You may have heard that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will be a Platinum sponsor at DrupalCON Boston March 3rd - 6th. What you may not know is what the Knight Foundation does and how they are connected to Drupal.

Knight Foundation’s signature work is its Journalism Program. Since 1950, the foundation has invested more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide. Today, the program focuses on leading journalism excellence into the digital age. We define journalism excellence as the fair, accurate, contextual pursuit of truth. [more]

I spoke to Gary Kebbel, former head of AOL News and current journalism program officer at the foundation. Among his duties, Gary runs the Knight News Challenge, a $25 million contest to find digital news innovations that are used to create community in a given geographic area.

In 2006, Drupal-based projects by Benjamin Melançon and Lisa Williams were both funded by News Challenge grants.

2007 was the second year of the Challenge, and while the winners won’t be announced until May 14-16 at the Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas, Gary tells me that this year featured a large number of outstanding Drupal proposals.

Since the Knight Foundation is a strong believer in Open Source and sees great potential in Drupal, Gary thought that DrupalCON was a perfect chance to:

• Explore the Drupal community
• Give back to Open Souce through funding
• Announce the next big initiative

Now, I can’t say what the next big initiative is — only that it is very exciting for the Drupal community. Over at the Newspapers on Drupal group, we’re thrilled to have the Knight Foundation involved.

Gary and I are planning a session at the conference to discuss the Knight Foundation, and we are both going to be at the News Industry meetup on Monday the 3rd.