This clever project bridges journalism, demographic data and blogging while tracking the travels, strategies and messages of the presidential candidates. It includes a fascinating and fresh new way to define various communities and provides entry points for citizen participation.

Reality TV with a meaningful mission: Purple States produces quality video of real people covering the presidential campaign. Their first season was broadcast on nytimes.com. A national online newspaper will feature their election documentaries.

A deep, rich and flexible online database provides citizens and others the ability to track currently elected politicians, announced and rumored candidates seeking public office in New York City.

Faced with the daunting task of informing Iowa caucus go-ers about the crowded field of 18 presidential candidates, The Des Moines Register produced innovative multimedia tools to explain how and where to participate in the caucuses, where candidates stand of a range of issues, based on their statements in debates and interviews.

The DesMoines Register partnered with YouTube to invite and Webcast citizen videos leading up to the Iowa Caucuses. Thirty people were given cameras and got to keep them if they uploaded five segments. These videos were politically diverse, some humorous, some serious, but pretty popular. It was a successful collaboration.

OffTheBus is a pioneering experiment in citizen-powered crowdsourcing of presidential election coverage, led by expert investigative journalists, savvy former Web political campaigners and one of the nation's most popular and trusted blogs/news vetters. OffTheBus got scoops, broadened and deepened reporting and modeled a new spirit of journalistic collaboration with traditional news institutions, emerging online platforms, and non-profit watchdog groups.

The Sunlight Foundation and grantee Taxpayers for Common Sense have created a tool that gives citizens access to the tools necessary to do real investigative journalism on the issue of congressional earmarks, the once-hidden budgetary amendments to federal appropriations where members can funnel pork to pet projects and campaign donors. The research tool has also led to professional journalistic investigations and citizen action.

Adrian Holovaty, creator of 2005 Batten Grand Prize-winner chicagocrime.org, has created EveryBlock.com, which offers a Web "newspaper" for every city block in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. Enter any address, neighborhood or ZIP code in those cities, and the site shows you recent public records, news articles and other Web content that's geographically relevant to that address. Included are civic information (building permits, crimes, restaurant inspections), news articles and blog entries, local Flickr photos and Craigslist postings, among other things. This project is the product of a $1.1M 2007 Knight News Challenge grant.

USA TODAY's Gene Sloan had been writing a blog about cruising for over a year. In January 2008, USATODAY.com launched its new Cruise Log Community site, which added a variety of new tools to the basic architecture of the blog and recast Sloan as a "curator" of cruise content. Because of its success, within two months they launched "Today in the Sky" concentrating on the airline industry. They've built widgets called "Cruisedex" and "Flightdex" which track news buzz around cruise lines and airlines.

American Public Media created this Flash-based budget balancing game for the U.S. budget. Users choose what their core values are, then are forced to decide what needs to be cut to fully cover those values. Users are shown the strengths and weaknesses of their budget and can see how their proposed budgets stack up against other users.

Gotham Gazette's game educates, entertains and engages residents of New York City in thinking about their own waste-producing behavior while crafting solutions to the city's problem of solid waste. The well-written text, hard facts and bold graphics make the game attractive, simple and powerful.

The Washington Post created this interactive "grocery store" where users can select a category and then choose between name brand products to compare nutritional information while Post health and nutrition columnist Sally Squires offers tips via video. The goal is to help people make smarter decisions when grocery shopping, and the virtual grocery store is one piece of a five-part Post series on childhood obesity.