Hacks/Hackers returns from NICAR, Boston takes the plate for a baseball hackathon
Happy Friday, hacks and hackers, and I hope those among you who went to NICAR last week are catching up admirably.
The week ahead:
- Boston is holding a Baseball Hack Day, their fifth annual hackathon for baseball-related projects
- Brisbane s holding a showcase for projects by its own members, as well as special guest Lydia Byrne, a graphic illustrator
- Montreal is hosting an informational talk on the dark web, the deep web, and internet security for journalists
- Hacks/Hacker IRE is holding its regular weekly lab
Group spotlight:
The Philadelphia group had some members at NICAR last week, and invited them back to share some of the tips and tricks they’d picked up. Olivia Hall from PMN, Rachelle Faroul from the Rutgers Coding Bootcamp and other shared some of the presentations they found most helpful, including how to make “snackable and shareable” dataviz projects.
Worth a read:
- NPR announced it would no longer promote its podcasts on air (Nieman Lab)
- Marty Baron, real-life star of the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight, says theloss of public trust is journalism’s greatest challenge right now (World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers)
- Dropbox, which is, according to this Wired writer, “a sweeping network of machines whose evolution epitomizes the forces that have transformed the heart of the Internet over the past decade,” has shifted away from storing files in Amazon’s cloud and onto its own servers (Wired)
- The Coral Project released an open-source tool for making comments more manageable (Nieman Lab)
- The American Press Institute released a report on how more old-fashioned newsrooms can start using data (API)
Job openings:
- Buzzfeed is taking applications for its Open Lab Fellowship until May 1
- The Deseret News in Salt Lake City, Utah, is looking for a UX designer
- WUNC, an NPR member station in North Carolina, is hiring a data reporter
- The International Center for Journalists is taking applications for a reporting fellowship in Kazakhstan
- Bloomberg is hiring an economy reporter in Johannesburg, South Africa
Call to action:
Let’s share the best tools we’ve got in our toolkits. It can be an app, a website, or even just a technique that’s netted you some success. Tweet at us at #hackshackers and we’ll share!
