Features / How-to
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 The Myth of the Sole and Useful Story
A newspaper investigation is a messy thing, and it generates a lot of stuff—papers, reports, spreadsheets, interview transcripts—that never sees publication. Should that change now that many publications work primarily online?
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 Guerrilla QA for Tiny Teams
QA can be okay. We promise. Here’s how Serious Eats makes QA happen, even with a small team.
How-to Lonely Coders, Here’s How to Get Things Done
Many of us newsroom coders work as one-person bands, whether we’re with big employers or smaller ones. Even with growing interest and investment in digitally native news and the slow fade of the ink-stained wretch archetype, our industry’s reporter-to-coder ratio isn’t in the coder’s favor yet, and informal chat with office colleagues probably doesn’t get too technical outside of New York, D.C., and the Bay Area.
This means we news nerds face challenges different from those of our old-school journalist colleagues and the coder-obsessed startup world. We can’t be content with simply writing code—we have to be simultaneously comfortable with mostly working alone and interfacing with co-workers outside our tribe, and we have to be in charge of our own professional development, without a traditional map.
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.
How-to 5 Things To Build Into Your Digital Workflow
Whether you work for a nimble online-only upstart or a still-adapting traditional organization, odds are good that there are processes in your digital product workflow that could use tweaking. Not everyone knows if their team has workflow challenges (or where those challenges are), but the simple act of discussion with stakeholders and peers in other organizations can illuminate pain points big and small, and ensure everyone is on the same page. Learning how others arrange their workflows can achieve a similar goal, plus give you some ideas for how to remedy those pain points.
How-to How to Run Projects on Time—and Keep Your Sanity
Vox’s director of editorial products on how to set up the processes you need to run healthy projects and a jubilant team.
How-to Inside the Globe and Mail’s New Interactive Team
How The Globe and Mail built a top interactive team from scratch, plus the tools and processes they need to keep turning out work that pushes the paper forward.
How-to Better Documentation Is Within Reach
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.
How-to 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.
How-to What We’ve Learned About Sharing Our Data Analysis
- By Jeremy Singer-Vine
- Ken Bensinger, Jessica Garrison, Mark Schoofs, Jeremy Singer-Vine, Kendall Taggart, John Templon
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.
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.
How-to How We Made “Money as a Weapons System”
- Ingrid Burrington, Ryann Grochowski Jones, Jeff Larson, Megan McCloskey, Lindsay Muscato, Mike Tigas, Sisi Wei
- ProPublica
How ProPublica’s team communicated the complexities—and absurdities—of $2B in mostly unrestricted spending by military personnel in Afghanistan.
How-to Die, Bot, Die!
When and how to say goodbye to the bots when something has gone terribly wrong…or when no one’s really laughing anymore.
How-to Hi, Weatherbot!
A Node-based Twitter bot, one easy step at a time—plus the way John Keefe teaches basic botmaking to class of journalism/design students.
How-to Twitter Mapping: Foundations
Twitter’s data editor lays out the major challenges and opportunities that arise when you set out to map tweets.
How-to Animating Maps with D3 and TopoJSON
An exploration of an easy way to animate paths in SVG maps.
