Features - Source: An OpenNews project

Project social media Code Convening image tools Introducing Lunchbox

By Tyler Fisher, Livia Labate
Danny DeBelius, David Eads, Tyler Fisher, Alyson Hurt, Livia Labate
NPR

At the OpenNews July 2015 Code Convening, the NPR Visuals Team built and released a desktop app for creating shareable images across social media platforms.

Roundup user research user-centered design SRCCON A User-Centered Conversation at SRCCON

By Lindsay Muscato

At SRCCON, we heard a lot about a user-centered approach. What does that mean for journalism?

Roundup opennews Code Convening Fellows + Code Convening = New Open Source Tools

Our fifth OpenNews code convening wrapped up last Friday. Uniquely for our convenings, this one included all seven of our current Knight-Mozilla Fellows, each working with a colleague from their news organization or another organization with shared challenges and complimentary skills. Over the next week, we’ll be posting project introductions from each of the seven project teams that joined us in Portland for the event. In the interim, a quick intro to the teams, the projects they brought to the convening, and what they got done.

Roundup events Event Roundup, July 27

By Erika Owens

Meetups this week in Austin, Tokyo, NYC, DC, Bogota, Miami, and Montevideo, plus it’s your last chance to pitch to the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires Media Party

Project satellite imagery mapping How We Made Losing Ground

How we tracked down, processed, filtered, revisualized, mashed up, and otherwise handled a boatload of disparate imagery to map changes in the Louisiana coastline backward and forward in time.

Roundup event Event Roundup, July 20

By Erika Owens

Chat with OpenNews this week about Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, or apply for the HBCU fellowship to ONA.

Roundup event Event Roundup, July 13

By Erika Owens

Media Factory bootcamps continue this week, with Knight-Mozilla Fellowship alum Sonya Song in Lima.

Roundup event writeup SRCCON You Are Such Polymaths

By Lindsay Muscato

At SRCCON, OpenNews’s two-day conference in Minneapolis last month, we basked in the collective smarts of 220+ attendees and nearly 50 sessions. Afterward, we heard a lot of lovely feedback (people like snacks and unisex bathrooms and child care, and we are so very happy you were happy). So we’d like to reflect back some thoughts about you. Like: it was really clear, in a tangible way, that you have more gears, switches, and hidden functions than Furiosa’s war rig.

Project code reuse Introducing Autotune

By Ryan Mark, Lauren Rabaino, Kavya Sukumar
Vox Media

Today we’re announcing a new project we’ve been working on at Vox Media: Autotune, a centralized management system for charts, graphics, quizzes, and other tools. We built the application to address the problem of reusability in our work. This project is open source and available to everyone.

Roundup event Event Roundup, July 6

The third Hacking Journalism event is in DC this weekend, plus a data visualization workshop in Pittsburgh, and Hacks/Hackers meetups around the world.

Project redesign iteration Reported.ly’s Editorial—and Web—Evolution

Kim Bui breaks down the iterative process reported.ly’s web presence has undergone alongside the team’s editorial evolution.

Roundup events Event Roundup, June 22

By Erika Owens

It’s time for SRCCON, plus the first Hacks/Hackers Connect, Open Source Bridge, and local meetups.

How-to How We Made “Faces of Death Row”

This 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.

Roundup events Event Roundup, June 15

By Erika Owens

Engage Local and Allied Media conferences this week, plus the application for the 2016 Knight-Mozilla Fellowship is now open.

Interview Remote Work Remote Control: Mandy Brown of Vox Product

By Mandy Brown, Kaeti Hinck
Vox Media

In the first installment of our new series on remote work in journalism-tech, Kaeti Hinck speaks with Mandy Brown about her setup, her team’s approach, and her advice to to anyone who wants to go remote.

How-to How We Made “Money as a Weapons System”

How ProPublica’s team communicated the complexities—and absurdities—of $2B in mostly unrestricted spending by military personnel in Afghanistan.

Roundup write the docs opennews Code Convening Seven Projects from the OpenNews + Write the Docs Code Convening

Journalist-coders tackled last-mile work and documentation at our Open News code convening in May, held in affiliation with the Write the Docs conference. Here’s what they did and what comes next.