Happy Memorial Day, y'all!
Hot Links
What we're reading this week
Adam: Aaron Williams, a developer at the Center for Investigative Reporting, has a great roundup of open source tools for expediting news graphics, including a walk through of the workflow they use at CIR.
Ben: North by Northwestern’s Housing Guide is a guide to the dorms at Northwestern University, run by the campus independent newspaper. It’s updated by students, but the best thing about it is that North by Northwestern put the code behind it on GitHub, for any and all campus media to learn from.
Dani: With most online technical guides aimed at the hard sciences, theProgramming Historian compiles technical resources for people in the social sciences and could be a good starting guide for journalists and news teams.
David: Medium is adapting to become less of a blog network and more of a network like Twitter. New tools launched by Medium lower the barrier to participation, but Mathew Ingram explores how this could further dilute the culture Medium worked so hard to establish.
Kaeti: This discussion of when and how to use relative vs. absolute timestamps will be of particular interest to the many publishers we work with.
Nick: What will happen when the 3.5 million human truck drivers in the US are replaced by robots?
Ryan: Royal Society Open Science published a study from a group of researchers in London charting the evolution of popular music. With their algorithm, they determined that pop music of the 1980s "became most homogenous period in music over the last 50 years" and rap and hip-hop "kicked off the most recent surge in musical diversity" in the early 90s. Read the full study here.
Will: Nieman Lab published a letter sent to Quartz staff calling the platform, among other things, "an API." Similar arguments have been made calling BuzzFeed a "tech company." I think there’s a lot to gain from looking at media from this perspective.
Bert: Cleaning up California's Coast.
We made a thing
What we're reading this week
New and improved documentation! Ben and Ryan attended a Write the Docs conference early this week making significant progress to our documentation framework.
Shout Out
Work we admire by our journalism peers
A shout out to the other projects that joined us this past week for OpenNews code convening in Portland. Thanks for the support and inspiration. Working alongside you was great fun.
Some other stuff
Gather ye rosebuds
LISTEN: Through NPR’s full archive of First Listen programs.
COOK: Coconut Cream Pie. Mmm.
WATCH: How to keep your dog amused.
GIF: Have a great Memorial Day!
