Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
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Event Roundup, Feb 24
By Erika Owens
Posted onThe NICAR conference is this week, but the news nerd fun doesn’t end there.
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How We Made “The Fed’s Balancing Act”
By Maryanne Murray and Charlie Szymanski
Posted onThe Reuters Graphics team’s unusual Fed interactive grabbed our attention when it appeared late last month and sparked some interesting conversations on Twitter. Reuters Global Head of Graphics Maryanne Murray and Interactive Data Designer Charlie Szymanski kindly wrote up their rationale and process for us.
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Introducing Source Jobs
By Erin Kissane
Posted onToday, we’re launching Source Jobs, a new place to list jobs for the newsroom designers and developers already populating our Community section—and for the curious developers and designers who don’t yet realize that their future lies in journalism. As the global journalism-code community continues to grow, our goal is to offer a simple, scalable listings service that newsrooms can edit on their own.
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New Work in News Code, Feb. 13th 2014
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Posted onThe Source roundup returns with biweekly summaries of notable interactive features, news apps, data work, and newsroom code commentary.
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Making Remote Work Work
By Christopher Groskopf
Posted onChristopher Groskopf’s tricks for going to the office without going to the office.
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Introducing Sheetdown
By Jessica Lord
Posted onSheetdown is a command line Node.js module for turning a Google Spreadsheet into a Markdown (well, actually, a GitHub Flavored Markdown) table. It started with a tweet…
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Event Roundup, Feb 10
By Erika Owens
Posted onThis week, vote on NICAR lightning talks, pitch ideas to Tribeca Hacks , and finish up that AP-Google Scholarship application.
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The Evolution of News Tech Teams
By Pablo Mercado
Posted onVox Media’s VP of technology breaks down the hard and frequently messy lessons his organization has learned about clearing the way for successful tech collaboration in newsrooms.
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Event Roundup, Feb 4
By Erika Owens
Posted onSend your NICAR lightning talk proposals now and check out ONA and Hackers/Hackers meetups this week.
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How to Make a News App in Two Days
By Al Shaw
Posted onAs part of the orientation week for the 2014 class of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellows, fellow nerd-cuber Mike Tigas and I led a hackathon at Mozilla’s headquarters in San Francisco…
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Lessons from the ProPublica/OpenNews Popup News Apps Team
By Ben Chartoff, Harlo Holmes, Brian Jacobs, Aurelia Moser, and Dan Sinker
Posted onMore things learned about process, expectations, and how to build a functioning team in two days, from Dan Sinker and the 2014 OpenNews Fellows.
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Forking Popcorn for a Journalist Audience
By Joe Flowers, Adam Martin, Erika Owens, and Brian Williamson
Posted onAt the Mozilla Festival last fall, a team from the Broadcasting Board of Governors launched KettleCorn, their fork of the Mozilla video-editing tool Popcorn.
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Event Roundup, Jan 27
By Erika Owens
Posted onFellowship deadlines, conference proposal pitches, and Hacks/Hackers web scraping.
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If You Build It, They Will Come…But You Have To Remind Them
By Chris Keller
Posted onKPCC developed a news app to track fires in California last summer. Chris Keller explains how, and what they’ve learned since.
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Event Roundup, Jan 21
By Erika Owens
Posted onHacks/Hackers meetups around Europe and the U.S. this week, plus, hacking European Parliament data this weekend.
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How We Made the Random Oscar Winner Generator
By Chris Wilson
Posted onTime’s interactive graphic editor explains how he built a not-so-random film blurb madlibs generator in the run-up to the Academy Awards.
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Data Journalism Community, Why and How Do We Do This Work?
By David Eads
Posted onDavid Eads wants to start a conversation about the power of data-driven journalism to engage and teach new developers, and he needs your feedback.
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Animation With Filmstrips
By Alyson Hurt
Posted onThe code and thinking behind NPR’s implementation of the JPEG “filmstrip” technique in “Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt.”
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To Scrape, Perchance to Tweet
By Abe Epton
Posted onAt the Chicago Tribune, we had a simple goal: to automatically tweet contributions to Illinois politicians of $1,000 or more, which campaigns are required to report within five business days. To see, in something approximating real time, which campaigns are bringing in the big bucks and who those big-buck-bearers are. The Illinois State Board of Elections (ISBE) has helpfully published exactly this data for years online, in a format that appears to have changed very little since at least the mid-2000s. There’s no API for this data, but the stability of the format is encouraging. A scraper is hardly an ideal tool for anything intended to last for a while and produce public-facing data, but if we can count on the format of the page not to change much over at least the next several months, it’s probably worth it.
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The Code (and Thinking) Behind Today’s Paper
By Alastair Coote, Kathryn Faulkner, Erin Kissane, and Andrew Phelps
Posted onLast month, while the team behind today’s NYT redesign were crunching away on final adjustments, another team at the Times launched Today’s Paper, an infinite-scrolling, offline-caching web app available to the paper’s subscribers. We spoke with three members of the team—a developer, a designer, and an editor—about the project’s challenges and ambitions.