Google recently announced Chrome's plans to participate in The Coalition for Better Ads' Better Ads Experience Program and support the Better Ads Standards. Sites are currently being reviewed for any violations of these standards. Continue reading "Chrome to uphold ‘Better Ads Standards:’ What this means for your site"
We're so excited to welcome Tyler Machado to the INN Labs team as our front-end developer.
Tyler Machado is a web developer based in Boston, MA, and working at the intersection of technology, journalism, and visual storytelling. Tyler previously worked as the editorial developer for Harvard Business Review, where he built interactive graphics and helped start HBR’s chatbot presence on Slack and Facebook Messenger. Before that he worked on web development, social media and email newsletters at the Vermont newsweekly Seven Days. He’s led sessions at SRCCON, Cascade BOS, and Boston University's Storytelling With Data Workshops, and he's won awards from Folio: Magazine and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia.
Tyler recently received a certificate in data science from Harvard University. He holds a B.A. in journalism from Saint Michael's College, where he won the John D. Donoghue Award for outstanding service to student publications. He has done volunteer work with the DIY arts website Boston Hassle, as well as the Code For America and Girl Develop It groups in Burlington, VT.
At INN, Tyler will be the front-end lead on our team, working on a mix of INN Labs tools and client projects, and contributing to our mission of building open source software that serves independent and nonprofit publishers.
Tyler starts full time with us on February 5, and we're thrilled to have him on board!
The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), a network of 140+ nonprofit news organizations, has an immediate opening for a part-time account manager with INN Labs, our product and technology team.
INN Labs focuses on solving problems that we're uniquely suited to tackle at a network level, such as:
Read about our team values and learn more about us on labs.inn.org.
As account manager for INN Labs, you’ll be building strong relationships with the expanding number of news organizations powered by WordPress. And you’ll be growing INN’s portfolio of news technology accounts.
INN Labs operates as a mission-driven social enterprise, providing subsidized news technology and open source publishing tools to news organizations as part of its mission to support and expand public service journalism.
You’ll own our customer relationships, making sure members and other clients are well-served, that they know how INN Labs can help them and understand the news products we build. You’ll grow the revenue stream from this work, which helps cover nonprofits’ costs and supports INN’s continued public service work. You’ll provide continual feedback and intelligence on customer needs to the product team.
The ideal candidate for this position is an outgoing professional who knows the technology needs of news organizations and can increase the scope and impact of INN’s design and development work. You’ll introduce INN Labs’ work to nonprofit and independent news startups and serve as client liaison for enterprise-level partners such as NPR, publishing groups, university innovation labs and other journalism initiatives.
Ultimately, you should be able to grow INN Labs' business and its mission impact by building successful, long-term partnerships from our membership base and beyond.
Key Responsibilities:
Skills and Qualifications:
Nice to have:
We are a distributed team and this is a remote, salaried position with some benefits. Previous experience working remotely would be helpful but we'll do whatever we can to help and support your transition if this is your first remote job.
INN is an equal-opportunity employer, and we are committed to creating a workplace where diversity is valued. People of color, women, and members of other under-represented groups in journalism, media, and technology are strongly encouraged to apply. In addition to federal law requirements, INN complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities.
Please read this post about our application and interview process and then send your resumé and cover letter to julia+jobs@inn.org.
As part of INN's support for the 2017 News Match campaign, we've released two WordPress plugins to help sites convert readers. News Match Donation Shortcode provides a donation form for your site to ease donations through the News Revenue Hub as part of the News Match campaign.
Prefer a video walkthrough? Watch this tutorial on youtube.
On your WordPress site, click on "Plugins" in the Dashboard menu. If you see an "Add New" button at the top of the page, click that.
If you don't see the "Add New" button or the "Plugins" menu, your user might not have permission to manage plugins on the site; you should contact your technical support and ask them to install News Match Donation Shortcode for you. Your site might require downloading the plugin ZIPs and uploading them via FTP instead of using WordPress' built-in plugin installation tools.
The plugin's settings are at Settings > News Match Shortcode in the WordPress admin.
When you first enable the plugin, you'll want to configure it with your organization's name, your News Revenue Hub ID, the default donation amount, and the live and staging URLs of your News Revenue Hub form.
The settings is where you configure the donation levels to match your organization's membership levels. While the plugin comes with 4 default donation levels, you can easily define your own labels and donation levels. The defaults are: $0-$5 Friend, $5-$50 Ally, $50-$500 Champion, and $500+ Ambassador. If you want fewer donation levels, set the third level's upper donation amount to a very high amount, such as your org's dream budget, and make sure that the fourth level is more than that.
If you use Salesforce to track campaigns, you can set a default Salesforce campaign ID for the plugin in the plugin's settings. This can be overridden on a per-form basis by setting the sf_campaign_id attribute of the shortcode, like so: [newsmatch_donation_form sf_campaign_id="foo" amount="25"]
The default form of the shortcode uses buttons to select the donation level:
[newsmatch_donation_form]type="select" to the shortcode, it appears like this:
[newsmatch_donation_form type="select"]
The above screenshots use the plugin's default styles with non-default configuration. You can style the donation form using your site's theme's CSS, Jetpack’s Custom CSS Editor, or any other tool that allows you to define custom styles on your site. Guidance for these custom styles can be found in the FAQ section of the plugin's WordPress.org entry.
If you have questions about this plugin and integrating it with your WordPress site, contact support@inn.org.
If you have questions about the News Revenue Hub, visit their contact page.
If you have questions about the News Match program, visit their website for donor, nonprofit and funding partner information.
This week we released two new WordPress plugins to support our members' News Match fundraising campaigns. Next week we will be hosting a webinar, WordPress Tools for your News Match Campaign, to demo the plugins and share some technical best practices for year-end fundraising. Continue reading "Plugin Releases: Two new News Match plugins are ready for action"
News Match is back! The team at INN Labs is gearing up to help participating organizations take advantage of this unique and impactful opportunity.
Continue reading "News Match is here, and we’re here to help"
https://wordpress.org/plugins/storytelling-tools/
If you're not familiar with them already, The Knight Lab at Northwestern University has built some great storytelling & visualization tools for journalists, all of which are freely available on their website.
Knight Lab Storytelling Tools
You may have already seen some of these tools in action as a reader and not realized what they were. Their Timeline, StoryMap, Juxtapose, and Soundcite tools have been featured in Time, The Washington Post, ESPN, and ProPublica, to name a few.
Even better, the Knight Lab has taken steps to make it as easy as possible for anyone to build these visualizations and embed them on their site. Each tool has its own page on the Knight Lab site that contains either a wizard to guide you through building the visualization or detailed information and examples on how to do it yourself (in the case of Soundcite).
Why We Built The Plugin
When you use the online wizard to build one of these tools, you'll get a few different options to embed the finished product on your website. If you're publishing on Medium, you'll receive a link you can just paste into your editor. If you're using WordPress or another platform, there's some iframe code you can add to your editor. For Soundcite, there are some rather detailed instructions for WordPress users, because you need to include the Soundcite JavaScript file that builds the players.
For non-technical users, relying on code to embed these tools can be difficult, and even prevent people from using these tools. We saw an opportunity here to add first-party support for these tools in WordPress, allowing for the same automatic embeds as Medium and a shortcode for Soundcite. Now, anyone can begin using these tools in WordPress without any coding skills!
More Info
By this point, you're probably thinking, "WOW, where can I get this plugin to start using it myself?!?"
You're in luck - it is freely available on https://wordpress.org/plugins/storytelling-tools/ or you can install from the comfort of your own website's plugin section. At that link, you'll also find detailed information about each of the tools and how to use them on your site.
If you have any questions or suggestions, you can always contact us via email, open a ticket on Github, or leave a note for us in the WordPress.org forums. We look forward to hearing from you!
Over the past few months, we've been soliciting feedback about Largo from members and the broader journalism-tech community – how they use it, what they like about, and, most importantly, what we can do to make it better. Continue reading "Reimagining Largo"
The security and performance of our hosted member sites is one of the most important tasks we handle on the INN Product & Technology Team. Our members rely on us to keep their sites secure and accessible so they can focus their efforts on the important journalistic work they're doing.
This week we're beginning a rollout of SSL certificates and 2 Factor Authentication for all hosted members sites. SSL provides encrypted connections to websites, is increasingly becoming the de facto standard for the web, and Google has indicated it will increasingly be viewed as a ranking factor in search. Enabling SSL will mean that all pages will be accessed using https:// at the beginning of the URL (and don't worry, we'll redirect any non-SSL URLs to the safe SSL version).
Two-Factor Authentication is an additional security step we are also making available in the coming months to our hosted sites through Google Authenticator. This will allow you to add additional authentication to your account by using your phone or another app to verify your identity when you log in. We're currently testing integrations of this and will provide public documentation for using this feature once we begin rolling it out on our hosted sites.
If you're a member with an INN-hosted site, there aren't any actions you need to take to enable these features. INN's tech team will be implementing these infrastructure improvements on a rolling basis, and we'll continue to communicate any updates or changes that may affect your site before they occur. If you have any questions, you can always find answers and reach out to us through our support portal.