Posts

Archive of posts with the tag

  • Events |

    SND panel: How designers can try to correct for the unconscious bias in design

    by Jessica Soberman

    At last week’s Society of News Design’s San Francisco Conference, three speakers hosted a panel on the application of unconscious bias in design: Sanny Lin, a product designer at Bloc; Martin Gee, senior art director at Time; and Tory Hargro, a product design manager at Facebook. Unconscious biases are the unconscious clichéd beliefs we hold about certain social groups. While we may consciously loathe the biases, numerous studies and research show that we act on...

    Continue Reading

  • Ideas , Profiles , Apps & projects |

    Uncle Sam's digital makeover and the lessons it holds for publishers

    by Josh Shi

    The website for the US Digital Services Playbook looks like anything but a typical government website. Find it at playbook.cio.gov/. In September, 18F, a team of designers and developers within the General Services Administration (GSA), and the United States Design Services (USDS) released the US Web Design Standards, a project that aims to unite all government websites under a single set of guidelines that guides visual design and user experience. This idea of creating a...

    Continue Reading

  • Ideas , Profiles , Apps & projects |

    How Byron Lutz untangled the Calderon family's connections and what it tells us about social network analysis

    by Matt Hong

    On Friday, February 21, 2014, two members of a Southern California family dynasty were indicted on a series of political corruption charges, including tax fraud, money laundering, and bribery. Two members of that family — Tom Calderon, a consultant and a former assemblyman, and Ron Calderon, a state senator — would surrender themselves by the following Monday, both pleading not guilty to the charges. Tied to their alleged wrongdoings was an extensive network of people...

    Continue Reading

  • 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...

    Continue Reading

  • People |

    Ethan Marcotte on web design, accessibility and why it matters to journalists, digital storytellers

    by Miranda Mulligan

    The Lab’s profiles are Q&As with smart people who are shaping the future of media. Follow the series. My career has been blessed with many mentors, but few have had a more profound effect on my work, and my career, than Ethan Marcotte. We worked together on the imagining, responsive design, prototyping and launch of The Boston Globe’s new website — BostonGlobe.com — in 2011. In fact, he actually coined the phrase “responsive web design” in his May 2010 A List Apart article,...

    Continue Reading

  • Ideas |

    Designing from data — How news organizations use A/B testing to increase user engagement

    by Jessica Soberman

    Back in November I had a minor journalism crisis, questioning journalism’s impact on society and the business models that are trying to sustain news organizations. This prompted me to look into other ways that people interested in social impact were developing and organizing businesses. Long story short, I applied and was accepted into a 6-month program at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management called NUvention Impact. It’s an interdisciplinary social entrepreneurship program that gives Northwestern graduate...

    Continue Reading

  • Ideas |

    Early adopter: Why an incoming freshman wants to be a hacker-journalist, discovering Knight Lab

    by Alex Duner

    This spring incoming Northwestern freshman, Alex Duner, reached out to us in utter excitement about newsroom programming and eager to get started. He's come to this niche of computer science and journalism earlier than most, so we asked him to write about why he wants to study computer science and journalism. Alex Duner, incoming NU freshman. Plans to study journalism and computer science. Hello! My name is Alex Duner, I am a recent high school...

    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

  • Lab projects , Team news |

    What is Knight Lab? Technology, editorial content and events

    by Miranda Mulligan

    Knight Lab has three major buckets of output – technology, events and editorial – all dependent on the other two for success. Immediately following the announcement of our new blog, my inbox was flooded with questions like these: Is Knight Lab making a content play? Are you all trying to be Nieman Lab? Reporters' Lab? Short answer: No. As this journalism nerd lab evolves, we have found it necessary to expand the definition of our output....

    Continue Reading

  • Lab projects , Team news |

    We have a new look — and strategy — for the Knight Lab's blog

    by Miranda Mulligan

    Knight Lab's responsively-designed relaunch I am so excited to pull back the curtain on our brand, spankin' new blog design and I'm not sure that we could be more eager to get going. It is a pretty new toy that, in contrast to our old site, will allow us to participate more substantially in the dialogue that is already taking place within our geographically diverse community of journalism-technologists. More importantly, our new name, visual identity,...

    Continue Reading

  • Team news |

    Aaron Salmon joins Knight Lab as professional fellow

    by Hilary Sharp

    It all started with Quake II. Aaron Salmon and his gaming buddies — his “clan,” in the parlance of the game — played the first-person shooter game feverishly in the mid 90s when they decided what they really needed was a website to track scores and records. Salmon built it, reverse engineering the whole thing using view source and eventually filling it with clan member profiles, achievement badges, downloads of maps, and screenshots of clan...

    Continue Reading

  • Team news |

    Scott Robbin joins Knight Lab as professional fellow

    by Ryan Graff

    What does it take to make Crain Chicago’s 40-Under-40 list? Well, for Scott Robbin it took creating a new way for millions of people to listen to music online while keeping a neighborly eye out for his fellow Chicagoans. All of which makes the Knight Lab very happy to have him as part of our inaugural class of professional fellows. Over the past six years Robbin has done great development work for Twitter, Adobe, and...

    Continue Reading

  • 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...

    Continue Reading

  • Team news |

    Spark Camp: Design – Recap and thoughts

    by Miranda Mulligan

    Around the beginning of the year, I participated in a Spark Camp, this time themed around design and designers – which was the fourth in a series which has already covered themes like "real-time," "data" and "money" – and hosted in Palo Alto, Ca., on Jan. 11-13. Lunch and the Spark Camp idea wall in the atrium – d.school at Stanford University Hosted in conjunction with the d.school at Stanford University, campers were asked to focus the weekend's...

    Continue Reading

  • Team news , Ideas , Events |

    Pair-programming-ish learning model and Code With Me Miami thoughts

    by Miranda Mulligan

    First, this post is incredibly tardy, yet I am going to publish it anyway. This Lab-hosted event was just too cool! Two weekends ago, Feb 2-3, Knight Lab hosted a Code With Me workshop at the University of Miami's School of Communication. This was the second of the two-day introductory web-making workshop for journalists offered by co-founders and Medill School alumns Tom Giratikanon and Sisi Wei. The first one was hosted by NPR in D.C. last...

    Continue Reading

  • 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...

    Continue Reading

  • Ideas |

    Moving the Needle 2012: Some design and presentation projects

    by Miranda Mulligan

    This week, Knight Lab is posting daily as we look back at 2012, taking a moment to call out some significant achievements, advances, or cool projects of the past year that move us just that much closer to saving journalism. Yesterday, Ryan Graff highlighted some of the storytelling that made 2012 great, delicately skirting a “Best of” list and instead noting some of the ideas that we thought were intriguing. Today is dedicated to design...

    Continue Reading

  • Ideas |

    Moving the Needle 2012: Storytelling highlights

    by Ryan Graff

    In the great tradition of news organizations for at least the last few decades the Knight Lab is taking a look back at the year gone by. It’s safe to say that for the technology and journalism community, 2012 was a great one. Every event and gathering seemed to have more people, more energy, and more ideas than in years past. All those people, ideas and energy produced some great work. Each day this week,...

    Continue Reading

  • Team news , Ideas |

    Ignite #NewsFoo 2012: 'Design is the missing link'

    by Miranda Mulligan

    Over the weekend, some of the Knight Lab team participated in News Foo, an unconference at the Cronkite School of Journalism, hosted by O’Reilly Media and the Knight Foundation. It's in its third year, deliberately maintains small – somewhat controversial – attendee list of about 150 "campers," all of which are involved in technology and/or journalism an interesting ways. It was overwhelming and exciting and we feel incredibly grateful have had the opportunity to participate. I...

    Continue Reading

  • 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...

    Continue Reading

subscribe via RSS