Knight News Challenge 2008 Winners Announced at E&P/Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference

Award recipients include World Wide Web Inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee

LAS VEGAS — Sixteen ideas to fund innovative digital projects around the world were awarded $5.5 million dollars today from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, accepted one of the awards for a project that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content.

Berners-Lee’s project is a partnership between the Media Standards Trust and the UK-based Web Science Research Initiative, of which he is a director.

This is the second year of the $25 million Knight News Challenge, which funds digital information innovations that transform community life.

Announced at the Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas, this year’s projects will touch people in rural India, the townships of South Africa and on college campuses across the United States, among other places. The winners’ ideas include:

• Using the Web to solicit funding from the public to pay for investigative journalism projects
• Creating software that allows a computer to become a digital radio transmitter, significantly reducing the cost of setting up community news stations in India
• Blogging to discuss the idea of interactive games where students measure and track their personal demand on natural resources.

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