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Features
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Lonely Coders, Here’s How to Get Things Done
By Tyler Machado
Posted onMany of us newsroom coders work as one-person bands, whether we’re with big employers or smaller ones. Even with growing interest and investment in digitally native news and the slow fade of the ink-stained wretch archetype, our industry’s reporter-to-coder ratio isn’t in the coder’s favor yet, and informal chat with office colleagues probably doesn’t get too technical outside of New York, D.C., and the Bay Area. This means we news nerds face challenges different from those of our old-school journalist colleagues and the coder-obsessed startup world. We can’t be content with simply writing code—we have to be simultaneously comfortable with mostly working alone and interfacing with co-workers outside our tribe, and we have to be in charge of our own professional development, without a traditional map.
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Surviving the News Business
By Tiff Fehr and Alyson Hurt
Posted onWhile each organization’s culture varies, aggressive deadlines, multi-tasking, and long hours are considered hallmarks of journalism. You can repeat that exact paragraph about the tech industry as well. If you combine them, as many of us do each day, you get something like a three-dimensional chess board of stressors, deadlines, and shifting ground.
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5 Things To Build Into Your Digital Workflow
By CJ Sinner and MaryJo Webster
Posted onWhether you work for a nimble online-only upstart or a still-adapting traditional organization, odds are good that there are processes in your digital product workflow that could use tweaking. Not everyone knows if their team has workflow challenges (or where those challenges are), but the simple act of discussion with stakeholders and peers in other organizations can illuminate pain points big and small, and ensure everyone is on the same page. Learning how others arrange their workflows can achieve a similar goal, plus give you some ideas for how to remedy those pain points.
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How to Run Projects on Time—and Keep Your Sanity
By Lauren Rabaino
Posted onVox’s director of editorial products on how to set up the processes you need to run healthy projects and a jubilant team.
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Inside the Globe and Mail’s New Interactive Team
By Matt Frehner and Julia Wolfe
Posted onHow The Globe and Mail built a top interactive team from scratch, plus the tools and processes they need to keep turning out work that pushes the paper forward.
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Better Documentation Is Within Reach
By Noah Veltman
Posted onGood docs help people use your work, but they have other benefits too. They encourage community contributions. They save you from your past self when you’re revisiting your own code six months from now. And they help you think: much like talking to a rubber duck helps you find bugs, carefully documenting your work for users helps you see it from a different perspective and design better code.
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If Your Reporters Aren’t Making Their Own Charts You’re Wasting Everyone’s Time
By Becky Bowers and David Yanofsky
Posted on“Someone could screw it up” is a terrible excuse not to cede control. We hear it often as a defense of why a newsroom doesn’t let its reporters make their own charts. It sounds reasonable enough, but when you consider the deluge of other types of content that come out of a newsroom getting swiftly edited to the highest standard, it becomes easy to see how the possibility of “screwing it up” is a terrible excuse. It’s time to think about and produce graphics in the same way that we do paragraphs: crafted by a reporter and vetted by an editor for both substance and style.
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What We’ve Learned About Sharing Our Data Analysis
By Jeremy Singer-Vine
Posted onLast Friday morning, Jessica Garrison, Ken Bensinger, and I published a BuzzFeed News investigation highlighting the ease with which American employers have exploited and abused a particular type of foreign worker—those on seasonal H–2 visas. That same morning, we published the corresponding data, methodologies, and analytic code on GitHub. This isn’t the first time we’ve open-sourced our data and analysis; far from it. But the H–2 project represents our most ambitious effort yet. In this post, I’ll describe our current thinking on “reproducible data analyses,” and how the H–2 project reflects those thoughts.
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How We Made “Faces of Death Row”
By Jolie McCullough and Lindsay Muscato
Posted onThis week, the Texas Tribune launched Faces of Death Row, a simply designed news app that prominently features photographs of each of the 261 people currently awaiting execution in Texas (accompanying article). The app allows for filtering by age, race, sex, and number of years spent on death row. Its simplicity—an artifact of the unavailability of the data the Tribune originally sought—is also its strength.
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How We Made “Money as a Weapons System”
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Posted onHow ProPublica’s team communicated the complexities—and absurdities—of $2B in mostly unrestricted spending by military personnel in Afghanistan.
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Die, Bot, Die!
By Matt Waite
Posted onWhen and how to say goodbye to the bots when something has gone terribly wrong…or when no one’s really laughing anymore.
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Hi, Weatherbot!
By John Keefe
Posted onA Node-based Twitter bot, one easy step at a time—plus the way John Keefe teaches basic botmaking to class of journalism/design students.
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Twitter Mapping: Foundations
By Simon Rogers
Posted onTwitter’s data editor lays out the major challenges and opportunities that arise when you set out to map tweets.
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Animating Maps with D3 and TopoJSON
By Roman Kalyakin
Posted onAn exploration of an easy way to animate paths in SVG maps.
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Getting a Job in Journalism Code
By Jeremy B. Merrill and Sisi Wei
Posted onJob hunting can be an intimidating process, especially for recent grads or people looking to break into a new field. The journalism tech community is a welcoming place for new faces and Sisi Wei and Jeremy B. Merrill want to help you overcome any fears and apply for jobs and internships in this growing and evolving field.
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A Botmaking Primer
By Joseph Kokenge
Posted onNot sure where to begin with this whole bot thing? Joseph Kokenge is here to help you get started with botmaking 101.
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Network Diagrams Are Hard
By Alyson Hurt
Posted onAlyson Hurt digs into the challenges of producing legible, useful network diagrams using evolving web technologies and methods.
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Watching the Results Change
By Jacob Harris
Posted onJacob Harris on the challenges of reporting and calling elections and the making of the NYT’s chart of minute-by-minute Virginia governor’s race reporting action.
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Live Streaming History
By Travis Swicegood
Posted onThe Texas Tribune’s Travis Swicegood explains how his organization handled a massive, unexpected wave of traffic when they became the only news organization closely covering the SB 5 filibuster in Texas.
What does peer support in journalism look like: Insights from U.S. and international experts