The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Initiative aims to promote open web technologies and standards to help ensure the future of journalism and the open web. It will do this through a 3-year program to place innovators within news organizations to generate ideas, train staff, build software demos, and provide thought leadership. The goal is to demonstrate that open web approaches are better, faster and cheaper than alternatives, and present viable open alternatives to closed systems that could impact the future of the news industry and web.

1. Knight-Mozilla News
Technology Initiative
August 2011

2. Why Mozilla cares
• News industry is at a crossroads.
• Big technology decisions. Budgets for
implementation & experimentation.
• Massive user reach means the choices they make
will impact the web's future as a whole.
• News is at the center of many people’s
experience of the web
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3. Vision
The next time there's an uprising in Tunisia
or Egypt, news organizations around the
world will be using people, software, and
ideas that came out of Mozilla's collaboration
with news organizations. Stories and maps will be
rich with semantic data and location aware. News will
adapt to different devices and screen sizes instantly. And
video will be interactive, searchable, and multilingual -- all
thanks to open web technologies.
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4. The future of journalism and
the open web are intertwined
• Visual execution slide. Big Knight & Mozilla
logos. Partners below. Extended network
(Medill, etc.) & users below.

5. How we win
• Demonstrate that the open web is better, faster,
and cheaper than the alternatives.
• Surface clear direction on standards, then help
drive adoption that results in real innovations.
• Present viable alternatives to monocultures
& toll booths on the open web.
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6. Case in point:
Mobile & New Devices
• News decision: Purpose-build individual apps?
Or take a HTML5 approach?
• Opportunity: Fragmentation of app markets
equals a big opportunity for open.
• Lever: A push on projects like jQuery Mobile
and Sencha Touch could demonstrate a clear path
forward.
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7. Case in point:
Open Standards
• News decision: Microformats vs. microdata
vs. RDFa?
• Opportunity: Set a clear standard for the
market.
• Lever: big adoption from our news partners and
Mozilla developer community.
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8. Case in point:
Identity & Monetization
• News decision: Use Google NewsPass,
Facebook Credits, or Apple's App Store? Build
internally? Other options?
• Opportunity: Big implications for identity on
open web side. And sustainability on the future of
news side.
• Lever: A distributed platform (e.g.: Diaspora)
with wide initial adoption by news partners could
present a viable, open alternative.
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9. What we are going to do
A three-year program to find, train, test and deploy
open-web innovators to work inside large news organizations.
• Generate great ideas: through design challenges &
open conversations.
• Train people: on taking ideas from concept to code.
• Make software: demos & reference implementations
of the best ideas and experiments.
• Thought leadership: through fellows, press
coverage & news partnerships.
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10. Team