OpenNews: Two Fellows, Two Bylines, One Day
Today was a first for the 2012 Knight-Mozilla Fellows: In one day day, two fellows had bylines on work they helped produce with their host news partner. Their contributions couldn’t have been more different and really demonstrate the breath of skills the Knight-Mozilla Fellows bring to the newsroom.
At the BBC, Laurian Gridinoc brought his considerable media-hacking skills to bear on this (literally) step-by-step analysis of the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests in London this April. By using the popcorn.js library as a method to break down the 3D animated map of Tomlinson’s path into distinct segments, he creates an immersive, web-only experience that helps you to really understand the data that came out of the inquest into Tomlinson’s death.
At the Guardian, Nicola Hughes applied her data mining skills to a chunky dataset of purchase award contracts used in US aid procurement. The story that grew out of her data work, “US food aid programme criticised as ‘corporate welfare’ for grain giants” is data-driven muckraking journalism at its finest. Added bonus, in the spirit of working in the open, Nicola documents how the story was made not once but twice.
This work—from creating immersive web experiences, to getting deep into data discovery, to the many other projects underway—demonstrates the types of challenges that our Knight-Mozilla Fellows are solving in their host newsrooms every day. We’re looking for our 2013 fellows right now: Are you up for the challenge?
