Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
PressPad, an attempt to bring some class diversity to posh British journalism, is shutting down
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Jan. 9, 2013, 9:21 p.m.

Press Publish 1: Dan Sinker and Erin Kissane of Source on the community of news developers

In the first episode of our new weekly Nieman Lab podcast, we look at how they built a central gathering point for news devs and how they’re trying to pull coders into journalism.

I’m very excited to welcome you to Press Publish, our brand new weekly Nieman Lab podcast.

Here’s the deal: At Nieman Lab, I’m very lucky to be able to talk with a lot of smart people engaged in building the future of news. Journalists, technologists, business-side folks, entrepreneurs, academics: They each have different angles on where we’re headed and how they’re trying to get us there. I’ve always wanted a forum to have longer conversations with these people — to nerd out with them, really — and share them with our audience.

So that’s what Press Publish will be: a weekly conversation with the people making the future of news.

We’ll be putting out a new episode every week, and they’ll usually average 45 minutes to an hour. (Great for commutes!) My hope is that, if you listen regularly, you’ll get a good sweep of the many ways news is changing — and also that you’ll get to hear from a lot of interesting people.

A quick note: Most episodes of Press Publish will be at least a little bit nerdy. This one gets a little nerdy about code; future episodes might be nerdy about advertising formats or workflows or analytics or academia. I’ll do my best to make sure it all remains accessible, but, hey — nerding out is what we aim to do here. I think part of our mission is to be a center point for different kinds of nerds to learn from each other, and I hope Press Publish will be part of that. Also, with each episode I’ll pull out links to all the things we talk about and include them in the Show Notes section below.

Episode 1: Dan Sinker and Erin Kissane

Dan Sinker and Erin Kissane are two of the key people behind Source, the new(ish) site from Knight-Mozilla OpenNews. Here’s how they describe it:

Source is a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project designed to amplify the impact of journalism code and the community of developers, designers, journalists, and editors who make it.

They do that by assembling a big, living repository of journalistic code, interviewing developers about how they did certain things, highlighting community events, and more. It’s pretty great for those of us are interested in the code side of journalism — and it’s definitely worth watching if you want to keep up with that rapidly developing space.

I talked with Dan and Erin about how Source came to be, how they designed a content strategy for it, how they’ve tried to work with the existing community of news devs, and how the journalism+code equation is evolving.

Listen

Download the MP3

Or listen in your browser:
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/niemanlab/PressPublish001.mp3]

Subscribe in iTunes

Subscribe (RSS)

Show notes

Source
Dan Sinker
Erin Kissane
@dansinker
@kissane
Punk Planet
The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel
Contents Magazine
The Elements of Content Strategy
A List Apart
Knight-Mozilla OpenNews
Django
Underscore.js
Backbone.js
D3.js
CoffeeScript
Jeremy Ashkenas
Agile software development
Krista Stevens
Scott Klein
Brian Boyer
Joe Germuska
Heather Billings
Ryan Pitts
OpenNews Learning
Erika Owens
GitHub
Responsive IFrames
TimelineJS
Simple Tiles
2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference
Tang (which wasn’t invented by or for NASA, actually)
Knight-Mozilla OpenNews’ News Developer Portraits
News Developer Portraits: Jeremy Ashkenas, New York Times
Jacob Harris
Source on The New York Times’ election results loader
Mike Bostock
Source on The New York Times’ 512 Paths to the White House
Source coverage of the 2012 elections
Source coverage of Hurricane Sandy
Source’s “People” content type
Chris Groskopf
Biella Coleman
Coleman, “Three Ethical Moments in Debian”
IETF language tags
Playdoh
Miguel Paz
Prose.io
Versioned writing

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).
POSTED     Jan. 9, 2013, 9:21 p.m.
Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
PressPad, an attempt to bring some class diversity to posh British journalism, is shutting down
“While there is even more need for this intervention than when we began the project, the initiative needs more resources than the current team can provide.”
Is the Texas Tribune an example or an exception? A conversation with Evan Smith about earned income
“I think risk aversion is the thing that’s killing our business right now.”
The California Journalism Preservation Act would do more harm than good. Here’s how the state might better help news
“If there are resources to be put to work, we must ask where those resources should come from, who should receive them, and on what basis they should be distributed.”