Project What I Learned from Researching Newsroom On-boarding and Off-Boarding Processes
As a Knight-Mozilla fellow, I wanted to do some type of research during my fellowship that could benefit the news community. During my 10-month fellowship in Berlin in 2016, I spent about eight months researching, collecting data and interviewing reporters, editors, managers, and directors about their on-boarding and off-boarding processes.
Project How Usability Testing Can Improve News Stories
Working in the news cycle often leaves little time to design different iterations of story ideas, and even less time to test them with an audience. But as an author or designer—and as a media outlet which provides a public service, like WNYC at New York Public Radio—we have a responsibility to know how the public might understand and engage with our stories. The reason to make time for some kind of usability testing is because it makes our work better and increases its impact on the audience we serve.
Project The Twitterverse of Donald Trump, In 26,234 Tweets
We wanted to get a better idea of where President-elect Donald Trump gets his information. So we analyzed everything he has tweeted since he launched his campaign to take a look at the links he has shared and the news sources they came from. But first, we had to get the tweets.
Roundup What I Learned Recreating One Chart Using 24 Tools
Lessons learned from trying to create one chart with as many applications, libraries, and programming languages as possible.
Event Building a Guide to Open-Sourcing Newsroom Code, Together
This week, eleven contributors gathered with us in Washington, D.C. to work on a new resource—a playbook for open-sourcing newsroom code. Together we hoped to tackle a question that’s come up again and again: how to help more newsrooms produce open-source projects, so that everyone can spend more time on great journalism instead of re-creating common tools, tech, and datasets from scratch.
Roundup Event Roundup, Dec 5
- By Erika Owens
Cleverly named meetup from Journocoders, and a scant few other events and deadlines before the end of the year.
Project How The Los Angeles Times Transformed its Publishing Tools with a UX Design Approach
The Los Angeles Times created a new publishing system by focusing on the needs of editors and reporters, supporting great journalism with better tools.
Roundup Event Roundup, Nov 28
- By Erika Owens
Deadlines this week for the JSK fellowship and IFF conference, plus some upcoming events.
How-to Low-Budget Natural Language Processing
- By Dan Zajdband
We can take advantage of our human ability to analyze natural language and use really simple techniques to assist and amaze our users. Here are a couple of ways to use these techniques in your own projects.
Roundup Event Roundup, Nov 21
- By Erika Owens
Session ideas are due soon for the Internet Freedom Festival, plus a bunch of other upcoming grant and fellowship deadlines.
Roundup Event Roundup, Nov 14
- By Erika Owens
Applications for ONA’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator are due tomorrow, plus other events and deadlines.
Roundup What You’ve Been Making, Nov 11
- By Erin Kissane, Lindsay Muscato
- National Geographic, NPR, ProPublica, The Coral Project, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, WNYC
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.
Roundup Event Roundup, Nov 7
- By Erika Owens
If you’re not buried in elections work, there area few events this week and upcoming deadlines to check out.
Project How (And Why) We Built A World Series Simulator
We created a tool that allowed users to peek under the hood of the MLB playoffs by simulating the postseason as many times as they wanted, which we hope taught even baseball fans something new about their sport.
Roundup Event Roundup, Oct 24
The Mozilla Festival is back this weekend. We’ll be in London and have coverage here on Source.
Project How NPR Transcribes and Fact-Checks the Debates, Live
For the presidential debate season, NPR is providing live transcripts of the debate with embedded fact checks and annotations throughout each debate night. Coordinating the workflow between live transcriptions, live fact-checking, and a live-updating page inside of our CMS was no small undertaking, resulting in what may have been our team’s most complicated technical architecture yet.
Roundup Event Roundup, Oct 17
- By Erika Owens
The Mozilla Festival comes to London next week, and this week there will be a Hacks/Hackers London meetup and BBC hackathon.
Roundup Source Project Roundup, Oct 14
Here’s a look at what we’ve been reading and scrolling through lately: border issues, complaints against cops, campaign data, invisible labor, and more.
Event Practical Tips for Improving Mental Health in the Newsroom
Every year, roughly one in five American adults experiences a mental illness. Working in a newsroom poses particular challenges to mental health: the job typically involves a high-stress environment, long hours, tight deadlines, exposure to graphic images and videos, and an unstable industry with uncertain benefits and job security. This July in Portland at SRCCON, dozens of journalists, developers and newsroom workers sat down together to share their personal experiences with mental health.
