Dan Pacheco explains how the new Printcasting model will be tested in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Printcasting lets people become their own publishers by creating a way to package stories and generate advertising revenue. Anyone can create a “printcast” about their interests or community.

Printcasting will be beta tested with the MediaNews Group, which owns 54 daily newspapers.

Pacheco, a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, is currently expanding his project to such cities as Denver and Los Angeles.

Knight Foundation awarded the Bakersfield Californian a Knight News Challenge grant to develop Printcasting, which ties online content to publication templates.

Printcasts update themselves when the selected web sites and blogs are updated, and can be printed or sent to a mobile device. People who make printcasts can also make money from targeted ads by local businesses.

The Knight News Challenge hopes to speed adoption of digital innovations in community news.

Printcasting is one of several Knight News Challenge platforms that, once completed, will be released to everyone as open-source software.

At several of the BarCamp sessions at the Future of Civic Media conference Knight held with M.I.T., attendees spoke about using mobile technology and video and audio communication to bridge the digital divide.

The Web was thought to be the great leveler, but how about for people who don’t have a computer, or can’t read web site text?

In one BarCamp session on media and information in the developing world, 2007 Knight News Challenge Winner Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices said the developing world is better wired for mobile technology than it is for Internet use on computers. His smart phone works faster in Ghana than it does in the U.S.

Knight News Challenge grants have supported such programs as Mobile Media Toolkit and News on Cell Phones. Knight Foundation Director of IT George Martinez and his team are also working on universal digital access in U.S. communities.

Below, 2008 Knight News Challenge winner Jessica Mayberry of Video Volunteers explains how illiteracy contributes to the digital divide.

On Wednesday morning, former Knight News Challenge winners like David Ardia and Lisa Williams gave their advice for web sites and non-profits at “Knight 101″

Wednesday evening brought a plenary called “Nerds, News, and Nabes” with Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibarguen, Henry Jenkins, principal investigator for M.I.T.’s Center for Future Civic Media (C4FCM), and N.Y.U. Professor Eric Klinenberg.

At Thursday morning’s plenary session, Chris Csikszenmihalyi, co-direcotr of the C4FCM, talked about bringing communities near natural gas fields the news and information they need to preserve their communities and their health, and M.I.T. grad student Ben Fry helped us visulaize data.

One example of data visualization from Martin Wattenberg was Wordle, a program that generates images based on word frequency. The more times a word appears in a given text or blog, the larger it is in the image generated. Here’s one for a press release on the KNC winners.

On Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, KNC winners and M.I.T. grad students and employees explained their digital media projects. Notable demos included Virtual Gaza, Sourcemap.org (in beta version) and a digital community storytelling effort.

Friday morning, we all voted on the best idea for collaboration among KNC winners developed over the course of the conference using Selectricity. TweetBill, a project linking constituents to one another and alerting them to bills and their representatives’ contact info, won the $3,000 first prize.

Check out live tweets from the conference at #kncmit, #knc09, and #fncm09. Other information is available on the conference’s wiki.

Congratulations to all the winners of this year’s Knight News Challenge that were announced this afternoon.

You can read the press release, great coverage from Nieman Lab, and follow the tweets on hashtags #knc09, #fncm09, #kncmit (all of them are aggregated in this CoverItLive that Greg Linch posted on his personal site.

Gary Kebbel is the Journalism Program Director at Knight Foundation.

During a panel at last week’s Interactive Media Conference, I realized that many of the projects funded by the Knight News Challenge have the potential to work with one another to create a project that none of us has yet imagined.

For instance, Tish Grier was explaining how people can use Placeblogger.com, a site that organizes the blogs about place, to learn more about their own communities or ones they wish to visit. And David Cohn was talking about how his Spot.us project used microfunding and crowd-sourcing to pay for local investigative reports. (So far, in 24 weeks of operation, 23 reports have been funded.) Dan Pacheco demonstrated how easy it is to create a “Printcast,” or personalized niche publication, at printcasting.com. (About 10 minutes from creation to printout.)

But while they were talking, the thought occurred to me: How cool would it be if a blogger indexed in Placeblogger.com submits a proposal to Spot.us that gets funded, and then he or she prints and distributes it via Printcasting?

On June 17 Knight Foundation will announce the 2009 winners of the Knight News Challenge. Each year, as more winners are announced, we increase the chances of a new project emerging from the discussion and cooperation of all the winning projects. Knight Foundation hopes that a project none of us has imagined will ultimately be the result of the ones we have funded.

From our Knight Pulse community site:

Founding Editor of Chi-Town Daily News (a Chicago non-profit online newspaper and Knight News Challenge winner) Geoff Dougherty talks with Daniel Honigman, Social Media Strategist at Tribune Interactive about building community with Chicago news.

Find out who Colonel Tribune is, how Chi-Town does outreach on public housing, an idea about associating actions with a story, the importance of SEO (search engine optimization), and why to organize offline events for online readership.

Other ways to encourage community around local news? How is the online news community different in Chicago?

Marc Fest is Vice President of Communications at Knight Foundation.

An article in today’s New York Times talks about some of Knight Foundation’s experiments in hyperlocal journalism. Specifically, it mentions Knight projects Everyblock.com and Placeblogger.com.

One of the questions in the article is what will happen to local news, as cities’ newspapers keep failing? That question has prompted Knight Foundation’s local news experiments for the past three years. In particular, we recognize that information is a core need of communities in a democracy. That’s why Knight Foundation funds community experiments through the Knight News Challenge; community information sites through the Community Information Challenge; an examination of policy through the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy; and studies ways to bring about universal access in local communities through a digital access project.

In the article, Journalism Program director Gary Kebbel says the news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be.” And that’s why Knight Foundation funds community news experiments.