Cross-posted from newschallenge.org Today is both exciting and melancholy for those of us working on the Knight News Challenge. After weeks spent with 364 full applications, we’ve settled on 75 semi-finalists. We will pare that group down to a smaller number of finalists over the next couple of weeks. Winners will be announced in late June.

It’s an exciting day, as we get to dive deeper into 75 promising ideas from 75 talented (in many cases proven) journalists, developers and entrepreneurs. Less exciting is the fact that we are declining dozens of good ideas. In addition to the 75 we’ll be examining in greater detail, there were at least 100 other proposals that we would have liked to explore further. Many of them came from people or organizations with track records in media innovation. As it is, 75 is more than we had planned to bring into a third round. The hard part will be narrowing that down to a group of finalists. We realize there is value among the projects we’re declining today. In coming weeks, we hope to come back to at least some of you with ways to help strengthen your ideas.

Thanks to everyone for sharing their ideas, to the commenters who have participated and to the readers who have lent us their expertise over the last few months.