Hacks and Hackers turn out in force at NICAR

Happy NICAR to the lucky hacks and hackers here in Denver, and happy Friday to everyone else! If you’re not at the conference but would still like to grab the tipsheets and tutorials, I’d suggest Melody Kramer’s tips for finding the most popular tweets circulating on the #NICAR16 hashtag.

The week ahead:

• Philadelphia is bringing delicious NICAR knowledge to a hometown session
• Boston is hosting a workshop on making livestreams with Deepstream.tv
• Toronto is keeping the conversation bubbling at its monthly Pub Night
• IRE’s weekly lab is open in Columbia, Missouri
• Miami is also holding an OpenHack for anyone at MIT

A huge round of applause for Pete MacRobert, co-organizer of H/H London, who created a calendar for ALL the Hacks/Hackers events around the world. Go here to add it to your calendar.

Group spotlight:

The Hacks/Hackers group in Colorado hosted a welcoming party for those in Denver. Abigail Edge, who recently rebooted the chapter, said she wanted to use NICAR to introduce people to Hacks/Hackers and other journalists in a fun environment.

“With regards to the sponsors, Tableau actually reached out to me. I’d also posted at the end of (an earlier) meetup event that I was looking for sponsors, and Knight Lab got in touch and said that they would like to sponsor. So two weeks before the event, we actually didn’t have a sponsor, but we were still going to do it anyway. And then within the last two weeks, Knight Lab and Tableau both came forward and offered to sponsor some drinks. It’s nice to see so many people enjoying one of my favorite breweries in Denver, just having a really good night and getting to know each other.”

Worth a read:

• The Dallas Morning News is finding that committing to being a fully web-first publication might mean starting from square one (Poynter)
• FiveThirtyEight uncovered a devious world of plagiarism, programming, web scraping and crossword puzzles (FiveThirtyEight)
• The Columbia Journalism Review took a look at the slow transition of control from publishers to Facebook in the dramatically headlined“Facebook is Eating the World” (CJR)
• A New York Times article reached tens of thousands of people before the NYT denounced it as a fake. First Draft News shared some tips for spotting news hoaxes (First Draft News)

Job postings:

• The Knight Lab at Northwestern University is hiring two new developers
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is looking for a news app developer
• The Tampa Bay Times is looking for both a designer and an enterprise data reporter
• The Guardian US is seeking an editor for its interactive team
• The Daily Vox in South Africa is looking for an editor, a staff writer and interns
• Bloomberg is hiring a reporter in London
• Stars and Stripes is looking for a design editor in Tokyo

Call to action:

For those of us not at NICAR, what is the best tutorial or tipsheet you’ve ever come across? It can be a Python walkthrough, or an Excel video, or even just an essay on good reporting tips. Send it to us at #hackshackers and we’ll spread the knowledge.

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