Features - Source: An OpenNews project

Roundup events Event Roundup, Sept 14

By Erika Owens

Meetups this week in Venezia, London, New York, Sydney, Montreal, Rochester, and Buenos Aires. Plus, upcoming session and award proposal deadlines.

Roundup News Nerd Roundup, Sept 8

By Lindsay Muscato

A roundup of what’s currently on our minds and in our browser tabs, assembled here for our fellow news nerds.

Tool CSV JavaScript Introducing Tik Tok: Beautiful Timelines, the Easy Way

By Alan Palazzolo
MinnPost, WNYC

Tik Tok creates elegant vertical timelines by pulling from a variety of data sources. It’s designed for newsroom coders of all levels. If you can copy and paste, you’re on your way.

Update workweek Tell Us How You Work

By Erin Kissane, Lindsay Muscato
OpenNews

Pitch now for Work Week (September 14-18), and tell us your best ideas related to workflow, project management, team communication, burnout, and more. Pitches due Friday, September 5.

Roundup events Event Roundup, Aug 31

By Erika Owens

It’s a great week to work on proposals: MozFest, SNDMakes Austin, and NICAR 2016 have upcoming deadlines.

How-to documentation GitHub Better Documentation Is Within Reach

By Noah Veltman
Cathy Deng, Noah Veltman

Good 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.

Roundup events Event Roundup, Aug 24

By Erika Owens

This week the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires Media Party brings hundreds of news nerds to Argentina.

Roundup News Nerd Roundup, Aug 21

By Lindsay Muscato

A few of our favorite pieces from the Los Angeles Times, NPR, the Post and Courier and more.

Roundup events Event Roundup, Aug 17

By Erika Owens

A few meetups this week, plus it’s your last chance to apply to be a 2016 Knight-Mozilla Fellow.

How-to charts If Your Reporters Aren’t Making Their Own Charts You’re Wasting Everyone’s Time

“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.

Project Rethinking the Building Blocks of a Chronicle Interactive

The Airbnb Effect, the San Francisco Chronicle’s follow-up story to a 2014 analysis of Airbnb listings in the city, was the first project the Chronicle’s Interactive desk published. The project tested the limits of the Chronicle’s CMS, and it is now the baseline we’re using for our larger enterprise features. Here’s a look at how it got started.

Roundup events Event Roundup, Aug 10

By Erika Owens

If you’re in Germany, you have a couple chances this week to learn about the Knight-Mozilla Fellowships.

Tool maps data visualization JavaScript Building on Data Viz for All

Helping newsrooms improve interactive graphics and data visualizations by making them more accessible to all users.

Tool Doc2Media opennews DocumentCloud Code Convening Opening Up Doc2Media

Earlier this year at La Nación, we developed Doc2Media, an app that adds media resources to documents hosted on DocumentCloud. We created it to visualize hearings from a famous trial led by Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who died in unclear circumstances hours before testifying against the Argentinian president. After we finished the project, we wanted to extend its functionality and abstract it to a tool that can be used in other projects as well as by other newsrooms.

How-to reproducible data analysis What We’ve Learned About Sharing Our Data Analysis

Last 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.

Tool Electron desktop apps Introducing Aufbau

Remembering where all our tools live and how to use them can be tiresome, even for us. As a potential solution, we’re experimenting with packaging these previously web apps into a desktop application using GitHub’s Electron framework, which NPR has also been experimenting with for photo tools. The project is called Aufbau and it’s up on GitHub.

Project Autotune opennews Code Convening Demo Sites Are Weird

Since the launch of Autotune, we have been approached by people interested in adopting it for their own newsrooms. While a lot of people didn’t mind diving right into the set up, a few people asked us “Is there anywhere I can try this out?”. Fueled by the amazing coffee selection at the most recent OpenNews code convening in Portland, we decided to build a demo site that allows users to try building projects and get a feel for the framework.

Project elections mapping LeafletJS Draw Your Own Election Adventure

At La Nación, we have been working on real-time coverage of Buenos Aires elections, as well as a more detailed view results once we get data for each polling station. In this post, we’ll to explain our mapping-app innovation that allows readers to choose what parts of the city they are interested in by drawing shapes over a basemap, and then returns custom results for their selected area.