J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism has announced its 2008 winners and honorable mentions, which include a site that tracks the source of edits on Wikipedia, an imaginative political fact-checking site and a site that tracks reports of violence in Kenya.
Here’s the quick list of winners:
$10,000 Grand Prize: Wired.com: WikiScanner Coverage – WIRED, San Francisco
$2,000 Special Distinction Award: PolitiFact – St. Petersburg Times, St. Petersburg, Fla.
$2,000 Special Distinction Award: Ushahidi – Crowdsourcing Crisis Information – Ushahidi, Inc., Orlando, Fla.
$2,000 Citizen Media Award: JDLand.com – Jacqueline Dupree, Washington
Honorary Mentions:
Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica – Bluecadet Interactive, Philadelphia
Iowa’s Deadly Tornado – The Des Moines Register, Des Moines, Iowa
iReport.com – CNN, Atlanta
U.S. Congress MAPLight.org – MAPLight.org, Berkeley, Calif.
It would be incredibly cool if someone took the WikiScanner tracking idea and applied it to other social media tools; especially sites like Digg and Reddit which have been run over by PR companies