Knight-Mozilla names news technology fellowship winners

Five developers, designers and programmer-journalists funded by the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership are to spend a year in five national newsrooms around the world.

Al Jazeera English, the Guardian, the BBC, Zeit Online and the Boston Globe will each be joined by a winner to produce open-source code and solve challenges within the news organisation.

The 2011 fellows are:

• Mark Boas – Al Jazeera English
• Cole Gillespie – Zeit Online
• Laurian Gridinoc – BBC
• Nicola Hughes – Guardian
• Dan Schultz – Boston Globe

The five have been funded to generate ideas, train colleagues and bridge the gap between technology and the news.

The partnership between the Knight Foundation, which supports advances in journalism, and Mozilla, a nonprofit technology company best known for making the Firefox browser, was created in February to help digital innovations in news rooms.

The five, who were named at the Mozilla Festival held in London this weekend, were among 300 so-called "news hackers" who applied responded to various challenges such as coming up with a "killer app for news".

A panel then selected 60 of the best ideas based on re-usable, open-source technology that benefits the web as a whole. Five were then chosen from the long list and will take up their new paid roles around the start 2012.

About the Fellows

Laurian Gridinoc – Fellow at BBC

While studying medicine Gridinoc co-founded a brand strategy and interactive consultancy in Romania. He then followed his interest in the semantic web through a masters in computational linguistics and research into semantic navigation at Knowledge Media Institute (Open University). For the past year he has been implementing applications using semantic web technologies at the technology innovation company Talis.

Nicola Hughes – Fellow at the Guardian

After academic excursions in the fields of physics, zoology, anthropology and journalism Hughes started her media career at CNN in London. Whilst working as a digital media producer she started blogging and tweeting about data journalism (@DataMinerUK). She left CNN to join a data scraping start up ScraperWiki and to gain coding skills.

Mark Boas – Fellow at Al Jazeera English

Boas makes, teaches, writes about and promotes new and open web technologies. Co-founder of Happyworm, a tiny entrepreneurial web agency and makers of the jPlayer media framework. A lover of all things audio, his passion often drives his work and is currently enjoying the challenge of taking audio "somewhere new" with his Hyperaudio experiments.

Cole Gillespie – Fellow at Zeit Online

Gillespie is a JavaScript developer from North Carolina Appalachians. In recent years he has spent his time in Raleigh, North Carolina, working with various companies including Project Mastermind, National Geographic, CNN and IBM. He spends most of his free time playing music, hacking open source projects or trolling in IRC trying to keep up with the web's rapid evolution.

Dan Schultz – Fellow at the Boston Globe

Schultz is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab studying in the information ecology group. At the lab he is a research associate at the Center for Civic Media. Before MIT Dan received a BS in information systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to write about "connecting people, content, and community."


Photos by mozillaeu on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

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