KK Rebecca Lai

Undergraduate Fellow

Articles

Articles by KK Rebecca Lai

  • SRCCON |

    On scaling and efficiency of long-form news story design, at #SRCCON 2014

    by KK Rebecca Lai

    Day one session, "Art directing posts, sustainably" with Scott Kellum and Lauren Rabaino. (Photo by Ramla Mahmood)There seems to be an uptick of production in digital storytelling: More and more newsrooms are beginning to build longform editorial pieces on the web, with designs that break out of their day-to-day article templates. Web developers in newsroom sometimes find themselves struggling to meet growing editorial demand for special treatment on story projects, sometimes by copy-and-pasting previous code in...

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  • Ideas |

    If you want to learn to build the web, start by building your community

    by KK Rebecca Lai

    Students at Open Lab Hours. Photo by Suyeon Son. For the last two quarters, student fellows at the Knight Lab have been hosting Open Lab Hours each week. The atmosphere, conversations and community that have developed have been more than we have expected. Friendships were born, pizza was consumed, and, most importantly, new projects were pushed online. The idea behind Open Lab Hours is simple: create a space for students interested in journalism and technology...

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  • NICAR , Events |

    Quick roundup of student sessions at IRE's CAR 2014 conference

    by KK Rebecca Lai

    Students flocking to Sisi Wei's & Jeremy Merrill's "jobs and career straight talk unsession", photo by Ted Han. Being a student at a 1000+ people conference full of industry professionals can be an intimidating experience. Based on an unofficial survey, there were roughly 30 college students at the conference from schools around the US, Canada and Denmark. Their majors ranged from journalism and communication to statistics and computer science. While students were merely a small...

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  • Ideas |

    Three lessons from Hacktucky on how to build and launch projects in real life

    by KK Rebecca Lai

    Screenshot from Hacktucky.com Last weekend I participated in Hacktucky, the Society of News Design's first annual hackathon (held this year in Kentucky). The goal of the hackathon was to build and ship something of local interest within 24 hours. It was an amazing learning experience and it reminded me that habits that are absolutely essential at hackathons should also be used in the real world. The team I worked with had very a diverse background...

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  • mozfest , Events |

    MozFest 2013: Journalists should command the command line

    by KK Rebecca Lai

    Journalists who want to learn more technology often jump into HTML, CSS and Javascript. Those are great places to start (as Knight Lab and others have written before), but if you want to maximize the potential of your computer, one of the first things you should learn is the command line! Some quick background: Regular computer users access the computer via a graphical user interface (GUI). This interface allows you to interact with the machine...

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  • Ideas |

    It's all about storytelling at SND Awards

    by KK Rebecca Lai

    Earlier this month, I joined 15 professionals digital designers as a student helper on the Society of News Design’s Best of Digital Design awards. It was my second time helping and I took away a few great lessons on the development of online news from the judges’ deliberations. (Check out snd.org for winning entries, or twitter and sndlive.tumblr.com for some more light-hearted coverage.) The biggest lesson was that while many of the winning entries featured...

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  • Team news , NICAR , Events |

    NICAR Lightning Talks: A round-up

    by KK Rebecca Lai

    Undoubtedly the most attended session at NICAR 2013, the Lightning Talks provided a delightful relief from the heavier (thought certainly worthwhile) information-laden talks that make up the bulk of the conference. Eleven journalists took on the challenge of presenting a topic of their choice in five minutes or fewer. It was lighthearted and fun, but concise but valuable. There’s a rumor that a video of the talks will appear sometime soon (and pictures have surfaced),...

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