It’s no surprise that newspapers and other outlets of old-school journalism have struggled in the digital space. However, a collaboration between the Mozilla and the Knight Foundation called OpenNews has aimed to remedy that, by bringing developers and journalists together. Perhaps most importantly, it aims to bring the fruit of this work to the world. Now, the New York Times and other major news operations have joined the project, hoping to make their content even more relevant in the digital space.
In a blog post made in advance of an announcement tomorrow at SXSW, OpenNews confirmed that The New York Times, investigative journalism site ProPublica, the Spiegel Online, and the La Nacion from Buenos Aires would be joining the program. These join the the ranks of an international cadre of journalistic heavy hitters, including the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, the Boston Globe, and Al Jazeera English.
In their own words, OpenNews aims to make traditional journalism accessible and relevant in the online world:
Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is about helping journalism thrive on the open web. It’s about producing next-generation web solutions that solve real problems in news. It’s about supporting communities of developers and journalists as they make, learn and invent together.
The organization has done this through hackathons to create new innovations in online journalism, workshops to introduce journalists to coding, and the eventual creation of an online repository of code, walkthroughs, and case studies called “Source” which other news outlets can draw from. Additionally, a fellowship program has placed developers with news agencies in an effort to bring high quality development to journalism.
In the short term, the results of the OpenNews efforts will probably remain behind the scenes. As the program grows, and especially as the results of the program become more widely available, it could give the old guard news outlets an invigorating shot in the arm.
(Knight-Mozilla, Mozilla Blog via The Next Web, image via Wiki)
