OpenNews launches $10K coding grants for news outlets

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Knight-Mozilla's OpenNews programme has launched 'code sprint grants', enabling news outlets to apply for $10,000 grants to fund the creation of "simple tools for journalism".

News outlets both large and small are encouraged to apply. In an email to Journalism.co.uk, OpenNews said: "Just as the Knight-Mozilla fellowships are international, the code sprint grants are also international and a great way to work with news organisations we're not currently connected with."

The grants aim to "fund small-scale utilities and tools that help solve specific, repeatable journalistic problems", according to an announcement post .

"At OpenNews, we want to help build great tools to do journalism, and we want those tools to be open-sourced and freely available to everyone," it continues.

OpenNews gives three examples of simple, repeatable tools built to solve journalistic problems:

• Tabletop.js: for the display of spreadsheet data
• Timelinesetter: for timelines
• Dataset: for management of data for visualisation

The process works by news organisations collaborating with OpenNews to "define code sprint projects, outline their technical needs, and find the right person to write the code".

"The news organisation is the project lead and should be able to both project-manage the development and shepherd the continued life of the open-sourced code."

Work is done as sprint cycles of between two weeks and two months and "they are projects spread over nights-and-weekends or done in one passion-filled push".

Details of how to apply are at this link .