I've decided to retake the plunge and attempt to do some Wordpress development for a friend's website. Because I hate myself, apparently. My coworker and tall-person Ryan Nagle helped walk me through setting it up on my local machine without using MAMP. Because we're ballers, shotcallers with 15-inch MacBook Pros. Read more – ‘Setting up WordPress on your local machine without using MAMP’.
During my first week on the Chicago Tribune News Apps team the first project I started was to build a Chicago Tribune’s Weather page. This involved using the styles of a project that already lived on our touch site, which was designed by a different team. I had to take their look and feel, use the same [...] Read more – ‘Coolness I’ve Learned At The Chicago Tribune, Part Two’.
Earlier I wrote a piece about using algorithms to help with your journalism, spurred on by this piece in Wired. Now I want to cover more the area that the piece mentions: Using algorithms to actually write stories. Read more – ‘Algorithms and journalisms, part two’.
This morning a story from Wired made the homepage of Hacker News. It was about a company that can take in data, run it through a program and spit out a basic news story. The company has been written about before, and when it first bounced around journalism blog-o-circle-sphericals I had meant to write something about it. This company is doing what we should be doing more of: Automation. Read more – ‘Algorithms and journalisms, part one’.
News organizations, can we all do ourselves a favor? We should stop calling things "blogs." I know, that probably stings a little, but let me try and explain why. Read more – ‘Stop Calling It A Blog, Please’.
Earlier I read this post via Hacker News on testing startup ideas. It got me thinking about whether or not you could do something similar in your newsroom. I’ll call it A/B Testing for News Coverage™. The basic idea is this: Use the data of what people click on with Google AdWords/Microsoft’s adCenter to help [...] Read more – ‘Using A/B testing to find story ideas’.
In case no one has seen me posting this link recently, I thought I would post it again. Here’s now an updated list of 20+ web developer jobs open at newspapers. If you’re a person who has these skill sets, you should really think about applying. Where else can you get to build awesome projects [...] Read more – ‘Use your awesome tech powers to help save journalism’.
Following my previous post, a few folks had some questions on where to get started doing web development with a journalistic bent. So I thought I'd write down a few thoughts and give a basic roadmap of resources online and off that can help you get your feet wet. Read more – ‘Learning to make the internets — a journalist’s guide’.
In case you didn’t know, many news organizations are looking to hire web developers to help create awesome stuff online. And as this list of 19 job openings might imply, news organizations are having a difficult time trying to find people to fill these gigs. One of the reasons for this difficulty, I believe, is [...] Read more – ‘Hey journalists — here’s why you should learn to make the internets’.
