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…
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.
Blog:Ideas
Getting GitHub: Why journalists should know and use the social coding site
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…
Journalism, computer science students to unveil eight collaborative projects
Next week, journalism and computer science students from Northwestern’s “Collaborative Innovation in Journalism and Technology” class will unveil the prototypes they’ve built over the past 10 weeks. And you’re invited to see what they’ve come up with. The students have been working since April, when I and my Knight Lab colleague, Associate Prof. Larry Birnbaum of the computer science department in the McCormick School formed eight interdisciplinary teams out of the 27 students…
Beyond spreadsheets for CAR reporters: Algorithms
The lightning talks at NICAR are often the highlight of the computer-assisted reporting conference, but Chase Davis (who recently did a Q&A with us) really grabbed my attention with his “Five Algorithms in Five Minutes” talk, complete with a mic drop. So much so, that three months later I’m still thinking about it and all of the ways that I might put these algorithms to use. NICAR coincided with my internship at The…
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…
Semantic APIs, what to consider when picking a text analysis tool
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…