five-projects-to-the-uutisraivaaja-final/ – there are videos of LongPlay and Infogr.am in English, the rest are unfortunately in Finnish.