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.

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.

Last weekend, ten teams participated in a competition to develop newsgames at Editors’ Lab New York, a hackathon organized by the Global Editors Network and The New York Times. Combining the fantastical and playful aspects of gaming with hard news is a hard problem and there are few examples of well-conceived and executed newsgames. Thanks to the hack day, there are now a few more.