Opportunity: Share Talent with Newsrooms, Share Code with Everyone

Here's a PSA-of-sorts if you (or your friends) love journalism and have a technical background, too: less than two weeks are left to apply for the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellowships. A Knight-Mozilla Fellowship offers a pretty unique experience to a developer, according to Dan Sinker, Director of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews. Those selected this year (the program's second year) will be plugged into a newsroom to solve problems, and they also receive a combination of paid compensation and benefits—a nice package on its own. But they also will share their code -- and experiences -- in the open, with hopes that the experiences and knowledge reaches beyond the fellows to a greater community. Fellows blog, share code publicly, and engage in other activities with developers inside and outside the OpenNews community. The concept of "open," as the name indicates, entails the idea of this particular fellowship. “Sharing code and working in the open is the real meat of the fellowship,” said Sinker in an email. “We want our Fellows to be putting out code that can be implemented in other newsrooms, and blogging their ideas and concepts can spread beyond their singular experiences.” More details: it's a paid opportunity to spend 10 months embedded in some of the world’s best newsrooms, to travel extensively to attend hack events and tech conferences, and to make friends and connections around the world. With that, the opportunity allows Fellows, in Sinker's words, "to spend a year of their lives creating kick-ass open-source software.” “And they get to play a part in reinventing journalism -- no small opportunity there either,” said Sinker. Newsroom partners this year include BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, Zeit Online, Lancion.com, Spiegel Online, The Boston Globe and ProPublica. The fellowship is open to anyone worldwide, but as you can tell, they’re looking for those with a technical background-- developers, engineers, hackers, UX folks, and so on. Eight fellows will be selected this year, an increase from last year’s five. The first year of OpenNews fellows are in newsrooms now. Read about them and their work here. According to the the fellowship’s promo video, the first round of the application process is “super simple,” too-- it only consists of a few text fields, 450 words and links to three things you’ve built online. The deadline is August 11. Apply here.

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Opportunity: Share Talent with Newsrooms, Share Code with Everyone

Kevin Loker

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Kevin Loker