Hacks/Hackers global call tomorrow

Welcome to September, hacks and hackers, and happy Labor Day to those laboring in the U.S. Tomorrow we’ll be holding our monthly global call at 1500 GMT. Please join in!

The week ahead:

• New York is featuring new journalism endeavors on its eighth Demo Day
• Miami is holding its regular OpenHack Miami
• IRE in Missouri is holding its weekly meeting
• It’s another #HacktheConstitution day in Johannesburg

Group spotlight:

Rosario, a group in Argentina, hopped on the Media Party train last week to present a series of lightning talks on search engine hacks. It was a follow-up to a session they had on search engines last month. Mauricio Viola, the organizer, said search engines are a topic that any group could take on, as long as they tailor it to their communities.

“For example, in Rosario, our city, journalists who investigate drug trafficking have very few tools and need programmers, data journalists and search specialists or search engines that help them find information that’s journalistically and investigatively valuable.”

Viola said the Rosario group hopes to help replicate these search engine hacking events in different locations around the world.

Worth a read:

• Reported.ly, an experimental social media and news verification site, is shutting down due to loss of funding from its parent company, a media startup (Reported.ly)
• The Texas Tribune, another media startup, successfully crowdfunded its reporting on police shootings in Texas (Beacon)
• There are dozens of platforms for news to be published on, these days, and one of them is Alexa, Amazon’s conversation robot (Nieman Lab)
• Jerry Mitchell, a famed reporter in Mississippi, shared some tips for investigating cold cases, including gathering handwritten documents and digitizing them (Poynter)

Job openings:

• Anywhere:
• ICFJ is hiring a data mining expert and data viz developer for an 18-month project
• North America:
• The Center for Responsive Politics (i.e., OpenSecrets) is hiring a full-stack developer
• New York Media is looking for someone to join its interactive team
• The WSJ is hiring a graphics reporter based in New York
• Wired magazine is hiring a software engineer in San Francisco
• Europe:
• i, a new media startup in London, is looking for a tech correspondent and other positions

Other upcoming events:

• September:
• Sept 8-10 – Buenos Aires, Argentina – Media Chicas, a hackathon and other events for women in LatAm digital media
• Sept 15-17 – Denver, USA – Online News Association (ONA)’s 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 28-29 – Chicago, USA – INN workshop on Tech and Product Design for News Leaders
• Sept 29-Oct 1 – Miami, USA – Digital Humanities + Data Journalism Symposium
• Sept 29-Oct 1 – Chicago, USA – Local indie online news publishers are gathering for the LION summit
• Sept 30-Oct 1 – Palo Alto, USA – Computation + Journalism Symposium
• October:
• Oct 7-9 – New York, USA – Future of Storytelling Festival
• Oct 17-17 – Vitoria, Brazil – Brazilian Conference of Citizen Media
• Oct 25-27 – Casablanca, Morrocco – d|bootcamp, a three-day workshop on civic hacking