Hi there. I'm the director of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews program. We're looking for developers, hackers, and the like who want to spend 10 months traveling the world and building new tools for journalism. It's an incredible opportunity.
This link is for the final pitch, as the application window closes at midnight Eastern tomorrow night.
I'd say that the difference between "news" and "information" isn't freshness, but relevancy. There's a lot of information out there that doesn't have relevancy to a user. When it does, that information transitions from simply being "information" into "news."
In terms of story, we are as a culture oriented toward story and narrative. I think that's been true for forever. Cave paintings are remnants of ancient narratives (and of the point that information (there are buffaloes) becomes news (there are buffaloes near us, so we killed them) in the same way that newspapers reflect the remnants of more recent narratives and how all sorts of information delivery vehicles now contain narratives today.
The key thing about The News today though is that it's still pretty reflective of old forms, and that's probably where your frustration with the story format comes in. Those old forms actually made sense when they were created, in part because they reflected the needs of the delivery systems.
Of course now the needs of, say, telegraphs during the civil war (which is where the "reverse pyramid" system was created) is a silly way to make your news.
Which is why what some newsrooms and devs are doing to blow up the story, to start thinking about how to put information across in ways that are exciting and new and reflective both of medium but also representational (and respectful) of the information itself is pretty damn kick-ass.
There's actually a lot of narrative there, but it's narrative in a very different way than we'd normally think about it. There's a ton of information there as well, but it's been touched in really thoughtful ways.
Things like this, which are happening more and more every day, make me super excited.
I think you're right: There's a real shift now in newsrooms as they realize the value of having developers involved in the editorial process and the power in creating web-native news experiences.
These videos were created in part to help spread the word about the Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, which place developers, hackers, and tech-minded folks into newsrooms around the world to do open-source development, travel the world hacking the news, and much more. Tons of info here: mozillaopennews.org/fellowships/
This link is for the final pitch, as the application window closes at midnight Eastern tomorrow night.
Happy to answer any questions here. Also, you can jump straight to the application if you want: http://mozillaopennews.org/fellowships/apply.html