Posts

Archive of posts from
November 2012

  • Apps & projects |

    'Bottomless' stories, Instagram mashup and more: This Week on Twitter

    by Stephen Autar

    Each week our very own Stephen Autar tracks the tech and journalism conversations on Twitter as he runs the @KnightLab handle. He offers a recap of the most intriguing and important stories each Friday. This week, one of the stories I found most interesting was that magazine publisher Future is reportedly selling $1 million in tablet magazines per month. I know how much I dislike tablet magazine designs for the most part so that seemed like a...

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  • Team news |

    New team member: Director of Software Engineering

    by Miranda Mulligan

    Joe Germuska We are pleased to announce that Joe Germuska will be joining the Lab as the Director of Software Engineering. He joins us from The Chicago Tribune, where he has worked as a news apps developer for the past couple of years, and brings with him twenty years of software design and development experience. We are all atingle with excitement. In his tenure at The Chicago Tribune, Germuska was instrumental in building out their crime, elections and schools applications, among...

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  • Profiles , Apps & projects |

    Evening Edition's big rush to return to slow news

    by Ryan Graff

    The beauty of startup life is how quickly things happen. For Evening Edition — a journalism startup dedicated, ironically, to slow news —quick meant taking a spark of an idea from a Wednesday night Twitter conversation, building it, and launching the product four days later. “In less than a week’s time we went from a joke on twitter, to something that was live and people could subscribe to,” says Jim Ray, one of Evening Edition’s co-founders....

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  • Apps & projects |

    Alan Taylor's journey from technologist to journalist

    by Hilary Sharp

    Alan Taylor, photo editor and curator of The Atlantic’s InFocus, hadn’t planned to become a journalist. But he did just that a few years ago while working as a programmer for Boston.com. For years, he’d been using interesting pictures to craft photographic series for friends and family. “I seemed to have a knack for seeing these jumbled photographs and putting them in an order that felt right,” Taylor says. “It may not be chronological, but...

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  • Apps & projects |

    Twitter on technology and journalism

    by Stephen Autar

    Each week our very own Stephen Autar tracks the tech and journalism conversations on Twitter as he runs the @KnightLab handle. He offers a recap of the most intriguing and important stories each Friday. Read the inaugural post below: If you’ve been following the news this week, you’ve surely seen news of David Petraeus’ resignation following news of his affair. What is most incredible about this story is how investigators unearthed the affair using data...

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  • mozfest , Team news , Events |

    Knight Lab's MozFest 2012 wrap up

    by Miranda Mulligan

    Last week, a significant portion of the Knight Lab team was fortunate enough to join the Mozilla Festival in London, November 9-12. This incredible event, hosted by the Mozilla Foundation, is in its third year and intends to motivate an entire generation of web makers. As far as we can tell, they are doing this job well. In fact, during the Sunday morning keynote, Mozilla's executive director, Mark Surman shared an anecdote that an attendee had likened #MozFest to #SXSWi in its early...

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  • mozfest , Events |

    MozFest: What the heck is a hack?

    by Jordan Young

    This year’s MozFest offered a session titled Jumping between Hacks and Hackers Communities, so as one of the newly appointed organizers of the Chicago Hacks Hackers I decided to attend and meet some people in the same ship. OK, really I just wanted to ask them for some pointers since I have found it to be a challenge getting Chicagoans in consistent enough attendance to build a community. Mariano from Buenos Aires showed us a...

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  • mozfest , Team news , Events |

    MozFest: Turning data in to a story in three hours? Almost.

    by Sarah Adler

    This year at MozFest, I responded to a “call for help” from three African nations to solve the mysterious drop in life expectancy they experienced. In a session called “Data Expeditions: Scout the Data Landscape with our Data Sherpas” (organized by a caped Michael Bauer) all participants split into groups to research and tell a story. My group, made of people with diverse backgrounds, reminded me how valuable a wide variety of skill sets can...

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  • mozfest , Team news , Events |

    Oh, the places you'll go, Hacker Journalists!

    by Katie Zhu

    My, how far we've come. We, meaning the OpenNews community. A little over a year ago, I was sitting in Berlin with 20 amazing, talented individuals — five of whom were to be the first OpenNews fellows — and five of the best news organizations in the world. Gunner, Michelle Thorne, Mark Surman, Ryan Merkley, Dan Sinker (and his beard) were all in attendance. We called our event #hacktoberfest, and it was the penultimate stage...

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  • mozfest , Team news , Events |

    One person's work, another's new idea at MozFest

    by Hilary Fung

    I have a rocky relationship with note taking. In middle school, my teachers encouraged me to copy their presentation slides word for word, insisting that putting pen to paper would help me retain information. I quickly realized that I would learn nothing that way, and I still struggle to note important and interesting events because in the most interesting moments, note-taking is the last thing I want to think about. This weekend, MozFest showed me...

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  • mozfest , Team news , Events |

    Dan on Data at MozFest

    I spent a lot of time at MozFest thinking about data and how we can use it as journalists. Here’s a quick recap of the sessions I attended and the lessons I learned. Data Expeditions More than 50 journalists and engineers followed a group of  “data sherpas” in to a role-playing game-style hack on datasets in the “Data Expeditions” session. The three-hour session was intended to be a hack and teams — consisting of storytellers,...

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  • mozfest |

    MozFest's maker mantra

    by Ryan Graff

    MozFest. Man, so hard to describe what this thing is. I don’t want gush too much, but it’s been a great weekend so far. I was intimidated coming in to the festival. The maker ethos here is strong and as a words guy I didn’t think I had the right cred to properly collaborate with the coders and designers. I can cobble together some HTML, shoot photos, and edit video, but generally words are my...

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  • Lab projects |

    TweetCast knows (probably) who gets your vote

    by Ryan Graff

    Today the Knight Lab quietly took the wraps off a project that seeks to uncover a secret most Americans hold — who we plan to vote for in this week’s presidential election. The project, Tweet Cast Your Vote (tweetcast.knightlabproject.com), is experimental, but accurately predicts the candidate Twitter users plan to vote for up to 80 percent of the time. For now the tool is an interesting experience for the user — a sort of political...

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