Joe Germuska

Chief Nerd

Joe runs Knight Lab’s technology, professional staff and student fellows. Before joining us, Joe was on the Chicago Tribune News Apps team. He's the project lead for CensusReporter.org and a board member of City Bureau.

Projects

Projects Joe Germuska has worked on.

Easy-to-make frame comparisons.

Digital Journalism, Bit by Bit.

Easy-to-make VR stories.

Seamless inline audio.

Tell the story behind the numbers.

Maps that tell stories.

Easy-to-make, beautiful timelines.

Studio Projects Joe Germuska has worked on.

Journalism AI Readiness Scorecard

Artificial intelligence (AI) drives innovation at news organizations around the world. Journalists use algorithms to find patterns in data to inform investigations and identify breaking news. Automation enables more efficient news production. AI helps drive subscriptions and personalize news for consumers. Yet AI advantages are largely limited to larger, national and international media. Many small, locally focused newsrooms lack the resources and skills to understand the potential of AI and are afraid to commit to...

Audience Engagement and Onboarding with Hearken

Students are working closely with the team at Hearken, and are gaining valuable insights into how important audience engagement is to our media landscape.

Cape to Cairo

In 1953, Lydia Luhman Pederson, a resident of Caledonia, Illinois, traveled from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo.

Civic Engagement with City Bureau

As local news organizations shrink, many civic advocates fear that no one will be monitoring the day-to-day processes that make city governments run. As part of their innovative approach to closing news gaps and promoting civic engagement, Chicago’s City Bureau has developed their “Documenters” program to train citizens to observe and record public meetings. As they develop this team of citizen journalists, they are now considering the complementary question: what is the most effective way...

Coding for Journalism

Did you know that people working in news organizations have created or contributed to some of the most popular open source software in the world? Among others, the Django content management system was developed at the Lawrence Journal-World, and the creator of D3.js worked at the New York Times for several years. News organizations have constrained budgets to purchase commercial software, and also often need control over the code they use, so building with open...

Creative Co-Author

Creative Co-author is a creative writing enhancement tool that focuses primarily on pounding out the first draft. It is type-ahead cranked up to eleven. It types ahead, lurks behind, and generally peers over your shoulder while you pound out words in a speed-draft writing reverie.

Crowdsourcing for Journalism

Many important news stories are buried amidst huge numbers of documents. And sometimes, those documents are hard for news organizations to process, either because of the sheer number, or the formats in which the documents are published.

Da Concierge!

Chicago is a big city. And for many visitors, Chicago is the big city. Whether it’s for work or pleasure, when visitors travel to Chicago it means figuring out how to experience a city that’s both large and diverse. That can make it challenging for visitors to discover and enjoy all of Chicago’s unique neighborhoods and experiences. For this Knight Lab Studio project, students will partner with Choose Chicago (the official destination marketing organization for...

Journalistic Diversity Dashboard

In recent years, much attention has been drawn to the social and cultural identities of journalists, and the ways in which those identities are often quite different from those of the audiences those journalists cover. From race and gender to education level and economic class, audiences and even the news organizations are looking for data to help them put stories into perspective. For this project, students will focus on the design of a system which...

Speed Reading Robots

Local governments hold a lot of meetings which are meant to allow the public to observe and comment on policy and legislation. But local news organizations are cutting back and often can’t cover them. Chicago’s City Bureau has developed a program called Documenters, which trains citizens and pays them to cover those meetings. Along the way, they have developed software which grabs not just the schedule of these meetings but the agendas, handouts, and other...

Fact Flow

Editorial fact-checking is a mess at best and readers don’t see the benefits. Typically they doubt it happens or don’t appreciate the work it takes to make it happen. On the editing side, almost everyone who does it uses an antiquated process derived from print production habits even though most writers and editors are drafting in Google Docs. This can be better. Let’s make it better for both editorial and readers!

Follow the Money

Each year, political campaigns break records for money raised and spent. Where does all that money come from? Who’s giving it? What are their interests in supporting any given candidate? Researching these questions has become a key part of national political coverage, and between the Federal Election Commission and various public interest organizations, basic access to campaign finance data is well understood. Things are much different for state and local elections. Reporting regulations vary considerably...

Tinder for Freelancers

Freelance journalists struggle to connect with editors, land assignments and establish steady cash flow. Meanwhile, news organizations need freelancers with diverse experiences and subject matter expertise to contribute a broad array of articles, photographs and other content. The Center for Independent Journalists (The CIJ) launched in September 2021 aiming to bridge the gap between these groups by providing support, community, education, tools and advocacy to freelancers and by offering editors access to a diverse group...

Historical Census Data

Census Reporter is a tool that helps journalists find and understand data from the US Census American Community Survey (ACS), making that data much more easily accessible and digestible. However, it only presents data from the most recent ACS releases.

Journalism and Democracy Applied

Many newsrooms crank out a steady flow of government and politics stories. Behind the daily stories is a lot of history and context. How might newsrooms better organize their publishing to provide this background information? How should that background information be organized to support the casual audience who is trying to catch up? How should it be organized to serve the “political junkies” who want to see how all of the pieces connect?

Journalism and Democracy beyond the Election

After what seems like a never-ending election season, many folks are ready to think about anything else. On the other hand, millions of people are activated and ready to be more civically engaged. Traditional journalistic work mostly proceeds as though there’s nothing to do until the next time the polls open, but is that all there is? Meanwhile, activist organizations and social media users often don’t worry so much about facts and fairness. For this...

Juxtapose

Juxtapose helps storytellers compare two pieces of similar media, including photos, and GIFs. It’s ideal for highlighting then/now stories that explain slow changes over time (growth of a city skyline, regrowth of a forest, etc.) or before/after stories that show the impact of single dramatic events (natural disasters, protests, wars, etc.). This popular tool could be more useful to storytellers and web-makers if it had a couple of key features that have come up in...

LATINEXT

The Chicago Reporter and Univision Chicago have teamed up to create LATINEXT: a first-of-its-kind cross-platform news team to engage and address the information needs of the 2.1 million strong Latinx community in the Chicago region. This project is radically rethinking the relationship between the newsroom and the audience, “putting the service back in public service journalism.” For this Knight Lab Studio project, students will: conduct design research about the needs of this audience; help LATINEXT...

Legislator Tracker

Since the last elections, public interest in contacting elected representatives about legislation under consideration has boomed. News organizations could do better addressing the public’s interest in understanding how their representatives are planning to vote on various issues.

Design Research in Local Newsrooms

It’s hard to run a local news organization. Advertising dollars have been siphoned away by social media platforms; audiences have many more choices of where to spend their attention and their money. These times call for creative thinking and reassessment of how local news organizations spend their energy and money.

Measuring Influence & Impact

The world is drowning in content. On Wordpress alone, 70 million posts are published per month. In an ocean of noise, how can you tell which ideas really resonate?

Metaverse Media

A year ago, the word “metaverse” was just a concept from a classic Science Fiction novel, but since then, it has leapt into the public conversation. But what does “metaverse” really mean? And how might the metaverse (or some metaverses) impact, or provide opportunities for journalism?

Music Magazine

Music fans today have trouble finding the stories they want to read. Following all your favorite artists on social media is overwhelming, and searching Google turns up page after page of irrelevant junk. We’ll build a system that finds just what a fan wants to read.

New to Town

When people move to a new community, they have a million questions about their new home. Meanwhile, news organizations serving that community have an interest in “meeting” those new people and converting them into subscribers. The Indianpolis (“Indy”) Star, one of Medill’s Local News Initiative partners has identified this as an opportunity in their coverage area. This project provides the opportunity to work on a real challenge in media innovation and product development. Students will...

Open Data Reporter

“Open data” might be a buzzword, but there are still significant obstacles to taking advantage of valuable datasets. They can be hard to find, hard to clean, and hard to manage. Human-centered design and a little coding energy can make it substantially easier for people to find stories and explore data. This team will approach a high-value public data set and aim to make the data more usable.

Photo Bingo

Create a mobile application which could be used by a news organization to involve their audience in covering a festival while having fun.

ProPublica Illinois

Students will design, develop, prototype and test one tool for community engagement, with a likely focus on the listening and information gathering stage.

Rethinking Election Coverage

In the popular imagination of American democracy, the press informs voters so that they can make the best choice at the polls. However, many citizens feel as though that contract has been broken. People are frustrated with “horse-race coverage” of elections—that is, journalism focused more on who is “electable”, who is “winning” and the mechanics of campaigning than on policy and helping voters make the best choice. Rather than seeking a technology-first solution, this project...

Sidebar

Publishing a story requires a constant balancing act: you have to get to your point, but you don’t always know whether your audience is fully up-to-speed on the content. Or maybe in your research you found some really fascinating information, but you have to admit it’s kind of a distraction from your main point. The web was developed on the promise of linking between documents, but too often a simple link fails – it doesn’t...

Travellers’ Tales

While quarantine has had most of us pretty home-bound, there’s no reason we can’t look ahead to the future. Travel journalism has always played a role in helping people learn about places to visit and prepare their journeys, but does it really “work” as well for the audience as it could? In this project, we’ll consider what people really need from travel journalism and how it could be made more useful for its audience.

Writing and Designing for Chatbots

Students will examine conversational user interfaces—that’s to say, using chat as a medium to interact with a bot.

Articles

Articles by Joe Germuska

  • Lab , projects |

    Another Big TimelineJS Update That You Shouldn’t Even NoticeBut we wanted to warn you ahead of time

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    There’s another big but invisible change coming to TimelineJS. In July, we announced a big update to TimelineJS on the day of the release. With some minor exceptions, we were right that most people didn’t notice. Next week, we’ll be making another big update, which, again, we hope you won’t notice. This time, we thought we should announce it ahead of time, because timelines created before January, 2015 will probably stop working unless steps are taken. Timelines...

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  • Lab , projects |

    A Big TimelineJS Update That You Shouldn’t Even Notice

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    Today we’re releasing a new version of TimelineJS, but most of you shouldn’t even notice a difference. We make updates to TimelineJS periodically, and we usually don’t say much about it, partly because people who publish timelines using our embed tool are automatically updated to the new version—there’s nothing they need to change. That includes this new release. However, in this case, we thought it was worthwhile posting for two related reasons. First, this release...

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  • Lab projects |

    Introducing StorylineJSToday we're excited to release a new tool for storytellers.

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    A screenshot of a StorylineJS instance StorylineJS makes it easy to tell the story behind a dataset, without the need for programming or data visualization expertise. Just upload your data to Google Sheets, add two columns, and fill in the story on the rows you want to highlight. Set a few configuration options and you have an annotated chart, ready to embed on your website. (And did we mention, it looks great on phones?) As...

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  • Lab projects |

    A Google Spreadsheets change affecting TimelineJS users

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    Google recently changed something about their Sheets service which is causing many people to run into an error when they are making a new timeline. Note: there should be no impact on existing timelines! After this change, many of you click on the "preview" and get this message: An unexpected error occurred trying to read your spreadsheet data [SyntaxError] Timeline configuration has no events. There is a straightforward work-around, but it requires those of you who have...

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  • Lab projects |

    A few small improvements to StoryMapJS

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    Based on research and user testing, we're making a number of small changes to StoryMapJS. We think they make the tool easier to use, but we wanted to explain the changes for any veteran users who might notice them. Thumbnail preview First, we made a simple change to the media section: you'll now see a thumbnail preview of whatever media you've attached to the slide. This should make it easier for people to know what they are looking at...

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  • Team news |

    New Team Member: Heather Billings, Designer/Developer

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    Heather Billings We are pleased to announce that Heather Billings will be joining the Lab as a designer and developer. Heather comes to us from the Chicago Tribune, where she has been a member of the News Apps team for the past three years. I'm very excited to have the chance to work with Heather again. When we brought her onto the team at the Chicago Tribune, I was already impressed by her smart, humane, and generous presence on social media. The...

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  • Lab projects |

    Introducing the StoryMapJS Alpha, now with an authoring tool

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    Where? is one of the fundamental questions journalists set out to answer, but often, the maps produced to accompany stories feel flat, or are hard to interpret. StoryMapJS is a new Knight Lab tool to help you connect the places of your story into a media-rich narrative. Like its sibling, TimelineJS, StoryMap makes it really easy to illustrate your work with photos, videos, sound, tweets and more. And today it's easier still: a couple of months...

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  • Lab projects |

    Announcing StoryMapJS developer release — a new tool for storytellers

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    TimelineJS is the Knight Lab's most popular project, and is one of the most widely used interactive storytelling tools on the web. Today we're excited to announce an early-access release of its sibling, StoryMapJS. Like TimelineJS, StoryMapJS is primarily developed by Medill professor Zach Wise, based on his experience developing interactive news projects at The New York Times and the Las Vegas Sun. While TimelineJS makes it easy for you to tell stories based on...

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  • Lab projects |

    TimelineJS — Now with even more Knight Lab

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    From the beginning, TimelineJS has been a project of Northwestern University Knight Lab. However, when Zach Wise first set out to create it, the Knight Lab had a less developed software process and identity, so Zach presented Timeline as a product of his personal Verite.co website. Since then, two things have happened: TimelineJS has become wildly popular, and the Knight Lab has established cohesive design guidelines and a more methodical software development process. In the...

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  • Profiles , People |

    Accidental journalist Jennifer Brandel on taking assignments from listeners and the need for positive news

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    Occasionally we'll do a Q&A with an impressive maker or strategist from media and its fringes. Each person brings a unique perspective on journalism, publishing and technology. Catch up and/or follow the series here. If Jennifer Brandel is an "accidental journalist," it's a very happy accident. Brandel's Curious City project has become a thriving component of the audience engagement program at WBEZ, Chicago's public radio station. Recently, the Knight Foundation recognized the promise of Curious City...

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  • Lab projects |

    Introducing Neighborhood Buzz

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    Neightborhood Buzz, Chicago, O'hare, Science tweets As social media have become a regular part of daily life, people have wondered what they can learn about themselves and their communities from the millions of messages posted online—especially on Twitter, because it is so public and so conversational. Many projects in this space begin by selecting tweets for analysis based on who tweeted or specific terms used in the tweets. Students in our Fall 2012 Innovation in...

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  • 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...

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  • Lab projects |

    Untangled: New Lab project aims to improve browser-based knowledge management for journalists

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    When we canvassed the community at News Foo late last fall, many people described tools they'd like to see which help journalists manage and make sense of data. These suggestions encouraged us to make a specific 2013 initiative we're calling "Reporters' Notebook," in which we'll look at existing tools and imagine new ones. As one step in brainstorming possibilities, we returned to a student project called Untangld. This project came out of our collaborative innovation classes,...

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  • Ideas |

    Moving the Needle 2012: Kickstarter journalism and alt. approaches

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    This week we have been taking time to acknowledge what we think are significant achievements, advances and cool projects from the past year in the technology + journalism space for our Moving the Needle 2012. The recently published Tow Center report, "Post-industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present," documents the collapse of the long-standing advertising subsidy, pointing out the need for new business models. Today, we look at a few new approaches: For a few journalism projects, Kickstarter provided a...

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  • Ideas |

    Moving the Needle 2012: Our news nerd community

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    It's not as though 2012 was the year in which a digital journalism community popped fully-formed into the world. However, looking back, there are some developments in our world which deserve to be called out. For this installment of our Moving the Needle 2012 series, we take a look at some of the best. As always, we expect we've missed a few, so please fill in the gaps in the comments below, or on Twitter...

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  • Team news , Ideas |

    NewsFoo 2012: What we learned, where we're going

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    We wanted to take advantage of the great brains assembled at last week's News Foo event, so we proposed a panel to suss out "big questions in journalism" that the lab should tackle. As might be expected from an unconference, the conversation ranged a lot more widely than our official topic. For starters, a number of folks had general questions about how the Lab works: Who are your stakeholders? Will your tools mostly be journalist-facing...

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Posts tagged with Joe Germuska

  • Team news |

    Steve Tarzia joins Knight Lab as a professional fellow

    Last week Knight Lab welcomed Steve Tarzia as a new professional fellow. During his fellowship, under a program supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Tarzia will work to make a gun violence site he founded more sustainable. Tarzia, who has a Ph.D. in computer science and has worked on development teams at several Chicago companies, launched GunMemorial.org in December and will work at Knight Lab for the next three months to...

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  • Ideas , Events |

    Event recap: Kickstarter for Journalism

    On Friday, Knight Lab co-sponsored an event with Kickstarter and Cards Against Humanity, whimsically entitled "How to journalism in a Scary World if you don’t have a Fancy Grant." The event brought together journalists and other storytellers to talk about how they’ve supported their work and the various funding models you might be able to use as well. Nicole He was on hand to make a pitch for Kickstarter, which last year launched a journalism category. It’s obviously...

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  • Ideas |

    Newsroom love stories start with collaboration and communication

    by Anne Li

    This twice-weekly exchange has been going on since my first editor’s meeting two years ago when I first joined the editing team of North by Northwestern, Northwestern’s online student-run news magazine: “We’re going to do a story on the architecture on campus for this Sunday,” a section editor declares excitedly at the editorial meeting. “It’s going to be interactive. It’ll be so cool!” “That’s great,” a managing editor responds. “Have you talked to the interactive...

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  • Team news |

    Joe Germuska expands Knight Lab role

    News veteran and technology expert Joe Germuska will take on an expanded role at the Knight Lab as interim director. Germuska has served as director of software engineering for the Lab. He previously co-founded OpenGovChicago and was on the Chicago Tribune News Apps team. Knight Lab executive director Miranda Mulligan will take a job in late January as creative director of National Geographic Digital. Mulligan has led the Lab for two years. “Our faculty, students,...

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  • Lab projects , Ideas |

    What I learned building my first news product, JuxtaposeJS

    by Alex Duner

      Just in time for last week's Online News Association Conference, Knight Lab announced the launch of JuxtaposeJS, a lightweight, easy-to-use, image comparison tool. Any product launch is exciting and I'm excited to see how journalists use JuxtaposeJS to tell stories. But from a personal perspective JuxtaposeJS is more than just a tool — it’s the first tool I’ve ever built from start to finish. It was also my first major Javascript project and I...

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  • Lab projects |

    Introducing the StoryMapJS Alpha, now with an authoring tool

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    Where? is one of the fundamental questions journalists set out to answer, but often, the maps produced to accompany stories feel flat, or are hard to interpret. StoryMapJS is a new Knight Lab tool to help you connect the places of your story into a media-rich narrative. Like its sibling, TimelineJS, StoryMap makes it really easy to illustrate your work with photos, videos, sound, tweets and more. And today it's easier still: a couple of months...

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  • mozfest , Team news |

    Knight Lab's MozFest 2013 wrap up and link-o-rama

    by Miranda Mulligan

    This post has been updated with additional links to MozFest 2013 content. Kicking off the festival, Friday night begins with a Science Fair at Ravensbourne College. Just like last year, the Knight Lab team took a jump across the pond a couple weeks ago to attend the Mozilla Festival (October 25-27) in London. Still running on fumes from the remaining high felt from our attendance in 2012, the eleven of us were really excited to be there. This incredible...

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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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  • 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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