How-to The Whole of Work
- By Mandy Brown
In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton interviews a number of workers at a biscuit manufacturing company and concludes, unsurprisingly enough, that the place is rather dreary. The difference between a happy home cook and our listless biscuit manufacturing employee comes down to what Ursula Franklin describes in The Real World of Technology as holistic versus prescriptive technologies. In a holistic technology, a single person or small group of people carry through an entire process, from inception to sweeping the crumbs off the floor, making their own decisions and adapting along the way.
How-to Unlearning
- By Tiff Fehr
As with most of our well-meant advice, we tend to target people at the heights or depths of mindsets—in this case, you on your career path. We don’t do as earnest a job of giving constructive advice for people in the middle, those metaphorically on a plateau or simply soldiering up a small hill.
How-to Writing the Patch for Communication Gaps
Don’t let a debrief go to waste. The SF Chronicle’s Michael Grant explains how to dig deeper, solve longstanding communication problems, and support the development and implementation of new ideas.
How-to Good Code Runs on Good Communication
When I started the interactive team at the Sun Sentinel in 2013, I thought the biggest challenge would be the code. I was wrong. Experimentation, no matter the size, requires creating new processes and collaborating in new ways. For the next two years, I worked closely with reporters and editors to plan, shape and create interactive journalism, retooling the already fantastic journalism coming out of the newsroom to reach audiences in a sophisticated way online. Most of the time we were successful; occasionally it didn’t work out. The biggest thing I learned was that getting things done in a newsroom only works when everyone is on the same team.
How-to Surviving the News Business
- By Tiff Fehr, Alyson Hurt
While each organization’s culture varies, aggressive deadlines, multi-tasking, and long hours are considered hallmarks of journalism. You can repeat that exact paragraph about the tech industry as well. If you combine them, as many of us do each day, you get something like a three-dimensional chess board of stressors, deadlines, and shifting ground.
Event Data Journalism Problems in Europe
- By Zara Rahman
Zara Rahman reports back on surprising insights from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia.
