The Knight Foundation has announced the winners of its 2010 News Challenge grant, a $2.74 million award split among 12 journalism innovators with plans to impact “the future of news.”

This year’s grantees are working on ways to fund journalism, visualize data and engage readers in new ways. Projects include an idea to create “real time ads”; a forum for audiences to pitch and pay for public radio stories (building on 2008 challenge winner Spot.Us); and a mobile application that allows residents to geo-tag ideas for improving their neighborhood.

Of the 12 winners, two are located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Just one hails from outside the United States – GoMap Riga, based in Riga, Latvia, will “create a live, online map with local news and activities.”

San Francisco-based Eric Rodenbeck, founder and creative director of the mapping and data visualization design studio Stamen, won $400,000 for CityTracking, a project that aims “to make municipal data easy to understand” by creating virally spreadable images of information such as crime stats and 311 calls.

Philip Neustrom and Mike Ivanov, Bay Area-based software engineers, were awarded $350,000 for Local Wiki, a project focused on allowing people to “learn – and share – their own unique community knowledge.”

“Members will be able to post articles about anything they like, edit others and upload photos and files,” according to the press release.

The full list of winners is available here.