Nerd Alert 206

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

Paola: How are journalists adapting to the digital age? The International Center for Journalists is conducting a survey to find out and also share findings from the 2017 survey.

Tyler: Most of us probably take A/B testing as a given these days. Researchers at Northeastern University are digging into the ethical implications of our constantly optimized reality.

Ben: From the WordPress Slack's #core-privacy channel I learned this week that Google Fonts keeps all its fonts in a single GitHub repo, allowing you to self-host permissively-licensed fonts.

Kay: There are many important things to consider when designing for mobile that can impact your organization's trustworthiness and revenue.

🤖 Inndy: A museum built by robots, for robots.

SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism/tech peers

Texty published the software and a write-up on how they used machine learning to find "interesting" places in satellite imagery: illegal amber mining in the Ukraine.

For all you ai2html users out there, Vox created and released an Electron/Vue GUI named Vizier to make some of the project management and deployment workflow easier.

Postlight Studios has open-sourced their Mercury web parser, which facilitates extracting article content from web markup.

EVENTS & DEADLINES

Be in the know

February 22: Voting closes on NICAR lightning talks.
February 25-27:  Knight Media Forum in Miami, FL.
February 28: The next biweekly Source Community Call.
March 3: Deadline to apply for a nonprofit fellowship at the 2019 Eyeo Festival.
March 5: Washington post live interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
March 7-9: AEJMC Midwinter Conference in Norman, OK.
March 7-9: NICAR Conference in Newport Beach, CA.
March 8-17: South by Southwest in Austin, TX.
March 15: AAJA's open call for pitches closes.
April 7: Deadline for the Data Journalism Awards.
April 10: Deadline to apply for the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism.

GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

Kaiser Health News is hiring a data reporter.
American Public Media is hiring a digital analytics manager.
Colorado Public Radio is hiring a web developer.
PBS NewsHour is hiring a senior UX designer.
The Texas Tribune is hiring a visuals team developer/designer.
Northeastern University is hiring a data visualization designer and a front-end web developer.
SCPR's Resound project is hiring software engineers in Pasadena, CA and Boston, MA.
NPR is hiring a product manager for voice platforms.
Chicago Public Media is hiring a lead software engineer.
The Markup is hiring several editorial and product roles.

If you're looking for general jobs in nonprofit news, check out the main INN newsletter and sign up here to get it in your inbox every Tuesday. Two INN newsletters are better than one!

DISCOVER

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: Happy Birthday to George Washington. 🎂

DRINK: Margaritas on National Margarita Day. 🍹

EAT: Food to pair with margaritas. 🍛

It's lime time.

Nerd Alert 205

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

Ben: Heather Bryant raises an interesting point in this thread about reimbursements for conference costs: the reimbursement model requires applicants to front the cash. What if there were an organization that gave conference attendees up front funding in exchange for the scholarship's later reimbursement money?

Paola: Save the date! On March 5th at 9 a.m., Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, will join Washington Post columnist David Ignatius and share his views on the rise of disinformation and censorship, threats to digital privacy, and more. This event will be livestreamed through the Washington Post. Get all the event details here!

Tyler: My favorite budding tradition at the NICAR conference is a session spotlighting how small, local newsrooms are doing exceptional work in data journalism, digital storytelling or general news nerdery. Got a project that fits that bill? Submit it here (whether or not you're going to NICAR).

Kay: New research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism confirms what we've known: clicks do not determine the value of an article and there's an opportunity for more personalization.

🤖 Inndy: So long and thanks for all the cool Mars photos, Opportunity.

SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism/tech peers

Congratulations to INN member Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, whose collaborative investigation with Quartz and the Associated Press, Hurricane Maria's Dead, won first place in the 2018 Philip Meyer Awards.

More than 200 student journalists worked in collaboration with media organizations, including the Trace, on the Since Parkland project, which tells the stories of 1200 children killed by gun violence since the Parkland shooting one year ago.

Storybench wrote up a quick summary of interesting projects at the the 2019 Computation + Journalism Symposium, including automated article creation, easy textual analysis, and a look at the media's obsession with social media sources.

EVENTS & DEADLINES

Be in the know

February 20: Deadline to apply to the next Join the Beat community of practice for beat reporters interested in audience engagement.
February 21:
WordPress 5.1 planned release date.
February 25-27:  Knight Media Forum in Miami, FL.
February 27: Two weeks 'til NICAR. Get your flu shot!
February 28: The next biweekly Source Community Call.
March 3: Deadline to apply for a nonprofit fellowship at the 2019 Eyeo Festival.
March 7-9: AEJMC Midwinter Conference in Norman, OK.
March 7-9: NICAR Conference in Newport Beach, CA.
March 8-17: South by Southwest in Austin, TX.
March 15: AAJA's open call for pitches closes.
April 7: Deadline for the Data Journalism Awards.
April 10: Deadline to apply for the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism.

GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

American Public Media is hiring a digital analytics manager.
Colorado Public Radio is hiring a web developer.
NPR is hiring a product manager for voice platforms.
PBS NewsHour is hiring a senior UX designer.
The Texas Tribune is hiring a visuals team developer/designer.
Northeastern University is hiring a data visualization designer and a front-end web developer.
SCPR's Resound project is hiring software engineers in Pasadena, CA and Boston, MA.
Chicago Public Media is hiring a lead software engineer.
The Markup is hiring several editorial and product roles.

If you're looking for general jobs in nonprofit news, check out the main INN newsletter and sign up here to get it in your inbox every Tuesday. Two INN newsletters are better than one!

DISCOVER

Gather ye rosebuds

WATCH: xkcd tv. 📺

EAT: Molten caramel cake. 🍴

DRINK: A pink gin/campari cocktail. 🍷

You're all our Valentines in nerdery.

 

Introducing the New Montana Free Press Website

Montana Free Press screenshot

The Montana Free Press is a digital investigative news outlet covering government, social justice, environmental issues and other beats in the Big Sky State.

Investigative journalist John S. Adams founded the Montana Free Press in 2015 and joined INN shortly thereafter. MTFP has been publishing stories on its own site and with partner organizations in Montana since its debut; this summer, INN Labs joined up with MTFP to migrate the site to the Largo framework.

Our goals for the project were to:

  • give MTFP a streamlined, modern look and feel
  • improve the usability of the site for MTFP editors, media partners, and readers
  • create new and better pathways to raise revenue on the site
  • engage the public and enhance the stories as valuable public resources

Some of our design inspiration came from INN Members (lookin’ at you, The Marshall Project, Mother Jones, and The Texas Tribune) and some from outside of our industry. We wanted big, bold headlines, a thoughtful type hierarchy, and a clean, modern way to highlight MTFP’s stories — both the latest developments and the long-term investigations.

Here's what John had to say:

“The new MontanaFreePress.org website is a huge upgrade, and major turning point for our growing nonprofit news organization. The INN Labs team took the time to understand exactly what our needs are and helped us design a beautiful and more functional website that improves reader experience and readability and gives us the tools we need to strategically grow our audience.”

Out with the old, in with the new

The Montana Free Press homepage, before and after INN Labs redesigned it.

Since MTFP typically publishes longer, analytical and investigative stories rather than quick-hit spot news, we created a fully custom homepage that emphasized their premium content. This gave us a great opportunity to try a different, clean and modern look for the layout.

Benefits of this custom homepage are big visuals for larger screens and ease of navigation on smaller screens. MTFP editors have room for both curated story choices and the most recently published articles.

A fresh and modern story layout

The Montana Free Press homepage, before and after INN Labs redesigned it.
A typical Montana Free Press article, before and after.

Article pages continue the sleek, clean design philosophy. We left out intrusive ads and ineffective sidebars in order to prioritize long reads, with easy-to-read text and large, responsively embedded photos and videos. Behind the scenes, our Largo framework adds tools for media organizations that WordPress lacks out of the box, which helps make it easier to keep content organized by author and category.

We didn't do it alone

The new Montana Free Press site on mobile.Continuing with the “fresh new look” theme, MTFP’s designer Clint McFarlin created a new logo package to launch in concert with the new website and provided direction on layouts. We collaborated with Clint to find colors and typefaces that stood out from the crowd and worked well with the new branding, as well as on the overall layout and design of the new site.

Upwards and onwards

We’re excited to have made the Montana Free Press site easier to use while improving the experience for their readers.

Next, we’ll be helping MTFP implement a new donation process as part of NewsMatch.

Looking for a website refresh of your own or have a digital project you’d like to discuss? Get in touch with us at labs@inn.org or via this form.

Some New Tools for News Orgs from NICAR 2018

Chicago skyline from Lincoln Park

The INN Labs team spent a few days in Chicago for the NICAR conference earlier this month. We came back with plenty of inspiration and a long list of tools for journalism on the web. (Many more links can be found in Chrys Wu's annual NICAR roundup.)

Colors

  • Coolors: a fun generator to help build color schemes
  • ColorBrewer: find accessible color schemes for maps and other data visualizations.
  • Colorsafe: another color and accessibility tool, this time focused on proper contrast.

 

Interactives

 

Transcription

  • Otter.ai: notes for voice conversations.
  • Temi: fast speech to text transcription.
  • Cassette: more transcription and search.

 

Music

  • Amper: an AI composer for soundtrack music.
  • Take: an iOS app for recording and collaborating on musical ideas.
  • Figure: make beats and music on iOS.

 

Social Video and Images

  • This by Tinrocket: annotate images for social media use.
  • Legend: create text-based animations on iOS.
  • Spark Post: fast graphics for social media from Adobe.
  • Quik: create quick and simple videos on mobile devices.

 

Collaboration

  • Styleguides.io: publicly available style guides for code, design and content with plenty of ideas to crib from.
  • Dropmark: visual organization for links and files, like Pinterest meets Google Drive meets Delicious.
  • Mural: digital, virtual whiteboarding tool.