Hacks/Hackers cover tragedies, humanitarian issues
Welcome to the weekend, hacks and hackers. The media world, and the rest of the world, was rocked by news of the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. Poynter wrote an article on how the Orlando Sentinel, which has had two-thirds of its staff cut over the years, covered one of the most intense and devastating events in its history. The New York Times made an animated presentation of how its design and publication of the news changed as the story evolved.
Conference season is firing along, with many journos and news hackers at the IRE conference in hot and humid New Orleans. (If you’re there, please say hi to our newsletter writer!)
The week ahead:
- London is taking on the EU referendum debate with the head of political polling at YouGov
- Miami is holding OpenHack Miami
- IRE in mid-Missouri is holding its regular open lab
Group spotlight:
Nairobi held a Hack4Humanity to coincide with the World Humanitarian Summit earlier this month. The 24-hour hackathon featured speakers from media, startups and government on how African media projects can intersect with the humanitarian community there.
“This will not be the last event of this kind as we continue working towards building and empowering a community of citizen data users in East Africa,” Moses Sitati wrote in a roundup.
Worth a read:
- A NYT editor with 35,000 followers is boycotting Twitter because they don’t monitor hate speech (NYTimes)
- The average American downloads zero apps per month, which led Re/code to declaire the “app boom is over” (Recode)
- Arianna Huffington is planning a new media startup to focus on health and wellness (Bloomberg)
- The Guardian is experimenting with automated push alerts to notify audiences of breaking news (Nieman Lab)
Job openings:
- North America:
- The International Business Times is seeking students or recent grads for a data fellowhip
- First Look Media has openings for both a frontend and backend engineer
- New York Magazine is hiring a UX designer
- Asia:
- CNN is hiring a social publishing producer in Hong Kong
- Internews is looking to fill several positions in central Asia
- Europe:
- Politico is looking for an economics reporter to be based in Frankfurt
Other events coming up:
- June 16-19 – New Orleans, USA – Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference
- June 17-18 – Berlin, Germany – Popathon, a media hackathon
- July 28-29 – Portland, Oregon, USA – SRC CON, a Mozilla conference for journalist coders
- July 29-31 – Atlanta, USA – Women Who Code hackathon
