When it comes to gun control, the White House is murkier than ever. Senate Bill 649, which primarily deals with stricter background checks, bigger punishments for drug trafficking, and programs devoted to school safety, is facing mounting filibuster threats and complicated opinions from Senators. Not many are speaking out publicly on the issue — making it difficult to get a clear picture of how the bill will fare, or even if it will make it out of the Senate at all.

ProPublica is shining a light on the battle for gun control by reporting on every Senator’s position on the issue. Of course, individually tracking down 100 offices for comment is outside the resource capabilities for a typical newsroom, so ProPublica is relying on the power of the people to help them #TrackTheVote. Read more

This week, the non-profit investigative journalism group ProPublica decided to take its quest to uncover the untold stories in a different direction on the Internet: Reddit. And here’s the twist, they’re not seeking sources — they’re seeking stories. They’ve opened up a channel, InvestigateThisNews, asking users to tell them what they should be covering.

We’re crowdsourcing investigative stories on Reddit. Join in: propub.ca/10trVsF

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) March 26, 2013

Now Reddit, which has been around for years, seems to be having a heyday these days. I mean, even the President did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) during the campaign! But for ProPublica, it’s part of their Get Involved strategy, according to senior engagement editor Amanda Zamora. She discussed it in a Q&A over at Niemen Journalism Lab, in which she talks extensively about user engagement and where the Reddit channel fits in. I think she nailed it with this point on why places like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. matter not only as a reporting source but as a story source:

…[W]e still pay attention and use social media to build a general audience for our work. We are using it to get the word out about what we report. But we’re just as concerned at using these tools to help attract people who want to participate in our work. We’re doing a lot of community building.

In other words, if you want to know what the story is, or if there’s a story people in your readership and your community think is uncovered and important, why don’t you ask them. Engage them in the reporting process before there’s a reporting process.
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In a fellowship-meets-hackathon type model that aims to grow the pool of people doing news application development in U.S. newsrooms, ProPublica is inviting news developers into their offices for a few days each month. The program is called ProPublica’s Pair Programming Project — P5 for short — and applications are open now.

P5 will accept one resident per month to go to New York City for an opportunity to work with some of the best news apps developers in the business.  They’ve won two Pulitzer prizes for their reporting, both of which had heavily data-involved and interactive storytelling attached.

People who are already proficient programmers and are working at a news organization are preferred for the program.  Though there will be some learning and mentorship involved, this residency isn’t for you if you don’t already know how to code. If you don’t have your own project in mind, worry not — you can work on one of ProPublica’s projects.

If you’re interested, you can get more information  on ProPublica’s site. If your skills aren’t up to snuff, maybe think about nudging a traditional engineer or IT person in your newsroom to apply.

Here at 10,000 Words, we’ve written about why developers should work in the newsroom, we’ve told you why journalists should learn to code, and we’ve also shared tools journalists can access to start coding.

While there are plenty of reasons to why journalists should gain some coding skills – it makes you a stronger digital journalist, you can fix things that break on your site, you can create projects without always going to the time-deprived developers, and so on – many journalists don’t see a real need to get their hands dirty in some code.

Well this week, the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project team has provided journalists everywhere with a lot of motivation to start coding with the launch of its journalism code sharing site, Source.

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Newsrooms can be stressful places, full of strong personalities, short deadlines and an insatiable news hole. For reporters and editors, they’re stressful for another reason: The on-going uncertainty of when the fun may end and their ride on the journalism merry-go-round will stop while they join the queue of former journalists vying for fewer and fewer news jobs.

Meanwhile, software developers can often have their pick of locations and a plethora of job opportunities to go after. Their skills are in demand in many industries. So why should they bother to take their talents to a corner of the development industry where so often the “developing story” is about its own struggles or layoffs?

Besides the obvious — we need help to make cool news apps to compliment and help build on our stories! — Dan Sinker at PBS MediaShift Idea Lab tracked down six developers working in the news business to get their take on why they wanted to code in the newsroom.

It turns out they’re drawn for similar reasons as the writers and editors: the unpredictable, deadline-driven development atmosphere is fun, and there’s the opportunity to help tell the story and make news and data more meaningful.

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