Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
Features
-
Welcome to Security Week
By Erin Kissane
Posted onWhen the conversation in nerd-journalism concentrates around a particular topic, we sometimes assemble a theme week on Source to help collect the loose threads and encourage journalists (and designers and developers and data analysts) to document their related work. Sometimes they’re excuses for robotic fun, and other times a catalyst for difficult but necessary culture conversations. A Security Week in 2017, though, is a no-brainer.
-
NICAR When You’re Not New Anymore
By Andrew Nguyen
Posted onWhen you’re no longer new to NICAR, it’s time to start mentoring and collaborating with students and newsrooms who need your help. Here’s one perspective on making the jump from newbie to veteran.
-
How I Learned to NICAR
By Kristin Hussey
Posted onWhat NICAR 2017 looked like through the eyes of a longtime freelance reporter who needed more data skills.
-
To NICAR, With Love
By Lo Bénichou
Posted onI am queer. I am a women. I am Jewish. I am mixed. And I work in the news in Trump’s America.
-
Five Tips to Make the Most of NICAR
By Stephanie Lamm
Posted onThe Computer Assisted Reporting conference brings together digital, data-driven journalists from all over the world.
-
Grabbing Government Data Before It’s Destroyed
By Dan Phiffer
Posted onLast Saturday morning, over 200 scientists, programmers, librarians, artists, students, and academics gathered for Data Rescue NYC to help archive at-risk scientific datasets. The event was the latest in a multi-city series organized by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), an international collaboration run by non-profits and academics working to support environmental government agencies.
-
Building a Guide to Open-Sourcing Newsroom Code, Together
By Lindsay Muscato
Posted onThis week, eleven contributors gathered with us in Washington, D.C. to work on a new resource—a playbook for open-sourcing newsroom code. Together we hoped to tackle a question that’s come up again and again: how to help more newsrooms produce open-source projects, so that everyone can spend more time on great journalism instead of re-creating common tools, tech, and datasets from scratch.
-
Practical Tips for Improving Mental Health in the Newsroom
By Joel Eastwood
Posted onEvery year, roughly one in five American adults experiences a mental illness. Working in a newsroom poses particular challenges to mental health: the job typically involves a high-stress environment, long hours, tight deadlines, exposure to graphic images and videos, and an unstable industry with uncertain benefits and job security. This July in Portland at SRCCON, dozens of journalists, developers and newsroom workers sat down together to share their personal experiences with mental health.
-
Peer Reviewing Our Data Stories
By Ariana Giorgi and Christine Zhang
Posted onAs journalists who analyze data for stories, we strive to hold ourselves accountable to a high standard of accuracy. But checking our work is rarely a straightforward process. Newsroom editors and fact-checkers might not have enough data expertise. Often, we need an outside opinion. Ideally, we could ask each other for advice, or even turn to experts in other fields for help.
-
Designing News Apps for Humanity
By Thomas Wilburn
Posted onReader trust is fragile and easily betrayed, and competition is fierce. Newsrooms can’t afford to ignore the way our work affects our readers when their contexts conflict with our expectations.
-
When They Don’t Want You To Lead
By Emily Chow and Kaeti Hinck
Posted onIt’s challenging to find your feet as a leader, even more so when you’re in an underrepresented group. For people of color, women and other underrepresented groups, there are structural systems and power dynamics in place that make navigating the workplace—and leadership—especially precarious. During SRCCON in Portland, we gathered to talk about our experiences and ideas for how to navigate shared challenges.
-
Hello from SRCCON 2016
By
Posted onSource is in Portland this week for SRCCON 2016. Here’s how you can follow along with us.
-
Welcome to Botweek 2016
By
Posted onToday kicks off the third annual Source Botweek, our yearly push to document the newsgathering bots, Slackbots, Twitter bots, and other automated creations that have emerged from newsrooms in the last year—and to check out a few extras from the makers of less practical/more adorable bots.
-
5 Things I Learned at AAJA’s iCON (and a Few Things I’m Still Considering)
By Emma Carew Grovum
Posted onReflections on iCON, the Asian American Journalists Association’s event in Miami last month.
-
Beyond “Be Like Facebook”
By David Sleight
Posted onThe SND judges’ controversial decision to give Facebook its “World’s Best Designed” award in digital—and the resulting unease in the journalism world—points to larger questions in our relationship with third-party platforms and our understanding of the scope of “design.”
-
Data Journalism Problems in Europe
By Zara Rahman
Posted onZara Rahman reports back on surprising insights from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia.
-
Return of the Code Convenings: Elections and Updates
By Erin Kissane
Posted onEarlier this month, we held our third-ever OpenNews Code Convening, and our first one west of Portland, Oregon. Code Convenings are short events that bring together pairs of developers from news organizations to finish, document, and release open source projects they’ve been chipping away at.
-
CrowData Grows Up
By Florencia Coelho and Gabriela Rodriguez
Posted onA La Nación hackathon to enhance the open-source file-freeing tool behind VozData results in a better CrowData and a tall list of changes to come.
-
SRCCON: How Not to Skew Data with Statistics
By Kio Stark
Posted onNotes from a lively SRCCON discussion on tricks for avoiding error, led by Aurelia Moser and Chris Keller.
-
SRCCON: Human-Driven Design
By Kio Stark
Posted onRyan Pitts and Sara Schnadt on how to know your users and build just what they need.
How to tell good LGBTQ+ stories with bad data