Election year for Hacks/Hackers across the world
Greetings, hacks and hackers. This is turning out to be an election year in more way than one, with referendums rocking Europe, attempted government changes erupting in Turkey and campaigns turning out high drama in the United States. London and Paris have both held meetups on polling data for their respective elections, and many other groups will probably follow suit before the year is out.
The week ahead:
- Miami and IRE are holding their regular weekly open labs
- New York is meeting to talk about using simulation games for news
- London is holding its July meetup at Twitter HQ
- Berlin is tackling a couple topics including crowdsourcing
Group spotlight:
Last month, Paris held a session on polling data, prepping for an upcoming election. Datagif, a consulting agency, presented some ideas on recycling tools from American outlets for the French election. Alexandre Lechenet, one of the organizers, said they tried to focus on the real, rather than innovation for innovation’s sake.
“For each session, we advice the speaker to focus on something they did rather than something they plan to do. That gives us the opportunity to talk about concrete material.”
Worth a read:
- The New York Times’s new public editor published her first piece, advising reporters and editors to listen to readers and actually act on the feedback they receive (NYTimes)
- Publishers are trying to churn out as much as video as possible, and turning to automation to help them out (NYTimes)
- Facebook Live has rocketed to prominence in the short time since it was introduced, and Poynter is staying ahead of the curve with a guide to using it for news (Poynter)
- Hacks/Hackers’ own Phillip Smith published a list of the most innovative media outlets in Canada (Medium)
Job openings:
- North America:
- The Miami Herald is hiring a digital news developer
- Voice of America is looking for an audience engagement coordinator who is fluent in Urdu
- Storyful, a social media startup, is hiring a viral video journalist
- Reuters is hiring a senior product manager for customer experience-related projects
- Europe:
- Computer Business Review is seeking a journalism intern for its website
- Voice of Norway is hiring a designer and audio engineer for an Arabic-language broadcast
- The UN has an opening for a data analyst in Geneva
Other upcoming events:
- July 28-29 – Portland, Oregon, USA – SRC CON, a Mozilla conference for journalist coders
- Aug 25-27 – Buenos Aires, Argentina – Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires media party
- Sept 15-17 – Denver, USA – Online News Association (ONA) annual conference
- Sept 17-20 – New Orleans, USA – Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism conference
- Sept 20-22 – Jakarta, Indonesia – Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD)
- Sept. 22 – New York, USA – NYC Media Lab Annual Summit, for executives, academics and startups to convene around future of media
- (Hacks/Hackers community members can register with a 25% off discount code: HACKSHACKER)
- Sept 23-24 – Toronto, Canada – Hacks/Hackers Connect Toronto
- Sept 23-25 – Kathmandu, Nepal – Asian Investigative Journalism Conference
- Sept 29-Oct 1 – Miami, USA – Digital Humanities + Data Journalism Symposium
