Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
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Wanted: Security Pitches
By Erin Kissane and Lindsay Muscato
Posted onNext month on Source, we’re running a week of pieces focused on security for journalists and news organizations—our first-ever Security Week.
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Two-Factor Authentication for Newsrooms
By Martin Shelton
Posted onPasswords are the brittle wall that keep unwanted visitors out of your accounts. Breaches can hit anyone, but as frequent targets with sensitive sources, work, and personal information at risk, reporters should take extra care. When it comes to account protection, two-factor authentication is one of the most effective defenses available.
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Things You Made, May 9
By Lindsay Muscato
Posted onA roundup of journalism and code projects from the last few weeks.
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Tracking the Trump Trackers
By Erin Kissane
Posted onWe’ve been collecting examples of “Trump trackers” since shortly after Election Day, and now that we’ve passed the Day 100 mark of Trump’s presidency, we’ve pulled together the most comparable of them to look at what they’re tracking, how they’re visually presenting the information, what kind of language they use, and what structural and design approaches underlie each feature.
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Event Roundup, May 8
By Erika Owens
Posted onONA meetups this week, plus audio hackathons this weekend.
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FOIA Data Models for Everyone
By Jeremy B. Merrill
Posted onBest practices for FOIA requests.
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Learn Something New Without Losing Your Head
By Ariana Giorgi
Posted onHere’s a simple approach to learning a new programming language on the job.
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Event Roundup, May 1
By Erika Owens
Posted onPitch to the first-ever WordCamp for Publishers, plus check out a bunch of other upcoming events.
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Competition Be Damned
By Erin Kissane
Posted onLast Wednesday, the Trump Inaugural Committee’s FEC filing appeared on the FEC site in its horrible hand-delivered image-PDF glory. ProPublica’s Derek Willis noted its arrival on Twitter.
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Things You Made, April 26
By Lindsay Muscato
Posted onA roundup of journalism and code projects from the last few weeks.
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How Reveal Mapped the “Secret” U.S. Border Fence
By Michael Corey
Posted onThe Trump administration’s pursuit of a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border has brought back a project that I thought I had finished years ago.
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Event Roundup, Apr 24
By Erika Owens
Posted onIt’s OpenVis Conf time, plus WordCamp for Publishers is looking for your talk ideas.
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Visually Speaking: Designing for the (Un)wired World
By Dana Amihere
Posted onWhy newsrooms should go responsive, even for complex projects.
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Ms. Management: The Hard Work of Hiring Well
By Stacy-Marie Ishmael
Posted onIn this installment of Ms. Management, we learn why a better interview process is better for everyone, not just the applicants.
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Event Roundup, Apr 17
By Erika Owens
Posted onSociety for News Design brings its conference to Charlotte, while WordCamp for Publishers is looking for your session ideas.
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Things You Made, April 12
By Lindsay Muscato
Posted onProjects from Buzzfeed, the Dallas Morning News, NJ.com, the Oregonian, the Tampa Bay Times, and more.
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Event Roundup, Apr 10
By Erika Owens
Posted onYou have till Thursday to pitch ideas to ONA, and till tomorrow to pitch DjangoCon.
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Ops to the Nines
By Dave Stanton
Posted onThe S3 outage had far-reaching consequences, with a significant chunk of all internet traffic—and a lot of major sites and web apps—impacted to some extent, but it didn’t have to be this way. You can insulate your apps from practically any outage given a bit of knowhow, some forethought, and a calculated approach to balancing your costs and risks.
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Shields Up: Developing Security Skepticism
By Martin Shelton
Posted onA little fear can motivate us to take action. But as consumers of security news, even the most well-intentioned reporting can scare us into paralysis—or worse, encourage us to adopt behaviors that promote a false sense of security.
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When The Designer Shows Up in the Design
By Lena Groeger
Posted onThe unintended ways that assumptions, perspectives and biases find their way into our work as journalists, designers and developers. We’ll look at how the decisions we make—what data to base our stories on, what form those stories should take, how they’re designed, who they’re created for—always come out of our particular point of view.