Today the Knight Foundation awarded $12 million in grants to various individuals and organizations to help journalism continue moving into a digital future. We're pleased to announce a couple of Drupal connections associated with this excellent initiative.

Benjamin Melançon, Co-founder of Agaric Design Collective, and Google Summer of Code student for Drupal this year, received $15,000 towards the development of a "Related Items" module for Drupal. The focus of this module will be on ease of use in connecting two pieces of content, including the ability to determine how to automatically forge connections between nodes. You can also read Benjamin's original proposal.

Lisa Williams, founder of Placeblogger and long time citizen journalist pioneer with her Boston local h2otown website, received $220,000 towards further developing Placeblogger. Placeblogger was developed using Drupal's built in aggregation ability, and customized to integrate geo and location information. The goal is to make it easier for people to find local news and information about their city or neighborhood through promotion of “universal geotagging” in blogs. Bryght worked with Lisa to help make this site a success. Find out more in Williams' announcement on Placeblogger.com.

Note that this contest is open to anyone in the world with innovative ideas for using digital news and information to foster community in specific geographic areas. First-year winners were selected from 1,650 applications submitted online. Individuals interested in the next round of the Knight News Challenge can register at http://www.newschallenge.org/. The site will begin accepting applications again on July 1, 2007. If you have a Drupal site connected with journalism, or want funding to make an awesome new feature that could be used to help people locally connect, this could be your chance!