This week, all past and present Knight News Challenge winners descend here upon the MIT campus as Knight Foundation and the MIT Center for Future Civic Media co-host the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media conference.

There has been an interesting evolution in the conference's -- and the News Challenge's -- focus: the question is less and less "How do we save, finance, or repurpose the functions of newspapers?" and more and more "How do we blow apart what we once thought media was 'merely' capable of?" News Challenge winners are showing that investigative journalism doesn't always need an investigative journalist. They're putting entire philosophies -- such as Mencken-style satire and Mako-style software development -- in conversation with each other. They're quite calmly ignoring the alarmists and getting on with the business -- the literal business -- of getting citizens the actionable intelligence they need to make good civic decisions.

Though registration is limited to Knight's guests, we hope you'll join us at 2:30 pm ET on Wednesday when Knight Foundation announces the 2010 News Challenge winners. We'll have a live stream here: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2010. And you can follow the conversation on Twitter with the #fncm hashtag. You can also look out for live-blogging here on Idea Lab by Mark Glaser and other writers.