The 25 winners of this year’s Knight News Challenge offer a taste of things to come in the news business. And it’s digital.

Sixteen journalists, bloggers and technology trend setters received a total of $5.5 million in the 2008 contest for their innovative ideas for gathering and distributing the news, particularly local news. The contest is sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

How does this apply to freelance writers? Several of this year’s winners are individuals who came up with projects they’re executing on their own - the classic definition of an independent writer. In other words, next year, this could be you.

This year’s winners include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, for a project to create a technology to give users more information about the origins of digital content. Other winners will use the Web to raise public funds for investigative journalism; create software to turn computers into digital radio stations in India; and create a blog about interactive games students can use to track their personal demand on natural resources.

You can read a complete list of winners here.

Registration for next year’s prizes open September 1. Or you can visit this page to sign up for a emailing list for announcements.

Dennis Cass is a writer, journalist, teacher, book doctor and also really funny. His first book, HEAD CASE: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain, is out in paperback and he’s started a Website to promote it. He also created this short video on YouTube that skewers all the Internet promotional stuff an author has to do these days to get ahead.

If you have a blog on WordPress.com, you may have noticed a new feature called Possibly Related that links posts from other blogs in the Comments section of posts on your blog.

The crew at Automattic introduced the feature in late April to add an element of social networking to blogging. At least that’s what Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg said when I interviewed him recently.

Possibly Related is basically software that trolls the blogosphere looking for blog posts with keywords that are similar to keywords on a new post that you’ve written. When it finds a good match, the software automatically lists a couple posts at the end of your post.

So far, reaction to the new feature has been pretty mixed. When it first appeared, Possibly Related wasn’t doing a very good job of picking posts. WordPress users reported the new feature was automatically generating links to some pretty questionable stuff, including links to X-rated sites.

On the other hand, I kind of like it, because it gives my readers other places to go to find out more about what I’m writing about.

WordPress bloggers can opt out of Possibly Related by changing the Design settings on their blog. To do that, go to Dashboard, Design, Extras and check the box that states: “Hide related links on this blog, which means this blog won’t show up on other’s blogs or get traffic that way.”

According to Mullenweg, Possibly Related’s post-matching should improve over time in much the same way Automattic’s Akismet blog comment spam filtering software gets smarter about determining what is and isn’t spam as more people use it. You can read more about Akismet here.

Freelance writer Kerri Fivecoat-Campbell interviews Marley & Me author John Grogan today on her blog for writers, K.C.’s Write for You. Grogan worked as a newspaper columnist and magazine editor before writing the book, which spent 76 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

In their Q&A, Grogan explains how keeping a journal helped him flesh out details of the story that he may otherwise have forgotten:

A journal is a wonderful and safe place to practice the craft, a place you can take chances without risk of embarrassment. For a memoirist, it also is a great document of your life. The first thing I did when I began Marley & Me was pull out my journal entries for the thirteen-year window covered in the book. Not only did the journal have detailed accounts of day to day life, including many incidents that otherwise would have been forgotten; it also helped shape the book, leading me in directions I otherwise would not have thought to go.

That’s a good tip for bloggers who use their blogs like diaries or journals. The details of your daily life might seem insignificant at the time. But you never know when you’ll be inspired write an essay or memoir and can use the material.

You’ll find Fivecoat-Campbell’s complete interview with Grogan here.

I’ve written about how great starting a blog can be for your freelance writing business. You can use a blog to promote yourself, develop a beat, make connections, improve your skills and if you’re lucky, pick up some paid gigs.

But sooner or later you’ll find yourself staring at the screen thinking, “What can I possibly write about today?” I’ve heard this recently from a couple of the 23 other freelance writers who’ve joined me in our May blogathon, where we’re all writing a post every day this month. While some people have no trouble posting something every day anyway, and some pro bloggers post many times a day, others are having a hard time coming up with ideas.

Here are 3 ways I come up with topics for blog posts:

React to news events related to my blog topic - In my case that means following news about the newspaper and magazine industry, online publishers or freelance writers.

Riff on what people are talking about - I connect with other freelance writers on blogs, Websites, LinkedIn and message boards and routinely get ideas for blog posts based on what they’re talking about.

Share lessons learned - I’ve been in the business in a while, I write a lot of service-type articles and I’ve taught journalism, so it’s a natural impulse to want to share what I know and love to do.

Here are two other places to go for inspiration on what to write about:

ProBlogger, one of my go-to sources for great tips on blogging, compiled a list of posts on how to write good posts, including a great one titled 7 Days to Rediscovering Your Blogging Groove, which includes suggestions such as writing a list, writing a review, answering a question and telling a story.

Joan Stewart, a publicity experts who blogs as The Publicity Hound, has some great ideas about what to write about in a post called Finding content for your blog is easy with these 19 ideas on Squidoo, a network of a half-million personal Websites.

If you’ve been in the freelance business long, you’ve accumulated a pretty hefty source list. How do you keep track of all those names?

When I was a newspaper reporter, I used the simplest method possible. I created one text file for each subject I covered and made a running list. When I was feeling organized, I filed new sources alphabetically. When I was in a hurry I cut and pasted names at the top. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done.

Thankfully, keeping track of sources has gotten easier. Here are some suggestions that take advantage of software you already have or Internet-based services you might not know about.

1. Google Desktop - It’s a free software program you download from Google. Once you install it, you can use it the same way you use Google, using names or keywords to search email or Word documents. This only works if you keep interview notes on your computer.

2. Create a business contacts list in your email software program. This one’s the no-brainer. Microsoft Outlook was made for this. But if you’re like me, it’s easy to get busy and forget about. Some smart Internet software developers figured out that if people were too lazy to organize their email inboxes themselves, there was a market for a software program that did it for them. They invented Xobni, which is “inbox” spelled backwards. Read more about it in Dianna Huff’s MarComWriter blog in this post.

3. Join LinkedIn. Then invite your sources to become connections. I like this option even better than No. 2 because on LinkedIn there’s lots more information about someone in their LI profile than you would normally save in their Outlook contact file. Some people use other social networks like Facebook for the same purpose.

4. Create a spreadsheet or database. Disclaimer: I don’t do this. But theoretically, you could create a spreadsheet in Excel or a simple database in Access with information on contacts and then use the search or sort functions in those programs to find experts by name or keyword.

5. Use Del.icio.us. This social bookmarking site, which I’ve written about here and here, wasn’t set up to be a contact manager, but who’s to say you couldn’t use it for that purpose? Say you write about clothing boutiques in Seattle. Each time you hear about new one you want to keep track of, bookmark the company’s Website in Del.icio.us. Better yet, bookmark a couple pages, such as the pages for press releases, media contacts and company management.

Susan Johnston, the freelance writer also known by her nom de blog, The Urban Muse, writes about social bookmarking sites in a guest post on Freelance Writing Jobs, another nifty blog for writers.

Johnston uses Del.icio.us, a popular social bookmarking site, to access her bookmarks from anywhere, to keep track of research for articles she’s working on, to keep track of potential markets and to share interesting tidbits about the magazine business with her circle of freelance writer friends.

I’ve come to rely on Del.icio.us as my electronic filing cabinet, tagging and saving stories I find while doing online research for articles I’m working on. Del.icio.us has lots of other suggestions for how to use the service here.

You can read more about how freelance writers can take advantage of social bookmarking and other Web-based tools in posts I’ve written about them here and here.

Who says freelance writers can’t make a difference? Loretta Tofani has.

On May 8, Tofani received the $25,000 Michael Kelly Award for a series investigating unsafe working conditions in China that she wrote as a freelancer for the Salt Lake Tribune. She was one of four journalists nominated for the prize and the only freelancer.

Tofani previously won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 at The Washington Post and served as The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Asia correspondent based in Beijing. But she’d left writing and opened up a shop in Ogden, Utah, selling Chinese antiques when she traveled to China on a buying trip and encountered the substandard health conditions in Chinese furniture factories.

The visit prompted her to apply for grants to spend 12 months in China documenting how Chinese workers risk their health and sometimes their lives making products for export to the United States and other countries. That investigation became the series, “American Imports, Chinese Deaths”, which the Tribune published in October, 2007.

Tofani writes about how she stumbled onto the story in this article for the Center for Investigative Reporting, which helped fund her research.

The Michael Kelly Awards is a $25,000 prize given by Atlantic Media Co. to honor Kelly, an editor at The Atlantic and National Journal who was killed in Iraq in 2003.

In addition to Tofani, this year’s other nominees include:

Kelly Kennedy, Army Times – for a series on an infantry regiment in Iraq hit hard by casualties.

Joshua Kors, The Nation – for stories on the mis-diagnosis of injured soldiers returning from Iraq, which have already received multiple other awards.

Blake Morrison, Peter Eisler, and Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today – for stories on the Pentagon’s failure to respond to the problem of roadside bombs in Iraq.

If you’re old enough, you remember when reporters wrote stories on IBM Selectric typewriters. Switching to a PC was huge.

Well, that’s nothing compared with the changes happening in the news business now. Print is out. Digital is in. Newspapers are suffering, online publications flourishing.

While some people lament these changes, others see opportunity. One of them is John S. Carroll, former editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. Carroll spoke of the changes facing the news business to journalism students at the University of Kentucky on April 1, 2008, saying, “The current period in journalism is, in fact, historic. It is epochal. It is remarkable, perhaps even unprecedented. I’m speaking, of course, of the passage of journalism into the digital age.”

He told journalism students that they’ll be working with tools unlike any imagined by earlier generations:

“You will have new tools for finding things out, and tools to send your stories to the entire world at the speed of light,” he says. “Journalism has always been a one-way bulletin from journalist to public. Now it is a conversation with millions of participants, which gives us access to new facts and new ideas.”

And he expressed hope that new media will continue in the journalistic tradition of:

“enriching the national conversation, keeping the old media honest and creating entirely new languages of journalism. I also hope that they’ll find ways to make more money and thereby to employ reporters in meaningful numbers.”

Read the complete text of John Carroll’s speech here.

A common question for freelancers with blogs is how to increase traffic. It’s a great question - and I’m the first to admit I don’t have a lot of answers.

I’m slowly building traffic to this site by:

¤ Posting a message on the online bulletin board of the freelance writer group I belong to whenever I put up a new post.

¤ Included an RSS feed button at the top of my blog, to encourage people to sign up to get new posts automatically mailed to them. See it up there in the top righthand corner?

¤ Using tags with common search terms on all my posts so they’ll get picked up by search engines like Google. I wrote more about this in a post called What Freelance Writers Should Know about SEO.

¤ Including the URL for this blog in my email signature.

¤ Including the name, description and URL in my LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn has a relatively new feature called Status that lets you write a short answer to the question “What are you working on?” so your LinkedIn connections can see what you’re doing. When someone looks at your LinkedIn profile, your Status sentence shows up at the very top, right under your name and job description. I use this feature to let my connections know about new blog posts. When I update my own “What are you working on?” description, the information appears on the Home page of all of my LinkedIn connections, so they can see what I’m up to - and hopefully, go read my blog.

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger offers some really good common sense tips in this post, 10 ways to improve blog traffic in 30 minutes or less. Among them: post your best stuff on the days of the week when you know you get a lot of traffic, and take time to respond to comments, so you’re building a rapport with your readers. Read Rowse’s other tips in the post.

Kathy Sena, a new online writer/editor friend, writes a blog called ParentTalkToday. In her email signature, instead of just listing a link to the blog, Sena also includes a line about her most recent blog post, which she rewrites every time she posts, and writes in a different color. The idea is for people to be so intrigued by what she’s written they follow the link to her blog. Here’s what it looks like:

Kathy Sena . Writer/Editor
Specializing in parenting, health, lifestyle and women’s issues
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Phone: 310-XXX-XXXX
Fax: 310-XXX-XXXX
Email: XXXXXXXXXX@XXXXX.net
Web: http://www.kathysena.com
Blog: http://www.parenttalktoday.com (Today we’re talking about keeping too many balls in the air…)

If you’ve got other tips for driving traffic to your blog, please share!