The winners of the 2008 Knight News Challenge were announced, and they are a fascinating group.

Read Ben Melançon’s Millions headed Drupal’s way for a good overview with relation to Drupal.

I was fascinated to read The WSJ interview with Alberto Ibarguen, Knight Foundation president and CEO. The following is his answer to the first question asked by WSJ’s Tom Weber:

Buzzwatch: What did you notice about the focus of entries this year compared with last year?

Mr. Ibarguen: We jumped from 1,600 applications to more than 3,000, with roughly half from overseas. And we had many more applications from young people, which we had particularly targeted.

In content, there was a significant increase in the number of people who had cellphone or cellphone-related projects. There were a notable number of projects using Drupal [an open-source content-management system].

There was also a significant increase in the number of people who wrote with projects related to online weeklies and online dailies in different small communities. We did not do anything with those in this context because they didn’t meet the threshold for innovation. But the crowd is telling us something. So sometime this summer we’re going to bring together a number of those people and see if there isn’t something we at Knight Foundation can do.

Now, this should get the Drupalverse excited about the Knight Drupal Initiative, a program that was created in direct response to this year’s News Challenge entrants. We’re ready to start taking applications, and are trying to arrange a public Q&A session for next week.

Today is my last day at Morris DigitalWorks. After a ten-year run in the newspaper industry, I am leaving to work full-time with Drupal development.

I am joining the team at Palantir, where I will be doing some programming, training and consulting for Palantir and their growing client list.

Tiffany Farriss and George DeMet have put together a great young team, and I am very excited to be coming on board. The company just moved into its new offices in order to keep up with demand for their award-winning services. Palantir is hiring more developers, too.

I also get to work with Larry Garfield, whom I greatly respect. We worked together on the GoPHP5 project, which helped chart a course for the future of Drupal.

For me, the decision came down to priorities and passions. I think that the Drupal community can do some amazing things, especially supporting the goals of free speech and freedom of information. I will continue working on the Knight Drupal Initiative as a central part of my Drupal contributions.

I am staying in Augusta, where my wife is about to start an exciting new career as well. More details to come over the next week or so, as I get organized in my new home office.