LONDON, Nov. 4, 2011 – Five coders will help newsrooms innovate and develop prototypes for digitally delivering news and information as the first group of Knight-Mozilla News Technology Fellows.

Announced at the Mozilla Festival in London, the fellows will be spending the year in leading newsrooms around the globe, including The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Al Jazeera English, BBC and Zeit Online.

Fellows will address a specific issue at each organization and then produce open-source solutions that advance the values of journalism and the open Web.

“This first cohort of Knight-Mozilla fellows is an impressive group, and well positioned to add real value – both to their partner news organizations and to the journalism field in general,” said John S. Bracken, director of media innovation at Knight Foundation. “At Knight, we see great promise in the intersections of technology and journalism.”

“We are thrilled with the fellows we have matched with our news partners and can’t wait to see the open-source innovations and code that they produce,” said Dan Sinker, who leads the Knight-Mozilla partnership.

The Knight-Mozilla Technology Fellows are:

Mark Boas (Al Jazeera English), cofounder of Happyworm, an entrepreneurial Web agency and maker of the jPlayer media framework.

Cole Gillespie (Zeit Online), a JavaScript developer currently working with Project Mastermind, National Geographic, CNN, IBM and other companies.

Laurian Gridinoc (BBC), a former researcher in semantic navigation at Knowledge Media Institute (The Open University) who currently works at the technology innovation company Talis.

Nicola Hughes (The Guardian), a former digital media producer for CNN and now with the data-scraping start-up ScraperWiki.

Dan Schultz (Boston Globe), a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, research associate at the Center for Civic Media and a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner.

More complete information on the fellows can be found at www.kflinks.com/knightmozillabios.

“We expect our fellow to be a great addition to the Bostonglobe.com and Boston.com development efforts, contributing to our work with HTML 5 and advanced browser-based features,” said Jeff Moriarty, vice president for digital products at the Boston Globe. “This will include work across our newsroom, r&d and core development teams that will very much contribute to the future of our two ”

The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership launched earlier this year to help bridge the gap between technology and newsrooms.  In its first year, the partnership involved hundreds of technologists in innovation challenges to develop ideas for advancing media innovation and the open Web.

In coming weeks, the partnership will announce both the application process for news partners who would like to host fellows in 2012, as well as the framework for next year’s program.

A one-page information sheet on the partnership s available at www.kflinks.com/knightmozillafaq.

About Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

About Mozilla

Mozilla is a global, nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Web better. We emphasize principle over profit, and believe that the Web is a shared public resource to be cared for, not a commodity to be sold. We work with a worldwide community to create open source products like Mozilla Firefox, and to innovate for the benefit of the individual and the betterment of the Web. The result is great products built by passionate people and better choices for everyone. For more, visit www.mozilla.org.

Contact:

Marc Fest, Vice President/Communications, 305-908-2677, [email protected]