Today’s viewers aren’t just watching TV as a solitary experience. Whether it’s the iPad, an Android tablet, or even the new Kindle Fire, tablet devices are quickly becoming an integral part of television viewing. Or as Nielsen puts it, cross platform is the new norm. 40% of tablet (and smartphone) owners in the U.S. used their devices daily while watching television, which creates a prime opportunity for news stations and news programs to reach a captive audience.

We’ve talked before about a few tips to define your newsroom’s mobile presence, but let’s look a little closer at a few more ways news organizations can help reach news junkies on that second screen.

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Seattle Times producers and engineers collaborate at a recent hack day. This team built in the ability to turn on Google's standout tag through the web CMS. (Photo by Eric Ulken)

Hackathon (n.): “an event when programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming.” In a newsroom, the definition is a little different: an event where engineers, designers, editors, reporters and producers combine their various backgrounds to quickly create much-needed story-telling tools.

I would know. I just participated in a hackathon this week at my news organization and it was wildly successful — a quick change of pace for the normally process-heavy development workflow of a newspaper.

Why a hackathon

Newsrooms (most of them, by my count) aren’t agile. They aren’t iterative. They don’t quickly pull things off. They have meetings. And meetings about meetings. They get a lot of people involved and take a long time to make decisions. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but when you’re trying to build cool tools on the fly, it’s a bottleneck. Read more