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. continued…

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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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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.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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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The API, which initially launched during the 2008 presidential election, previously updated every other week. In some cases, some data updated daily, according to a post about the upgrade from NYT developer Derek Willis. Now, the updates happen within minutes after the FEC receives them (updated every 15 minutes).
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That method worked well for ProPublica. Its graphic of changing congressional support for SOPA and PIPA from Jan 18. to Jan. 19 went viral after being posted on ProPublica’s Facebook page Thursday night. In less than 48 hours, the image received more than 17,000 likes, was shared more than 10,100 times and received a whopping 1,298 comments. And those numbers are still rising.

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Can a good reporter with smarts and some technical savvy become a news app developer? ProPublica, the online news organization that has blazed a path in creating innovative news apps, is offering a paid fellowship to find out.

The News Application Fellowship is a pilot project that will give one person the opportunity to work side-by-side with ProPublica’s News Apps desk and its news app developers. You’ll learn how to create news apps like Dollars for Docs and the Opportunity Gap.

“We know that out there in the news universe there are whip-smart people who are starting to teach themselves how to program by reading books and building stuff they never show anybody; people who want to take their graphics talents to the next level and to start working on the back-end code as well,” reads the description. “If that’s you, hurry up and apply already.” continued…

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Photo Credit: Jay Westcott

This past summer, for example, Reuters hired Anthony De Rosa to lead its social media team. And this week, ProPublica announced Daniel Victor as its newest social media editor.

So, what exactly does it take to land the gig? Who better to ask then ProPublica’s newest addition?

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While there are many tools available to do the trick, one stands out for its power, and that’s ProPublica’s open source TimelineSetter.

The introduction to TimelineSetter reads like this: “TimelineSetter creates beautiful timelines.”

That’s an understatement.

The timelines created by TimelineSetter are sleek, can incorporate rich media like Google Maps and YouTube videos and can be easily modified. continued…

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When it comes to working with and presenting data, Google reigns supreme. We’ve covered Google’s Chart Wizard, Google’s Public Data Explorer, and even ways to run a news website using Google Docs (with WordPress). Another of Google’s powerful data tools, Google Refine, lets users work with “messy” data sets and transform them into something amazing. Check out Part 1 of the Google Refine screencast.

Unlike Google’s general web-based data services, Google Refine is a standalone desktop application. Formerly known as Freebase Gridworks, the Google Refine tool has been used by the Chicago Tribune, data.gov.uk, and most famously by ProPublica for their “Dollars for Docs” investigation series from October 2010. Once you download and install the Google Refine tool, you interact with it through your web browser. You can create a new project from scratch, or you can import data sets from files stored on your computer. When your data is imported, that’s where the real power of the tool comes through.

You can use facets and filters to create subsets of data, as well as format strings of data which match your search patterns. For example, if you see the term “as soon as possible” and “ASAP” in the same data set, you can reformat both data strings to match each other. For more complicated queries, you can use the Google Refine Expression Language (GREL) to create regular expressions and isolate substrings of data to separate columns.

Once you’re done with formatting your data, Google Refine lets you export your work in a number of different formats, including as an Excel spreadsheet, an HTML table, or as JSON data, which you can change to match a wiki-style format. Google Refine also lets you hook into open web services, such as Google’s Language Detection Service or the open map service Nominatim.

Google Refine is a free download and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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Forget simple kinetic type as a storytelling technique. ProPublica and New York University’s Studio 20 have taken it a step further today with the release of their music-video explainer: a fun, typographic animation and song based on ProPublica’s investigation on hydraulic fractured gas drilling.

The ongoing investigation, “Buried Secrets” — which contains 106 articles as of today —  is a thorough look at the environmental threat of gas drilling. But it’s rich with information — and lots of it. The music video takes a fun twist on that investigation, giving readers a welcoming sample of the wealth of information that the investigation itself has to offer.

The video is a product of Studio 20′s “Building A Better Explainer” project, which was launched in November 2010 by a graduate journalism class taught by Jay Rosen:

The project will experiment with the form of  “the explainer,” a genre in journalism that provides the essential background knowledge necessary to follow events in the news.

The Fracking Song completes that mission sufficiently. As I’ve said before about animated videos — I think they’re a brilliant storytelling technique in a day in age when consumer attention spans are short and the “shareability factor” is vital for the spreading of information. continued…

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