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"So what's the future of news? A Local Wiki platform that allows citizens to easily maintain news about their community? A tool for that would allow news organizations to create real-time ads? Or is it mapped news integrated with social sites? These are just a few of the examples that were named winners of the The Knight Foundation News Challenge today at the Future of News Conference at MIT.\nThe Challenge awarded 12 winners $2.74 million in grants who submitted innovative open-source, digital pitches that can create better \"informed and engaged communities.\" Though many of winners included elements of social media, perhaps some of the most interesting ideas are ones that attempt to solve some of the business model problems of journalism, including NowSpots, which enables news organizations to create and sell real-time ads and PRX StoryMarket, which is partnering with Spot.us to allow \"anyone to pitch and help pay to produce a story.\"\nReal-Time Ads With NowSpots\nThe Pitch: \"To create software that allows news sites to generate revenue from a new kind of ad.\" \nThe project is being led by Brad Flora, the founder of the WindyCitizen, who has tested the concept of real-time ads on his site by creating a widget that features a business's social updates (i.e. Twitter and Facebook updates). The project would scale this idea to other news organizations that want to integrate it into their sites. \n\n\"Display ads suck,\" Flora said in his acceptance of the News Challenge Award. \"It's hard to make money with online banner ads.\" Flora explained that although small business have not really taken advantage of banner ads or online ads in general, they have jumped to create a social presence with Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts and more. Real-time ads meet them halfway, he said. \nWhat is clever about this idea is that the ads function as a paid social widget that refreshes each time a business updates its status. It's also interactive, so that users can click to follow the business or retweet or reshare that update, which makes the ads feel different from the traditional banner ads we are used to. Because social updates are not all about promotion, the ads have the potential to add more value. \nHowever, the site could have some competition in getting publishers to use their platform over that of Minnpost.com, which is already selling Real Time Ads on its site and plans to offer it to other publishers for use. \nCrowd-funding With PRX StoryMarket\nPitch: \"To take the software from Spot.us and adapt it for public radio.\"\nPublic Radio Exchange is going to take the crowd-funding idea of Spot.us and extend it to public radio stations, enabling loyal listeners \u2014 many of whom are already supporting the station \u2014 to fund local content by donating to stories that they find important.\nWith Spot.us, readers see pitches for stories from freelance journalists and are able to fund the cost of that story by contributing. This project will extend the crowd-funding idea to a medium, and one that is already thriving through user donations.\nReporting Using Social Media With One-Eight\nPitch: \"To interactively chronicle the new uses of social networks by the military.\"\nAfghanistan recently passed Vietnam as the longest American war. At that time, T.V. was the medium that is often credited with informing the public, which eventually resulted in its end. \nBecause the Department of Defense opened social media use to soldiers, social media has the potential to be the new media that results in the end of this war, said Teru Kuwayama, the award winner of $202,000 for One-Eight, which will document a Marine battalion in Afghanistan by combining reporting with the Marine's own use of social updates. \nYou can see the full list of News Challenge winners here or view the video with a 10-second pitch from each winner. What do you think of these ideas? \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nImage Courtesy of Knight Foundation. \n\n\nFor more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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