We’ve returned from roundup hiatus with a new website, a new OpenNews, a bunch of great columnists and new writers, and the another batch of excellent new things you made.

Meetups and Misinfocon in the week before NICAR.

Little Vermont’s been in the limelight lately—C-SPAN style. Between Sen. Bernie Sanders, now more well-known now than ever, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, the senior-most member of the Senate Judiciary committee, my team here at Vermont Public Radio knew that the new administration’s cabinet nomination process would be of key interest our audience. We knew we wanted to track our senators’ roles throughout.

For a recent story about how Washington Post editor Doris Truong became the center of a partisan online flame war, we wanted to illustrate what happens when a person becomes part of viral false story and subject to online trolling.

From BuzzFeed’s BuzzBot, an emoji-heavy offering designed to deliver updates about the Democratic and Republican National Conventions to CNN’s more traditional approach, news bots were suddenly everywhere. And then they weren’t.

Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, Vox published the inuagural address with annotations from Vox’s policy writers.

Last Saturday morning, over 200 scientists, programmers, librarians, artists, students, and academics gathered for Data Rescue NYC to help archive at-risk scientific datasets. The event was the latest in a multi-city series organized by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), an international collaboration run by non-profits and academics working to support environmental government agencies.

Journalism-code meetups around the world, plus a bunch of upcoming deadlines.

To make it easier for tipsters to share sensitive information, a growing number of news organizations are launching resources for confidential tips. This short guide will describe some basics around how to think about security on behalf of your sources before thinking about tools and practices.

Source is published by OpenNews, a project incubated at Mozilla and funded by the Knight Foundation to support and strengthen the community working on open technologies and processes in journalism. As of today, OpenNews is independent, working as a project of Community Partners, a nonprofit fiscal sponsor. You can read about our new setup and the programs and events we’ll be offering—and get the just-released dates and location for SRCCON 2017—at our blog.

Deadlines this week for some major journalism fellowships, plus a bunch of upcoming events.

I finished a project with a home-built table that was about 16GB, some 60 million rows by 110ish fields. It was…big. Sometimes it was painful. Mostly, though, it worked out, and it got us what I think is a damned good story. Anyway, I think it was Ben Welsh who’d observed something like: We have some good tools to work with Big Data, but not great tools for data that’s not quite so big. I ran into that situation.

Welcome! This is the first of an occasional series of posts I’ll be writing here about how news organizations around the world are going about the same things differently. The plan is to focus on the kind of work that doesn’t fit neatly into our CMSes, or that need custom design or code. I’ve been doing this work for seven years and remain to be fascinated by the varying approaches to the same subject matter. When news breaks, (or perhaps when news is planned 12 months ahead) how do we in media make the same things, differently?

Data can be impersonal, especially large datasets with thousands or even millions of records. The fact that most data of this magnitude is calculated by machines is, however, a sharp contrast to the ultimate goal of examining it in the first place—to find human trends and patterns behind the numbers.

The mini-series Mars, that aired on the National Geographic Channel in November 2016, imagined what it would be like to live on Mars in the near future. For the interactive narrative Rewind the Red Planet, we endeavored to show Mars as it was before it was a red desert, back to a time when liquid water may have run freely, between three and four billion years ago. We wanted to allow readers to see ancient Mars in its entirety from a planetary scale, how it may have featured a vast northern ocean, or may have had water trapped in expansive glaciers.

A new Mac OS X desktop app, autoEdit, creates automatic transcription from a video or audio file. The user can then make text selections and export those selections as a video sequence, in the editing software of their choice.

Data journalism training in Berlin, plus a bunch of upcoming meetups around the world.

OpenNews wants to help you get to events, plus meetups later this month.

In researching Settling for Misconduct, we had to account for details from hundreds of county and federal court filings, identify thousands of officers named in civil complaints and tally hundreds of millions of dollars in monetary awards. We also needed thorough reporting to connect issues of police misconduct to fiscal accountability. And oh yeah – we had to have a slick web app to present the data to the public.

Slow start to the new year for events, but that means more time for fellowship applications.