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The Knight Foundation has announced the launch of its 2009 Knight News Challenge, a contest that will award people with the best ideas for building the future of news media a total of $5 Million in support. The Challenge is riding high this year on news that a past winner, hyper-local news aggregator Everyblock, was just acquired by MSNBC.

Now in its 4th year, the Knight News Challenge has funded 35 news projects so far. The rules of the contest have changed this year in response to one of the biggest complaints of the past: projects can now be submitted privately to Knight judges and not be exposed to the public at large.

A team of journalist-engineers from ProPublica and The New York Times has been awarded the Grand Prize in this year's Knight News Challenge and will receive $700k to build DocumentCloud, a new online knowledge-bank filled with documents unearthed in journalists' and bloggers' research and commented on by the public. "While rich source documents are the foundation of investigative journalism," the DocumentCloud team writes, "too often reporters throw or tuck them away after a story fades, never to be used again."

This year's Knight News Challenge winners were just announced this afternoon, nine winning projects will receive over $2 million total to try and change the way the news world works. All of us should benefit from the results.