I am excited about where you are going, and it has been a gift to spend five years in service of your work.

Our biweekly roundup of interactive and data journalism you may have missed.

Lindsay and Erin and the rest of the OpenNews crew will be in Chicago for NICAR 2018, and we’d love to see you there. Come hang out with us!

Our regular biweekly roundup.

We really appreciated Vox’s recent illustrated interactive on school segregation and gerrymandering—particularly because its creator, Alvin Chang, worked alongside Tomas Monarrez, a UC Berkeley economics PhD candidate.

Very subjectively, it was an astonishing year in data and interactive journalism. Every week, we found ourselves both horrified by the subject matter and thrilled to see our community producing so much good work, and doing so with open kindness and generosity.

With SRCCON:WORK just getting underway, here’s our Q&A with our opening speaker, Sydette Harry of the Coral Project and the Mozilla Foundation. Sydette spoke this morning about journalism’s inclination to skip the critical questions about diversity and representation.

SRCCON:WORK is coming up fast. In the run-up to the event, we’re publishing short interviews with the nine people selected to give talks to frame the participatory sections at the heart of the conference.

SRCCON:WORK is coming up fast. In the run-up to the event, we’re publishing short interviews with the nine people selected to give talks to frame the participatory sections at the heart of the conference. Here’s our Q&A; with Mandy Brown.

SRCCON:WORK is coming up fast. In the run-up to the event, we’re publishing short interviews with the nine people selected to give talks to frame the participatory sections at the heart of the conference.

SRCCON:WORK is coming up fast. In the run-up to the event, we’re publishing short interviews with the nine people selected to give talks to frame the participatory sections at the heart of the conference. Here’s our Q&A with David Yee.

SRCCON:WORK is coming up fast. In the run-up to the event, we’re publishing short interviews with the nine people selected to give talks to frame the participatory sections at the heart of the conference. Here’s our Q&A; with Nicole Zhu.

Last week, ProPublica’s Olga Pierce wrote to the NICAR-L list asking for help putting together a list of “happy data stories” or stories related to the arts, at the request of some of her students.

SRCCON:WORK is coming up fast. In the run-up to the event, we’re publishing short interviews with the nine people selected to give talks to frame the participatory sections at the heart of the conference. Here’s our Q&A; with Disha Raychaudhuri.

We launched Source Guides a couple of years ago as a way of giving readers new angles on our archives—but it quickly became apparent that they’d work even better if they included external resources as well. Earlier this year, we opened up Guides to non-staff curators, and as we look toward the end of the year, we want your Guide pitches.

The owner of the DNAInfo and Gothamist family of local news websites shut the sites down today, which means that not only are all their 115 journalists out of work, but all their bylines—and all the vital information in their years of reporting—is gone.

Our regular biweekly roundup.

How we made Source, and why, and what happened then.

Over the past two years or so, we’ve kept tabs on our community’s work around guns in America. We’ve seen a wealth of data visualizations and a huge breadth of interactive projects that bring clarity to stories of gun violence and mass shootings—projects often assembled quickly amidst the chaos of breaking news.

Our biweekly roundup of projects in the journalism/code universe.

A Q&A about how the new ProPublica site came to be.

What we did on our summer vacation SRCCON 2017.

The session on accessibility and media run by Joanna S. Kao and John Burn-Murdoch in 2016 was one of our favorites, and deals with one of those topics that hovers at the fringe of most newsroom-dev conversations.

Last year’s SRCCON participants got a lot out of Lauren Rabaino & Kelsey Scherer’s docs session, and we’ve found ourselves returning to the transcript more than once.

One of the SRCCON 2016 sessions that attendees talked about most was “Keeping People at the Forefront of Data Stories,” facilitated by William Wolfe-Wylie and based on his experience working on the CBC News project, “Missing and Murdered: The Unsolved Cases of Indigenous Women and Girls.”

Harlo Holmes is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist who leads digital security work for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the organization co-founded by Daniel Ellsberg and Trevor Timm in 2012 to fund and protect adversarial investigative journalism. Holmes has long been a contributor to the open source mobile security collective The Guardian Project, and was a founding member of the DeepLab cyberfeminist collective. In 2014, Holmes was a Knight-Mozilla Fellow at the New York Times.

When the conversation in nerd-journalism concentrates around a particular topic, we sometimes assemble a theme week on Source to help collect the loose threads and encourage journalists (and designers and developers and data analysts) to document their related work. Sometimes they’re excuses for robotic fun, and other times a catalyst for difficult but necessary culture conversations. A Security Week in 2017, though, is a no-brainer.

Emily Goligoski has spent nearly three years doing deep-dive ethnographic research as user experience research lead at the New York Times, where she analyzed reader interactions with breaking news stories, studied millennial news junkies, and more. Goligoski recently announced that she is leaving the Times to join the brand-new Membership Puzzle Project, a collaborative effort between De Correspondent and NYU, and kindly agreed to speak with us during her transition between projects.

Next month on Source, we’re running a week of pieces focused on security for journalists and news organizations—our first-ever Security Week.

We’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.

Last 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.

Projects from the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Pudding, the Sun Sentinel, and more.

Projects from the Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica, Reveal, Univision, and more.

How our small team redesigned Source, with a design refresh and a new navigation and structure that matches the way we publish now.

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.

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.

Call for pitches, looking ahead to 2017.

OpenNews (and thus Source) exists to do one thing: to help a community of newsroom technologists, data scientists, and interactive designers thrive. We believe in the value of the work, now as ever. We will continue to look for new ways to support what you do, and to support you, as human beings. For now, we offer some links to your work on the way the vote went down, a map of loss, images of new Europeans, strong words, and more.

Yesterday morning, ProPublica announced two new projects: Electionland, a large-scale intiative to report on voting access and problems in the upcoming US elections, and Election DataBot, a comprehensive election-info data tracker and feed.

A few of our favorite bits of thinking and linking around bots.

As the ICIJ-led consortium prepares for the second major wave of reporting on the Panama Papers, we spoke with Mar Cabra, editor of ICIJ’s Data & Research unit and lead coordinator of the data analysis and infrastructure work behind the leak. In our conversation, Cabra reveals ICIJ’s years-long effort to build a series of secure communication and analysis platforms in support of genuinely global investigative reporting collaborations.

Our third annual Source #Botweek will kick off April 25, 2016, bringing another batch of automation-related project teardowns and walkthroughs, bot-centric how-tos, and considerations of the challenges and implications of bots in newsrooms.

Over a month after Brazil declared a state of emergency in response to a Zika outbreak, clear information on the virus is hard to come by. On Monday, BuzzFeed’s Jeremy Singer-Vine started an open guide to Zika-related data, to collect what we do know and help other journalists do the same. It points to resources like global and country-specific data on the spread of the virus, its mosquitos, and microcephaly, from respected sources. We asked why he started it, how he curates it, and where he can use everyone’s help.

On October 19, the Guardian published Homan Square: A Portrait of Chicago’s Detainees as a part of its ongoing investigation into the Chicago Police Department’s alleged abuses of detainee rights at a warehouse facility on Chicago’s west side. We spoke with the Guardian interactive team responsible for the interactive feature, both in their NYC offices and via email.

Pitch 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.

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.

Journalist-coders tackled last-mile work and documentation at our Open News code convening in May, held in affiliation with the Write the Docs conference. Here’s what they did and what comes next.

A chat roundtable from the News Nerdery Slack group focused on practical ways to make sites (and news apps) run faster.

A roundup of the little bots that make daily research and administrative tasks easier and more fun.

We’re planning many changes and additions to Source over the course of 2015. I’ll write about those as they happen, but our first announcement is about changes behind the scenes. I am very happy to announce a new opening for an assistant editor, to join me and the rest of the team in keeping Source watertight and pointed in the right direction. If that sounds like you or someone you know, please take a look at the job description and send us a résumé.

Earlier this month, we held our third-ever OpenNews Code Convening, and our first one west of Portland, Oregon. Code Convenings are short events that bring together pairs of developers from news organizations to finish, document, and release open source projects they’ve been chipping away at.

The new site is responsive, speedy, and fully backed by new tools for journalists. We spoke with the project’s leaders about their experience, the new features, and what they have planned for the future.

CSV Fingerprints creator Victor Powell talks about the tool’s inception, inner workings, and potential to help data-slingers in newsrooms finally ditch Excel.

We spoke with the NYT and BuzzFeed about recent data postings prompted by the news from Ferguson, MO.

SRCCON, the first-ever OpenNews conference, wrapped up last Friday night at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. As Quartz’s Nikhil Sonnad notes in his wrap-up post, the problem with even the most energetic and inspiring conference is that the motivation found often fades when everyone returns to the daily hustle and sprint. Like Sonnad, we’re confident that the news-code community that showed up in force at SRCCON has the stamina and sustained interest to maintain the momentum that built up in sessions and around the coffee-hacking stations, and we want to help with that as much as possible. We also want to scoop up as much of the energy and intensity and brain-sharing from SRCCON as we can and pour it out into the wider world that couldn’t fit into the physical conference itself.

Even among the many wonderful World Cup interactives and news apps we saw this year, the NYT’s Spot the Ball was a standout, both in conception and execution. We spoke with the team behind it about the project’s design, world-class Photoshopping, and surprising inspiration.

We are exactly one month away from the August 16th deadline for applying for the 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, and this is the perfect time for you—the people actively wrangling data, building news apps, and designing interactives in newsrooms—to help chase amazing candidates toward the Fellowship application. We’ve assembled a one-stop shop of your arguments for joining development teams in news organizations, along with some of our former Fellows’ experiences and exhortations to future candidates.

Last week, the New York Times published an interactive photo-mosaic of 43,634 Detroit properties at serious risk of foreclosure. As you scroll down the page, viewing neighborhood after neighborhood, the number of properties and the total amount owed on them adds up at the top of the page. We contacted Matthew Bloch and Haeyoun Park at the Times to ask about the making of the interactive and the design choices they made along the way.

In part one and part two of our #owhack report-backs, we introduced four new projects that emerged from the Hack Day. Today, we introduce the final two and wrap up with our notes from the event’s closing circle.

On Tuesday, Vox Media announced that it was acquiring the technology and co-founding team of the late and much-missed collaborative writing tool Editorially. We chatted with Editorially’s Mandy Brown and Vox Media’s Trei Brundrett about the team’s next steps, the probability of open sourcing more code, and the internal Vox hack week going on at this very moment.

Over the weekend, we put on the third Knight-Mozilla-MIT Hack Day, leading into the 2014 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. As usual, the hack day was loosely organized around the conference’s theme: this year, “The Open Internet and Everything After.” After 24 hours of hacking in the welcoming environment of the MIT Media Lab (spread over two days because we believe in sleeping), we ended up with six wonderful projects ranging from an ultra-practical redaction utility to a fake astroturf campaign againt Net Neutrality.

Last week, NPR’s Visuals team released their dailygraphics rig, which offers workflow for small-scale visualizations, interactives, and graphics, along with “automated machinery for creating, deploying and embedding these mini-projects.” Their introductory blog post breaks down how to set up and use the rig, and the code is open source and ready to use. Alyson Hurt joined last week’s OpenNews community call to talk a little about the project, and we chatted with her and Christopher Groskopf afterward about how the rig came to be, what kind of skills are required to use it, and their aim to improve code quality and culture through process-improving tools.

A tweeted rebuttal to selected claims in the NYT Innovation Report from a journalism-code insider at the Times.

Now that FiveThirtyEight, Vox, and the Upshot have been live for a few weeks, we’re taking a closer look at the data, and especially the code, that each has released.

Everything you need to know to get psyched about coming to SRCCON 2014.

Automated news-gathering tools aren’t new, but they’re multiplying like crazy and getting quite a bit of attention. Little bots have also turned into interesting remixing devices and distribution channels, especially on Twitter. This week on Source, we’re going 100% bot.

In the year-and-a-bit we’ve been publishing Source, we’ve built up a solid archive of project walkthroughs, introductions to new tools and libraries, and case studies. They’re all tagged and searchable, but as with most archives presented primarily in reverse-chron order, pieces tend to attract less attention once they fall off the first page of a given section. We’ve also been keeping an eye out for ways of inviting in readers who haven’t been following along since we started Source, and who may be a little newer to journalism code—either to the “code” or the “journalism” part.

Today, 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.

Last 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.

The New York Times just launched the first piece of their sitewide redesign: new article pages, with other tweaks and nudges throughout the site. We spoke with two designers and a developer who worked on the project to learn about the tech choices, design ideas, and strategy behind the new look and feel.

Just before Christmas, we asked you to submit one thing you found helpful or wonderful or excellent this year. Here’s part two of your favorite things—the first half lives here.

Just before Christmas, we asked you to submit one thing you found helpful or wonderful or excellent this year. The gist where we made the call grew into its own comment ecosystem of awesome links, and we’ve combined those submissions with the ones you emailed and DMed.

“Behind the Bloodshed: The Untold Story of America’s Mass Killings,” is a collaboration between the database team at USA Today and Gannett Digital’s interactive applications and design teams. We chatted with Anthony DeBarros of Gannett Digital, with input from colleagues Juan Thomassie and Destin Frasier, on how the project came together.

Back in April of this year, NPR’s Planet Money began a Kickstarter campaign to learn about and report on global supply chains by making a t-shirt and telling the story of its creation from start to finish. The new Visuals team at NPR collaborated on the project’s web manifestation, which went live last night, but the source code is already on GitHub, and we spoke with team lead Brian Boyer about the collaboration.

At the Los Angeles Times, a design-editorial-programming team has resurrected the spirit of the beloved, out-of-print California Cookbook as a new website collecting hundreds of recipes from the Times Test Kitchen. In our Q&A;, the project’s editor, designer, and lead programmer share their goals and challenges, and offer a peek at the site’s building blocks and planned future.

Lobbying Missouri is a collaboration between St. Louis Public Radio and members of NPR’s news apps teams. We spoke with three team members about the project, their design process, and the code under the hood.

A light round of elections were held this week in the US, giving news developers an opportunity to outdo their usual coverage. We’ve rounded up a few highlights.

Yesterday, NPR announced that news apps team leader Brian Boyer was assuming a new role as head of the combined news apps/multimedia superteam. Boyer offers the unusual experience of having built out two news apps teams within five years, first at the Chicago Tribune and then at NPR. We spoke with him about his new gig, his path from computer science to journalism, his focus on sound process, and the internal obstacles new teams can face.

Today is Source’s one-year anniversary. To celebrate, we’re kicking off a new series of interviews with news apps and interactive features editors. John Keefe tells us about learning as you go, cicadas, and how the WNYC Data News team came to be.

With the hustle of fall around the corner, we’re keener than ever to bring your projects and hard-won lessons to light. As always, we welcome your write-ups and code index entries—and we’re also inviting you to something new.

The Wall Street Journal’s Jeremy Singer-Vine recently released Reporter, an open source tool that makes it easy to hide and reveal the code behind common forms of data visualization presented on the web. We spoke with him about the tool’s makeup, design goals, and future development plan.

We sat down with ProPublica’s contributor to the story, Jeff Larson—with an assist from news apps editor Scott Klein—to talk about the tech involved and why the story needed someone from the team affectionately called the news nerds.

Last November, the BBC News team created a front-end regression tool that collects and diffs screenshots to automatically highlight discrepancies produced (intentionally or otherwise) by CSS changes. Last week, the team open-sourced Wraith. We spoke with David Blooman, who developed the tool last fall and worked with Simon Thulbourn to prepare it for public release.

Yesterday, ProPublica released Transcribable, a new open source tool that makes orderly crowdsourced transcription available to any organization that uses Ruby on Rails. ProPublica’s Al Shaw introduced the project to the public in a post on ProPublica’s Nerd Blog yesterday and here answers all our questions about the project.

On the weekend leading into the Knight-MIT Civic Media Conference, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and MIT sponsored a hack day focused on data liberation and housed at the MIT Media Lab.

The first ever OpenVis Conf, held last month in Cambridge, MA, was jam-packed with excellent talks. All the talks are now online, and we’ve pulled out a selection of special interest to people working in and around journalism.

Gabriel Florit creates data visualizations at the Boston Globe, and was at OpenVis Conf to talk about the surprising difficulties of bringing the principles of responsive design to data viz.

In early May, Reuters began rolling out previews of its new design for Reuters.com. We checked in with Paul Smalera, Editorial Tools Product Manager and Technology Editor at Reuters.com, who fought his way out from under a stack of redesign-related work to answer our questions.

In our second dispatch from OpenVis Conf, Twitter's Miguel Rios digs into four major options for displaying visualizations on the web.

Our first write-up from OpenVis Conf in Cambridge, MA features the opening keynote from Amanda Cox of the New York Times Graphics desk.

We asked for your thoughts on Strongbox, the New Yorker’s new implementation of DeadDrop. Our first wave of responses includes the New York Times’ Jacob Harris, the Overview Project’s Jonathan Stray, and Mike Tigas, OpenNews Fellow at ProPublica.

We spoke with three members of team behind the new New York Times mobile site to learn what’s going on under the hood and how they made the design decisions underlying the new view.

The last month has brought us a spate of fresh news apps, updated and brand-new tools for journalist-developers, thoughtful analytical write-ups, and coverage of events.

After the bombings during last week’s Boston Marathon, newsrooms in the US and UK produced interactive maps and features to help their readers understand the locations and chronologies of the bombings themselves, the ensuing medical treatment of victims, and the hunt for the bombers—and in the days that followed, to collect and communicate the stories of the victims.

We spotted Tom Lee’s Lobbyist Registration Meter video on YouTube this morning and it made our day. Lee, director of the Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Labs, used an old voltmeter, a Raspberry Pi, and Sunlight Foundation data to create a meter that physically displays the number of new lobbyist registrations in Washington, DC. Lee very kindly agreed to answer a few questions about his setup and the data behind it.

It’s been a fruitful couple of weeks for news apps and people writing about them: this roundup brings a sturdy batch of new features and tools and about twice as many write-ups as usual.

Open Gender Tracker is an open source deployable content analysis service funded by a Knight Foundation Prototype grant. We spoke with its creators about the project’s origins, technical specifications, and possible future in and near newsrooms.

Today, we launched OpenNews Learning, a brand-new kind of awesomeness hosted here on Source. We’re opening with three crunchy case studies from three heavy hitters.

In the third of our Knight International Journalism Fellow profiles, Mariano Blejman talks about his upcoming projects.

The second in a series of interviews with Knight International Journalism Fellows.

The first in a series of interviews with Knight International Journalism Fellows.

The For Journalism project aims to create nine brand-new courses for journalists who want to learn how to design and build news applications, and to offer them to individuals and institutions in the fall of 2013.

Yesterday morning, EveryBlock announced its sudden closure by its parent company, NBC. The news developer and civic code worlds reacted with intense sadness and a recognition of the advances made possible by EveryBlock and its founders.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen new apps, new map releases, and plenty of community projects and conversations. In the US, the NICAR convention is around the corner (see Chrys Wu’s preparatory write-up). Also, just about everyone got hacked.

On the most recent episode of Dave Stanton’s View Source podcast, Chris Amico walks through the process of making Your Warming World.

Chase Davis breaks down his fec-standardizer project and explains where it’s going next.

New Scientist’s Peter Aldhous and NPR’s Chris Amico break down the data, mapping, and interface details of their collaboration on Your Warming World.

Interactive features, new code, and blog posts dealing with the problems of working with data and code in and around newsrooms.

Reporters, designers, developers, and editors who worked on the NYT’s Snow Fall explain how they pulled it off.

Interactive features, new code, and blog posts dealing with the problems of working with data and code in and around newsrooms.

Last week, ProPublica released an explainer on fires, chemical spills, explosions, and other incidents related to US oil and gas pipelines, along with an interactive map and a series of charts and tables. Reporter-designer-developer Lena Groeger explains how the project came about, what challenges she encountered, and how she assembled the final presentation.

A weekend-friendly rundown of the many projects from the last two weeks that have absolutely nothing to do with elections.

At MozFest today in London, OpenNews led a 70-person session on election-related news apps and tools.

As superstorm Sandy approached the East Coast of the US, newsdev teams ranging from large to tiny created maps, charts, trackers, and tables about the storm’s path, expected effects, and civic responses.

The week in journalism code: new projects, updates, releases, APIs, and more.

The week in journalism code: new projects, updates, releases, APIs, and more.

ProPublica’s interactive data-analysis project gets an API, and Al Shaw answers our development questions about the making of Free the Files.

Jessica Lord breaks down the context and process behind sheetsee.js, a JavaScript mashup developed during her Code for America fellowship.

As ONA12 gets going in San Francisco, we’re hitting the last stretch with Source, the OpenNews community and index for news development. We even have a launch date, and it’s…really soon.

Events, newly released projects, blog posts, and other announcements.

A mapping project from WNYC that displays NYPD stop-and-frisks by block and locations where the police discovered guns during such stops.