August 6, 2014 at 7:45am
Have a Good Idea to Improve Journalism? Come Be The Guardian’s 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellow
The Guardian has a long history of digital innovation, from the MP expenses project through NSA Files Decoded. With Janine Gibson returning to London after three years running the US operation, the Guardian is poised for even greater things in 2015. That’s one of the reasons I choose to to make the jump after nine years at The New York Times.
This will be the Guardian’s (and my) third year as part of the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship, and it is by far the most open in terms of the sort of person we are looking for. Whether your specialty is data science or data visualization, we will find a way to make your time here meaningful – for you, for us and, ideally, for journalism as a whole.
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August 8, 2013 at 5:33pm
From Documents to Data: Help Build a Toolkit for the Rest of Us
From Tesseract to Tabula, there are dozens of open-source software libraries designed to help users work with unstructured data – or what non-nerds might call documents.
Web-based services like DocumentCloud, Open Calais and Overview have solved a few of the most common problems journalists face, but there is still a big hole to fill.
That’s the challenge our Knight/Mozilla fellow will tackle.
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May 10, 2013 at 9:31am
Why Design Matters: If Snow Fall Were Published in a Standard Template
I am in beautiful Bergen, Norway, this week for the Nordic Media Festival. I gave a talk this morning on digital storytelling and, of course, everyone wanted to talk about Snow Fall.
As part of the presentation – and to drive home my point about design – I mocked up what Snow Fall might have been had our brilliant design, graphics and video teams not taken this project on.
Since a couple people asked for it, I decided to post the images here.
Doesn’t really grab you like the actual piece, does it?
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May 1, 2013 at 6:39am
Thank you Matt Langer
Matt’s joining Interactive News next week, and completely unrelated to that I decided I needed to change my poor, neglected Tumblr theme. Imagine my surprise when I noticed who built the theme I ultimately picked. It’s fate.
July 25, 2012 at 2:30pm
Finding the Right Metric for News
The project our Knight-Mozilla fellow will help tackle was hatched in January during a bus ride to the Austin airport with news brainiac (and karaokaholic) Greg Linch.
He had just written a terrific post on his blog, The Linchpen, about the need for more sophisticated metrics to measure the success or failure of journalism online. I’d been thinking about the same problem, but Greg crystalized the challenge and the opportunity perfectly.
In his words: “So, what if we measured journalism by its impact?”
It sounded to both of us to be an ideal project for someone to sink his or her teeth into. After all, the benchmarks we use now are so ill suited. They are the simplistic, one-dimensional metrics we all know: pageviews, time on site, uniques. We use them largely because they are there and because they are easy – even though we all know they’re a lousy way to measure impact.
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April 22, 2012 at 7:07pm
Moved this to Tumblr
Sure it was fun, but I got sick and bloody tired of managing my own blog platform, so I moved this to Tumblr. We’ll see how it goes.