New media is pushing the boundaries of journalism by introducing new technologies. But the question is how newsrooms and journalists can innovate without having to dive into the programming world themselves. This is where the Knight-Mozilla Fellows come in.

The Knight Foundation has long supported quality journalism and journalistic innovation. In 2012, they teamed up with the Mozilla Foundation, which actively promotes an open internet and open source software. The two created the OpenNews partnership with the idea of bringing journalism and technology together.

In 2013, Knight-Mozilla Fellows are hacking newsrooms at the prestigious media organizations such as the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, Spiegel Online, the Boston Globe, ProPublica and La Nacion.

DW Akademie’s Steffen Leidel met with the head of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, Dan Sinker. They talked about why hackers are interested in working with journalists in the first place, how journalists can tap into the world-wide community of hackers and a revolutionary new piece of software for data scraping.

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