The Knight Foundation is awarding $5.5 million for a “Freedom Fone” and other projects as part of the second annual Knight News Challenge. Sixteen digital experiments intended to transform community news are receiving varying cash awards, with mobile getting more entries and more attention this year. “Freedom Fone,” the first-prize winner of $876,000, will provide a voice database where users can access news and leave feedback on a voicemail system via land, mobile or internet. Other winning mobile-centric projects include one enabling cheap mobile phones to receive news feeds, while another creates tools for mobile editing that will let journalists edit stories on the go.

Knight Foundation president and CEO Alberto Ibarguen explained the mobile interest to Buzzwatch: “Around the world, mobile is a critical and inexpensive way that the market is telling us it is willing to receive information. Some of that we see in other countries, but more and more, even in the U.S.” Asked how this will affect long-form journalism, Ibarguen replied, ”What I’m concerned about is that we’re not experimenting enough…with the way kids in particular [and] the population in general is receiving information. We’ve got to find other ways to deliver civic information that may not fit that same format that you and I might have grown up with, newspapers or local television. We need to figure out how people will take the information, and how we can get enough information to them.”

The foundation plans to invest at least $25 million over five years in the search for “bold community news experiments.” Last year 25 individuals from private and public entities, ranging from MIT to MTV, collectively were awarded $12 million. Release.