About

Technologists and journalists are coming together as reporting goes digital and Internet companies become media empires. Journalists sometimes call themselves “hacks,” a tongue-in-cheek term for someone who can churn out words in any situation. Hackers use the digital equivalent of duct tape to whip out code. Hacks/Hackers tries to bridge those two worlds. It’s for hackers exploring technologies to filter, visualize and distribute information, and for hacks who use technology to find and tell stories. Hacks/Hackers is a digital community of people who seek to inspire each other, share information (and code) and collaborate to invent the future of media and journalism.

The roots of Hacks/Hackers were planted in 2009, based on the interests of three people interested in the intersection of journalism and technology.

In Massachusetts, at a conference organized by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Aron Pilhofer of The New York Times and Rich Gordon from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, proposed creating “a network of people interested in Web/digital application development and technology innovation supporting the mission and goals of journalism.” Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, Burt Herman, a former AP foreign correspondent fresh from a Knight journalism fellowship at Stanford University, launched a group bringing the journalism and technology communities together at casual face-to-face gatherings to trade ideas and find potential collaborators.

From opposite sides of the country, we coincidentally both hit on the name of “Hacks and Hackers” as a way to symbolize what the group was about. The terms conveyed the grassroots spirit of the community we wanted to build both online and off, made up of the people doing the real work on the ground.

Now the three of us have combined forces to build the Hacks/Hackers community. We welcome your participation and suggestions.

This group is to bring all these people together — those who are working to help people make sense of their world. It’s for hackers exploring technologies to filter and visualize information, and for journalists who use technology to find and tell stories. In the age of information overload, all their work has become even more crucial.

We aim to help members find inspiration and think in new directions, bringing together potential collaborators for projects and new ventures.

Who are we?

Rich Gordon is associate professor and director of digital innovation at the Medill School of Journalism, where he launched the school’s graduate program in new media journalism. He has spent most of his career exploring the areas where journalism and technology intersect. As a reporter and editor, he was an early adopter of technological tools to analyze data for journalistic purposes. At The Miami Herald, he was among the first generation of journalists to lead online publishing efforts at newspapers. At Medill, he has developed courses through which students have explored digital content and communities and developed new forms of storytelling taking advantage of interactive media. He has also served as director of new communities for the Northwestern Media Management Center, where he researched the impact of online communities on journalism and publishing. In 2007, Rich won a Knight News Challenge grant allowing Medill to offer full scholarships for journalism master’s degrees to people with computer programming experience.

Burt Herman is a journalist and entrepreneur exploring the intersection of journalism and technology from his base in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was a Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University from 2008-9, where he researched entrepreneurship, innovation and design at the university’s Institute for Design and Graduate School of Business. Before Stanford, Burt roamed the globe for a dozen years as a bureau chief and correspondent for The Associated Press and has written stories from Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia and the Middle East along with the U.S. He covered the war in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, and later moved to Central Asia where he founded a new AP bureau in charge of the five former Soviet republics in the region. His latest overseas posting was Korea bureau chief, where he supervised coverage of North Korea and implemented creative uses of technology to help report on the isolated regime.

Aron Pilhofer is editor of Interactive News Technologies at The New York Times, overseeing a news-focused team of journalist/developers who build dynamic, data-driven applications to enhance The Times’ reporting online. He also is co-founder of DocumentCloud, Knight Foundation-funded organization designed to improve journalism by making original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on. He joined The Times in 2005 as a projects editor on the paper’s newly expanded computer-assisted reporting team, where he specialized in stories related to money, politics and influence for the politics desk and Washington bureau. Prior to that, Pilhofer was database editor at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, where he began an ongoing project in 2002 to track a new form of political non-profit organization. The Center’s reporting was among the first to highlight the hole in campaign finance regulations that allows these groups to pump hundreds of millions into elections. Earlier, Pilhofer was on the national training staff of Investigative Reporters and Editors and worked for a number of years as a statehouse and projects reporter for Gannett newspapers in New Jersey and Delaware.