Above: Advisers gather to review applications in Mozilla’s offices. Photo credit: John Bracken. 

Yesterday we huddled with 14 advisers in Mozilla’s San Francisco office to help us determine a group of semifinalists in the News Challenge. Today, we’re sending notices to 56 projects asking them for additional information. We’ll look at their submissions over the next few weeks and, after considering the advice of another set of advisers, we’ll notify a group of finalists on May 12.

We received 704 submissions in the contest, which is focused on the question “How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation?”

We saw ideas covering a range of topics, among them access to the Internet, freedom of expression and ideas to fix the Web. Now we enter the “refinement phase.” For the next 10 days, we encourage you to review the entries and add your comments, questions and suggestions. During refinement, semifinalists will get the chance to provide more details about their ideas and respond to community input.

After the refinement phase, we’ll review the entries offline and select the winners. We will announce that group on June 23 at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass. Winners will receive a share of $2.75 million.

Of course, all of the proposals can’t move forward in the News Challenge, but our interest in information innovation is broad. From the submissions, we’re also identifying ideas that align with our Prototype Fund, which supports media innovators taking projects from idea to demo. Please check out the full range of our work at KnightFoundation.org.

Thanks to our partners, Ford Foundation and Mozilla, and to everyone who has joined us in the challenge, and thanks to the group of advisers who helped us to review the entries. We’re looking forward to the next stages and to continuing the conversation, which you can follow at KnightBlog.org or on Twitter at #newschallenge.

John Bracken, director of journalism and media innovation and Chris Sopher,  journalism program associate, at Knight Foundation.