Articles

Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.

Features

Introducing Aufbau

By Michael Keller

Posted on August 5, 2015
Remembering where all our tools live and how to use them can be tiresome, even for us. As a potential solution, we’re experimenting with packaging these previously web apps into a desktop application using GitHub’s Electron framework, which NPR has also been experimenting with for photo tools. The project is called Aufbau and it’s up on GitHub.
Mockingjay: A Smarter Repeater

By Michael Keller

Posted on April 1, 2015
Meet our Twitter bot that follows a list of users and retweets them when they mention a certain topic.
Thank You, Electionbot

By Jacob Harris

Posted on March 30, 2015
Offloading some of a burden of continuous human monitoring to a friendly bot can be just the comfort you need on a cold Election Night.
Eleven Awesome Things You Can Do with csvkit

By Christopher Groskopf

Posted on October 2, 2014
Christopher Groskopf, master of CSVs, breaks down the magical powers of csvkit.
All About CSV Fingerprint

By Erin Kissane and Victor Powell

Posted on August 25, 2014
CSV Fingerprints creator Victor Powell talks about the tool’s inception, inner workings, and potential to help data-slingers in newsrooms finally ditch Excel.
All About the dailygraphics Rig from NPR

By Christopher Groskopf, Alyson Hurt, and Erin Kissane

Posted on June 3, 2014
Last week, NPR’s Visuals team released their dailygraphics rig, which offers workflow for small-scale visualizations, interactives, and graphics, along with “automated machinery for creating, deploying and embedding these mini-projects.” Their introductory blog post breaks down how to set up and use the rig, and the code is open source and ready to use. Alyson Hurt joined last week’s OpenNews community call to talk a little about the project, and we chatted with her and Christopher Groskopf afterward about how the rig came to be, what kind of skills are required to use it, and their aim to improve code quality and culture through process-improving tools.
What Heartbleed Means for Newsroom Technology

By Mike Tigas

Posted on April 9, 2014
If your websites have SSL enabled (when users log in, for example), or if you use VPN software to secure your network, or if you run your own mail servers, your newsroom might be affected by Heartbleed. Here’s what to do next.
How We Are Exploring Mountains of Linked Data at BBC News Labs

By Basile Simon

Posted on March 13, 2014
I was asked to join BBC News Labs a couple a weeks ago to work on a project that, when it was first briefly explained to me by email, left me clueless about what it was about. (Imagine the discomfort before my job interview with Matt Shearer, Innovation Manager at the Lab.) The project is called #newsVane—and yes, we refer to it with the hash sign every time, don’t ask me why.
Introducing Streamtools: A Graphical Tool for Working with Streams of Data

By Mike Dewar

Posted on March 12, 2014
We see a moment coming when the collection of endless streams of data is commonplace. As this transition accelerates it is becoming increasingly apparent that our existing toolset for dealing with streams of data is lacking. Over the last 20 years we have invested heavily in tools that deal with tabulated data, from Excel, MySQL, and MATLAB to Hadoop, R, and Python+Numpy. These tools, when faced with a stream of never-ending data, fall short and diminish our creative potential. In response to this shortfall we have created streamtools—a new, open source project by the New York Times R&D Lab which provides a general purpose, graphical tool for dealing with streams of data. It offers a vocabulary of operations that can be connected together to create live data processing systems without the need for programming or complicated infrastructure. These systems are assembled using a visual interface that affords both immediate understanding and live manipulation of the system.
Introducing Source Jobs

By Erin Kissane

Posted on February 19, 2014
Today, we’re launching Source Jobs, a new place to list jobs for the newsroom designers and developers already populating our Community section—and for the curious developers and designers who don’t yet realize that their future lies in journalism. As the global journalism-code community continues to grow, our goal is to offer a simple, scalable listings service that newsrooms can edit on their own.
Introducing Sheetdown

By Jessica Lord

Posted on February 11, 2014
Sheetdown is a command line Node.js module for turning a Google Spreadsheet into a Markdown (well, actually, a GitHub Flavored Markdown) table. It started with a tweet…
Animation With Filmstrips

By Alyson Hurt

Posted on January 15, 2014
The code and thinking behind NPR’s implementation of the JPEG “filmstrip” technique in “Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt.”
SecureDrop, the Open-Source Submission Platform for Journalists and Whistleblowers

By Trevor Timm

Posted on November 19, 2013
Freedom of the Press Foundation executive director Trevor Timm discusses SecureDrop’s evolution and future prospects.
How Promotion Affects Pageviews on the New York Times Website

By Brian Abelson

Posted on November 14, 2013
2013 OpenNews fellow Brian Abelson has been conducting research on pageviews as a metric, and on the relationship between pageviews and promotion at the New York Times during his fellowship there. This article is cross-posted from his blog.
The Code Behind AJAM’s Displaced Syrians App

By Michael Keller

Posted on November 13, 2013
Al Jazeera America’s Michael Keller introduces the three new open source libraries behind AJA’s displaced Syrians interactive app.
Mapping Made Simple, Now with Bonus UI

By Alan Palazzolo

Posted on August 29, 2013
Introducing the double-whammy of Simple Map D3 and Tulip, a new mapping app from MinnPost.
Introducing Ractive.js

By Rich Harris

Posted on August 23, 2013
Ractive.js is a new JavaScript library for making interactives and news apps. Tl;dr: Ractive.js will make your life easier! Check out the examples and tutorials. (But really, you probably want to read this first.)
Introducing csvdedupe

By Derek Eder and Forest Gregg

Posted on August 15, 2013
Introducing csvdedupe, an open source command line tool for de-duplication and entity resolution.
Responsive CSS Testing Made Simple with the BBC’s Wraith

By David Blooman, John Cleveley, Erin Kissane, and Simon Thulbourn

Posted on August 9, 2013
Last November, the BBC News team created a front-end regression tool that collects and diffs screenshots to automatically highlight discrepancies produced (intentionally or otherwise) by CSS changes. Last week, the team open-sourced Wraith. We spoke with David Blooman, who developed the tool last fall and worked with Simon Thulbourn to prepare it for public release.
Ultralight CMSes Head to Head

By Katie Zhu

Posted on July 29, 2013
Ultralight CMSes are, in many ways, the product of hacking or infecting the CMS. Here’s a breakdown of a few popular ones, complete with setup instructions, pro/cons, and newsroom case studies.