Have you heard of OpenNews? This is the new name of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, its head Dan Sinker announced today in a blog post.
As you may remember, Mozilla and the Knight Foundation have been partnering since 2011, with the ambition to invent the future of journalism by bringing it together with technology. Over the same period, other groups emerged that shared the same goals, such as Hacks/Hackers, leading us to predict that the convergence of journalism and technology will be one of the top media trends in 2012.
With OpenNews, both non-profit institutions are now taking this partnership one step further. According to Sinker, OpenNews plans to promote several new initiatives in 2012, starting with organizing and sponsoring hackdays around the world.
While hackdays will mostly appeal to developers interested in coding for newsrooms, online Learning Labs will give journalists a chance to become code-savvy ‘webmakers.’
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As for existing initiatives, such as the Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, they will be extended, as eight annual fellowships will be granted this year, up from five in 2011.
Perhaps even more importantly, OpenNews seems interested in building a journalism code community, and has announced that it would soon launch a stand-alone site called ‘Source’, where readers will find “case studies, walkthroughs, tutorials, code snippets, and much more.”
Do you think hacks should also be hackers? What’s the best way to convince developers to work for newsrooms? Let us know in the comments.
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