Propelled by a journalist’s skepticism, Claudia Nuñez questioned the data driving front page New York Times and decided she needed to develop her own analysis skills. Shortly after, she earned a John S. Knight Journalism fellowship, where she developed RDataVox, an online data visualization network for ethnic media journalists and non-profit organizations. Last December in Los Angeles, Nuñez organized a large scale hackathon on the topic of immigration. Now, working with the Institute for Justice in Journalism, she is organizing a follow-up event, the Chicago Migrahack. In advance of the event, we asked her a few questions.
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.
National Day of Civic Hacking Comes to Chicago
Hackers, unite! For the first time, civic hackers across the nation will come together to participate in one of the largest collaborative hacking projects, National Day of Civic Hacking. The initial idea came from the White House’s desire to establish programming that increased government transparency. They reached out to hacking organizations like SecondMuse to help organize hackathon events across the country. These events will use data released by federal agencies to build useful…
Chase Davis on data-driven decision making for news projects
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…
Travis Swicegood’s real world data lessons from Texas Tribune
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…
A journalist’s beginner guide to code and web proficiency
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…
Dan Fletcher on Facebook, good content and monetization
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.