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Features
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An Accessibility Starter Kit is Already at Your Fingertips
By Thomas Wilburn
Posted onYour built-in screen reader is waiting for you, on your smartphone.
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How We Publish Live Chats with Slack
By Andrew Briz
Posted onCreating a newsroom tool from scratch.
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Your Interactive Makes Me Sick
By Eileen Webb
Posted onPicture this: you’re sitting in a car, and the car next to you starts to pull forward. For a moment you feel like you’re moving backwards. That brief feeling of disorientation, where the world is moving in a way your body doesn’t quite process—imagine that you feel like that all the time.
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Shields Up: In the Face of Supply Chain Attacks, Stay the Course
By Martin Shelton
Posted onEverything you need to know about supply chain attacks, a kind of security breach that targets trusted distribution channels for delivering software and hardware.
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Shields Up: Using Signal Without Giving Your Phone Number
By Martin Shelton
Posted onEncrypted messaging apps like Signal, as well as WhatsApp and Viber, use your phone number as your main username. This means that if I want to chat with someone on these apps, I have to give them my phone number. But we may have many reasons—both practical and principled—not to share our number with someone. These digits are personal.
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Social Engineering in Newsrooms with Hamilton and Burr
By Hannah Birch
Posted onAlexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, two of the most successful guys operating during the dawn of American politics, faced a problem very similar to the ones we have in newsrooms today. They wanted to get things done at a breakneck pace, but the politics of dealing with other people slowed them down. Journalists have a similar issue. When you work in news, it can feel like working with other people is as much—or more—work as the journalism itself.
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Caregiving in and around Journalism
By Emily Goligoski
Posted onThe pressures on news staff to be resourceful and to deliver have never been greater. The stresses involved are compounded by our day-to-day caregiving responsibilities for our children, parents, and friends, among others.
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Shields Up: Get Your Malware Shots
By Martin Shelton
Posted onMalware lets an unauthorized third party access or take control of your device. In practice, it’s become a catch-all term for a huge variety of malicious software. That could include software that hijacks computing resources, lets an attacker monitor your screen, keystrokes,microphone, or effectively turns your device into an expensive brick.
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How to Lose Friends and Anger Journalists with PGP
By Martin Shelton
Posted onAll the reasons that journalists should look beyond PGP for sending encrypted messages.
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How Slack Controls Our CMS
By Andrew Briz
Posted onVisit the “Latest Stories” page. See what’s new. Copy the slug. Go to the collections. Click the right row. Paste the slug. Hit save. That was the multi-step process of adding a story to the homepage of the LA Times up until a few weeks ago. Now, you just click a button.
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Why My Motto as a Security Journalist Is “Assume Breach”
By J.M. Porup
Posted onThe network is hostile. We now live next door to every sociopathic intelligence agency, corrupt police force, and mafia hacker on the planet. In such a world, we have no guarantees and few guidelines, but “assume breach” will help you stake out an improved security posture.
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A Guide to Practical Paranoia
By Stephen Lovell
Posted onIn most cases, before we lose either privacy or control, the first thing we lose is our paranoia.
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An Open Letter to Newsroom Hiring Managers
By Rachel Schallom
Posted onHow newsroom hiring practices can serve everyone better.
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Protecting Your Sources When Releasing Sensitive Documents
By Ted Han and Quinn Norton
Posted onCritical advice for protecting sources when releasing sensitive documents.
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Two-Factor Authentication for Newsrooms
By Martin Shelton
Posted onPasswords are the brittle wall that keep unwanted visitors out of your accounts. Breaches can hit anyone, but as frequent targets with sensitive sources, work, and personal information at risk, reporters should take extra care. When it comes to account protection, two-factor authentication is one of the most effective defenses available.
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FOIA Data Models for Everyone
By Jeremy B. Merrill
Posted onBest practices for FOIA requests.
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Learn Something New Without Losing Your Head
By Ariana Giorgi
Posted onHere’s a simple approach to learning a new programming language on the job.
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Visually Speaking: Designing for the (Un)wired World
By Dana Amihere
Posted onWhy newsrooms should go responsive, even for complex projects.
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Ms. Management: The Hard Work of Hiring Well
By Stacy-Marie Ishmael
Posted onIn this installment of Ms. Management, we learn why a better interview process is better for everyone, not just the applicants.
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Ops to the Nines
By Dave Stanton
Posted onThe S3 outage had far-reaching consequences, with a significant chunk of all internet traffic—and a lot of major sites and web apps—impacted to some extent, but it didn’t have to be this way. You can insulate your apps from practically any outage given a bit of knowhow, some forethought, and a calculated approach to balancing your costs and risks.
What does peer support in journalism look like: Insights from U.S. and international experts