Features / Project
Project How We Made the 3D Tour de France Interactive
Our Tour de France 3D interactive brought users right into one of the steepest, toughest, most iconic stages of the race, using WebGL.
Project How We Made “Failure Factories”
For several weeks, the Tampa Bay Times has been publishing Failure Factories, a series exploring the effects of the Pinellas County school district’s decision to resegregate its schools. On the web we decided to try something new: kicking off the series with a D3-powered graphic that used data to show readers how dire the situation is for black students in south St. Petersburg.
We were aiming for a brief and engaging piece that would invest readers in the stories to come. In that sense, our experiment was successful. #FailureFactories was trending in the Tampa Bay region before the first day of the project ran. We heard from readers across the country that they were waiting anxiously for the series, and both the graphic and the 5,000-word first installment in the series have been among the most viewed stories we’ve published this year.
Project Rethinking the Building Blocks of a Chronicle Interactive
- By Maegan Clawges, Michael Grant, Aaron Williams
- Maegan Clawges, Michael Grant, Aaron Williams
- San Francisco Chronicle
The Airbnb Effect, the San Francisco Chronicle’s follow-up story to a 2014 analysis of Airbnb listings in the city, was the first project the Chronicle’s Interactive desk published. The project tested the limits of the Chronicle’s CMS, and it is now the baseline we’re using for our larger enterprise features. Here’s a look at how it got started.
Project Demo Sites Are Weird
Since the launch of Autotune, we have been approached by people interested in adopting it for their own newsrooms. While a lot of people didn’t mind diving right into the set up, a few people asked us “Is there anywhere I can try this out?”. Fueled by the amazing coffee selection at the most recent OpenNews code convening in Portland, we decided to build a demo site that allows users to try building projects and get a feel for the framework.
Project Draw Your Own Election Adventure
- By Juan Elosua
- Cristian Bertelegni, Gastón de la Llana, Juan Elosua, Pablo Loscri, Mariana Trigo Viera
- La Nación
At La Nación, we have been working on real-time coverage of Buenos Aires elections, as well as a more detailed view results once we get data for each polling station. In this post, we’ll to explain our mapping-app innovation that allows readers to choose what parts of the city they are interested in by drawing shapes over a basemap, and then returns custom results for their selected area.
Project 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.
Project 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.
Project Introducing Autotune
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.
Project 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.
Project Tracking Amtrak 188
How curiosity and tinkering let Al Jazeera America publish historical data for a derailed train’s route without Amtrak’s cooperation.
Project The Strange Tale of FCCliefs
- By Dylan Yep
It started as a joke and turned into hashing through thousands of Net Neutrality comments the hard way, then building a chatbot to post them and interact with curious readers.
Project Scraping Nevada
Derek Willis breaks down the three stages of scraping (denial, annoyance, and acceptance) while confronting the election-results form from hell.
Project Introducing Bedfellows
The financial relationship between PAC contributors and recipients can be difficult to divine from the information reported to the FEC. Bedfellows is a new Python library based on a model developed at The Upshot for understanding those relationships via several different measures.
Project Tag Soup: Using Custom Elements to Cover Elections and Beyond
How the Seattle Times’ election page served as a testbed for custom elements in a news app, and what it means for other news apps teams.
Project Reporting from the Youngest Land on Earth
How ProPublica and The Lens got the aerial photos they needed to produce Losing Ground.
Project How to Build an App for 14 Member Newsrooms
What INN’s newsroom technology team learned about inter-organizational collaboration while building Power Players, and what they’ll do differently next time.
Project Introducing Clarify
An open source elections-data URL locator and parser for Clarity Elections results, from the team at OpenElections.
Project Introducing MinnPost’s Election Night API
The Election Night API is a set of tools, configurations, and instructions to collect and serve election results on election night, while still providing an off-season service, and focusing on saving resources as much as possible.
Project Introducing Wherewolf
Last week, as part of the OpenNews post-election Code Convening, Jenny Ye and Noah Veltman put the finishing touches on Wherewolf, a JavaScript library that lets you run a boundary service in a browser.
Project Introducing Whippersnapper
As part of the OpenNews Code Convening held earlier this month, we’re releasing Whippersnapper—an automated screenshot tool to keep a visual history of content on the web. It builds on top of other open source projects to capture and upload screenshots of a web page, giving users creative power to track how the internet visually changes.
