Features
Project From the BBC News Labs: Datastringer
Basile Simon walks through the process of building a new tool that aims to help reporters cover beats, and that was prompted by work by Knight-Mozilla Fellows and a presentation at Hacks/Hackers London.
Roundup Event Roundup, Sept 2
- By Erika Owens
Meetups this week and hackathons in Buenos Aires and São Paulo.
How-to Animating Maps with D3 and TopoJSON
An exploration of an easy way to animate paths in SVG maps.
Project Comparing the Net Cost of College
The Chronicle of Higher Education set out to compare net cost of colleges and found an unexpected discrepancy. The team describes the piece they created to help explain the difficulty in comparing net costs.
Tool All About CSV Fingerprint
CSV Fingerprints creator Victor Powell talks about the tool’s inception, inner workings, and potential to help data-slingers in newsrooms finally ditch Excel.
Project When the News Calls for Raw Data
- By Tom Giratikanon, Erin Kissane, Jeremy Singer-Vine
- Tom Giratikanon, Alicia Parlapiano, Jeremy Singer-Vine, Jeremy White
- BuzzFeed, The New York Times
We spoke with the NYT and BuzzFeed about recent data postings prompted by the news from Ferguson, MO.
Roundup Event Roundup, Aug 19
- By Erika Owens
Hacks/Hackers meetups around Latin America and your last chance to pitch a session proposal to the Mozilla Festival.
Project How (and Why) We Made Twitter Reverb
- By Simon Rogers
- Emma Alterman, Scott Benish, James Buckhouse, Dino Citraro, Brett Johnson, Kim Rees, Simon Rogers, Earl Swigert
- Periscopic, Twitter
Twitter’s Simon Rogers introduces Reverb and walks through his team’s design and development work with Periscopic.
Roundup Event Roundup, August 11
- By Erika Owens
Journalism conference in DC, Hacks/Hackers meetups around the world, and two scraping events in Latin America.
Event SRCCON: How Not to Skew Data with Statistics
- By Kio Stark
- AmyJo Brown, Emma Carew Grovum, Jacob Harris, Chris Keller, Jeff Larson, Aurelia Moser, Latoya Peterson, Sara Schnadt, Noah Veltman
Notes from a lively SRCCON discussion on tricks for avoiding error, led by Aurelia Moser and Chris Keller.
Roundup Event Roundup, August 4
- By Erika Owens
It’s a quiet week for journo code events, which makes it the perfect time to work on your Knight-Mozilla Fellowship application.
Event SRCCON: Human-Driven Design
Ryan Pitts and Sara Schnadt on how to know your users and build just what they need.
Event The Great SRCCON Brain Dump
- By Erin Kissane
SRCCON, the first-ever OpenNews conference, wrapped up last Friday night at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. As Quartz’s Nikhil Sonnad notes in his wrap-up post, the problem with even the most energetic and inspiring conference is that the motivation found often fades when everyone returns to the daily hustle and sprint. Like Sonnad, we’re confident that the news-code community that showed up in force at SRCCON has the stamina and sustained interest to maintain the momentum that built up in sessions and around the coffee-hacking stations, and we want to help with that as much as possible. We also want to scoop up as much of the energy and intensity and brain-sharing from SRCCON as we can and pour it out into the wider world that couldn’t fit into the physical conference itself.
Project Announcing Raster Support for Simple Tiles
Live from SRCCON an update you want to know about.
Project How We Made “Disappearing Rio Grande”
Last December, Colin McDonald pitched an opportunity for The Texas Tribune to partner on an ambitious project–he kayaks, canoes, and walks the Rio Grande’s entire 1,900-mile course, and we create a platform that makes it possible for him and his team to publish their reports on the journey. After a very successful Kickstarter campaign, the Disappearing Rio Grande project was born.
Roundup Event Roundup, July 21
- By Erika Owens
Yup, this Thursday and Friday is the first conference from OpenNews: SRCCON.
Interview How We Made “Spot the Ball”
- By Alastair Coote, Erin Kissane, Sam Manchester, Rumsey Taylor
- Alastair Coote, Sam Manchester, Colleen McEnaney, Rumsey Taylor
- The New York Times
Even among the many wonderful World Cup interactives and news apps we saw this year, the NYT’s Spot the Ball was a standout, both in conception and execution. We spoke with the team behind it about the project’s design, world-class Photoshopping, and surprising inspiration.
Project Planting the Next Crop of Newsroom Coders
- By Erin Kissane
We are exactly one month away from the August 16th deadline for applying for the 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, and this is the perfect time for you—the people actively wrangling data, building news apps, and designing interactives in newsrooms—to help chase amazing candidates toward the Fellowship application. We’ve assembled a one-stop shop of your arguments for joining development teams in news organizations, along with some of our former Fellows’ experiences and exhortations to future candidates.
Roundup Event Roundup, July 14
- By Erika Owens
This week news nerds and data lovers descend on Berlin for the Open Knowledge Festival.
