Interview: Boston Globe’s Moriarty

There has been alot of talk on the MoJo list about whether Knight Mozilla fellows will really be able to innovate inside large news orgs. I asked Jeff Moriarty what kind of environment fellows will be landing in at the Boston Globe: “We have reporters and developers working across desks from each other. Everybody is now involved in every platform.” As VP Digital, Jeff has really pushed the integration of journalists and developers. I asked him to say more about how this works:

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/24057904]

When I visited the Globe a few weeks back, I saw two things that really impressed me. The first was the prototype of a fully cross platform HTML5 version of the paper: I saw it work (and resize itself) seamlessly across big monitors, tablets and phones. It was beautiful. I also saw a mini-lab with about 10 devices that allowed developers to test the new paper in real time: as I surf, all the devices show the page I am on at the same time.

These are small parts of Jeff’s bigger vision of how the paper should innovate: “We’re building a media lab where we can prototype new ideas and work on emerging technologies.” The idea is to both physically and socially build innovation into how the Boston Globe works.

IMHO, this is an awesome environment for a MoJo challenge fellow to land:  there are real people and resources in place to help the fellow play, invent and innovate. For someone building a career in media and technology, that’s a pretty awesome platform. And, it’s the kind of platform all of our news partners are building inside their organizations. That’s why we chose them to host our first fellows.

If working in Jeff’s lab — or a similar setting at Al Jazeera, BBC, Guardian or Zeit Online — sounds interesting, enter the MoJo challenge and compete to become a fellow.

This is part of series of interviews with people involved in the Knight Mozilla News Innovation Partnership (MoJo). Find out more on the MoJo web site or enter the MoJo news innovation challenge.

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