Posts

Archive of posts from
May 2013

  • Profiles , People |

    Mohammed Haddad on his journey from computer science to Al Jazeera data driven storyteller

    by Ryan Graff

    Using the theory ‘Hire humans. Not skills. Not roles.’ as inspiration, the Lab’s profiles are Q&As with highly-impressive makers and strategists from media and its fringes, each with unique perspectives on journalism, publishing and communications technology. We’re talking to smart people who are shaping the future of media. Not all of them work in a newsroom, not all are big names, not all have fancy titles, but each is a bright person with something to...

    Continue Reading

  • Ideas |

    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 Sacramento Bee,...

    Continue Reading

  • Profiles , People |

    Claudia Núñez on Chicago Migrahack, hackathons and tolerance

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    Using the theory ‘Hire humans. Not skills. Not roles.’ as inspiration, the Lab’s profiles are Q&As with highly-impressive makers and strategists from media and its fringes, each with unique perspectives on journalism, publishing and communications technology. We’re talking to smart people who are shaping the future of media. Not all of them work in a newsroom, not all are big names, not all have fancy titles, but each is a bright person with something to...

    Continue Reading

  • Events |

    National Day of Civic Hacking Comes to Chicago

    by Hilary Sharp

    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 tools that...

    Continue Reading

  • Profiles , People |

    Chase Davis on data-driven decision making for news projects

    by Ryan Graff

    Using the theory ‘Hire humans. Not skills. Not roles.’ as inspiration, the Lab’s profiles are Q&As with highly-impressive makers and strategists from media and its fringes, each with unique perspectives on journalism, publishing and communications technology. We’re talking to smart people who are shaping the future of media. Not all of them work in a newsroom, not all are big names, not all have fancy titles, but each is a bright person with something to...

    Continue Reading

  • Events |

    Travis Swicegood's real world data lessons from Texas Tribune

    Travis Swicegood 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...

    Continue Reading

  • Ideas |

    A journalist's beginner guide to code and web proficiency

    by Emily Ferber

    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. All you need is a computer, the Internet and the will power to add some new abilities to...

    Continue Reading

  • Profiles , People |

    Dan Fletcher on Facebook, good content and monetization

    by Ryan Graff

    Editor's note: Using the theory ‘Hire humans. Not skills. Not roles.’ as inspiration, the Lab’s profiles are Q&As with highly-impressive makers and strategists from media and its fringes, each with unique perspectives on journalism, publishing and communications technology. We’re talking to smart people who are shaping the future of media. Not all of them work in a newsroom, not all are big names, not all have fancy titles, but each is a bright person with something...

    Continue Reading

  • Ideas |

    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 take text...

    Continue Reading

  • Events |

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

    by Ryan Graff

    Some of the the Knight Lab crew spent some time yesterday at the 2013 Entrepreneur@NU Conference yesterday, and I have to say, while we didn’t hear anything ground breaking, the team members in attendance agreed that it was inspiring to be around so much energy, so many new ideas, and so many folks who had built something new. It was also a good reminder of the trends in technology and startup culture that we try to keep...

    Continue Reading

  • Profiles , People |

    Karen McGrane on mobile, content strategy, fixing technology and the media culture

    by Miranda Mulligan

    Editor's note: Using ‘Hire humans. Not skills. Not roles.’ as our marching orders, the Lab's profiles are Q&As with highly-impressive makers and strategists from media (and its fringes), each with unique perspectives on journalism, publishing and communications technology. We’re after smart people shaping the ways we communicate with technology, and not all of them work in a newsroom. Catch up and/or follow the series here. I want to be Karen McGrane when I grow up, and you should want to be...

    Continue Reading

  • Ideas |

    A model for every story type or smarter story modeling?

    by Tyler Fisher

    This post by Knight Lab student fellow Tyler Fisher, originally appeared on Medium. For about seven months, I have been developing my college publication’s homebrew Django-based CMS (not to be confused with django-cms). I suppose “maintain” would be the more appropriate word; I didn’t actually build the CMS. Instead, I’ve added a few features, subtracted a few useless ones and optimized for performance. These days, it works well, and my editors know how to use...

    Continue Reading

subscribe via RSS