Skip the history lesson and tell me what you want me to do
Sunday’s the last day to submit ideas to this year’s Mozilla Knight Journalism Challenges! The challenges (MoJo for short) are the start of a three year collaboration between the Knight Foundation and Mozilla’s Drumbeat project to foster the growing overlap between tech and journalism.
I’ve been really excited by MoJo as someone who’s spent the past 5 years working in tech and also has feet planted pretty firmly in non-entrepreneurial fields. Technology has changed the world a whole lot in the past 25 years, and while that’s made life a whole lot easier for a lot of people in a variety of ways, the adaptation and adoption of tech into different fields has varied tremendously, promoting some fields wonderfully (graphic design, animation and photograph for instance), and relegated other fields to digital backwaters (Art History, Library Science, Journalism).
Journalism’s case is especially interesting, due to it’s history as a successful business. What was unfortunate about the circumstance of Journalism is not it’s inability to adopt new technologies, but rather that it was stuck in a local maximum in terms of economics, and the shifts caused by interconnectivity and digital distribution basically tore the rug out from under the news business, without providing a path to a “new normal” which would allow Journalism as an industry to survive.
Instead, the news business has floundered, reacting to each new technology which changed the landscape in which journalists operated, whether that was RSS, mobile browsing, twitter, news aggregators, blogs or video games. But there’s been a marked change in the past couple years. Regardless of the furious but ultimately inconsequential debates about the legitimacy of blogging as a written form, or whether twitter makes you stupid, there are a core of journalists and tech people who have slowly and somewhat surreptitiously tilled the fields of news rooms and academic journalism so that seeds of future journalistic success could be planted.
Things like MoJo, to me, look like a culmination of these efforts. Mozilla, particularly through Drumbeat, is the sort of organization with a broad reach and appeal within developer communities, and a history of advocating for technological freedom, and actually pushing innovation. The Knight Foundation is obviously well-connected within the world of Journalism world, and has enough financial resources to provide some new opportunities to make cool new stuff. And the ecosystem, probably the most important indicator, that has shaped up around data journalism and journalism technologies is now bursting into flower.
What do we, the public, get out of this?
First, an opportunity to take all of the miserable crap that has made us unhappy about how Journalism has functioned as a field that expects us to be their audience, consumers, and users, and channel that into ideas on how to make using the news suck less. This is a chance for us to change how the news is made. To voice our opinions about what is wrong with the news, and how it could be fixed.
Second, we will (hopefully) get new leaders who can grow in the intersection of journalism and technology, who will represent the ideals that Mozillans and we citizens of the open web care about, and carry forth the mission of good investigation and reporting which everyone still applauds the news media for when done properly.
How do you want to change the news?
So, if you care about Journalism and technology, or if there are things that bug you about how the news operates, I encourage you to write up your ideas, and submit them to MoJo. From the challenge entries, MoJo (and it’s panel of judges) will pick 60 people to participate in an online seminar series that will culminate in a hack jam in Berlin, to do some rough tool prototyping. From those 60, 5 will be offered fellowships to operate for a year within the news rooms of the Boston Globe, the BBC, the Guardian, Der Zeit and Al Jazeera English.
The three challenges for this year are Unlocking Video, Beyond Comment Threads, Open Web’s Killer Apps.
I’ve put in a couple ideas myself, and I definitely think other people can and should do so as well. :)
