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Why “Sorry, I don’t know” is sometimes the best answer: The Washington Post’s technology chief on its first AI chatbot
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May 19, 2014, 12:26 p.m.
Reporting & Production
LINK: thunderdome-data.github.io  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   May 19, 2014

Digital First Media’s Project Thunderdome is in the history books, yes, but the labors of its data team will survive.

At GitHub, they’ve posted the code they built for interactive graphics and news apps, ready for your newsroom to use.

In the repos of our Github organization, you’ll find the code and data behind many of the projects we built in our short lifespan. These are charts and maps, graphs and quizzes, news applications and games that ran on the websites of Digital First Media’s 75 daily papers. Many of these we created as a result of partnering with reporters and editors in those local newsrooms on stories they were pursuing. Others we reported and built ourselves.

Most of these repos are just the code for the various one-off stories and projects, including the bombings at the Boston Marathon, coverage of the Newtown school shooting, an investigation of Connecticut school superintendent salaries and more data tables than you can shake a stick at, like all of the ads aired during the Super Bowl for five years. You’re welcome to peruse the code, look at the projects and use anything you find interesting.

Some of these tools and templates we found ourselves using over and over again. We think these repos in particular will be of interest to other newsrooms looking to kickstart their news development.

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