opennews

This year the eight Knight-Mozilla Fellows are roughly half folks who were not previously involved with journalism development and half people who have deepened their engagement with this community via the Fellowship. Last week, we heard from the first group, Fellows who took varied paths to their news organizations. This week we learned what it's like for people who have worked in newsrooms to experience those spaces as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow.

What do you mean, I get to do whatever I want? Stijn Debrouwere began the week by expressing his awe at the very premise of the Fellowship and the space it allows for exploration.

Open source development can often involve much solo toiling, but next week in New York there will be two in-person opportunities to learn about awesome open source projects.

Yesterday OpenNews launched the search for five Knight-Mozilla Fellows in 2014. In just 24 hours, we already received eight applications. Applications came in from six countries on four continents. We heard from Argentina, Belgium, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, and the U.S. From coders who, in addition to English, speak five other languages. From people who want to use their skills to hack and experiment with some of the best news organizations in the world. 

While some journalists were relaxing in Italy, the coolest of the cool kids were hanging out in Philly. (But isn't that always the case? Yes, yes it is.)  During a panel in Perugia last week, Aron Pilhofer described the New York Times' in-house analytics team, which teed up nicely a conversation at BarCamp News Innovation between Brian Abelson, the Knight-Mozilla Fellow working on analytics at the Times, and Greg Linch, the guy who helped spark the idea for the position.

Brian, Greg and I kicked off BarCamp with a discussion of impact and a flurry of links, examples, and takeaways. The session followed up from sessions Greg led last year on impact and an ongoing conversation about how to define and incorporate analytics and ideas about impact into journalism. As Brian has been researching the topic, he's compiled a bibliography of writing on impact. He noted that a great white paper from ProPublica includes case study descriptions of different stories and how ProPublica has defined impact.