Newsletter: Oct. 21, 2015

Happy Wednesday. Hacks/Hackers Austin celebrated its 5th birthday last night with cake, tacos and an event on media innovation. Cheers to another 5 years!

The week ahead for Hacks/Hackers:

• The Miami Hacks/Hackers group holds a Q&A with the founders of the media startup The New Tropic.
• In Vancouver, the local group is meeting up for a social event, to commiserate about the seasons changing (and relax now that the national election is complete). http://www.meetup.com/HacksHackersVancouver/events/225856238/
• In Los Angeles, a group of Hacks/Hackers are getting together to plan promotion and recruiting for their next event, and to discuss the ‘Follow the 990 Money’ project.
• Also in California, the San Francisco Hacks/Hackers is meeting at Stanford University to chat about computational journalism with folks from CIR, Vocativ and SmartNews.
• The Barcelona group gathers to discuss election data.
• In Montréal, they’ll be learning about Crypto 101 – Secure communication for journalists – including understanding encryption and tools to use for protection from government surveillance.
• In Venice, member Carlo Felice Dalla Pasqua shares what he learned while at the Online News Association conference. (This was rescheduled from a few weeks ago due to bad weather.)
• Hacks/Hackers Helsinki is holding an event around the refugee crisis. Other groups are also hosting events on that topic in the next few weeks, including Amsterdam.

Group spotlight: Hacks/Hackers Dublin

Last night, the Dublin group packed a room at RTE to hear about data-driven investigations. Discussion ranged from FOI data quality to using D3 to how data stories can drive traffic and lead the front page. Two very different projects highlighted during the event: Seeking Asylum in Ireland (RTE Investigations Unit) and Ireland’s Cheapest Pints (Irish Mirror). For more from the event, here’s a Storify.

Worth a read:

(Note: If you have a link to suggest for this section, tweet it with #HHreads)

• The Future of News is Not an Article (Alexis Lloyd, NYTLabs)
• New York Times enters the world of virtual reality with Google partnership (Fortune)
• What it means to be a mobile editor (Nieman Lab)
• Robot reporter Wordsmith begins its advance (Capital New York)
• Facebook announces next wave of publishers to join Instant Articles (Poynter)

Call to action:

A quick survey to help Hacks/Hackers find ways to help you do your hackish and hackerish things with your local group:

• What would you like to see on the Hacks/Hackers website? (3 question survey)

See you next week.

Produced by Julia Haslanger. Say hi: @JuliaJRH.