Millions headed Drupal's way: Knight News Challenge awards announced

Live from the Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's News Challenge announcements looked a little like the Drupal show. It may not be millions of dollars, but millions more people are likely to be using new local, cutting edge community news Drupal sites within a couple years.

Among the winners:

• Margaret Rosas and her Drupal-focused web shop, Quiddities, will be creating a Drupal installation profile for public radio stations ($327,000).
• Tony Shawcross has his eyes on the 1,000 public access channels across the country. His project is to build them a set of tools in Drupal to share programs and information and where users take a larger role ($380,000).
• Alexander Zolotarev will help the citizens of a small town in Russia share their reactions to becoming the center of the 2014 Olympics ($600,000). (Insider information puts Drupal as the likely platform for this people-powered coverage.)

Other projects may well use Drupal, and they are all amazingly awesome in any case. The caliber of people this round may be indicated by another winner, with Martin Moore, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who uses Drupal to blog. And he did some other thing about inventing the World Wide Web.

My favorite of all though is David Cohn's plan for community funded reporting, Spot.us. But he still hasn't settled on Drupal! So Drupal developers, get ready to respond to his request for proposal. Drupal world domination in the service of reporting in the service of democracy to save the world.

Update Spot.us is surely worthless 'cause it won't be using Drupal. BUT:

Dan Pacheo's Bakersfield-born project Printcasting uses Drupal.

And don't anyone forget the separate, and very exciting, Knight Drupal Initiative, which is for any idea that can make Drupal better for local public interest journalism.