Thank you everyone who turned out for the first Hacks/Hackers gathering in Boston! We had a great crowd that mixed with attendees from the Knight Foundation’s conference on the Future of News Civic Media, with people from local news organizations like The Boston Globe and Boston.com, the Nieman Journalism Lab and also startups like pinyadda. A photo is below, and check out more at the Boston meetup page: http://meetupbos.hackshackers.com
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my iPad. And much of that came from all the confusion and debate over what the iPad actually is. Is it a big iPhone that can’t make calls? Is it a netbook replacement that doesn’t have a camera? Is it a laptop replacement without a keyboard or multitasking? Is it a TV replacement that can’t play Flash video? I was frustrated that my iPad didn’t live up to the hype.
The word is out and already more than 100 people have signed up to attend the first Hacks/Hackers gathering in New York on June 2. Please sign up to attend at http://meetupnyc.hackshackers.com. The first event will be focused on getting to know each other and assembling the wider journo-tech community to talk about what events you’d like to see in the future. Hacks/Hackers co-founders Burt Herman and Aron Pilhofer will talk about the goals of the organization.
Hacks/Hackers began as a meetup, but the vision for the group is about more than social gatherings. There’s already been so much talk about the future of journalism. We wanted to create a community of people leading the charge and building that future. We’re moving ahead with more of that plan. Hacks/Hackers is partnering with KQED, the leading public radio station in the country, to host its first workshop event May 21-23.
The art of making sense of data — and it is truly an art — is a key element in building the future of journalism. Interactive presentations created from data can be personalized by the reader, giving a more engaging news experience. Data-based applications can also lead to new business models, through paid or subscription-based applications that give extra value to readers by providing a new dimension on news coverage.
Thanks to all who turned out at Google for our event on Wave and journalism. If you weren’t able to make it, the archived livestream of the event is embedded below (two videos). There’s lots of info there about the concepts behind Wave as well as demonstrations of typical workflows. “It took Twitter months to get the 1 verb of its product into the popular lexicon. Wave has a whole new vocabulary!
I’m excited to announce that we’re joining forces with some industry leaders working at the intersection of journalism and technology to help expand Hacks/Hackers into a wider community. Rich Gordon, associate professor and director of digital innovation at the Medill School of Journalism, and Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News Technologies at The New York Times, will be helping to build Hacks/Hackers. We all felt this is the right idea at the right time, and look forward to bringing our different perspectives on the issue to help foster this community.
For the next Hacks/Hackers event, we’ll be heading to Google headquarters in Mountain View to talk about Wave and potential applications for journalism. I’ll be writing more about what people have done so far in a future post and are happy to hear about ways you think it could be useful. But for now, here’s the description for the event from our meetup site, and please go ahead and RSVP here.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project is out with their latest report on how Americans consume news. There are many highlights in there, so I’ll just mention a few that are direct quotes from the report’s summary. I would strongly recommend that you read the rest for yourself. The internet is now the third most popular news platform, behind local television news and national television news 50% [of Americans] say they read news in a local newspaper The majority of online news consumers (57%) say they routinely rely on just two to five websites for their news 75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% say they share links to news with others via those means
Asking the right questions is critical in getting compelling answers from sources, as all reporters know. A problem with online comments is that they are often unfocused and off-topic given the open nature of many commenting systems. Asking the right questions is critical in getting compelling answers from sources, as all reporters know. Yahoo! researcher Yury Lifshits has built a tool called Interview2010 that aims to help get better answers from readers through a structured question and answer system.