HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: This week, an interesting experiment from KPCC using remarketing to convert readers to donors. Some privacy considerations here for sure, but the approach is interesting and it provides some helpful insights into reader/donor behavior.

  Ben: SSH is an amazing protocol, and there are so many things to do with it. (h/t Ryan Nagle)

  Gabe: Paul Blow has some fabulous illustrations for a Washington Post story on ageism and baby boomers.

  Jack: With 75 different newsletters, the Washington Post increased email-driven site traffic by 129 percent over the past year. As news consumption become more personal, and perhaps increasingly opt-in, the humble newsletter may be poised as the next big thing in home delivery.

  Julia: Consider using 18F’s design methods during your next big project. These method cards were the focus of one session at SRCCON, OpenNews’ hands-on journalism tech conference that wrapped up last week. For more from SRCCON, check out the session notes and live transcripts from the event.

  RC: WordPress 4.6 is just a few weeks away from being released. In addition to Shiny Updatesthat let you update plugins & themes without reloading the page, WordPress 4.6 will also detect broken links in the text editor.

  Inndy: Do you want this in binary?

WELCOME

Our newest team member

This week we're excited to welcome RC Lations to the INN team. He joined us Monday as our new lead developer working on Largo and our other WordPress work. He lives in Portland, Maine and comes to us most recently from a marketing firm where he held roles as a developer, project manager, and product manager, focusing primarily on data-driven marketing programs and website performance metrics. Read more about him and say hello!

SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

This week WNYC announced that is was open-sourcing its Audiogram Generator, a social tool meant to provide podcasters, radio professionals, producers and audio makers an easy way to share their work across social platforms including Facebook and Twitter.

Also, the Online News Association released a WordPress plugin that they use to manage their conference schedule. Looks really promising if you have similar needs!

EVENTS

Come learn with us

September 28-29 - INN is hosting a two-day event for news leaders to discuss everything you need to know about managing technology and product design in your news organization. Travel stipends for INN members are available!

GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

INN is hiring a program director and an operations manager.

Texas Tribune is hiring a software engineer.

The Marshall Project is hiring a full stack Ruby developer.

And Mother Jones is hiring an advancement officer for their fundraising and membership work.

SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: Luke Miller's remix of the Stranger Things theme using a massive collection of vintage synths. ?

WATCH: A swarm of crabs is about as terrifying as it sounds.

EAT: An illustrated history of the Philly cheesesteak.

DRINK: 37 summer cocktails.

Mesmerizing.

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: With the growing number of third-party platforms vying to be the primary place to publish your content, a word of caution and reminder that no platform is forever. Own your own stuff.

  Ben: Do you use vim? @vimgifs is full of tons of neat commands and tips, presented as gifs with keypresses. Not interested? Read this one Pokémon’s post about color spectra, names, models, spaces, lies, and blending.

  Gabe: The former Trump-Pence logo, but re-designed to align with a grid. Looks better, but still naughty.

  Jack: OK so video is cool and Facebook Live is a threat to cable TV news. Audiences are massively moving to digital, but according to the Reuters Institute it turns out that people worldwide still read most of their news.

  Julia: From the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, this Guide to Journalism and Design is a collection of case studies and interviews identifying best practices in the field.

  Inndy: Why walk when you can crawl?

BE OUR GUEST

This week's guest contributor

Our guest this week is Joellen Easton (@jo_in_la), a Product Manager at BDN Maine.

This one is a listen more than a read: Dan Blumberg, director of product at NYTimes, talks about his journey to product management from public radio, and how he thinks about product management in a news context. Dan challenges a lot of assumptions we make about how to help news consumers discover value in what we create and subsequently pay for it.

Want to be a guest contributor for a future edition of this newsletter? Learn how and shoot us an email at nerds@inn.org if you're interested. We'd love to hear from you!

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

See  you in Chicago!

We're excited to announce our first in-person tech and product training event for news leaders.

All INN members are invited to join us in Chicago September 28-29 to learn everything you need to know about managing technology and product development at your news organization. Hear from special guest speaker Rebekah Monson of The New Tropic, as well as tech and product staff from a number of INN member organizations and members of our own team here at INN.

It's a free event and we have some limited travel stipends available (thanks to Knight-Mozilla OpenNews). Registration is initially only open to INN members, but if we have space we'll open it up to other organizations before the event (watch this space).

More information, registration and a preliminary agenda for the event can be found on our website. Hope to see you there!

SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

NPR has released Carebot, a new analytics platform built to focus on a subset of stories with similar characteristics, and deliver meaningful numbers to  a team with a shared purpose. They share the thinking behind the project and have an open source slackbot implementationthat you can take for a test drive.

Also this week, the Vox Product team released a great accessibility checklist broken down by role so you can easily integrate accessibility checks into your design and development process.

LOVE NERD ALERT?

We love you back

Please consider supporting this newsletter with a donation to INN.

Thanks much!

GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting is hiring an investigative reporter.

ProPublica is hiring a senior reporting fellow.

Hearken is looking for a sales account manager.

And our friends at Upstatement are accepting applications for design and technology apprentices.

SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: Car Talk gets punked by the government.

WATCH: The Warriors (1979). A film about a convention that goes hideously wrong, and the efforts one delegation takes to get home.

EAT: Pre-dunked donuts.

If at first you don't succeed.

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: Want to start a newsletter? Read this first.

  Ben: This is a few months old, but a new spaceship has been discovered in Conway’s Game of Life. Conway’s game has been around for decades, and people are still finding novel things in it.

  Gabe: The horrifyingly labor-intensive – but beautiful – craft of creating a new Chinese typeface.

  Jack: Amidst lots of gloomy talk about the decline of local news, might we be missing how it’s being resurrected through innovation? Local Media Consortium’s Rusty Coates says the gloom comes from the perspective of what local news was, rather than what it’s becoming.

  Julia: The Bits Are Rotting in the State of Data Journalism: How can we better maintain and archive interactive projects as sites undergo redesigns and front-end standards evolve?

  Inndy: Bot brews are the best brews.

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SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

The Texas Tribune and Reveal published a joint investigation identifying at least 140 border officials who were arrested or convicted for acts of corruption. The app nicely integrates narrative storytelling with data visualization.

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WE CHANGED A THING

So long, Hangouts

We’re moving our weekly office hours to Zoom. Party with us every Friday from from 2-3 p.m. ET.

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GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

The Miami Herald is hiring a digital news developer to help create interactive storytelling experiences.

PRX is looking for a software engineer who has experience with Ruby on Rails and Angular.

American Public Media is hiring a director for their podcasts and national cultural radio programs.

PRI is hiring a data journalist to produce both quick-turn visuals and long-term data projects.

The Marshall Project is looking for a new director of technology to manage infrastructure, vendors, monitoring, and deployment.

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LOVE NERD ALERT?

We love you back

Please consider supporting this newsletter with a donation to INN.

Or if you'd rather contribute content over cash – be a guest contributor!
Read about that here and shoot us an email if you're interested. We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks much!

---

SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: Last week Sir Patrick Stewart sang cowboy classics. Today, we remind you that the late Sir Christopher Lee made heavy metal Christmas albums.

EAT: Delve into the pleasures of diner butter.

DRINK: These "evolving" Pokémon cocktails will get you in the spirit for the next Pokémon Go pub crawl near you.

WATCH: Twitch Plays Pokémon Go.

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Hop on the bandwagon.

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: In pushing live video, how ready is Facebook to answer the complicated ethical questions that come along with it?

  Ben: One of the most important things in this list of principles of the keyboard-accessible website is the advice on keyboard shortcuts: “Developers should never unexpectedly change keyboard controls on the user.” What was the origin of the shortcut Command/Control-K to make text a link? I don’t know. But it works that way of every site with a rich text editor that I’ve used, and that’s a good thing.

  Gabe: Love this photo illustration in a profile about professional de-clutterer Marie Kondo; it captures the organized but joyful quirkiness that is her brand.

  Jack: With social media increasingly important in how people get and share information, it’s also changed how people get news, right? Actually a new study by Pew reports the vast majority of people most commonly share news using an older technology: word of mouth.

  Julia: Learn D3 basics by planting a vegetable garden.

  Inndy: Deal with it.

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SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

This week the Marshall Project published a sobering investigation of private prison transport companies. They also included a guide on how to localize the story for your state.

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WE MADE A THING

Our projects, manifest

Congratulations to The Crime Report on launching their new site using our Largo WordPress framework!

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GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

Chalkbeat is hiring a growth editor to join their product team.

Texas Tribune is looking for an investigative reporter.

Public Radio International is hiring a data editor and a data reporter.

And our team is still accepting applications for a lead WordPress developer. Come work with us!

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LOVE NERD ALERT?

We love you back

Please consider supporting this newsletter with a donation to INN.

Or if you'd rather contribute content over cash – be a guest contributor!
Read about that here and shoot us an email if you're interested. We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks much!

---

SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: Sir Patrick Stewart sings cowboy classics.

WATCH: An incredible short film on cicadas.

EAT: How do you define barbecue?

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HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: Facebook this week announced yet another set of changes to further devalue content posted by publishers. With the increasing importance of third-party platforms in publishers’ content and revenue strategy, Mark Armstrong has a list of things to consider when platforms show up with money, and Sarah Lacy argues publishers need to own their own audience and destiny.

  Ben: If you want to break an experiment, keep reading. There’s a billboard company in Utah that’s testing the efficacy of billboards by asking Utahns who the 9th president was.

  Gabe: Editorial cartoonists play an important role in American political discourse. How are social media and the increase in Internet vitriol affecting this form of journalism?

  Jack: The modern tech industry has gifted us with some amazing opportunities and affordances. This includes, says Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski, “the greatest surveillance apparatus the world has ever seen.” Some food for thought about our work as technologists.

  Julia: For the niche subset of nerds who appreciate both typography and science fiction, check out Typeset in the Future – the blog dedicated to type in classic sci-fi films. The writing is hilarious.

  Inndy: Look at this robot salamander.

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SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

NPR built an interactive that lets you try to predict who will win the presidential election by adjusting margin of victory and turnout percentage for different voter demographics.

ProPublica’s new map lets you find the percentage of doctors at your local hospital who take payments from drug and medical device companies.

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WE MADE A THING

Our projects, manifest

We're happy to introduce Version 1.6 of the NPR Story API WordPress plugin, a collection of tools for reusing content from NPR.org.

The Nerds partnered with NPR Digital Services to develop the latest release of the plugin, which provides access to audio, articles, images and other content from NPR and NPR member stations, dating back to 1995. The archive consists of over 250,000 stories grouped into more than 5,000 different aggregations – now at your fingertips thanks to our handy plugin.

NPR Story API is available for download from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

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GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

INN is still accepting applications for a senior WordPress developer. Join our team!

The Online News Association is looking for a new executive director.

The Global Investigative Journalism Network is hiring a research director.

Pew Research is looking for a software product manager.

St. Louis Public Radio has a handful of internship opportunities.

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LOVE NERD ALERT?

We love you back

Please consider supporting this newsletter with a donation to INN.

Or if you'd rather contribute content over cash – be a guest contributor!
Read about that here and shoot us an email if you're interested. We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks much!

---

SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

READ: Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet and discuss it with us during News Nerd Book Club on July 13.

EAT: These pupcakes (puppy + cupcakes) and pandonuts (panda + donuts) might be too cute to consume.

WATCH: Twinkie the Terrier pops 100 balloons in less than 40 seconds, like a boss.

PRINT: Deck your walls with NASA's Mars: Explorers Wanted poster series.

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Practice makes perfect – never give up your dreams!

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: For five years now, OpenNews has been working to support folks working in journalism and technology. Take a few minutes to fill out this survey and help them plan their future. And (because who doesn’t love surveys?) here’s another survey from OpenNews fellow Sandhya Kambhampati on newsroom onboarding/offboarding processes.

  Ben: Brent Victor’s Web of Alexandria follow-up post talks about the dichotomy of the Internet: Is it permanent, like a library, or ephemeral, like letters? Even though we treat it like it’s permanent, many, many things pass away. And many things that should perhaps pass away do not.

  Gabe: A call to arms to put more thought in choosing your next typeface. Also, a great compendium of available web font resources.

  Jack: The future of journalism may be predicated on relationships with audiences, but if so how do you build them? An interesting report on “social journalism” published by the Tow-Knight Center says “share, find and connect.”

  Julia: An open-source brand redesign? Regarding Mozilla’s latest initiative, Fast Company asks: Creative commons or creative chaos?

  Inndy: Drone journalism gets an OK from the FAA.

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SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

Our friends at NPR did some great data reporting on semi-automatic weapons and background checks, which David Eads followed up with some useful scraping techniques to help others do the same.

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WE MADE A THING

Our projects, manifest

Settling for Misconduct: The INN Nerds worked closely with data journalists from the Chicago Reporter to build a searchable database of Chicago's police misconduct lawsuits – lawsuits that have cost the city more than $210 million between 2012 and 2015. Explore the app and the rest of the series on chicagoreporter.com.

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GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

INN is still accepting applications for a senior WordPress developer. Join our team!

ProPublica is looking for a senior editor with a knack for data-intensive storytelling.

You have until Sunday to apply to become Hearken's community manager.

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LOVE NERD ALERT?

We love you back

Please consider supporting this newsletter with a donation to INN.

Or if you'd rather contribute content over cash – be a guest contributor!
Read about that here and shoot us an email if you're interested. We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks much!

---

SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

COOK: Chicken Tikka Masala – the national dish of Britain?

LISTEN: New York fuzz-rock trio Jackal Onasis released their debut EP.

READ: The End of All Things, John Scalzi's collection of sci-fi novellas full of "thrilling adventure scenes, politics, snarky commentary and food for thought."

WATCH: An oldie but goodie, The Corgi Flop. This never gets old.

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Connect.

P.S. FWIW, DDJ FTW translates roughly to, "data-driven journalism, for the win."

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: Growing a company is hard. I remain really impressed with Buffer’s transparency, even when they have to make very difficult decisions – like the round of layoffs they announced this week. I’m also fascinated by their salary calculation, which you can see in this spreadsheet.

  Ben: Git version 2.9 and following has better diff-detection, if you run it with the experimental--compaction-heuristic. It makes messy diffs somewhat cleaner.

  Gabe: What can you do with the world's ugliest color? Keep people from smoking.

  Jack: How can news organization compete with Google and Facebook, who now control 64% of the digital advertising market? Matt McAlister from The Guardian says it’s time to leverage our shared values and embrace collaboration as a core objective.

  Julia: Learn about animating the viewBox for interactive data viz in this really great SVG tutorial by Sarah Drasner.

  Inndy: Good effort, friend.

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LIVE AND IN PERSON

Our Head Nerd is on tour in New Orleans

Our own Adam Schweigert is at IRE today and tomorrow – he'd love to chat with you about tech, nonprofit news, product design and alpaca farms. Find him and say hi.

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SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

Congrats to ProPublica's Sisi Wei for winning Best Individual Portfolio at the 2016 Global Editors Network Data Journalism Awards.

Here's one of Sisi's projects, Debt by Degrees:

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WE MADE A THING

Our projects, manifest

The Nerds are on a roll with WordPress plugins these days! Two new ones this week:

Pym Shortcode is a super-simple way to add responsive iframes to your WordPress posts. Pym.js is a handy JavaScript library for embedding responsive iframes (developed by our friends at NPR), but it historically hasn't played nice with WordPress because it requires a<script> tag in the post body. Our plugin lets users place Pym embeds without extra JS.

News Quiz Shortcode embeds quizzes created with Mother Jones' news quiz library. Very nice.

ICYMI: Also check out last week's featured plugins – Super Cool Ad Inserter, Term Debt Consolidator, and Google Analytics Popular Posts. All of our plugins are available for download from the WordPress Plugins Directory. Get 'em.

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AND UPDATED A THING

With heavy hearts

The tragic attack in Orlando last weekend left 49 dead and another 53 wounded.

Last August, Julia created an animated data sonification to illustrate the many lives lost in U.S. mass shootings – it has been updated to reflect recent events.

Source Data: Mother Jones' mass shootings database
Source Code: https://github.com/julia67/shooting-fatalities

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GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

INN is looking for a senior full stack developer with a WordPress focus. Come work with us!

KQED is hiring a product manager for their web and native mobile apps.

The Philadelphia Media Network is hiring a data visualization specialist.

KHOU-TV in Houston, Texas is looking for an investigative journalist and visual storyteller.

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LOVE NERD ALERT?

We love you back

Please consider supporting this newsletter with a donation to INN.

Or if you'd rather contribute content over cash – be a guest contributor!
Read about that here and shoot us an email if you're interested. We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks much!

---

SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: Atomic by Mogwai.

READ: How to Make White People Laugh by social-justice comedian Negin Farsad. It's been described as “smart racial politics with a side of fart jokes.” Good stuff.

WATCH: All Six Star Wars, if only for the deafening intro sequence.

EAT: Three-Cup Chicken. Yum.

DRINK: The Painkiller Cocktail – a twist on the piña colada, recommended by Ryan.

ADMIRE: The art of Benjamin Shine, created with tulle and an iron.

SIT: Erm, perch?

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Fly! Be free!

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: New life goal: get a pet bear. (Sorry, that link was too good to not share.) On a more serious note, here’s a great post with some questions to ask when interviewing for a remote job, such as, say, our open lead developer position.

  Ben: Random A11y Color Palettes generates new color schemes and rates them according to W3C accessibility standards.

  Jack: Are your login credentials for LinkedIn, Tumblr, Adobe, or even the old MySpace account among those now on the market? Find out if you’ve been “pwned.” And maybe it’s time to rethink this password thing.

  Julia: Get a behind-the-scenes look at how the WSJ visuals team created The Hamilton Algorithm – the very fun interactive that analyzes rhymes from ‘Hamilton,’ the ever-popular hip-hop Broadway sensation. (Sorry, Adam.)

  Ryan: Check out John Wheeler’s Flask-Ask if you’re a Pythonist looking to write custom skills for Amazon’s Alexa. Don’t miss the intro video where John also covers the useful-looking ngrok utility.

  Sinduja: This article tells us how to scientifically have a productive day by scheduling different types of tasks that match our body’s circadian rhythms.

  Inndy: The efficient way. The snail way.

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SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

Mozilla just launched the Secure Open Source (SOS) Fund, which will provide security auditing, remediation, and verification for major open source software projects.

Some good news for open government: The US House of Representatives is releasing their financials in machine-readable CSVs.

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WE MADE A THING

Our projects, manifest

Plugins galore! This week we released three shiny new WordPress plugins:

Term Debt Consolidator examines your site's tags and categories and groups them by similarity, allowing you to consolidate groups of similar terms down to a single term of your choosing.

Google Analytics Popular Posts queries Google Analytics for your website's pageview data and uses an algorithm – based on publish date and total number of pageviews – to determine a weighted popularity score for a post. Using this scoring mechanism, the plugin generates a list of the most popular posts for a site.

Super Cool Ad Inserter allows site administrators to insert widgets – like ads, newsletter signups, and other calls to action – into posts at set intervals.

All three plugins are available from the WordPress Plugins Directory.

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GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

INN is accepting applications for a senior full stack developer to lead our WordPress work. Join our team!

NPR is hiring a digital editor.

Sunlight Foundation is hiring a quantitative analyst.

MapLight has an opening for a data analyst looking to dive into campaign finance data.

APM is looking for a digital product designer to join the team at Minnesota Public Radio.

Making Contact is hiring an online community manager.

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LOVE NERD ALERT?

We love you back

Please consider supporting this newsletter with a donation to INN.

Or if you'd rather contribute content over cash – be a guest contributor!
Read about that here and shoot us an email if you're interested. We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks much!

---

SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: Foil Deer by Speedy Ortiz. Also this remix.

DRINK: Space Coffee. Can't make it into orbit? You can at least try the same beans the astronauts drink.

WATCH: Teens react to Windows 95. It’s now safe to turn off your computer.

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The question is: What aren't we going to do?

Happy 30th Anniversary, Ferris.

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: Project Include is an effort to foster diversity and inclusion, particularly in tech and startup companies. Their recently published list of recommendations has a number of concrete steps any company can take to build an inclusive culture and give everyone a fair shot at success.

  Ben: Build a Raspi-based NPR One player following these instructions from Adafruit, using this command-line NPR One player. (h/t @alykat)

  Jack: In the past, news publishers built massive distribution networks and controlled their own financial destiny. Today, Facebook is the paperboy. How did we get here?

  Julia: Kajero is a super cool interactive JavaScript notebook (like IPython but for JS) that allows you to create Markdown documents with executable code blocks that you can edit in-browser. It has built-in support for D3.js and you can export your notebooks as Gists on GitHub.

  Ryan: "In other words: Warner had just DMCA'd an artificial reconstruction of a film about artificial intelligence being indistinguishable from humans, because it couldn't distinguish between the simulation and the real thing."

  Sinduja: Beware journalists! According to this article in the Columbia Journalism Review, getting fooled by fake news websites is easier than we imagine.

  Inndy: Surveyor 1 was America's first soft-landing spacecraft to successfully land on the moon – the "robotic precursor of the Apollo astronauts to come." Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of its landing.

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WE'RE HIRING!

Join the team and make some awesomeness

We're looking for a Senior Full Stack Developer to lead our WordPress-related projects, including Largo, our platform/framework for news sites. It's a key role on our remote-friendly team, and we'd love to hear from you or your friends who might be interested in joining us. Learn more about our application and interview process here.

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WELCOME, GABE!

Hurray for new team members

We're excited to welcome Gabriel Hongsdusit to the INN Nerds team as our summer apprentice! Gabe is a graphic designer and illustrator, and he'll be helping us revamp of our style guide and make our editorial projects really shine. Learn more about Gabe here.

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SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

We'd like to recognize a bit of D3.js news nerdery this week.

WNYC's Noah Veltman made a strip map with labels.

Vijith Assar of the New York Times released a deep-linking plugin for D3.

And if D3 makes you crazy, the Wall Street Journal's Elliot Bentley wrote a great post about a better way to structure D3 code.

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GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

INN is looking for a senior full stack developer with a WordPress focus. Come work with us!

DataMade is hiring a full-time developer to join their team of Python programmers.

Hearken needs a community manager to help scale its team's operations.

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LOVE NERD ALERT?

We love you back

If you like this newsletter, please consider supporting it with a donation to INN.

Or if you'd rather contribute content over cash, be a guest contributor! Readmore about that here and shoot us an email at nerds@inn.org if you're interested. We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks much!

---

SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: Check out the inaugural episode of NPR’s Code Switch podcast,Can We Talk About Whiteness?

WATCH: The Present is very cute.

READ: Nostalgic for '90s cartoons? The Pitch Meeting for Animaniacs will satisfy your daily dose of "things that must have happened."

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Have a little fun with it.