Newsletter: Sept. 30, 2015
Last week Hacks/Hackers groups around the world tackled a ton of great topics: developer newsroom culture, chat apps, experimental video approaches, interactive news web apps in Angular and so much more.
On a personal note, it was wonderful to meet some Hacks/Hackers organizers at the Online News Association conference in Los Angeles last week. I hope to find more chances to meet Hacks/Hackers organizers and members face-to-face. Y’all are a good group of folks.
This next week is shaping up to be another great one for Hacks/Hackers, so let’s dive in:
The week ahead for Hacks/Hackers:
- The Portland, Ore., group meets with two members of The Coral Project team to discuss “Rethinking the Conversation” around online commenting.
- In Columbia, Mo., Hacks/Hackers-IRE will be talking about web-scraping in Python.
- Hacks/Hackers Nairobi meets to discuss net neutrality and its importance in the emerging and developing world.
- Four college instructors in New York City will talk about what it’s like to teach data + journalismwhile also working as a journalist.
- In Berlin, the Hacks/Hackers crowd will meet at Zeit Online’s newsroom to hear from Tran Ha,Anh Hoà Truong and Martin Kotynek about the work each of them did while at Stanford.
Group spotlight: Hacks/Hackers London
On Thursday, a sold-out crowd of hacks and hackers gathered at Twitter’s UK offices. Read the tweets from the event to learn more about timesXtwo (a video collaboration from BBC and ABC), see how attendees played around with Firechat (a chat tool that has proven useful in protest situations – or when you want a backchannel to chatter in during a Hacks/Hackers event), and several intriguing lightning pitches. Another option: Check out these live notes taken by Sarah Marshall.
Worth a read:
- Slate is taking steps to reduce its page load time by 75 percent (Joseph Lichterman at Nieman Lab)
- New York Times editor: Data journalism starts with people (Downtown Devil, Phoenix)
- Coral Project’s first product aims to help publishers find their best contributors (Coral Project has participated in Hacks/Hackers events)
- The AP will build out data partnerships with local newsrooms with $400,000 from Knight (Nieman Lab)
- What I Learned Meeting Innovators in East Coast Media (Cindy Royal, co-founder of Hacks/Hackers Austin, for MediaShift)
- Spotify but for the Titanic: A Proposal for the Future of News and Publishing (Zeynep Tufekci)
- The Worcester Sun wants to bootstrap paywalled hyperlocal digital into a Sunday print product(Dan Kennedy for Nieman Lab)
- With its curation product Twitter becomes an editorial beast. Does this beast have a soul? (Jay Rosen)
- Remember Your Old Graphing Calculator? It Still Costs a Fortune — Here’s Why (Jack Smith IV at Mic)
Call to action:
What was your very first experience with Hacks/Hackers? Write up your memory (recent memory or not-so-recent, depending on how long you’ve participated in Hacks/Hackers) or dig up a photo and send it to me, or tweet it at @HacksHackers. I’ll collect some of the responses and include them in next week’s newsletter.
That’s all for now. See you next week!
_Produced by Julia Haslanger
Say hi: @JuliaJRH_
