Knight News Challenges

The Knight Foundation runs an annual "news challenge":

The Knight News Challenge accelerates media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information. Winners receive a share of $5 million in funding and support from Knight’s network of influential peers and advisors to help advance their ideas.
http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/

Numbers by Koen Vereeken
http://www.flickr.com/photos/koenvereeken/2088902012

I was recently browsing through the many entries to the current stage of the challenge: "DATA"

We’re looking for new ways of collecting, understanding, visualizing and helping the public use the large amounts of information generated each day.
http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/24130238607/knight-news-challenge-data-is-now-open

I encourage you to look through them, too. To whet your appetite, here are a handful that caught my eye:

Satire
This one might be good for a laugh?

Combine satire, open data, and software development to produce an informative, comedy hackathon centered around the 2012 election.

http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25579071683/satire-hackathon-pairing-comedians-and-developers-to

rNews
I've got an interest in rNews. It is nice to see it spread in the wild a little bit.

Enable publishers to automatically augment content with meta data in the rNews format, derived from natural language processing.

http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25579264393/metafy-us-automatically-tagging-content-in-the-rnews

HTTP for Data / Python

And I've got a soft spot for Python, still one of my favourite programming languages of all time.
Improve Python, Numpy, Scipy for data science & big data. Lay groundwork for an open data web (“HTTP for Data”).

http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25579049658/next-generation-numpy-scipy-and-python-for-data

Wikidata
The fledgling Wikidata initiative is very interesting and has generated a lot of excitement in the semantic web world. Perhaps a little ambitious - a repository for all identifiers for everything - but the ambition is laudable.
Turn Wikidata into a common, free identifier repository for tagging, exploring, linking, and visualizing resources, news stories, and data everywhere.
http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25575917516/wikidata-as-a-central-free-repository-of-identifiers

News Event Service

And my name is on this one...
Create a news event registry and a curated event taxonomy based on both a daily crawl of global news and contributions from news providers.

http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25576383721/the-news-event-service