The Knight Foundation today announced the award winners of its innovation prize, The News Challenge. I’ve been following the challenge and was very curious to see who they would ultimately fund—the list of folks is downright impressive.

What do I like about what the good folks at Knight did?

1. They opened the contest up to companies, bloggers/individuals, schools/university, and nonprofits. Some of the best innovations aren’t sector specific and, in fact, such criteria can often lead funders to overlook innovations that will truly have impact and scale. For goodness sakes, they awarded a prize to MTV!
2. They acknowledge the importance of open source and community commons. Adrian Holovaty is amazing because he thinks with a hacker mind and a journalist mind. In the web framework world, Django is the equivalent of sliced and toasted bread. His site, Chicago Crime, unfolds data visualization in a real time mashup.
3. They aren’t afraid to fund things that challenge the business model of Knight Corporation. You know what? Some of these folks—with or without Knight funding—are disruptive innovations to the mainstream media. At worst, Knight (I assume the foundation and the company) will learn about new media, citizen journalism, and Web 2.0. At best, they become part of the mix.
4. They embrace the creative. Much like the MacArthur Genius awards, this is a celebration and recognition of the Creative. As Guy Kawasaki says, “Make meaning”. Every single one of these award winners does. This isn’t about widgets or service hours, it is about changing the paradigm.

What else?

1. I’d love a way to track the progress of each of these projects as they go forward. For the blogs, it seems easy—just subscribe to the RSS feed. For the others, how will I know what is going on?
2. Digg style voting. Take a look at what’s being done by NetSquared and Digg. I wonder how interactive “vote for this” buttons might impact next years’ award winners.
3. Change the animated sun on the News Challenge site. (This one is just a personal opinion, but I think it is on the cheesy side. :)

Personal congratulations to Paul Lamb, Zfellow and CTFC innovator, Leslie Rule who along with KQED is leader in the digital storytelling field and part of our grantee network, and JD Lasica, who graciously presented at our Digital Storytelling conference earlier this year.