The Knight and Mozilla Foundations came together in support of OpenNews over a year ago. OpenNews brings together technologists and journalists to collaborate on the future of news. The programme is designed to address a specific concern in an industry that is becoming heavily digitized, moving from traditional models of engagement to the web.

The Guardian, along with the BBC, Zeit Online, Al Jazeera English, and the Boston Globe had an OpenNews fellow ensconced this year – and it will soon have a new fellow starting next year. A fellowship is a ten month placement with a news organization to tinker, experiment and endorse free and creative codery. Involvement ranges from setting up hack days, introducing news partners to outside organizations, building applications, helping process data for a news story – you name it.

Each fellowship is unique to each fellow, as each fellow is picked for his/her unique set of skills. A fellow is not a spare hand for everyday journalistic chores, but is there to look at new ways of solving problems and to promote the adoption of new technology along with innovative ideas.

At the moment, it is hard for the news industry to invest in innovation as ad revenue tumbles. The web means that audiences are connecting in real time across desktop and mobile devices. Mozilla don't want the bastions of the analog era to be left behind and so are fostering innovation through fellowships and code sprint grants. In this way, OpenNews hope to furnish new ways of making and receiving news inside and out of news organizations.

Our OpenNews fellow of 2012, Nicola Hughes, speaks of her ten months embedded in the Guardian's Interactive team:

I was the only fellow to come from a predominantly journalistic background. I had taken it upon myself to learn to code in March 2011 at the tech startup ScraperWiki. My passion for which I wanted to match my skill, was scraping, parsing and analyzing data in order to uncover stories. I'm at the bottom of the production line in terms of generating news. But I saw this as the niche for the full-stack journalist.

I learnt a lot about my trade as a full-stack journalist. Where better to learn than at the Guardian, with a fantastically skilled and diverse team in the Interactive team. It wasn't just my coding I had to polish, but the journalistic process of computer-assisted reporting. You can see the results of the stories I helped work on on my contributor page. You can also see my scrapers and download the data from my ScraperWiki profile and read about my journey on my blog.

What I have set up which I will take with me forever is a GitHub repository I call Infinite Interns – a skeleton structure for setting up and documenting big data digging cases with all the tools I require, set up on virtual machines. Those are the tangible takeaways. What will carry me through all my ventures to come will be memories of the fun I had at SXSW, HacksHackers BA Media Party, Mozilla Festival and the great friends and talented people I met at the Guardian.

I learned a lot, slammed my head against a brick wall a lot, laughed a lot and owe a lot of gratitude to the people who gave me this opportunity.

What's happening in 2013?

This will be the second year of the fellowship, and the selection process has changed substantially since the first round of fellows were hired. This year the number of organisations taking on a fellow has increased from five to eight, and will also include the New York Times, La Nacíon (Argentina), der Spiegel Online, and ProPublica.

As announced yesterday, the OpenNews fellow in 2013 for the Guardian will be Stijn Debrouwere. Stijn is a technologist trying to figure out how we can innovate in the face of the challenges faced by news industry. I'm sure you will find out more about his exploits within the Guardian as his fellowship evolves – you can read more about him at his blog on the future of news.

Our developer Annabel Church has also been offered a Knight-Mozilla fellowship and will be embedded in Zeit Online's newsroom next year:

I have had the great privilege of working at the Guardian as a web developer twice in the last four years, with my current stint lasting a year and a half. In the last year I have been busy creating a new editorial and user experience for our live blogging platform. Our small team has been developing a rich JavaScript web application that sits atop a Scala API, and we are proud to say that we can get content from our journalists to our users in under ten seconds.

I am passionate about how news is consumed by readers, what information needs to be presented at each point in their journey and the tools required to achieve this. Next year I will be embedded within one of Germany's most prestigious news organisations, Zeit Online, and I am looking forward to working with them and to further encourage collaboration between the Guardian and Zeit both within technology and journalism.

This year, eight new fellows go out into eight news organisations distributed around the world, becoming OpenNews advocates. Follow OpenNews on Twitter to find out more.