OpenNews/roadmap

Open News Goals

OpenNews is building a thriving community of people writing innovative code in journalism. We are helping those people lead and shape where journalism goes in the future.

Shape: Guided by the OpenNews community, journalism on the web is transforming how we view the web itself.
Teach: Through Source, SRCCON and newsroom outreach, OpenNews is the leading destination for those seeking to understand web development in the newsroom, and for those interested in building web-native news.
Build: Code developed through OpenNews initiatives achieves relevance and is adopted in newsrooms and beyond.
Empower: OpenNews is the central hub for a global community of news developers and programmatic journalists. It attracts and trains new members while developing and supporting existing leaders.

Open News Story

1. What is Open News and why does it matter?
OpenNews is building a thriving community of people writing innovative code in journalism. We are helping those people lead and shape where journalism goes in the future.

2. How will it shape the world by 2016?
We envision a world where there are many more curious, civically minded news coders than there are today. In this world, open source and the values of the web are baked into how journalism works. It’s easy to dive into data, visualize a point, organize a community; it happens every day. Journalism needs these people, practices and technologies if it wants to continue to inform citizens and help communities thrive. To get there, OpenNews will become the connective tissue in the journalism code community. We'll connect people writing innovative code in journalism with their peers so they can learn, solve problems and build new tools together. We'll offer onramps for the community to document, improve and spread the code they write and the practices they develop to the news industry, the open-source software community and the world.

3. Why will people get involved in what were doing?
OpenNews works with a global community of news developers, civic hackers and open-source makers. These are loosely tied communities. OpenNews is the first organization to recognize that reaching out to these disconnected developer communities and organizing them along the lines that engineers and hackers want to engage was a crucial first step in strengthening the overall journalism code community.

4. Why will lead users or partners get involved?
We have designed the OpenNews ecosystem around two core audiences: News Developers and Civic Hackers.

Inside newsrooms, we see our core audience as News Developers. News Developers are the people actually coding inside the newsroom. This community engages with our events (attending & hosting hack days and MozFest), writes for Source (project documentation and learning case studies) and takes part in our biweekly community calls. Over time, this community has become a collaborator with OpenNews, advocating publicly for our programs and helping to conceive of the new projects we’re undertaking. Outside newsrooms, we engage with a broad spectrum of coders that broadly fall into the “Civic Hacker” bucket. These people dabble with open data and open-source software, and build hobbyist-level visualizations and applications. They engage with us at events, read Source and take part in our biweekly community calls. This community is where we find many of our Fellows.

Why these audiences?

These two communities are moving journalism forward on the web. One is doing it inside traditional industry structures; the other is doing it independently. When these two communities collaborate (as we’ve seen through successful open-source projects like Backbone.js, Django and D3), the impact reaches far beyond journalism to the entire web itself. OpenNews regularly enables this collaboration.

5. What we're doing in 2014 to move towards this:
We connect people writing innovative code in journalism with their peers so they can learn, solve problems and build new tools together. We offer onramps for the community to document, improve and spread the code they write and the practices they develop to the news industry, the open-source software community and the world.

We're doing this through the following initiatives:

Knight-Mozilla Fellowships: Our 10 month fellowships connect members of the open-source software and civic hacking worlds into newsrooms around the world.

Hack Days: We offer financial and planning support for organizers of journalism-themed hack days in their community.

Source: We launched our journalism-code hub in October 2012 after extensive collaborative design with the news developer community.

Journalism Code Convenings: The introduction of Journalism Code Convenings, which bring together top talent from the news developer world, our Fellows and leading external community members to collaborate on code that will be widely shared throughout the journalism-code community.

Newsroom Outreach: We're adding in-person learning and discussion opportunities to place our fellows, alumni and other leaders in the community into smaller, less tech-heavy newsrooms.

SRCCON: The Source Conference (SRCCON), a hybrid un-conference and hack day to further engage the communities we intersect with.

Mozilla Festival: This annual Mozilla event, held in London has featured a “source code for journalism” track that attracts both journalism developers and open-source hackers.

6. Possible revenue opportunities: We're already generously funded by the Knight Foundation to work on the core programs outlined above.

Long-term revenue opportunities include:

• expanding our newsroom outreach program and getting separate funding for that
• getting additional funding for expansion of Source
• allowing newsrooms to pay full freight for a Fellow

Short-term (or small amount) revenue opportunities include:

• creating and selling Source Guides to various news technology topics
• advertising on Source

7. Why we will succeed:
From visualizations produced for the 2012 Elections in the storytelling of the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning “Snowfall,” it is clear that we’ve reached the inflection point for web-native journalism. OpenNews is the only organization actively engaging and empowering the people doing this work. We’re the only ones trying to grow the ranks of news developers while also seeding innovative code outside traditional news organizations. While there are other trade organizations that address digital journalism, none are actively organizing developers in the way that these communities natively operate. OpenNews does. When done right, this community doesn’t simply impact journalism in the long run, but the entire web itself. Fundamental architectures of the modern web — Django, Backbone, Underscore, D3 and others — have been built in the newsroom first. Better organizing this community and harnessing its true potential has impact far beyond journalism.