BOSTON — You don’t need to hire prodigies to build award-winning, traffic-generating news apps according to Matt Waite (professor of journalism at UNL), Jeremy Bowers (senior developer at The Washington Post) and Shazna Nessa (director of interactive at The AP), who spoke on a panel Friday afternoon at The Online News Association about how to build an awesome data team with a few people.

Finding the right team

When looking for talent within your newsroom to recruit for the web, Matt Waite said to look for the following types of people: Those who are angry, passionate and willing.

“Finding people who are being sorely underused — people with skills that will go to waste … convince their bosses they are being wasted, and magic will happen,” Waite said. Read more

BOSTON — This afternoon at the Online News Association conference, Associated Press interactives producer Michelle Minkoff and WNYC’s data news director John Keefe held a hands-on, learn-by-doing session about creating quick data visualizations on a newsroom deadline.

Using free, open source tools and data sets, the barrier to entry for creating usable visualizations is lower than ever.

Michelle showed the audience how to make an interactive chart that graphs crime data using Google Chart Tools. She posted a full tutorial on her website and the downloadable source code for the visualization. Here are the key links you need to build a chart yourself:

• Michelle’s full tutorial
• A sample data set to use
• The source files (.zip)
• The extensive list of links from Michelle and other resources

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Earlier this week, the colossal film, interactive, and music festival known as SXSW announced the opening of the 2012 SXSW PanelPicker, a community-driven voting portal that allows people to vote on panels which they wish to see at the upcoming conference. The PanelPicker votes and comments comprise 30% of the decision-making process for any given programming slot, with the SXSW Staff and SXSW Advisory Board accounting for 30% and 40% respectively. Voting is open from now until 11:59pm CT on Friday, September 2, 2011.

For those of you who may not be familiar with SXSW, here’s a brief video from SXSW that gives an overview of the conference:

While there are three distinct portions of the conference, SXSW Interactive offers the most diverse group of topics, especially for journalists. Currently, there are over 50 journalism-related panels up for voting in the PanelPicker. I’ve culled through them all, and here are fifteen which I think would be great for journalists of all kinds. Each panel description also includes a link to vote for the panel on the PanelPicker (voting does require registering for a free PanelPicker account).

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Are you still debating if you will register for the Online News Association Conference and Awards Banquet, aka ONA11? (We highlighted the conference last week.) Well, here’s one more reason to go: J-Camp. ONA is offering a new two-day series of panels where leading experts from Google News, Facebook, and Twitter will teach journalists both the basics and more advanced aspects of social media. If you haven’t signed up for ONA11 yet, there’s (just barely) time to make the early bird registration. Read more

Two weeks ago, we covered Journalism Interactive 2011, a two-day conference hosted by the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and sponsored by publisher SAGE/CQ Press. As we continue into the second half of 2011, we’re highlighting five upcoming journalism workshops and conferences that will help you network, expand your skill set, and learn new topics from some of the thought leaders in the journalism industry.

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