SuperPACs. Drones. Gerrymandering. Dark Money. How do you quickly illustrate these concepts in a way that is meaningful and impactful to an audience of different education levels and cultural backgrounds? That was the challenge set out before a group of 60 volunteers at the February Hacks/Hackers NYC Investigative Journalism Iconathon led by The Noun Project in partnership with ProPublica.
Journalists, editors, graphic designers, web developers and engaged citizens brainstormed and sketched ideas for icons frequently needed throughout news editorials and applications.
The Design Thinking hands-on workshop with Hong Qu, one of the first designers at YouTube, took place at the CUNY Journalism school. It led the attendees through the premise behind user persona testing. Then Hong had us get together with teams and create user persona scenarios and wireframes for 5 ideas submitted by attendees; first on paper, then with Omnigraffle.
The team topics:
Finding medical price info Gourmeet Penpal news Event sign-up Videogames: mobile mall stats page Hong explained that taking the time to identify users and iteratively build from paper to wireframe and onward minimizes the risk of making something unusable.
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.
Things got a little heated at the Hacks/Hackers event on the Future of Personalized News.
After founders Dan Olsen of yourversion and Ethan Gahng of lazyfeed talked about providing relevant stories to readers, some in the crowd pressed them about how to pay the creators who craft all that quality media that audiences want.
But as Dan and Ethan pointed out, they aren’t making any money themselves and are still trying to figure out their business model.
Thanks to all who attended the Hacks/Hackers meetup on the Future of Personalized News! I’ll be writing more about the event in a separate post — things got a bit heated at times and there was some good debate about how to ensure quality content survives in the aggregation age. The archived livestream is below, and here’s a written summary on Google Buzz by Abe Epton of Google News. (thanks Abe!
Welcome to Hacks and Hackers, the online community for discussion around the real-life meetups of the same name.