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This post originally appeared on OpenNews' Source.
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This post originally appeared on OpenNews' blog. Today, Knight is announcing a $1.1 million investment in OpenNews' network of journalists and technologists to launch as an independent organization.Today is a big day for OpenNews. After six years with Mozilla, we’re striking out on our own thanks to a new grant from the Knight Foundation. There are press releases and blog posts and this really is a big deal, but before we get to what’s new I want to talk about our community.At OpenNews, we build our programs with the community of coders and journalist, data geeks and designers that are helping journalism stay vital and relevant. These are people that wake up every day driven to ask hard questions, to write tough code, and to help the world better understand itself. It’s not an easy job. It’s not one that pays all that well. The demands of deadline and the culture of newsrooms can be taxing. But it is rewarding work. It is work that helps people. It is work that speaks truth to power. -
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Photo by Flickr user Marc Wathieu. The Coral Project, a collaboration by Mozilla, The New York Times and The Washington Post, is creating an online community platform where readers can participate in conversations about stories and topical issues. Knight Foundation supported this project in June 2014. The Coral Project is building an open-source content and commenting platform. It will allow audiences to more deeply engage with media coverage and help news organizations everywhere better manage user comments and contributions. The project was announced in June 2014. It is being created by a new group made up of staff from Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Since the announcement, exciting things have been happening at The Coral Project (now tweeting @coralproject), and we thought you should know about them. > Introducing our Project Lead: Andrew Losowsky -
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Cross-posted from Dan Sinker's blog. Photo: Newsroom of The New York Times via Wikimedia Commons. Community is at the core of what we do at Knight-Mozilla OpenNews—helping to build and strengthen the community of people writing code in journalism. And community is a big part of what has made Mozilla successful—the global community of contributors that has helped to build the Firefox web browser. Community is also at the core of journalism: whether it’s geographic communities that form the bedrock of local news or the communities of interest that form around subjects as broad as basketball and politics, journalism has always had community at its core. Which is why it’s exciting to announce that today, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are joining forces to create a next-generation community platform for journalism. The web offers all sorts of new and exciting ways of engaging with communities far beyond the ubiquitous (and often terrible) comments sections at the bottom of articles. We’re looking forward to writing code together to enable them. -
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Photo: Knight-Mozilla OpenNews director Dan Sinker visiting the MIT Media Lab with the 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellows. Photo credit: Knight-Mozilla Fellows. This item was originally posted on June 16, 2014 at dansinker.com. I’m excited to announce that starting today, applications to become a 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellow are open. The Fellowships offer an opportunity for people that love to code to get paid to spend ten months building new things in collaboration with some of the best news organizations in the world. Fellows spend their time following their passions, working in the open, sharing ideas, traveling the world, and writing transformative code. 2015 marks our fourth year of the fellowship program, and we’re going strong with seven incredible news organizations: -
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The following blog, written by Ryan Pitts and Dan Sinker, is cross-posted from source.opennews.org. When we talk with newsrooms about open-sourcing their work, often the response we get is that they’d love to, but deadline pressures keep the last-mile work and documentation that signifies a good open-source project on the to-do list. So at OpenNews, we came up with a simple proposition: What if we free up that time by getting developers out of the deadline grind? Let’s put them up for a few days, feed them, and help get the work done. Last week, we brought eight news developers to Portland, Oregon, to pilot the concept. We’re calling these type of get-togethers “Code Convenings,” and last week’s was the first of many that OpenNews will organize over the next three years. We had developers from the New York Times, NPR, ProPublica, WNYC, Al Jazeera America, and Github, and together they released: · Pym.js: An NPR library enabling responsive iframes for embedded graphics · PourOver and Tamper: A New York Times library and protocol pair that let you quickly filter datasets with thousands of records, right in the browser · Landline + Stateline: A ProPublica tool for creating easy SVG maps that work across all browsers · FourScore: A WNYC graphic template for capturing reader sentiments in an elegant 2D chart Each team has introduced their projects here on Source, and we also wanted to share our own process and things we learned from this event. -
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The following, written by the head of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, Dan Sinker, is cross-posted from dansinker.com. Above, the 2014 OpenNews fellows from left to right: Ben Chartoff, Harlo Holmes, Brian Jacobs, Aurelia Moser, Gabriela Rodriguez, and Marcos Vanetta. 2013 was an incredible year for OpenNews. Our Knight-Mozilla Fellows did fantastic work; Source continued to grow as a hub for the incredible work done by the news nerd community; we helped to sponsor more than 50 news hack days around the world, and much much more. But 2013 is almost over and, in these waning days of it, I wanted to tell you about some amazing stuff that’s happening right out of the gate in 2014: Surprise Sixth Fellow! RELATED LINKS "Knight-Mozilla OpenNews: Cultivating the community of people behind the code" by Marie Gilot on KnightBlog "Knight-Mozilla fellows strive for global impact in journalism" by Jenna Buehler on KnightBlog When we announced our 2014 Fellows at the Mozilla Festival in London this year, our friends at the Knight Foundation approached us about adding a sixth fellow, to be hosted by the team doing great work at the Washington Post. We jumped at the opportunity, in part because we received so many stunning applicants for our original fellowship search we were excited to revisit the list and find someone amazing to work with. And today, I’m thrilled to announce our sixth 2014 fellow: Ben Chartoff designs and creates data visualizations. He is committed to building data literacy and numeracy through viscerally clear and compelling visuals. At the Sunlight Foundation in Washington, DC, Ben worked to demonstrate the value of open government and open data as essential elements in a democracy. He has a background in both the arts and sciences, and strives to bring both beauty and rigor to every project. He is passionate about most things, including food and backpacking. Ben will be joining our five other fantastic 2014 Knight-Mozilla Fellows at our Fellowship Onboarding event in San Francisco in mid-January. We’re so excited!