As the deadline to apply to become a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow approaches, there’s one question often comes up: Why would I want to work as a developer in the newsroom?
There are all sorts of reasons—from being in the room when news breaks, to working with a community of people creating the future of an industry, to helping move civic dialogues into new directions. But the most compelling answers come from the very people doing it.
So when I was in New York a few weeks ago, I visited our news partners at the New York Times and ProPublica and posed that very question to some of the members of their groundbreaking news dev teams. I shot some video while I was there and put together these six short interviews about what’s exciting about news app development.
Jeremy Ashkenas, the creator of CoffeeScript, Backbone, Underscore.js, and much more, is a developer at the New York Times:
Jeff Larson is a developer at ProPublica:
Tiff Fehr is a UX engineer at the New York Times:
Al Shaw is a developer at ProPublica:
David Nolen is a developer at the New York Times:
Krista Kjellman Schmidt is a news applications editor at ProPublica:
These six short testimonials point to one simple truth: There are few moments in time more exciting than this one in the news industry. By becoming a Knight-Mozilla Fellow, you get to experience it and influence it right in the heart of some of the best newsrooms in the world. The deadline to apply ends August 11. Get your application in now.
Dan Sinker heads up the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project for Mozilla. From 2008-2011 he taught in the journalism department at Columbia College Chicago where he focused on entrepreneurial journalism and the mobile web. He is the author of the popular @MayorEmanuel twitter account and is the creator of the election tracker the Chicago Mayoral Scorecard, the mobile storytelling project CellStories, and was the founding editor of the influential underground culture magazine Punk Planet until its closure in 2007. He is the editor of We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the collected interviews and was a 2007-08 Knight Fellow at Stanford University. He occasionally blogs about media for the Huffington Post.