The Knight Foundation announces the winners of its 2010 Knight News Challenge Posted by Carole Wurzelbacher on June 17, 2010 at 11:21 AM The Knight Foundation recently announced the winners of its 2010 Knight News Challenge, reports ReadWriteWeb. The contest offers awards for innovative ideas concerning how news is distributed to communities using digital technologies. This year, 12 entrants were awarded $2.74 million with the largest sum ($400,000) going to Eric Rodenbeck who designed a data visualization project called CityTracking. Rodenbeck hopes his project will help facilitate the process of creating visual representations of municipal data. The Knight Foundation description says, "CityTracking will allow users to create embedded data visualizations that are appealing enough to spread virally and that are as easy to share as photos and videos." The second place entry, called Tilemapping, was likewise aimed at digital visualization. Other project topics included reader engagement and journalistic funding at local levels. The foundation hopes their encouragement of new ideas through its News Challenge will instigate innovative thinking and allow for journalism to move forward into the age of digital media. "We can use the Knight News Challenge to experiment with ways to learn how to think in different ways about information sharing so we might discover the future of news," says Knight Foundation President, Alberto Ibargüen.
Almost half of this year's winners are private enterprises (as opposed to only 15 percent in 2009). This signifies that "businesses are finding more ways to build on open source software, a requirement of the challenge," reports The Knight Foundation's website. A full list of the challenge winners can be found here. The relevance of The Knight Foundation's initiative is particularly potent as several journals have recently decided to institute paywalls on their websites. Some have argued that the paywall could be a disaster for online journals, which will most likely lose much of their readership once blocked by the paywall. Thus, also taking into consideration the many other problems facing today's journalism, the time has never been better for a bit of innovation. The Knight Foundation News Challenge presents a platform for positive change in the news industry. "Until someone figures out the next big thing," says Ibargüen, "the next killer app that might provide blockbuster connectivity and information sharing to masses of people- we can use the Knight News Challenge to experiment with ways to learn how to think in different ways about information sharing so we might discover the future of news."