Posts

Archive of posts from
June 2013

  • Ideas , Events |

    Want to build a data journalism team? You'll need these three people

    by Rich Gordon

    When I started using software to analyze data as a reporter in the late 1980s, "data journalism" ended once my stories were published in the newspaper. Now the publication of the story is just the beginning. The same data can also be turned into compelling visualizations and into news applications that people can use long after the story is published. So data journalism — which was mostly a one-person job when I started doing it...

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  • Lab projects |

    SoundCite gives voice to WaPo's account of Wendy Davis' filibuster

    by Jordan Young

    Knight Lab couldn’t have been more excited to learn that The Washington Post used our newly launched project, SoundCite, to tell the story of the Wendy Davis ‘tweetstorm’ following her filibuster in Texas. There's just something about launching a project and seeing it used to help tell stories. It's like sending a child off into the world and watching her succeed. SoundCite co-creator and Knight Lab student fellow, Tyler Fisher, said it best: Got home...

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  • Lab projects , Team news , Ideas |

    On receiving Google Glass: The world – well, the Web – #throughglass

    by Owen Youngman

    This post by Knight Lab founding faculty member Owen Youngman originally appeared on his personal blog. Glass, meet Owen. Owen, meet Glass. Wednesday, June 19 — my grades turned in, and commencement yet to come — I headed to Google’s Chelsea Market space in New York City, across the street from the massive New York headquarters building the company bought for $1.9 billion in 2010 (check out Andrew Blum’s book “Tubes” to learn an interesting reason the...

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  • Ideas |

    Web scrapers for journalists: Haystax and other graphical interface systems

    I’ve spent my last weeks as a Knight Lab student fellow exploring web scrapers for non-programmers through an open source browser plugin called Haystax. As a journalism student who picked up computer science, I love scraping because you create a program that acts like a reporter, tracking the information you want from web pages you specify. It’s a useful technique to save journalists time copying and pasting data from an organization’s website, and scraping can...

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  • Lab projects |

    SoundCite beta, in-line audio tool, ready to use

    by Ryan Graff

    https://vimeo.com/68383495 Knight Lab officially took the wraps off of SoundCite this week, our most recent tool for content creators. In a nutshell, SoundCite makes it incredibly easy for web publishers and writers to include in-line audio in their stories. We released an alpha version a month or two back and WBEZ's Jim DeRogatis used it to give a profile of Chance the Rapper more depth by allowing readers to hear the lyrics DeRogatis cited in his piece....

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  • Lab projects |

    Slimformation: A prototype that helps you read smarter, improve your “information diet”

    by Katie Zhu

    Slimformation: A prototype that tracks the kinds of content a user is viewing and provides advice on how to improve his or her “information diet.” Activities tab shown above. How many of you have tried to diet before? I know I have my fair share of attempts. So we all know there are better and worse foods for you (say, vegetables over macarons). The same logic applies to information. We live in a world of...

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  • Ideas |

    On being a journalist at Confab 2013, a content strategy conference

    by Sarah Adler

    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 considered until...

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  • Profiles , Apps & projects |

    Civic Needs App helps developers find interesting problems to solve

    by Hilary Fung

    At a National Civic Hack Day event in Chicago earlier this month, one thing was clear: a lot of talented developers want to use their skills for a good cause. The problem is that it's difficult to get all that talent collaborating and working on the right problems. That's why Ryan Briones, who does civic development for the City of Chicago, came up with a new idea he calls the Civic Needs App. With the...

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  • Ideas |

    Getting GitHub: Why journalists should know and use the social coding site

    by Emily Ferber

    The famous GitHub logo. 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...

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  • Profiles , People |

    Tasneem Raja on growing an interactive news team, skill-sharing and smart approaches to data

    by Miranda Mulligan

    Using the theory ‘Hire humans. Not skills. Not roles.’ as inspiration, the Lab’s profiles are Q&As with smart people who are shaping the future of media. Catch up and/or follow the series here. Meeting the lovely Tasneem Raja was the highlight of my week during 2012's South by Southwest Interactive Conference. Formerly a staff writer at The Chicago Reader and the news apps editor at The Bay Citizen, she is now an editor at Mother Jones leading their interactive storytelling team. She is...

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  • Apps & projects |

    My first news apps team: Making the North by Northwestern housing guide

    by Tyler Fisher

    This post by Knight Lab student fellow Tyler Fisher, originally appeared on Knight-Mozilla OpenNews' Source. The North by Northwestern housing guide project we built Last week, I launched my first team-developed news app with a group of amazing student news nerds and peers: Hilary Fung, Dan Hill, Rebecca Lai, Sheng Wu and Katie Zhu. We developed a housing guide for incoming freshmen to Northwestern University who are in the process of applying for freshman housing. It includes an interactive map of campus, filters to narrow down housing options, photos...

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  • Lab projects , Ideas |

    Journalism, computer science students to unveil eight collaborative projects

    by Rich Gordon

    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 enrolled in...

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