Posted on May 17, 2013 by Ryan Graff — 0

Chase Davis on data-driven decision making for news projects

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Ryan Graff — 0

If a model exists for the type of young journalist everyone’s talking about and pining for these days, Chase Davis is probably it. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 2006 with a journalism degree and some solid reporting chops thanks to time at the Boston Globe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a few other name-brand newspapers. But then he went and made a name for himself by applying machine learning, natural language processing, and statistics to his work. Check out his Five Algorithms in Five Minutes talk at this year’s NICAR. He served as director of technology at the Center for Investigative Reporting, helped to build and launch the Texas Tribune, and recently took a job as assistant editor for interactive news at The New York Times. Basically, he’s a guy worth paying attention to…

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Dan Hill — 0

Travis Swicegood’s real world data lessons from Texas Tribune

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Dan Hill — 0

Travis Swicegood, director of technology at Texas Tribune, spoke this week at the latest Hacks/Hackers Chicago Meet-up about the challenges of working with public data — real world data, as Swicegood calls it. There are plenty of challenges in collecting, managing and presenting data from a state the size of Texas — 26 million people, 254 counties, five major cities and a gross state economy of $1.2 trillion. Swicegood shared just a few…

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Emily Ferber — 2

A journalist’s beginner guide to code and web proficiency

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Emily Ferber — 2

It’s really easy to make it through journalism school without picking up a stitch of coding knowledge. But you know this already. Hacker journalists have written article after blog post about how the new crop of journalists needs to sit down, plug in and plain learn the essentials of the web. Well, some of us are listening. After watching a few journo-friends go full on hacker in front of my eyes, I decided…

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Ryan Graff

Dan Fletcher on Facebook, good content and monetization

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Ryan Graff

Dan Fletcher, the recently departed managing editor at Facebook, seems to be always ahead of the curve. In 2009, at age 22, he became the youngest person ever to write a cover story for TIME magazine. He also created and launched TIME.com’s NewsFeed feature and TIME’s social media feeds. At Bloomberg a few years later he created and staffed the editorial social media teams for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek picking up a Forbes 30 Under 30 distinction in the process. Now, at a time when journalists are headed to the Twitter and LinkedIns of the world to help shape editorial content, he’s already completed his time as managing editor at a giant tech company and is looking for his next project.

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Miriam Boon — 0

Semantic APIs, what to consider when picking a text analysis tool

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Miriam Boon — 0

Today, our online experiences are richer and more interconnected than ever. This is in part due to the existence of third-party services called Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs for short. APIs allow computer systems to speak with each other and exchange information. Facebook and Twitter’s APIs, for example, allow Twitter to repost your Facebook updates, and vice versa. At the Knight Lab, we often make use of semantic APIs. These APIs will usually…

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Ryan Graff — 0

Ignore your focus groups, test relentlessly, and other lessons from NU’s entrepreneur conference