$10,000 Grand Prize:
Wired.com:
WikiScanner Coverage
WIRED,
San Francisco
 WIRED
magazine's blog, called "Threat Level," made clever use
of a brilliant new technology in the service of the public's right-to-know,
engaging readers in a crowd-sourced expose of corporate whitewashing
of Wikipedia entries not favorable to a company's reputation. Wired
issued this invitation to its reader community: "Share Your
Sleuthing! Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries?
Spotted any government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's
Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then submit your finds and vote on other
readers' discoveries here."
$2,000
Special Distinction Award:
PolitiFact
St.
Petersburg Times, St. Petersburg, Fla.
 Reporters
and researchers from the St. Petersburg Times have partnered
with Congressional Quarterly to create a "bold" resource
for the 2008 election. PolitiFact is a database where
users can sort news items by candidate, issue or ruling.
They have also developed the "Truth-o-meter" which
takes election coverage and judges the accuracy of the
report.
$2,000
Special Distinction Award:
Ushahidi
- Crowdsourcing Crisis Information
Ushahidi,
Inc., Orlando, Fla.
 A
handful of Kenyan techies launched a site for bloggers
and citizen journalists to report, document and map incidents
of political
violence following an apparently stolen presidential
election. Eventually 130 people uploaded incident reports. The
site modeled
grassroots information-sharing in a time of crisis and censorship.
$2,000
Citizen Media Award:
JDLand.com
Jacqueline Dupree, Washington
 A
one-woman citizen media project to document and inform
a local community about real estate development issues.
Armed with a digital camera, web production skills, mapping,
and a mission to inform neighbors about construction
projects, plans, meetings and its impact on daily life.
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Honorable
Mention:
Hope:
Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica
Bluecadet
Interactive, Philadelphia
 A
multi-media reporting project that uses poetry as an entryway into
documentary-style coverage of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. This site was commissioned
by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and made possible with the
Virginia Quarterly Review.
Honorable
Mention:
Iowa's
Deadly Tornado
The
Des Moines Register, Des Moines, Iowa
 In
May, a tornado ripped through a community in Iowa. The Des Moines
Register created a house-by-house color-coded mapping to chronicle
the path of destruction and its human impact. The map includes
before and after photography of homes, aerial photos, text stories,
videos of survivors and uses a variety of surveillance camera footage
and cell phone video. The package is breath-taking and chilling.
Honorable
Mention:
iReport.com
CNN,
Atlanta
 This
user-generated news Web site from CNN launched in Feb. 2008. Simple
Web tools invite anyone with a news story to share it, and to rate
and talk about the others on the site. iReport.com's homepage is
organized by a formula that gives prominence to stories based on
their community activity. News that is fresh, popular, highly rated
and that provokes conversation floats to the top of the page. The
best stories are verified, expanded on by CNN reporters, posted
to CNN.com and marked with an "On CNN" stamp. iReport.com
has received almost 20,000 stories since it's launch.
Honorable
Mention:
U.S.
Congress MAPLight.org
MAPLight.org, Berkeley,
Calif.
 A
large-scale database combining all campaign contributions
to members of Congress with how each official votes on
every bill, illuminating patterns of money and influence
that were never before possible to see without hours
or days of effort. The MAPLight.org Web site launched
May 16th, 2007 and covers all bills and votes in the
current, 110th Congress. The site is updated daily within
an hour of each vote on Capitol Hill.
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