Category: Announcements

Welcome Our Newest Team Member – Nick Bennett

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

nick-bennettWe're excited to welcome the newest addition to our team, Nick Bennett.

Nick comes from being Hoy Chicago's first News Application Developer, where he led their site migration, developed a custom WordPress theme and plugins, and trained and supported the newsroom staff. Before that he spent 11 years helping people improve their relationship with technology by providing full service technical support at Kellogg School of Management.

Nick's duties as a News Applications Developer at INN include working on Largo, INN's WordPress framework for member sites and contributing to internal products and editorial projects for our members and clients.

He's also passionate about teaching and learning and we're excited to have him around to continue to improve our documentation and help our members and clients to use the products we build.

His first day on the job is Monday, March 9.

Make him feel welcome by dropping him an email at nick@inn.org or on Twitter: @yoyoohrho.

Welcome Our New Support Specialist: Meredith Melragon

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

As a team we believe very strongly that our mission is not just to build great products but also to focus on educating and empowering the users of these products at INN member organizations and beyond.

To that end, we've decided to invest more of our time, energy and resources in creating comprehensive documentation for the products we build, a more robust support infrastructure to help users with problems they may run into and training resources to help our members to level up their technology skills.

1930807_1052929756159_4892_nTo help us with this undertaking, today we're very excited to welcome our newest team member, Meredith Melragon.

Meredith joins INN from a variety of professional development roles focused on educational technology, including serving as the director of implementation for a software company. Across topics and settings she has designed, developed and delivered training sessions for a wide audience. Her consistent focus on customer service and developing meaningful learning experiences has enabled users to adopt tools and integrate them into their work, inspiring them to imagine new possibilities.

In her role as a contract support specialist at INN, her responsibilities will include managing our support workflow and developing documentation and training systems to help users and leaders implement the tools we build.

Her “b-side” is music. She has also served as the senior editor of a music magazine and an arts administrator for a non-profit music festival.

You can find her on Twitter @meredithm or say hi by email at meredith@inn.org.

Please help me to welcome her to the team!

Free Ideas! Announcing Our New Open Office Hours

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

IMPORTANT! We have made some changes to the schedule and format of our office hours (starting in June 2015), they are now held every Friday from 2-3 pm ET. More details here.

We're a small team juggling a lot of projects. There's not always much time to answer questions (particularly those not directly related to the products we build and support) or to give thoughtful feedback on projects that people bring to us.

But we want to be accessible, approachable and create an opportunity for INN members (and members of the journalism and tech community at large) to ask us about any tech-related issues they may have or to get feedback on their projects.

So we're going to start setting aside some dedicated time every month as a team to do just that.

Starting next month we will hold open office hours on the first Thursday of the month from 3-5 p.m. CT. For now we're going to do this once a month, but we might do them more frequently if there's sufficient demand.

Here's how it's going to work:

Anyone can sign up for a 30-minute block to meet with our entire team and get feedback on tech-related issues you might be facing (new project ideas, critique of works in progress, general tech/strategy/design questions, etc.). You can sign up for a longer block of time if you clear it with us in advance.

Here's the signup sheet.

INN members will get priority but, if space is available, we'll open the signups to any organization or individual on the Monday before each month's hangout. If we're already booked, you can put yourself on the waitlist and we'll let you know if a spot becomes available.

Since we're a remote team, these will be Zoom.us video calls (the persistent link for this call is right here). (This used to be a Google Hangout; we changed it in July 2016)

The default for these hangouts will be public because we think sharing ideas in the open helps everyone learn and improve but if you want to keep the conversation just between us, indicate that on the signup sheet and we'll set up a separate, private hangout.

If you have any questions or suggestions for us on how to make these office hours work best for you and your organization, email us anytime: nerds@inn.org.

Showing How We Work

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

We're excited to announce the release of a new collection of documents that show how our team works.

In putting this collection together, we wanted to go beyond a style guide (also important, and we're working on that, too) to try to explain as much as possible about the process and values that inform our work: What makes our team unique, how we recruit and hire new team members, our internal process, and how outside members or clients interface with our process.

Opening up our process has a number of benefits for us as a team and, we hope, for others, as well.

Codifying existing processes in one place makes them easier to reference and helps keep the team on the same page. It allows new hires to get up to speed faster and gives prospective employees insight into how we work, our mission and values, and whether working with us would be a good fit.

It also helps external partners, like INN members and our consulting clients, learn how to work with us most effectively.

Above all, we hope that collecting this information in one place will be useful to other organizations who are building and managing similar teams.

This is especially important for us because INN's mission includes a strong educational component and we want to do everything we can to help our members make smart technology decisions.

By showing not only our process, mission and values, but also expanding the scope of this collection to include things like job descriptions, how we run meetings and the tools we use to work effectively as a remote team, we are attempting to create a sort of "missing manual" for running a news apps and technology team.

We hope, over time, to make this manual even more comprehensive as we refine our process and our thinking. And we hope that providing this model will make it a little easier on organizations and managers traveling down this road in the future.

We're grateful to the teams that have come before us who have written and released documentation that served as a source of inspiration for various parts of our team docs, particularly:

- ProPublica's News App and Data Style Guides
- The NPR Visuals Team's app template, coding best practices and manifesto
- Guides and process docs from The Chicago Tribune's News Apps Team
- MinnPost's style guide

This is a work in progress and we plan on updating frequently so we'd really value your feedback and contributions. Feel free to contribute to the project on GitHub or send us suggestions to help us improve our existing docs (or to propose new sections you'd like to see us add).

Welcome The Newest Member Of Our Team: Kaeti Hinck

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

INN's news applications and technology team has been growing steadily over the past few months to allow us to better serve our members.

june2013kaetismallToday we're very pleased to announce another addition to the team, our new Design Director, Kaeti Hinck.

Kaeti joins INN from MinnPost where she was most recently Director of News Technology. In that role she managed MinnPost's web development and strategic digital projects

In 2011, she successfully led a redesign and platform migration for minnpost.com, which launched as one of the first responsive news sites in the country.

She also created MinnPost's data team, leading news application design and interactive reporting. All of MinnPost's data projects are open source and available for other journalism organizations to use and learn from: www.github.com/minnpost.

Before joining MinnPost, Kaeti spent time as a magazine editor, video producer, graphic designer, and photojournalist. Much of her work has been focused on visual journalism, design, and making things for the web.

At INN she will be responsible for improving the design of our current products (including our Largo WordPress platform) and will work with the rest of the news applications and technology team to develop interactive features and news apps to support our members' editorial work.

Kaeti also brings a lot of strength in building team culture, process and design thinking and we're excited to get to work with her on tackling the thorniest problems facing nonprofit news organizations.

Kaeti's first day at INN will be September 22 and she'll be with us in Chicago next week for the Online News Association Conference. Please make her feel welcome!

Party Time In A Widget

Posted on by Ben Keith

The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting launched its Political Party Time series this week. It's powered in part by the Sunlight Foundation's Political Party Time database, which I'll call the PPT.

PPT is a giant database of political fundraisers, filled with information from invitations sent to Sunlight by readers like you. There are a lot of ways to sort the information,

Screenshot - 09132014 - 09_25_06 PMThe Pine Tree Watchdog Political Party Time series queries the PPT API (what's an API?) to get a list of events in Maine. Sunlight's API  has a number of ways to limit the events returned (by date, host, beneficiary, etc.), but the sidebar widget we wrote for the series' pages simply lists events that benefit Maine politicians.

The widget lists the benefiting politician or politicians, the date, the place, and a name for the event, for the most-recent 50 events. If a politician has been talked about on the Pine Tree site, readers can click to see stories about that politician. If there's a story about that event, it will be listed in the results. They can also click on the event name to go to the PPT site to see more about the event, including the invitation.

The code for the widget is currently contained in the WordPress child theme for the Pine Tree Watchdog site (they use INN's Largo platform and that provides the parent theme), the relevant parts to this post are the widget itself and the custom page template for the PPT series page.

Here's how it works, and what I learned while building it.

How do you query an API?

The simple way to query an API is to find the right URL and hit it with a browser. It'll return some JSON code that looks like this:

Screenshot - 09132014 - 12_49_46 AM

But our readers prefer pretty tables. We do, too, which is why we parse that JSON to get information about the event. Slap some JavaScript into the browser window, load the page and go.

Except it's not that simple. We can't hit the API from the browser because, in addition to requiring an API key to limit access, the Sunlight Foundation APIs deny CORS requests.

CORS is a response to a response to a security threat. In order to prevent Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks, where a malicious website uses your credentials to gain access to another site, browser makers implemented the same-origin policy. Now, code on malicious sites can't access information on good webpages, but neither can good web pages access information on other good web pages.

In situations where both sites want to share information, browser and server developers agreed on the CORS mechanism. When code on a site like Pine Tree Watchdog requests information from the Sunlight Foundation PPT, the browser adds an HTTP header saying that the request originated on the Pine Tree Watchdog site. The Sunlight Foundation API response could include a corresponding HTTP header telling the browser that the Pine Tree Watchdog site is allowed to access the data.

But the response doesn't. Sunlight doesn't have unlimited bandwidth and server space to handle a good, thorough slashdotting. Denying CORS requests cuts down on the amount of information they have to serve.

Since the reader's browser can't retrieve this information, the PTW site does it for them. If the PPT API hasn't been queried in the last 30 minutes, the server will download the API response and save it to disk. Then the site parses that into an HTML table, and saves the table to disk. The HTML table gets placed inside the widget, and the widget is displayed to readers with some CSS that makes the table look like a list.

cache-the-thingsAll this caching happens in order to keep things snappy for readers. By caching the PPT API response, the server doesn't have to hit the API every time it wants to rebuild the list of events. And by caching the event listing HTML, it can insert that in the page instead of laboriously building the listing every single time.

Cross-referencing

The links to the politicians' names is a pretty cool feature. It checks to see if a tag exists in the WordPress database that matches the politician's name. If it does, then their name in the listing is made a link to all stories tagged with the politician.

In a development build, I had it automatically create new tags if the tag didn't exist. This was a little too much information for the readers, so it was removed before the widget launched. The pre-creation of new tags made things easier for the writers, but it gave readers a link to nowhere.

What I learned:

  • CORS feels generally useless
  • file i/o in PHP (for caching)
  • td { display:block; }
  • some ways of handling JSON in PHP
  • WordPress widget construction
  • think about the readers, not just the newsroom users

This was the last project I worked on during my summer internship with INN. Now I'm in Idaho on a 3-month emedia internship for the Progressive Publishing family of magazines.

Announcing Our New Intern: Welcome Will Haynes!

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

This week we're excited to welcome Will Haynes to the team as our new News Apps and Technology Intern.

will-haynesWill is a student studying computer science and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He developed a passion for media, and the technology that drives it, after getting involved with UW’s independent student newspaper,The Badger Herald. There he served as web director before transitioning into the role of digital managing editor. This year, he will still serve as chairman of the Herald’s board of directors.

In addition to the paper, Will also spent a semester as a fellow for UW’s Center for Journalism Ethics. There he worked with the Center’s staff to design and develop a new WordPress presence for the organization. For INN, he will be working on Project Largo improvements and documentation, as well as helping member organizations with other projects.

He'll be with us through the academic year and you can reach him on Twitter @willhaynes.

Welcome to the team, Will!

Hire Us! Announcing New Consulting Services From INN’s Technology Team

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

INN's technology team is focused on helping our now 100+ member organizations any way we can.

We now provide free hosting and support to over 30 member websites on our Largo platform and a significant portion of what we do involves improving the platform and supporting members so they can take maximum advantage of the tools we build.

We've made a lot of headway in the past couple of years reducing costs for members, eliminating duplication of effort and getting members onto a stable platform that looks great and works well across devices.

But it's hard for us to help every member individually and there are many member (and non-member) organizations who would like us to do more and have expressed the willingness to pay for our services.

Specifically, we’ve heard from a number of INN members that they:

  • Have a hard time finding vendors/contractors who “get” what they’re trying to do and often wind up working with local agencies or freelancers who focus mostly on internet marketing or building small business sites so they don’t understand the other considerations unique to news and content sites or nonprofits
  • Are often unhappy with the vendors/contractors they do have and/or are overpaying for subpar services
  • Would, in a number of cases, rather work with INN's tech team directly rather than with an outside vendor. Given our current staffing and workload we typically haven't been able to do this if the request goes above and beyond what we’re able to do for "free" as a benefit of INN membership.

We also frequently hear from non-members that they:

  • Want to use the tools we have built (particularly Largo) but may require some help setting them up or customizing them to suit their needs
  • In some case may require additional custom development to add functionality that we have not yet built
  • Would be willing to pay (provided our rates are competitive) for our services and even (potentially) pay us to host their sites in the same way we host sites for members.

Until now we’ve just been referring people to outside contractors and freelancers but as we continue to grow our technology team we now have the capability to take on some of this work ourselves.

For INN members we will subsidize the cost of these services to keep them very affordable (see the rates section below for details), but we will also, from time to time, take on work from non-members as well (at regular market rates).

Some examples of the services we may offer include:

  • Content migration, design customization and custom development for members using our Largo platform beyond what we're able to do for "free" as a benefit of INN membership
  • Assistance with editorial design and development for news apps, data projects or special series
  • Ongoing or project-based support, training and assistance with story production
  • Design and development of microsites or other special projects

Taking on this additional paid work will allow us to:

  • Offset a portion of our costs and make our team more sustainable for the long-term by being less reliant on grants and other less-predictable sources of funding
  • Expand our technology team faster than would otherwise be possible and offer competitive compensation packages to help us recruit the best talent
  • Provide better service to members at lower rates than what they’re often getting now
  • Assist non-members with the adoption of tools we build (particularly our Largo platform)

We hope that this new program will be a win-win for members and for INN and that we'll now be able to provide an even higher level of support at very reasonable cost.

If you're interested in working with us, we'd love to discuss your needs and how we can help. Get in touch with us here to learn more.

We've also assembled an FAQ to provide more detail on the program.

FAQs

For INN members, what is free and what do we have to pay for?

As a benefit of your INN membership you receive free hosting for your main website if you use our Largo platform (if you have more complex needs, multiple sites, etc. we may need to pass some of our infrastructure costs through to you). In addition, we will provide a reasonable amount of support to help you migrate to the platform and customize the look and feel of your site.

If you require more assistance, extensive design customization, custom functionality, etc. or ongoing support then this is typically what we would ask you to pay for.

Weren't you doing this for free? Why do we have to pay now?

This new program does not affect any of the benefits we currently offer to members as part of their regular INN membership.

We will continue, for the foreseeable future, to cover hosting costs for members using our Largo WordPress platform and will continue our work to improve the platform itself as well as help members where possible with migration, on-boarding and basic customization.

The reason we're starting to do paid work is that we now have a lot of requests that are very specific to one particular member that we don't believe would necessarily benefit others in the network.

Our team is focused on tackling problems we believe can best be solved at a network level and given our size and funding level we will never be a complete replacement for investment in technology at the member level.

We also hope that by reducing duplication of effort, building common platforms and tools, etc. we free up resources that members can (and should!) re-invest in technology at their organization to best serve their audience, try new things and innovate further faster.

Why should we pay you instead of a local freelancer/agency?

In short, our aim is provide better services at a lower cost.

In the past when members came to us with one-off needs we would refer them to outside contractor or in some cases helped them recruit and hire a full-time tech staff.

Sometimes this works out well but many members have told us they have had bad experiences with contractors or had a hard time finding good help at all that was reasonably priced and understood what they were trying to do.

Other members may want to eventually hire a full-time staff member focused on technology but aren't quite at that point yet and have a need for ongoing help in the meantime.

The way we're hoping to solve this problem is to form a sort of "co-op" comprised of the best news technologists, designers and support staff we can possibly find who will be focused full-time on meeting the needs of nonprofit news organizations. Members will then be able to tap into this team as needed on a project-by-project basis and/or use us for ongoing support, training, etc.

What are the rates? How do you structure your contracts?

As of January 2015 our rates are as follows*:

  • For INN member organizations we offer a further discounted hourly rate of $85 per hour. This is actually slightly below our cost and is subsidized by the other consulting work we do for non-members and by INN's general operating funds (grants we receive from foundations, member dues, etc.)
  • For non-member non-profit organizations we offer a substantially reduced hourly rate of $125 per hour.
  • For non-member, for-profit organizations our regular hourly rate is $175 per hour.

*rates are subject to change but once we agree to an hourly rate we will honor it per the terms of your contract.

Contracts will typically be project-based and we will bill twice monthly for the actual hours worked during the preceding two week period. Under certain circumstances we may agree to do fixed bid contracts but we believe it's typically more fair for both parties to charge for actual hours worked.

I have ongoing tech needs but we're not ready to hire a full-time staff member yet, can you help?

If you have ongoing needs, we've talked to a few members about doing a retainer-based support agreements where you would essentially be sharing a full-time headcount on our team with a number of other INN members. The advantage would be that you would be guaranteed a certain percentage of that person's time without having to recruit and manage them.

If this is something that you would be interested in, contact us and we can discuss your particular needs and how we might best help you.

We’re Hiring! Be Our Next News Apps Designer/Developer

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

UPDATE: Applications for this position are now closed. If you'd like, you can still submit a resume for consideration for future FT positions and we do occasionally work with freelancers/contractors. Email: adam@inn.org.

Come help us build the future of nonprofit news!

We're looking for a full-time designer/developer to join our team. Abbreviated job description follows, full description is right over here.

INN's tech team is a small (but growing!) team of makers (presently two, soon to be three full-time employees with a handful of contractors and interns) and this position would be our de facto "design lead" although everyone pitches in and does a little bit of everything.

The ideal candidate is passionate about news and information design and looking to put her/his skills to use tackling design and technology problems facing nonprofit news organizations.

We have a fair amount of flexibility on exactly what this role will be and how it will fit in with the rest of the team. That said, here are some desired skills and attributes (we understand you might not meet all of these but if this roughly sounds like you, we'd love to hear more):

  • 3-5+ years professional experience in design and technology (degree in a related field would be nice but is not strictly necessary), previous experience working in the news/media/nonprofit space would be extremely helpful, passion for nonprofit news is required
  • Expert level knowledge of front-end web design/development, particularly HTML and CSS (use of CSS preprocessors such as LESS or SASS is a nice to have), some experience with JavaScript programming would also be helpful
  • Strong visual design sense (our team is not currently geeked out enough about typography, this needs to change) and relentless focus on improving overall user-experience
  • Experience with rapid prototyping and an understanding of the right level of fidelity needed to clearly communicate an idea
  • Some exposure to and/or experience with one or more modern server-side programming language such as PHP, Python or Ruby (or at least the willingness to learn)
  • We use WordPress (a lot) so some experience creating WordPress themes, plugins, etc. would be very useful
  • Experience with various project management tools (we use Atlassian programs, mostly) and version control (we use Git(hub), mostly)
  • Experience working with data visualization and mapping tools; photo, video, illustration and other visual/graphic design skills would also be great to have
  • Strong communication skills including the ability to explain complex things simply
  • Commitment to openness and showing/writing/talking about your work. We open source and write about nearly every project we do and encourage our team members to speak at industry conferences, local tech meetups, etc. about their work
  • Curiosity and the willingness to learn, adapt and teach

This is a full-time salaried position with benefits. Our compensation package is commensurate with experience and extremely competitive. We are also committed to giving our employees the tools they need to do their job and supporting their professional growth so you'll get an allowance for hardware, software, travel to conferences, etc.

Our team is presently distributed so remote candidates are fine as long as you're comfortable with that. Previous experience working remotely would be helpful. If you'd rather work with us (in the same room) Columbus, OH or Chicago, IL would be the preferred locations for this position.

INN is an equal opportunity employer and we are committed to creating a workplace where diversity is valued. 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.

To apply, please send the following to adam@inn.org:

  • Brief resume/cv
  • Cover letter (an email is fine) explaining why this is the perfect position for you
  • A few projects you're particular proud of (links to projects in the wild, your github repo, design portfolio, etc.)
  • Salary expectations (ballpark is fine)

Welcome Jacki Keys To The Team

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

Today I'm excited to announce the addition of another vegetarian former oboist from northeastern Ohio currently residing in Columbus, Ohio to the INN technology team.

jacki_keysJacki Keys is joining us to focus on training, documentation and support particularly for our Largo Project sites but also to help us better serve INN members' general technology needs, answer questions and provide general technology support.

Jacki brings with her extensive experience working in technical support in many forms at different types and sizes of organizations ranging from large companies with 50,000+ employees to small non-profits, though she prefers the personally rewarding experience of working with the latter. You can read her full bio on our team page.

Jacki is joining us as a contractor to start and says she's excited to use all her powers for good at INN and would love to help you in any way she can. And we're happy to have her.

You can also follow her on Twitter: @jacki890