Knight-Mozilla News Technology Initiative 

August 2011

Why Mozilla cares

• News industry is at a crossroads.

• Big technology decisions. Budgets for implementation & experimentation.

• Massive user reach means the choices they make will impact the web's future as a whole.

• News is at the center of many people’s experience of the web

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Vision

The next time there's an uprising in Tunisia or Egypt, news organizations around the world will be using people, software, and ideas that came out of Mozilla's collaboration with news organizations. Stories and maps will be rich with semantic data and location aware. News will adapt to different devices and screen sizes instantly. And video will be interactive, searchable, and multilingual -- all thanks to open web technologies.

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The future of journalism and the open web are intertwined 

• Visual execution slide. Big Knight & Mozilla logos. Partners below. Extended network (Medill, etc.) & users below.

How we win

• Demonstrate that the open web is better, faster, and cheaper than the alternatives.

• Surface clear direction on standards, then help drive adoption that results in real innovations.

• Present viable alternatives to monocultures& toll booths on the open web.

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Case in point:

Mobile & New Devices

• News decision: Purpose-build individual apps? Or take a HTML5 approach?

• Opportunity: Fragmentation of app markets equals a big opportunity for open.

• Lever: A push on projects like jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch could demonstrate a clear path forward.

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Case in point:

Open Standards

• News decision: Microformats vs. microdata vs. RDFa?

• Opportunity: Set a clear standard for the market. 

• Lever: big adoption from our news partners and Mozilla developer community.

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Case in point:

Identity & Monetization

• News decision: Use Google NewsPass, Facebook Credits, or Apple's App Store? Build internally? Other options?

• Opportunity: Big implications for identity on open web side. And sustainability on the future of news side.

• Lever: A distributed platform (e.g.: Diaspora) with wide initial adoption by news partners could present a viable, open alternative.

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What we are going to do

• Generate great ideas: through design challenges & open conversations.

• Train people: on taking ideas from concept to code.

• Make software: demos & reference implementations of the best ideas and experiments.

• Thought leadership: through fellows, press coverage & news partnerships.

A three-year program to find, train, test and deploy open-web innovators to work inside large news organizations.

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Team