Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
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How to Run Projects on Time—and Keep Your Sanity
By Lauren Rabaino
Posted onVox’s director of editorial products on how to set up the processes you need to run healthy projects and a jubilant team.
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How We Made “Failure Factories”
By Nathaniel Lash and Adam Playford
Posted onFor several weeks, the Tampa Bay Times has been publishing Failure Factories, a series exploring the effects of the Pinellas County school district’s decision to resegregate its schools. On the web we decided to try something new: kicking off the series with a D3-powered graphic that used data to show readers how dire the situation is for black students in south St. Petersburg. We were aiming for a brief and engaging piece that would invest readers in the stories to come. In that sense, our experiment was successful. #FailureFactories was trending in the Tampa Bay region before the first day of the project ran. We heard from readers across the country that they were waiting anxiously for the series, and both the graphic and the 5,000-word first installment in the series have been among the most viewed stories we’ve published this year.
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Inside the Globe and Mail’s New Interactive Team
By Matt Frehner and Julia Wolfe
Posted onHow The Globe and Mail built a top interactive team from scratch, plus the tools and processes they need to keep turning out work that pushes the paper forward.
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Welcome to Work Week
By
Posted onWelcome to #workweek.
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Event Roundup, Sept 14
By Erika Owens
Posted onMeetups this week in Venezia, London, New York, Sydney, Montreal, Rochester, and Buenos Aires. Plus, upcoming session and award proposal deadlines.
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News Nerd Roundup, Sept 8
By Lindsay Muscato
Posted onA roundup of what’s currently on our minds and in our browser tabs, assembled here for our fellow news nerds.
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Introducing Tik Tok: Beautiful Timelines, the Easy Way
By Alan Palazzolo
Posted onTik Tok creates elegant vertical timelines by pulling from a variety of data sources. It’s designed for newsroom coders of all levels. If you can copy and paste, you’re on your way.
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Tell Us How You Work
By Erin Kissane and Lindsay Muscato
Posted onPitch now for Work Week (September 14-18), and tell us your best ideas related to workflow, project management, team communication, burnout, and more. Pitches due Friday, September 5.
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Event Roundup, Aug 31
By Erika Owens
Posted onIt’s a great week to work on proposals: MozFest, SNDMakes Austin, and NICAR 2016 have upcoming deadlines.
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Better Documentation Is Within Reach
By Noah Veltman
Posted onGood docs help people use your work, but they have other benefits too. They encourage community contributions. They save you from your past self when you’re revisiting your own code six months from now. And they help you think: much like talking to a rubber duck helps you find bugs, carefully documenting your work for users helps you see it from a different perspective and design better code.
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Event Roundup, Aug 24
By Erika Owens
Posted onThis week the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires Media Party brings hundreds of news nerds to Argentina.
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News Nerd Roundup, Aug 21
By Lindsay Muscato
Posted onA few of our favorite pieces from the Los Angeles Times, NPR, the Post and Courier and more.
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Event Roundup, Aug 17
By Erika Owens
Posted onA few meetups this week, plus it’s your last chance to apply to be a 2016 Knight-Mozilla Fellow.
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If Your Reporters Aren’t Making Their Own Charts You’re Wasting Everyone’s Time
By Becky Bowers and David Yanofsky
Posted on“Someone could screw it up” is a terrible excuse not to cede control. We hear it often as a defense of why a newsroom doesn’t let its reporters make their own charts. It sounds reasonable enough, but when you consider the deluge of other types of content that come out of a newsroom getting swiftly edited to the highest standard, it becomes easy to see how the possibility of “screwing it up” is a terrible excuse. It’s time to think about and produce graphics in the same way that we do paragraphs: crafted by a reporter and vetted by an editor for both substance and style.
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Rethinking the Building Blocks of a Chronicle Interactive
By Maegan Clawges, Michael Grant, and Aaron Williams
Posted onThe Airbnb Effect, the San Francisco Chronicle’s follow-up story to a 2014 analysis of Airbnb listings in the city, was the first project the Chronicle’s Interactive desk published. The project tested the limits of the Chronicle’s CMS, and it is now the baseline we’re using for our larger enterprise features. Here’s a look at how it got started.
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Event Roundup, Aug 10
By Erika Owens
Posted onIf you’re in Germany, you have a couple chances this week to learn about the Knight-Mozilla Fellowships.
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Building on Data Viz for All
By Julia Smith
Posted onHelping newsrooms improve interactive graphics and data visualizations by making them more accessible to all users.
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Opening Up Doc2Media
By Juan Elosua
Posted onEarlier this year at La Nación, we developed Doc2Media, an app that adds media resources to documents hosted on DocumentCloud. We created it to visualize hearings from a famous trial led by Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who died in unclear circumstances hours before testifying against the Argentinian president. After we finished the project, we wanted to extend its functionality and abstract it to a tool that can be used in other projects as well as by other newsrooms.
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What We’ve Learned About Sharing Our Data Analysis
By Jeremy Singer-Vine
Posted onLast Friday morning, Jessica Garrison, Ken Bensinger, and I published a BuzzFeed News investigation highlighting the ease with which American employers have exploited and abused a particular type of foreign worker—those on seasonal H–2 visas. That same morning, we published the corresponding data, methodologies, and analytic code on GitHub. This isn’t the first time we’ve open-sourced our data and analysis; far from it. But the H–2 project represents our most ambitious effort yet. In this post, I’ll describe our current thinking on “reproducible data analyses,” and how the H–2 project reflects those thoughts.
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Introducing Aufbau
By Michael Keller
Posted onRemembering where all our tools live and how to use them can be tiresome, even for us. As a potential solution, we’re experimenting with packaging these previously web apps into a desktop application using GitHub’s Electron framework, which NPR has also been experimenting with for photo tools. The project is called Aufbau and it’s up on GitHub.
What does peer support in journalism look like: Insights from U.S. and international experts