Cross-posted from Daniel Sinker at dansinker.com

I’m excited beyond belief to announce that I’m joining Mozilla as the head of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. It’s an incredible opportunity to help build discussions, communities, and tools to drive innovation in journalism.

The partnership is funded by the Knight Foundation, the folks that created theKnight News Challenge (which I was a reviewer for this year), and is run byMozilla, the folks that bring you the Firefox web browser. The idea of the partnership is to help to facilitate further collaboration between technologists and journalists through a series of design challenges, learning labs, and culminating in a fellowship program that places developers in residence in newsrooms around the globe. The partner newsrooms for 2011’s fellows are Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Guardian, Die Zeit, and the Boston Globe. It’s an amazing group of people that I am excited to collaborate with.

For those of you that know me, you know that bringing innovation to journalism and storytelling is my driving passion. This new job lets me fuel that passion on a global scale. I can not wait to begin this new challenge.

Of course, beginnings are also endings and it’s with quite a bit of sadness that I will be leaving my position as a member of the full-time faculty of Columbia College Chicago. My three years there were amazing, and the students that I got to work with still leave me in awe.

Some things will stay the same, of course. I still have the @MayorEmanuel book coming out on September 13, I am still building web projects of my own, and I’m still staying in Chicago. And of course, I will still be engaging in conversations about journalism and tech, but now will be doing so on a much bigger stage.

Let’s get to work!