Seventeen people are gathering in Miami today to help us review the 40 semifinalists for Knight News Challenge: Health. You can check out the semifinalists’ ideas to harness data and information for the health of communities on the News Challenge site.

By the end of the day, with the help of these health innovators, media experts and technologists, we expect to have a group of finalists that we’ll examine more deeply over the next few weeks during a period of offline review.

We plan to announce the winners in January 2014.

If you are one of those finalists, you can expect to hear from us next week. If you are not a finalist, you can expect to receive a declination e-mail from us soon. We may also follow up with projects individually if we believe they are better suited to another funding option at Knight, such as our Prototype Fund.

We’d like to thank the following people who have taken the time to join us:

• Paul Tarini, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
• Ginny Ehrlich, Clinton Health Matters Initiative
• Dwayne Spradlin, Health Data Consortium
• Jon McTaggart, American Public Media
• Andy Krackov, California HealthCare Foundation
• Esther Dyson, investor
• Clay Shirky, New York University
• Ginny Hunt, Google
• Dr. Calvin B. Johnson, former Pennsylvania secretary of health
• Dr. William Dietz, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Lesa Mitchell, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
• Jesse Salazar, Council on Foundations
• Deborah Estrin, Cornell Tech
• Elise Hu, NPR
• Jake Levine, Betaworks
• Cheryl Wold, Wold and Associates
• Rebekah Monson, University of Miami; Code for Miami

The $2 million News Challenge: Health will include additional prizes from two of our four collaborators. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation will award $100,000 for projects that combine public health data and health care data to improve the health of communities, and the California HealthCare Foundation will award $100,000 for projects helping county and city officials use health data for policymaking. Other collaborators include the Clinton Health Matters Initiative and the Health Data Consortium.

We closed the News Challenge: Health on Sept. 17 with 686 applications. A special thanks goes out to everyone who’s joined us in the challenge so far and to our readers.

To stay up-to-date on the News Challenge follow @knightfdn and #newschallenge.

By Elizabeth R. Miller, communications associate at Knight Foundation