Ted Han, DocumentCloud, in a video by Jon Vidar.

Above, Ted Han describes how DocumentCloud, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, is developing a new feature allowing newsrooms to invite public participation in annotating and commenting on source documents.

The tool will help newsrooms involve their readers in the news and improve DocumentCloud as a journalistic tool and investigative reporting resource. The site recently merged with Investigative Reporters and Editors.

As a two-time Knight News Challenge winner (it won also in 2009 to launch), DocumentCloud already helps journalists analyze, annotate and publish original source documents. The site is used by more than 200 newsrooms nationwide.

Han joins DocumentCloud from Videojuicer, an online video platform focused on open standards and software integration. He’s a computational linguist by degree, developer by trade, and Sci-Fi nerd by leisure. 

Michael Maness, vp/journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation, recently gave a preview of the 2012 Knight News Challenge. The challenge is going to be broken up into faster, more focused competitions held three times next year – a way to be more responsive to the fast-paced culture of the start-up world. 

Earlier this week, KnightBlog profiled two other 2011 Knight News Challenge winners, Zeega, an open tool that will make it easy to collaboratively produce, curate and publish participatory multimedia projects and PANDA, a newsroom data app that provides a place to store, search and share data.