The Knight Foundation and Mozilla foundation have joined forces to promote “quality journalism and media innovation.”

Jose Zamora, writing on the KnightBlog:

Years ago, foundations helped place journalism professors in newsrooms and journalists in universities to bridge the education-profession gap and we wondered… What if we did the same for technology? What if we could help expand the field of media innovation by building a bridge between the technology and the news community?

The two foundations have come up with $2.5 million to fund the Knight-Mozilla News Technology partnership.

The partnership will accelerate media innovation by solving technological challenges, developing new news products and services of the Web and embedding technologists in news organizations. Everything done through the Knight-Mozilla Innovation Challenge and by Knight-Mozilla Fellows will be open, providing knowledge, solutions and open-source products that are valuable and useful to the whole field.

There will be an open innovation challenge. This will be followed by 15 Mozilla-Knight News Technology Fellows embedded in newsrooms working on solving “digital challenges.”

The first newsrooms are: the Boston Globe, BBC, The Guardian and Zeit Online.

Foremski’s Take:

It’s good to see initiatives such as these. However, the initial choice of the newsrooms is poor. These are large organizations with plenty of their own resources.

It would be better to concentrate on the smaller media organizations, especially neighborhood newspapers. These have fewer resources and need the most help in transitioning to a new media economy/

[Cross-posted at Silicon Valley Watcher]