Idea Lab

Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Sponsors Dual Journalism Hack Days

by Dan Sinker

There's no better example of the global scale of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project than the dualing hack days we recently sponsored in New York City and Buenos Aires. In New York, we gave money for travel scholarships to bring top-notch developers to town to take part in the Wall Street Journal's Data Transparency Weekend, which brought more than 100 developers and privacy experts to town to create tools to help people see and control their personal data online. The "hackathon" grew out of the Wall Street Journal's excellent ongoing series that looks at how your online footprint is being used...

• April 24, 2012
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Knight-Mozilla Partnership Evolves, Seeks New Fellows

by Dan Sinker

It's only the start of April, and already it's been a big year for the Knight-Mozilla Partnership. We've placed four fellows at the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, and Al Jazeera. (A fifth fellow, at the Boston Globe, will be starting a little later this spring.) We've renamed and refocused the partnership under the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews name. We've begun sponsoring hack days around the world. (In fact, two are coming up this weekend!) And we've started having biweekly open conference calls with the larger journo-code community. (One is happening this Wednesday.) And we're only getting started -- there is a...

• April 10, 2012
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Journo-Coders Take NICAR 12 to a Whole New Level

by Dan Sinker

I spent a rapid-fire 23 hours in St. Louis this weekend at the NICAR 12 conference. For those who don't know, NICAR stands for "National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting," and, as the slightly antiquated name might suggest, was founded long before the commercial Internet, back in 1989. Traditionally, the organization (which is run by IRE, Investigative Reporters and Editors), has been about helping reporters use computers to comb through data, but over the years, it has become the de facto organization and conference for news apps developers. And this year, it felt like the journo-coders in attendance took to it...

• February 29, 2012
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Knight-Mozilla Partnership Morphs into Knight-Mozilla OpenNews

by Dan Sinker

Change is awesome -- it's a necessary component to anything remaining vital and a required ingredient to facilitate organic growth. And so it's with real excitement that today I'm announcing changes to the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. Before we get to the changes, some quick background: Conversations around the original partnership began in 2010, with the program launching at the start of 2011. That means that the program design, by necessity, reflected 2010's problem sets. Two years is an eternity on the Internet -- it was time to rethink and retool for today. The community around code in journalism is...

• February 8, 2012
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Journalism in the Open: Are Our Systems for Learning Making the Grade?

by Dan Sinker

This week on MediaShift, we're exploring the moving target that is teaching journalism. Stay tuned as we offer tips, tools and insights on educating tomorrow's journalists. "Beyond J-School 2011" is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers an intensive, cutting edge, three semester Master of Arts in Journalism; a unique one semester Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism; and the CUNY J-Camp series of Continuing Professional Development workshops focused on emerging trends and skill sets in the industry. I had a brief exchange on Twitter recently with ProPublica's Scott Klein about how high school poets end up as...

• November 14, 2011
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Knight-Mozilla Announces 2011 News Technology Fellows

by Dan Sinker

This week I've spent a lot of time writing about the opportunities that lie at the intersection of open-source philosophies and journalism. Today the "thinking out loud" stops, and the "making it happen" begins. And that begins with the announcement of the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla fellows. But before I get to that, a quick background: In 2011, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership's pilot year, the goal was to place five technologists in partner newsrooms through a selection process that included an open-call design challenge that received over 300 applicants, a 60-person learning lab, and a 20-person hackfest in Berlin. At each...

• November 4, 2011
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3 Key Reflections From Knight-Mozilla's Hacktoberfest in Berlin

by Dan Sinker

Last week, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership invited 20 developers, designers, and journalists to take part in a week of hacking and making in Berlin. I forget at what point in the planning one of the participants jokingly called it "Hacktoberfest," but the name stuck. And so now that the jet lag has worn off for the most part, I thought I'd reflect on three of my standout moments of Hacktoberfest and how they're influencing my thinking moving forward on the Knight-Mozilla project. Working in the open Sitting in a meeting with our news partners, I got to witness a...

• October 5, 2011
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