Tool Introducing Source Jobs
Today, we’re launching Source Jobs, a new place to list jobs for the newsroom designers and developers already populating our Community section—and for the curious developers and designers who don’t yet realize that their future lies in journalism. As the global journalism-code community continues to grow, our goal is to offer a simple, scalable listings service that newsrooms can edit on their own.
Roundup New Work in News Code, Feb. 13th 2014
- Jeremy Ashkenas, Jeremy Bowers, Andy Boyle, Jonathan Corum, Gabriel Dance, Kenan Davis, Tyler Fisher, Erik Hinton, Ben Koski, Becky Lettenberger, Wes Lindamood, Jen Linder, Maryanne Murray, Joanna Nikas, Claire O’Neill, Charlie Szymanski, Scott Taylor, Jeremy White
- NPR, Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The New York Times
The Source roundup returns with biweekly summaries of notable interactive features, news apps, data work, and newsroom code commentary.
Learning Making Remote Work Work
Christopher Groskopf’s tricks for going to the office without going to the office.
Tool Introducing Sheetdown
Sheetdown is a command line Node.js module for turning a Google Spreadsheet into a Markdown (well, actually, a GitHub Flavored Markdown) table. It started with a tweet…
Roundup Event Roundup, Feb 10
- By Erika Owens
This week, vote on NICAR lightning talks, pitch ideas to Tribeca Hacks
Learning The Evolution of News Tech Teams
Vox Media’s VP of technology breaks down the hard and frequently messy lessons his organization has learned about clearing the way for successful tech collaboration in newsrooms.
Roundup Event Roundup, Feb 4
- By Erika Owens
Send your NICAR lightning talk proposals now and check out ONA and Hackers/Hackers meetups this week.
Learning How to Make a News App in Two Days
- By Al Shaw
- Ben Chartoff, Harlo Holmes, Brian Jacobs, Aurelia Moser, Gabriela Rodriguez, Al Shaw, Mike Tigas, Marcos Vanetta
- OpenNews, ProPublica
As part of the orientation week for the 2014 class of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellows, fellow nerd-cuber Mike Tigas and I led a hackathon at Mozilla’s headquarters in San Francisco…
Project Lessons from the ProPublica/OpenNews Popup News Apps Team
- By Ben Chartoff, Harlo Holmes, Brian Jacobs, Aurelia Moser, Dan Sinker
- Ben Chartoff, Harlo Holmes, Brian Jacobs, Scott Klein, Aurelia Moser, Gabriela Rodriguez, Al Shaw, Dan Sinker, Mike Tigas, Marcos Vanetta
- OpenNews, ProPublica
More things learned about process, expectations, and how to build a functioning team in two days, from Dan Sinker and the 2014 OpenNews Fellows.
Interview Forking Popcorn for a Journalist Audience
- By Joe Flowers, Adam Martin, Erika Owens, Brian Williamson
- Joe Flowers, Adam Martin, Brian Williamson
- Broadcasting Board of Governors
At the Mozilla Festival last fall, a team from the Broadcasting Board of Governors launched KettleCorn, their fork of the Mozilla video-editing tool Popcorn.
Roundup Event Roundup, Jan 27
- By Erika Owens
Fellowship deadlines, conference proposal pitches, and Hacks/Hackers web scraping.
Project If You Build It, They Will Come…But You Have To Remind Them
- By Chris Keller
- KPCC
KPCC developed a news app to track fires in California last summer. Chris Keller explains how, and what they’ve learned since.
Roundup Event Roundup, Jan 21
- By Erika Owens
Hacks/Hackers meetups around Europe and the U.S. this week, plus, hacking European Parliament data this weekend.
Project How We Made the Random Oscar Winner Generator
Time’s interactive graphic editor explains how he built a not-so-random film blurb madlibs generator in the run-up to the Academy Awards.
Project Data Journalism Community, Why and How Do We Do This Work?
David Eads wants to start a conversation about the power of data-driven journalism to engage and teach new developers, and he needs your feedback.
Tool Animation With Filmstrips
The code and thinking behind NPR’s implementation of the JPEG “filmstrip” technique in “Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt.”
Project To Scrape, Perchance to Tweet
At the Chicago Tribune, we had a simple goal: to automatically tweet contributions to Illinois politicians of $1,000 or more, which campaigns are required to report within five business days. To see, in something approximating real time, which campaigns are bringing in the big bucks and who those big-buck-bearers are. The Illinois State Board of Elections (ISBE) has helpfully published exactly this data for years online, in a format that appears to have changed very little since at least the mid-2000s. There’s no API for this data, but the stability of the format is encouraging. A scraper is hardly an ideal tool for anything intended to last for a while and produce public-facing data, but if we can count on the format of the page not to change much over at least the next several months, it’s probably worth it.
Project The Code (and Thinking) Behind Today’s Paper
- By Alastair Coote, Kathryn Faulkner, Erin Kissane, Andrew Phelps
- Alastair Coote, Kathryn Faulkner, Andrew Phelps
- The New York Times
Last month, while the team behind today’s NYT redesign were crunching away on final adjustments, another team at the Times launched Today’s Paper, an infinite-scrolling, offline-caching web app available to the paper’s subscribers. We spoke with three members of the team—a developer, a designer, and an editor—about the project’s challenges and ambitions.
Project Behind the Scenes on the NYT Redesign
- By Erin Kissane, Eitan Konigsburg, Renda Morton, Allen Tan
- Eitan Konigsburg, Renda Morton, Allen Tan
- The New York Times
The New York Times just launched the first piece of their sitewide redesign: new article pages, with other tweaks and nudges throughout the site. We spoke with two designers and a developer who worked on the project to learn about the tech choices, design ideas, and strategy behind the new look and feel.
Project Introducing Treasury.IO
- By Michael Keller, Cezary Podkul
- Brian Abelson, Jake Bialer, Burton DeWilde, Michael Keller, Thomas Levine, Ashley Williams
The U.S. Treasury’s Daily Treasury Statement lists actual cash spending down to the million on everything the government spent money on each day, as well as how it funded the spending. But, the Treasury only releases these files in PDF or fixed-width text files like this one, making any analysis very difficult.
To liberate the data and make it easy to analyze federal money flows across time, we created Treasury.IO. The system we built downloads and parses the fixed-width files into a standard schema, creating a SQLite database that can be directly queried via a URL endpoint.
