Knight Foundation and Mozilla send geeks into newsrooms

In London last weekend, journalists, software developers, filmmakers, designers and many others spent time discussing ideas and building tools at the 2011 Mozilla Festival at Ravensbourne College. Following the theme of “Media, Freedom and the Web”, many attendees developed prototypes around the idea of the future of media including tablet interface prototypes for the Boston Globe, designs for open source software for DJs, and hacks to enable journalists to combine video and original source text together to tell stories in more interactive ways.

One important announcement made at the event was details of five new fellowship places sponsored by the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation that attempt to bring together journalists and open source-minded software geeks. Wikinews spoke to Laurian Gridinoc, who currently works at Talis building software for higher education but will move for a year to the BBC to work in the newsroom. Other fellows will be working for The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, the Boston Globe and Zeit Online.