Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
Features
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What Product Teams Should Know About Working With Newsrooms
By Brittany Hite and Christopher Chung
Posted onEditorial and product teams are more effective and impactful when they work together, not separately. Here’s a guide to help product teams better understand their news colleagues.
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Why and How Journalists Should Build Better Support Networks
By Jennifer Mizgata
Posted onSupport looks different for different people, and it can look really different at different moments of your life. Personal support is relationship-based. Your relationships are going to change, and the support you have from them changes at certain times too, depending on people’s capacity. Here’s a question you can start with to think about what support might look like for you: What are your asks and offers to your support network?
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Engagement Isn’t a Project, It’s a Way of Making News
By Angilee Shah
Posted onEngagement is not something you simply add to an organizational chart or a budget. If you want to be engaged with the people you are trying to serve, you have to change what you prioritize in your newsroom.
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How We Reported on Gunshot Victims’ Access to Trauma Care
By Sean Campbell, Laura Laderman, and Maya Miller
Posted onUsing data on the more than 12,000 shootings recorded by the NYPD in a 9-year-period, we mapped shootings relative to trauma centers and looked at the relationship between fatality and distance to a trauma center. We also looked at how the number of ICU beds in trauma centers nearby victims affected fatality.
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Know Your Own Blind Spots, When Covering Communities
By Dana Amihere
Posted onHow do we measure how well our coverage reflects the communities we are entrusted with reporting on? How do we check our work for social and cultural tone deafness, for blind spots and holes, especially when it comes to marginalized or vulnerable communities?
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“Abandon Normal Instruments”: How We Spent SRCCON Fighting Creative Block
By Katie Park and Alex Tatusian
Posted onRegardless of what role you play in your organization, you’ve likely encountered creative block: Sometimes it feels like every story has already been done, or there’s no way around the problem you’re trying to solve. Here’s our attempt to figure out why it happens and what you can do about it, from our SRCCON session in 2019.
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Invest in Trust and Make Projects Reproducible by Sharing Your Data Analysis
By Janelle O’Dea
Posted onSharing a data analysis is one tactic to open up your process and improve transparency. Showing your process to your audience, so long as you won’t burn any sources, is a great way to earn readers’ trust. It’s also a pathway to starting a conversation.
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How to Start Taking Digital Security More Seriously
By Emma Carew Grovum
Posted onA starter pack of ideas for increasing the security of your digital footprint.
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We Started Our Own News Nerd Training, and You Can Too
By Rachel Alexander and Kaitlin Gillespie
Posted onSmall local news organizations are increasingly scaling back their budgets for professional development—that is, if they pay for journalists to travel to conferences at all. To work on filling the gap, Northwest News Nerds runs data journalism conferences open to women and non-binary journalists in the Northwest. We wanted something aimed squarely at beat reporters in small and medium-sized newsrooms to show that data wasn’t just for the big kids with big budgets. We also saw a need for more spaces for women, especially women of color, to speak candidly to each other about the challenges they face in newsrooms.
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How We Made a Human-Centered Homicide Report
By Lindsay Muscato
Posted onA Q&A; with the team behind Houston’s first homicide report, a cross-team collaboration that altered how different areas of the newsroom worked together.
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Our Industry Needs to Invest in Childcare, Especially for Conferences
By Emily Goligoski and Marisa Mazria Katz
Posted onOn the difficulty of journalism professionals arranging night and weekend care for their children and how employers, allies, conference conveners and other parents can help.
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Fix Your Feedback Loop
By Bridget Thoreson
Posted onThe solution to the horse-race coverage trap that is all too easy for newsrooms to fall into is what Jay Rosen of NYU describes as the “citizens agenda” approach. This involves turning to the citizens themselves before starting down the campaign trail and making a commitment to cover the issues that matter the most to them.
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Hacking Our Hiring at the Star Tribune
By Chase Davis
Posted onHow we ended up with more applicants than we expected, a diverse list of finalists, and a shocking amount of unsolicited positive feedback.
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How SRCCON Changed the Way I Teach Journalism
By Lisa Waananen Jones
Posted onAttending SRCCON transformed my own perspective on teaching by demonstrating how popular education strategies benefit professional journalists—and you can also use these strategies in newsrooms and journalism.
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How 10 Newsrooms Built a Chicago Voter Guide, Together
By Patrick Judge and Matt Kiefer
Posted onAt the end of 2018, as Chicago faced a historic election with a wide-open mayoral race and all 50 city council seats on the ballot, a group of independent newsrooms decided to try something unprecedented with their election coverage: collaborate.
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How We Built (and Nurtured) a Newsroom Product Team
By Jessica Morrison and Amanda Yarnell
Posted onWhen we started thinking about bringing a product mindset to our work, our resources weren’t growing in step with our ambitions. We started to build infrastructure that would support our work, processes that would scale, and strategies that would help us respond quickly to change.
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Dollars for Data Journalism: Q&A with Stephen Stirling
By Erika Owens and Stephen Stirling
Posted onA Q&A with NJ.com about why and how they decided to sell the data behind the Force Report.
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How We Visualized an Election with No Political Parties
By Josh Rayman
Posted onDesigning a process and visual style, for covering parliamentary elections in Afghanistan
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Learning the Best Ways to Grow Our Local News Subscribers
By Anika Anand
Posted onWe’re always looking for the most efficient and effective ways to grow. But we’ve learned that we can’t rely on tech tools alone– we also have to make time to build human relationships.
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How We Improved Visual Storytelling with Templates that You Can Use, Too
By Robin Kwong
Posted onHow the Financial Times improved visual storytelling at scale, across the newsroom.
What does peer support in journalism look like: Insights from U.S. and international experts