Hacks/Hackers has grown in ways we never predicted. It was just over two years ago that the first event was held at a San Francisco bar. Since then, we’ve expanded across the U.S. and the world, and now have more than 9,500 members in Meetups across four continents.
We’ve long sought to bring everyone together and enable journalists and technologists to connect regardless of their geographic location. We also want to make sure Hacks/Hackers survives as a sustainable movement long into the future.
[View the story “The “Awesomest Journalism Party” Leaves its Marq” on Storify]
This is a guest post that also appeared on Oct. 15 on ProPublica’s blog at http://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-use-mechanical-turk-to-do-data-driven-reporting-and-how-you-can-too by Amanda Michel ProPublica
Of all of journalism’s recent evolutions, data-driven reporting is one of the most celebrated. But as much as we should toast data’s powers, we must acknowledge its cost: Assembling even a small dataset can require hours of tedious work, deterring even the most disciplined of journalists and their editors.
Fortunately, there’s an affordable — and amazing — tool that can make the impossible easy: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk).
Hacks/Hackers is hosting a hackathon in conjunction with the annual Online News Association conference that is being held Oct. 28-30 this year in Washington DC. We’re calling it Hacks/Hackers/Hacking.
With all the journalistic and Web talent gathered in one place, this will be an amazing chance for people to work together aside from the usual newsroom rush. We also want to draw people from across the DC technology and media community.
We’re delighted to announce that freelance journalist Corey Takahashi is the winner of the Hacks/Hackers scholarship to Poynter’s workshop on programming for journalists / journalism for programming.
Based in Los Angeles, Corey is planning to apply the digital skills from the Poynter workshop to revisit demographic trends that he wrote about during the 2000 Census through a data-focused lens. As part of his trip, Corey also will create a video reflecting on what he learns at the workshop and lessons from bringing together the cultures of journalism and programming — and we’ll be sure to post that here.