But Seriously Folks

The winners of the Knight News Challenge were announced a few months ago, but it's worth recognizing the winners again here. Those honored included a number of games in a journalistic mode, which included projects from the Newseum and the game from the University of Minnesota, Playing the News. Critics of these choices might argue that the interactive experiences offered only attempt to preserve the status quo of pre-Internet news gathering rather than seriously interrogate the reporter-hero model of conventional one-to-many journalism that has been reified in films like All the President's Men. However, there is a wide range of offerings among the winners, from a nostalgic look at Oakland jazz in Remembering 7th Street to the now classice procedural rhetoric of September 12th to database-driven games about waste management and budgeting from Gotham Gazette, to the event can be read as more than an attempt to prop up a moribund enterprise.