All of our 33 Fellows

Meet the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship Community

The Knight-Mozilla Fellows spent 10 months working with a partner news organization, contributing to and learning from the journalism code community. After their fellowship, they joined a thriving community of fellowship alumnit. Fellows shared their curiosity, code, and insights during their fellowship and beyond.

The fellowship is on hiatus for 2017, but you can meet our five cohorts of fellows.

Throughout their time as a fellow, we encouraged fellows to explore their passions, collaborate on projects, and share their work. Here are some examples of work from our fellows.

Explore

The mandate to explore is one of the ways a fellowship is really different from a regular job. Fellows had the time, space, and support to learn new skills, investigate topics of interest to them, and experiment to answer questions that fascinate them.

Brian Jacobs - 2014 fellow, now at National Geographic

Brian brought his prior experience with mapping and science to ProPublica’s “Losing Ground,” a project documenting erosion of the coastline in Louisiana. He dove into a huge project to understand historical, satellite, and even balloon-mapped imagery and then figure out how to make it accessible and understandable to readers.

###Mark Boas - 2012 fellow, now at Hyperaudio Mark came to the fellowship with a wealth of experience with online audio and video. This was a great fit for interactive projects at Al Jazeera as well as efforts to add better navigation and captioning support to news events like the 2012 U.S. presidential debates.

Collaborate

Working together is at the heart of open source development and fellows had the chance to combine forces with their newsroom colleagues, the other fellows in their cohort, the wider journalism-code community, and beyond.

###Kavya Sukumar - 2015 fellow at Vox Media, now at Vox Media Kavya and colleagues on the Vox Product team open sourced Autotune, a tool to make it easier to create templates for things like quizzes and charts. Vox had been using the tool internally, and with Kavya’s help they were able to share it so other orgs can use it, too.

###Manuel Aristarán - 2013 fellow, now at MIT Civic Media
Mike Tigas - 2013 fellow, now at ProPublica Manuel and Mike worked on the tricky problem of extracting tabular data from PDFs. Manuel began work on Tabula prior to his fellowship and continued its development while at La Nacion in partnership with ProPublica. Mike, his ProPublica colleague Jeremy B. Merrill, and Manuel launched TabulaPDF in 2013 and have continued its development.

Share

A handful of individuals get to spend 10 months as a fellow, but by documenting, speaking, and teaching about their work, fellows expand the reach of their efforts and allow the rest of the journalism-code community to benefit from their work.

###Martin Shelton - 2016 fellow at The Coral Project, soon at Google Chrome As part of Martin’s work at The Coral Project, he did user research about topics including operational security for newsrooms. He compiled resources to defend against common attacks in a guide for Source and created, Tinfoil, an online community for discussing and sharing strategies about journalism, media activism, and information security.

###Harlo Holmes - 2014 fellow, now at Freedom of the Press Foundation
Aurelia Moser - 2014 fellow, now at Mozilla Foundation Harlo and Aurelia wanted to help journalists understand how and why to communicate securely with sources. Harlo brought her extensive experience in the security community and Aurelia brought her curiosity about apps and communication to develop several talks about opsec for journalists. They presented together, alongside Barton Gellman at HOPE, and at the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires Media Party.