Knight-Mozilla OpenNews announced five new fellows for 2014 today at the Mozilla Festival in London.

We’re excited to announce that Brian Jacobs will be ProPublica’s OpenNews fellow in 2014.

Brian is an interactive developer and designer who specializes in civic-minded visualizations and interactive projects, especially ones involving maps and geographic data. Most recently, he worked in Singapore on MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, and before that he was at Azavea, a GIS development shop and ProPublica collaborator based in Philadelphia.

At ProPublica, Brian will work alongside the other developers on the News Apps desk, building interactive projects that help people find their own stories in large data sets. Our plan is to get him to work immediately pursuing great accountability stories, and we’re especially eager to employ Brian’s expertise in telling stories with maps and location.

Our current OpenNews Fellow, Mike Tigas, continues to have a big impact at ProPublica and in the news-coding world beyond. In addition to his terrific work on our Nonprofit Explorer, Mike is a core developer on Tabula, which has made the impossible possible by turning text tables inside PDFs into structured data useful for data journalism (if that sounds like no big deal, trust me, it’s an amazing advancement). Mike’s got more projects in the works, so stay tuned.

OpenNews continues to play a critical role in supporting a community of practice among people who do journalism by writing code. We’re thrilled and grateful to be part of the OpenNews Fellowship again this year.