Knight Foundation honors digital media projects

Two Bay State residents who proposed new digital media experiments were among the winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which funded the contest, chose nine winners involving mobile technology, digital investigative journalism, and new ways to inform and connect communities The winners were announced today at the Future of News and Civic Media Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

They included participants in New York, California, Washington D.C., Phoenix, and Orlando, who won $5.1 million overall in coming up with ideas for experiments that would transform the distribution of news and information in everyday life.

The largest winner was an initiative called Document Cloud, which was conceived by journalists from the New York Times and ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. Their idea: Create an online database run as an independent nonprofit, where media and watchdog groups can share and study source documents. That group won $719,500 in the international contest.

The winners from Massachusetts included Springfield's Katrin Verclas. Her project, called Mobile Media Toolkit, will help people use technology such as phones and social media sites to create and distribute news and information. Verclas, a fellow at MIT's Media Lab, won $200,000 from the Knight Foundation.

The other local winner was John Ewing of Roxbury. His project, called Virtual Street Corners, involves connecting residents of Brookline and Roxbury through citizen journalist video newscasts that would be projected on life-sized screens to spur interaction between the two communities. Ewing, a new media artist, won $40,000 from the Knight Foundation. (By Johnny Diaz, Globe staff)