Our Scholarships+ program offers funding to help people pay for events and programs that develop their work as a journalist with data and code. This recap of the programs we helped people take part in in 2022 is part of our commitment to transparency and trust in our work—and we also think it’s a great source of ideas for community members who want to keep building their networks and careers.

Takeaways from a recent event with community leaders and journalists.

OpenNews events and programs have always welcomed honest talk about careers, identity, and our sense of belonging in an industry that often isn’t kind to workers. This series was another way to convene a community-wide conversation about our newsrooms and what it would take to make them better.

We spent August and September in conversation with local journalists covering COVID-19, asking what they need most

For the next several months, OpenNews and Big Local News will work with local journalists to develop resources their newsrooms can use to better cover COVID-19. What should that support look like? We don’t know yet! But you can help us figure it out.

Where do you turn with a question that’s stopping your data project in its tracks? If you don’t have a news-nerd colleague nearby, there’s a whole community out there happy to help. Here are three ways you can tap into networks of support, both right now and next week.

Express your gratitude to the peers who’ve helped you make it through the year known as 2019.

Our new open-source Slackchat tool is ready for everyone.

A practical, collaboratively written guide that everyone in newsrooms can use.

A human-friendly doc sprint produced The Field Guide to Open Source in the Newsroom.

Security has felt like a topic we ought to address for a while now, and we were thrilled to partner with BuzzFeed Open Lab this month on a convening designed to improve security knowledge and practice in newsrooms everywhere.culture and technology, so we hope you’ll help us keep this guide up to date.

Today we’re thrilled to announce the first release of our community-built guidebook, The Field Guide to Open Source in the Newsroom.

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

Here’s the second half of our report-back from Austin’s code convening, introducing five more bot-centered open source projects from our participants.

Code convenings have been regular events on the OpenNews calendar for a little more than two years now, each of them bringing a small group of designers and developers together to work on projects that fit a particular theme. Given a chance to step away from normal routines and daily deadlines, participants spend a couple days writing code and documentation before releasing fresh open-source projects and updates into the journalism community. The Austin event earlier this month definitely was our largest so far, with nine projects. It was a fantastic mix of people, with developers and designers from all sizes of news organizations, and fields like education, finance, and civic tech. Here’s what everyone is working on.

As we did last year, we’ve asked a couple of dozen people from all around the news-nerd community to tell us about one thing—article, feature, app, tool, or something else entirely—that they loved in 2015. This week, we’re publishing their responses, from interactives to project management software. We hope you find here at least one thing that eases your work, inspires new angles on your stories, and helps carry you through to 2016.

Our own Ryan Pitts on the tools that helped him do better work and the projects and sites that inspired him in 2012.

Ryan Pitts breaks down the recipe for a holiday lights map app, with special nods to artisanal admin interfaces and full-screen BoyerMaps.