From my position as a fellow Knight grantee (i run DocumentCloud, and interact with many of the folks involved in this upcoming project) i'm pretty excited.
The NYT and WaPo have world class developers, and the OpenNews folks are people who very clearly get both the web and the news.
And a project like this serves some concrete needs including one that DocumentCloud itself would benefit from. If this project ends up tackling part of the single sign on problem for news organizations, integration with 3rd party tools & platforms like DocumentCloud becomes a lot easier.
Sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post upload documents to our site, and then embed on their pages. Rather than requiring their users to login to DocumentCloud as well as the host site, we'd love to be able to have a standard way (that has buy-in from news sites) to authenticate users, especially if it's one that allows us to feed back moderation and the like back to the host organization.
It's interesting you say that the NYT has world-class developers, because it seemed like (from the leaked memo a few weeks back) that the digital side is kind of a mess right now - but maybe that's a direction vs. talent problem.
Yeah, if you read the innovation report there's a breakout box that specifically highlights a number of their development talent.
To name but a few: Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, Underscore, Coffeescript), Mike Bostock (D3), Amanda Cox (creator of a lot of the NYT's great data visualizations), Kevin Quealy (Amanda's partner in vis), Gregor Aisch (wrote much of DataWrapper), and until recently David Nolen (aka Swannodette of Clojure & Clojurescript fame) all work for the NYT.
I haven't done a detailed read-through of the innovation report, but Niemanlab's writeup comports with my sense of the state of digital journalism (and the Niemanlab folks are quite good): http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-i...
Key to many of the problems that orgs like the NYT have are not a lack of prestige or ability to attract top tier talent. The problem news orgs have are organizational and structural, which are partially a matter of leadership and priorities.
Anyway, irrespective of any of that, the NYT does innovative things with data and visualization before anybody else in journalism, or hell even visualization in general, does (not to say that they're the only ones pushing the state of the art).
Going by their iOS apps, it's damned hard to argue that NYT has world-class dev talent. (I could be blaming the talent for the sins of management, of course.)
The NYT and WaPo have world class developers, and the OpenNews folks are people who very clearly get both the web and the news.
And a project like this serves some concrete needs including one that DocumentCloud itself would benefit from. If this project ends up tackling part of the single sign on problem for news organizations, integration with 3rd party tools & platforms like DocumentCloud becomes a lot easier.
Sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post upload documents to our site, and then embed on their pages. Rather than requiring their users to login to DocumentCloud as well as the host site, we'd love to be able to have a standard way (that has buy-in from news sites) to authenticate users, especially if it's one that allows us to feed back moderation and the like back to the host organization.