News Challenge winners

I’m at the  E&P/MediaWeek Interactive Media Conference in Miami. Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibargüen just announced the winners of the News Challenge, in which $12 million in grants were announced out of the five-year program’s $25 million contest. The goal is to help lead journalism into its digital future. I got to meet nearly all of the awardees.

Here’s some information the foundation released about the top winners:

– The Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology receive $5 million to create a Center for Future Civic Media to develop, test and study new forms of high-tech community news.

– Journalist/web developer Adrian Holovaty, creator of chicagocrime.org, receives $1.1 million to create a series of city-specific web sites devoted to public records and hyperlocal information. He’s taking a two-year leave from the Washington Post to begin hiring a development team.

– VillageSoup in Maine receives $885,000 to build free software to allow others to replicate the citizen journalism and community participation site VillageSoup.

– MTV receives $700,000 to establish a Knight Mobile Youth Journalist (Knight "MyJos") in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia to report weekly – on cell phones, and other media – on key issues, including the environment, 2008 presidential election and sexual health.

– Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism receives $639,000 for nine full journalism scholarships for students with undergraduate degrees in computer science.

– The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University receives $552,000 to create an incubator where students will learn how to create and launch digital media products.

For more:

Editors Weblog: The Knight Foundation announces winners of the first Knight News Challenge.

Miami Herald: Challenge winners have a new take on the news.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.