There’s nothing less funny than listening to a journalism professor joking that we’re all in this field because we can’t do math. Some of the best journalism being done today only exists because journalists overcame their fear of numbers and dug deep into the data.
Take the L.A. Times’s series on 911 response times. An analysis found stark disparities in the response times of emergency vehicles, and it produced journalism with real impact. Not bad for a bit of math.
Here, I’ll say it: It is possible for a journalist with zero background in code to become a coder.
When you look at a page of code with no understanding of what the characters on the screen stand for, you may go through the following stages: intimidation, frustration, surrender. Programming languages are foreign, as is your understanding of the syntax, the definition of words and concepts used, and how to put it all together into something meaningful. It’s like learning a spoken language.
But fear not, my fellow coding noobs! You can overcome that initial hurdle, that sinking sensation that develops when faced with so much uncertainty, and it’s more painless than you think.
This is one of a series of blog posts from the second ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows, three journalists under 30 who are beginning to make their voices heard and expand the boundaries of digital news. Fellow Tricia Fulks is the story director and researcher for Hollow: An Interactive Documentary.
On the left: Tricia Fulks, story director, storyboards in Welch, W.Va., during the summer production months of Hollow. On the right: Interactive Art Director Jeff Soyk outlines the interactive experience’s site map during post-production in Boston. (Photos: Hollow: An Interactive Documentary)
Adopt. Adjust. Adapt.
When it comes to emerging technologies and platforms for storytelling in our industry, we’ve all heard it. And — as long as we want to stay current — we’ve had to familiarize ourselves with new tools accordingly.
A year ago I built the above atrocity for a class project. We were learning how to use a 3-D software program. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to form the shape of a rifle out of the number of ships that were attacked by Somali pirates in 2011.
The numbers were gleaned from a public database I had been wanting to use for a while, and the concept was inspired by the photographer Francois Robert’s far superior and moving Stop the Violence project. In my final composite, some three dozen 3-D ship models awkwardly join to form the idea of an assault rifle, the tip pointing towards a globe out of which a plume of misshapen white blobs attempt to represent water splashing.
This is one of a series of blog posts from the second ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows, three journalists under 30 who are beginning to make their voices heard and expand the boundaries of digital news. Fellow Hagit Bachrach is a video producer at the Council on Foreign Relations.
One of the biggest challenges I face in covering international affairs and foreign policy is the lack of direct access to the people and the regions I report on.
This is hardly uncommon, as many news organizations have been cutting back on foreign bureaus and international coverage for years. One organization working to fill the gap is the International Reporting Project, which has provided hundreds of journalists with access to more than 100 countries through its fellowships and reporting trips.
Two sisters, 20 days and 18 months, sleep in a hallway in a slum resettlement project in Mumbai.
I’ve been a gamer since I was three years old, when I got a Commodore 64. The love affair hasn’t diminished. If anything, at the age of 30, I realize how significant an impact the games I’ve played have had on my life.
It’s difficult to imagine a situation where gaming, more often a means of entertainment and distraction, can be used to communicate important and real ideas. How can shooting virtual terrorists in Call to Duty or growing a fantasy farm in FarmVille inspire complex game development ideas? While it’s true that not all games are built for narratives or help the player understand a real-world system, many can.
This is one of a series of blog posts from the second ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows, three journalists under 30 who are beginning to make their voices heard and expand the boundaries of digital news. Fellow Hagit Bachrach is a video producer at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Before joining the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), I worked on hard-core news desks for many years, and there are a lot of things I miss. I miss breaking news, I miss convincing sources to go on record, I miss asking unexpected hard-hitting questions, and perhaps most of all, I miss the pace.
This is one of a series of blog posts from the second ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows, three journalists under 30 who are beginning to make their voices heard and expand the boundaries of digital news. Fellow Tricia Fulks is the story director and researcher for Hollow: An Interactive Documentary.
Ron Serino, volunteer fire fighter and Hollow community storyteller, looks over the "stairsteps" near Ashland, W. Va., home to a former strip mine that has become a popular place for ATV riders on weekends. ATV fatalities continue to increase as the Northfork Volunteer Fire Department struggles to gain access and promptly evacuate the injured without a UTV. In the past, Ron and his fellow firefighters have carried injured riders out for miles to save their lives. (Photo: Hollow: An Interactive Documentary)
When Hollow‘s Project Director and creative force, Elaine McMillion, asked me to participate in the interactive documentary in December 2011, I was immediately on board. Elaine and I had gone to school together at West Virginia University’s P.I. Reed School of Journalism, and although we had both worked in journalism, I was the more experienced journalist, while she had more experience in self-starting projects.
So imagine the shift in mindset for me, a former newspaper reporter and editor, when I had to become one of the project’s fundraisers and PR people.
This is the first in our series of posts from our 2012 MJ Bear Fellows, three journalists under 30 who are beginning to make their voices heard and expand the boundaries of digital news. Fellow Denise Hassanzade Ajiri is a web writer for Radio Farda.
When I attended ONA’s annual conference in San Francisco last September, I struggled to fit in among the crowd of ambitious journalists. Everything was new for me — the way journalists interacted, the way they came up with interesting ideas, the way they were leading projects. To be honest, I felt out of place describing myself only with a simple title: “I am a web writer at Radio Free Europe.” Full stop. It was one of those moments when I wondered what I was contributing to the world of journalism.
During those three days, though, I had a revelation. After meeting media entrepreneurs and listening to their stories about how they started projects, I suddenly came up with my own concept: Iran Election Watch.
It seemed like perfect timing. The Iranian presidential election will be held in June. Why not start a website in English to cover it?
The Iran Election Watch website is still a newborn, having officially launched Jan. 22. Evaluating it shall be left to others, but I can share what I’ve learned up until now from leading a project with several collaborators who not only already work or study full time, but who are living in different parts of the world.
Journalists make characters acceptably curious and therefore perfect for pushing the plot forward. The career is up there with police and emergency room personnel as a romanticized method of getting characters out of a stuffy cubicle and into the grittiness of life.
After Apple booted Google Maps from iOS last year, Daniel Graf led the development of a beautiful, refreshed mapping experience that shot to number one in the iTunes store and kicked Apple’s ass on its own turf. Here’s how Graf made it happen—in his own words:
“We have a very successful Android version of Google Maps, so the easiest thing to do was to say, this is super-successful, users love it, so why don’t we just port it over to iOS? But I wanted to challenge the team. While the Android version is a great product, you can also tell it’s been around for a while. You have to access everything via menus—it’s not really best-use-case driven anymore. I said, let’s take a step back—what if we could start from scratch and forget anything we’ve ever done? We have the foundation—the Google data, the mapping data, the local business data, the imagery, the navigation algorithms—it’s a dream to start with.”
