Today’s an exciting day for Knight Foundation, and for the Knight News Challenge. One of the projects that we helped start through our contest, DocumentCloud, is merging with Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Since winning a News Challenge award in 2009, DocumentCloud has become an important tool to more than 200 newsrooms across the country. (A list of newsrooms using it is here.) The merger means that DocumentCloud will continue to provide free hosting for public source documents. The two organizations complement each other well. I’m excited to see what they come up with together.

We’re excited that one of the News Challenge’s most successful ventures has found a permanent home with one of our longtime partners. Knight Foundation first supported IRE in 1988 and has made a total of 7 grants worth $2.44 million.

This is a particularly fun announcement to make today. Here at Knight, we are preparing to recommend to our trustees a list of projects to become Knight News Challenge winners. We are also putting the finishing touches on an assessment of the first two years of the News Challenge. (My colleague Mayur Patel previewed this work a few weeks ago.) We’ll announce both this year’s winners, and the evaluation of the 2007-08 projects, later this month.