Open-sourcing the news

Kate Hudson
Managing Editor
Newspapers may be dying, but if you forget about the paper, journalism hasn’t been more alive since Gutenberg. The Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Partnership is part of the movement to build that future.
Media innovation is hot, but it’s not easy. Unlike “proprietary” tech revolutions like Apple or Facebook, success requires an intense collaborative process between journalists and developers.
The partnership is an international initiative, educating and supporting key developers, designers, and journalists hoping to create technology that will deliver the new news.
Dan Sinker, Chicago journalist and editor, heads the partnership. He is the author of @MayorEmanuel, a satirical and viral Twitter feed of 2011’s Chicago mayoral election. It is soon to be published.
“We’re at an interesting point in time,” he says. “The way information has been delivered for a century is being replaced — or has been replaced — by an entirely new delivery mechanism. And, as a result, you’ve seen all sorts of changes in people’s information consumption habits.”
So far, the partnership has put more than 60 international participants through a round of intensive online education. Participants learn from industry pacemakers like user experience guru Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path, or Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at CUNY.
Where the learning experience stands out is its focus on real prototyping.
“We need to do a lot of experimentation. And we need to share the results of those experiments,” Sinker says. “Open collaboration is the only way to successfully navigate such unknown waters.”
By the end of the month-long course, each participant produced a prototype for a project they developed, and many participated in feedback sessions through interactive video-conferencing.
The projects are promising. James Greenway from the UK turned his frustrations with current online video players into OpenNewsPlayer: a platform for journalists to footnote information, links, and images on video. Trina Chiasson’s Curious allows newsrooms around the city to look at a map of user-submitted reports, and determine if there are events, accidents or situations that they should be aware of. A full list of projects can be found at the Knight-Mozilla partnership website.
Mozilla’s creed is simple: open collaboration, not proprietary secrecy. While it’s widely adopted in the developer community, news organizations are hesitant to jump on board.
Newsrooms dependent on exclusivity and information scarcity are slow to change. Sometimes experimental ideas are crushed under layers of bureaucracy.
York is known for its interdisciplinary research, but the day-to-day learning environment for university students and forward-thinking professors suffers from many of the same barriers.

“A university has a curriculum, a set agenda of things that you need to do and beats that you need to hit. As a result, change doesn’t happen rapidly,” says Sinker, a former journalism professor at Columbia College Chicago.
“That’s very different at a tech company, where agility and speed is crucial. So the idea of the [Knight-Mozilla] partnership is to take the speed, agility, and experimentation that’s so prevalent in tech companies — especially one like Mozilla — and bring it to places that may not historically have acted like that.”
Funding and support is available to people willing to take up the challenge. The program is aimed at creative thinkers, and those with skills in design, development, and computer science. Since 2007, the Knight foundation alone has contributed $100 million to media innovation.
“I think that it’s entirely possible to bring [the experiment-focused] model into the university,” says Sinker. “Young people, students, people that haven’t traditionally been able to influence long-set mechanisms suddenly can. It’s exciting! Be excited!”