The Knight News Challenge Garage launched (beta) today. In the press release, the site is described:

Fifty coaches are standing by online to help innovative thinkers apply for the Knight News Challenge, a $5 million-a-year contest to move journalism into the 21st Century. The coaches — made up of past jurors and winners — will give News Challenge hopefuls a better chance of winning up to $5 million in prizes annually. They also hope to attract a more diverse range of ideas.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has funded the contest with $25 million over five years. Its goal is to discover new ways of using digital technology to meet the information needs of geographic communities. Last year’s contest received 3,000 applications. It named 16 winners.

The new “Knight News Challenge “Garage” mentoring site can be accessed online at garage.newschallenge.org. “With this incubator site we are taking a page from technology companies,” says Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation’s journalism program officer. “We hope that the Garage coaches will extend the contest’s reach beyond the journalism field. We want to attract more applicants from technical communities, such as the social media arena. Another goal is to improve the overall quality of applications.”

In her blog post announcing the Garage, Kristen Taylor, Online Community Manager for the Knight Foundation, writes:

The Garage site was built in Drupal, an open source content management platform by pingVision in Boulder, Colorado.

Drupal for the rapid turnaround solution

Last month, pingVision was commissioned to develop rather quickly a community website where potential applicants to the Knight News Challenge could workshop their applications, get feedback from mentors and peers, and – hopefully – improve their chances of winning some of the $5 million being granted this year by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

pingVision designed and developed the site in 2 weeks, from wireframes to beta deployment. The Garage is running Drupal 5, with some customized implementation of the Organic Groups modules. Having the incredible power and extensibility of Drupal to start with made the rapid turnaround possible.

Open sourcing the news

Here is Kristen Taylor's video announcement by Kristen Taylor, courtesy of DotSub:

If you are multilingual, you can help get the word out. On the Knight blog, Kristen writes:

We've used a video-sharing service called DotSub above so that the video can be subtitled in many different languages–the News Challenge is an international contest and open to everyone.

You can help us get the word out by going to this video on the DotSub site here and subtitling it in another language (thanks in advance for your help).

There's money to be had here. Seriously, if you have an idea for a project that might fit the mission of the Challenge, go to the News Challenge Garage and start workshopping your application!

Edited to add: See also the Knight Drupal Initiative for grants on improving Drupal!