“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.

The 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.

If you’re in Germany, you have a couple chances this week to learn about the Knight-Mozilla Fellowships.

Helping newsrooms improve interactive graphics and data visualizations by making them more accessible to all users.

Earlier 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.

Last 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.

Remembering 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.

Since the launch of Autotune, we have been approached by people interested in adopting it for their own newsrooms. While a lot of people didn’t mind diving right into the set up, a few people asked us “Is there anywhere I can try this out?”. Fueled by the amazing coffee selection at the most recent OpenNews code convening in Portland, we decided to build a demo site that allows users to try building projects and get a feel for the framework.

At La Nación, we have been working on real-time coverage of Buenos Aires elections, as well as a more detailed view results once we get data for each polling station. In this post, we’ll to explain our mapping-app innovation that allows readers to choose what parts of the city they are interested in by drawing shapes over a basemap, and then returns custom results for their selected area.

Demos at Hacks/Hackers meetups this week in Seattle and next week in New York.

Recent pieces that we loved from ProPublica and Matter, BuzzFeed, the Daily Herald and WBEZ, New York Magazine, and more.

Made at our recent code convening, broca creates a system for easier experimentation and implementation of natural language processing.

At the OpenNews July 2015 Code Convening, the NPR Visuals Team built and released a desktop app for creating shareable images across social media platforms.

At SRCCON, we heard a lot about a user-centered approach. What does that mean for journalism?

Our fifth OpenNews code convening wrapped up last Friday. Uniquely for our convenings, this one included all seven of our current Knight-Mozilla Fellows, each working with a colleague from their news organization or another organization with shared challenges and complimentary skills. Over the next week, we’ll be posting project introductions from each of the seven project teams that joined us in Portland for the event. In the interim, a quick intro to the teams, the projects they brought to the convening, and what they got done.

Meetups this week in Austin, Tokyo, NYC, DC, Bogota, Miami, and Montevideo, plus it’s your last chance to pitch to the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires Media Party

How we tracked down, processed, filtered, revisualized, mashed up, and otherwise handled a boatload of disparate imagery to map changes in the Louisiana coastline backward and forward in time.

Chat with OpenNews this week about Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, or apply for the HBCU fellowship to ONA.

Media Factory bootcamps continue this week, with Knight-Mozilla Fellowship alum Sonya Song in Lima.

At SRCCON, OpenNews’s two-day conference in Minneapolis last month, we basked in the collective smarts of 220+ attendees and nearly 50 sessions. Afterward, we heard a lot of lovely feedback (people like snacks and unisex bathrooms and child care, and we are so very happy you were happy). So we’d like to reflect back some thoughts about you. Like: it was really clear, in a tangible way, that you have more gears, switches, and hidden functions than Furiosa’s war rig.