The latest media innovation comes from the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, as they join forces to promote “quality journalism and media innovation.” The Knight Foundation chose Mozilla as a partner due to its characteristics of popularity, openness and innovation.

The two partners will invest $2.5 million in the Knight-Mozilla News Technology partnership aiming at accelerating media innovations and developing new Web news products. “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. This partnership spurs media innovation and helps news organizations facing the same or similar challenges understand how to solve them.”

The program starts off with an open innovation challenge in which winners will participate in an online learning lab and in-person prototype-building event to brainstorm ideas that will be followed by 15 Mozilla-Knight News Technology Fellows embedded in newsrooms to work on solving “digital challenges.” The first newsrooms include the Boston Globe, BBC, The Guardian and Zeit Online.

Skeptics, such as Foremski, Silicon Angle contributor, see the newsrooms as not being the best choice, as more emphasis should have been put on ‘smaller media organizations, especially neighborhood newspapers. These have fewer resources and need the most help in transitioning to a new media economy.’

The media frenzy enshrouded AOL as well, the company having announced the acquisition of The Huffington Post for $315 million to catch up with search giants like Microsoft and Google that dominate the content sphere. As Kit mentioned, one cannot tell which road will AOL and HuffPo take: either the traditional or the digital newspapers and magazine.  But one thing is for certain–the face of print media publication has been changed forever.