Mozilla is planning to make an announcement at SXSW 2012 on Saturday that The New York Times will be joining the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project. The project is designed to drive technological innovation in journalism by placing fellows in the newsrooms of various news organizations to work alongside developers and journalists. Those who receive the fellowships share their work with other members of the OpenNews project, allowing others to see and duplicate what advances are being made.
The New York Times is one of four partners that are joining the project. ProPublica, Spiegel Online (in Germany), and La Nacion (in Buenos Aires) are also new partners this year. These four new organizations join the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, the Boston Globe, and Al Jazeera as partners in the program, which was founded in the spring of 2011.
The OpenNews Project will be awarding eight new fellowships in the coming months, with applications opening on April 9. Fellows spend a year embedded with one of the eight partner organizations, writing code alongside developers and journalists. Aron Pilhofer, Editor of Interactive News at The New York Times, expressed his enthusiasm at the project, which he said grands those in the news industry the opportunity to “dig deep on a subject of critical importance” in a way they usually can’t.