A Northwestern University joint initiative of Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications and the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science. Northwestern University joint initiative of Medill & McCormick School of Engineering.

Advancing news media innovation through exploration & experimentation.

SoundCite beta, in-line audio tool, ready to use

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Knight Lab officially took the wraps off of SoundCite this week, our most recent tool for content creators. In a nutshell, SoundCite makes it really easy for web publishers and writers to include in-line audio in their stories. We released an alpha version a month or two back and WBEZ’s Jim DeRogatis used it to give a profile of Chance the Rapper more depth by allowing readers to hear the lyrics DeRogatis cited in his piece. Indeed, music reviews were the original inspiration for SoundCite, but …

Slimformation: A prototype that helps you read smarter, improve your “information diet”

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How many of you have tried to diet before? I know I have my fair share of attempts. So we all know there are better and worse foods for you (say, vegetables over macarons). The same logic applies to information. We live in a world of information overload, and consuming more of this information doesn’t necessarily make us smarter. In fact, it can do the opposite. People need to be more conscious about

On being a journalist at Confab 2013, a content strategy conference

Content strategy is a kind of floofy term, and it refers to a relatively new field. I didn’t know what it meant before I spent some time last week in Minneapolis at Confab 2013 with the Facebook content strategy team, learning from the great Kristina Halvorson and her gang of accomplished mavericks changing the way companies think about content creation, delivery and management. Many conference attendees complained that, at their companies, content wasn’t

Civic Needs App helps developers find interesting problems to solve

At a National Civic Hack Day event in Chicago earlier this month, one thing was clear: a lot of talented developers want to use their skills for a good cause. The problem is that it’s difficult to get all that talent collaborating and working on the right problems. That’s why Ryan Briones, who does civic development for the City of Chicago, came up with a new idea he calls the Civic Needs App.

Getting GitHub: Why journalists should know and use the social coding site

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If you’ve been hanging around newsrooms or journalism classrooms lately, you’ve probably heard the word GitHub. It might sound a little scary and mysterious, but even the most traditional pen-and-notebook journalists should know about this super helpful tool (to say nothing of aspiring newsroom programmers). So, what, exactly, is GitHub? Why do you need to get it? GitHub is a social coding site. Designed for the purpose of democratic and collaborative coding, GitHub

Tasneem Raja on growing an interactive news team, skill-sharing and smart approaches to data

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Meeting the lovely Tasneem Raja was the highlight of my week in Austin during 2012′s South by Southwest Interactive Conference. Formerly a staff writer at The Chicago Reader and the news apps editor at The Bay Citizen, she is now an editor at Mother Jones leading their interactive storytelling team. She is kind, tremendously witty and scary smart. In fact, Tasneem is perhaps best known outside of the news nerd circle for brilliantly writing about the “Brogrammer” problem and sexism in Silicon Valley and about being a woman in the video game industry last year. Read on to learn about her adventures in the MoJo newsroom, how she manages an interactive news team and her approach to knowledge-sharing between teams of journalists …