By Dana Amihere, Brian Boyer, Daniel Drepper, Maite Fernandez, Sydette Harry, Erika Owens, Ryan Pitts, Linda Sandvik, Elisabeth Soep, Matt Waite, Sisi Wei, Jue Yang
From Homan Square: A Portrait of Chicago's Detainees.
As we did last year, we’ve asked a couple of dozen people from all around the news-nerd community to tell us about one thing—article, feature, app, tool, or something else entirely—that they loved in 2015. This week, we’re publishing their responses, from interactives to project management software.
We hope you find here at least one thing that eases your work, inspires new angles on your stories, and helps carry you through to 2016. Read the first and second parts of our community roundup. —ed
Favored Formats
Brian Boyer, NPR
2015 was the year of, for lack of a better name, the sequential visual story: stories in which the visuals drive the narrative, and the user taps, swipes, or clicks to progress. We saw lots this year: Vox doing great stuff on Snapchat Discover, Twitter aggregating moments, our own Look At This stories, and Tampa Bay Times’ epic explainer of how Florida’s schools are failing black students, to name a few.
Excellent Interactives
Sydette Harry, The Coral Project
The Guardian’s piece on Homan Square. It went from the systemic, to the geographical to the personal , in an incredibly clean and gut-wrenching way. Epidemics of police violence visually became people suffering real consequences. It was a personalization of data rarely seen in reporting.
Daniel Drepper, Correctiv
I loved America’s Most Admired Lawbreaker by Steven Brill for Highline at The Huffington Post. I think we can’t put enough effort into telling great investigative stories about complex issues that affect a lot of people. I loved the attention to detail and read/listened to the whole series.
Dana Amihere, Dallas News
What Are the Fish Telling Us, from Fusion Interactive.
Erika Owens, OpenNews
Lena Groeger’s small multiples piece has really stuck with me, so I loved seeing New York Magazine using it numerous times in print this year. Their 100 women directors piece helped me find more films and TV directed by women. I spent a couple of weeks marveling over their print layout of One Block in Bed-Stuy, and a mini tour of the block over four pages.
Bonus round: Social studies was my favorite subject growing up, so I was humbled and surprised by how much schooling I got from the Struggle and Progress Jacobin issue about Reconstruction after the US Civil War. From economics to the portrayal of Confederate sympathies in film over the past 100 years, and with some striking design (you can buy the cover as a poster), it’s kept me thinking throughout the year.
Lissa Soep, Youth Radio
Here’s a project all of us at YRI shared with the youth team and learned a lot from: The N-Word.
Intriguing Interviews & Explainers
Maite Fernandez, ICFJ
One of my favorite things this year is Paul Ford’s What is Code, published on Bloomberg Businessweek over the summer. It’s a terrific long piece (more than 38,000 words!); it’s not only written beautifully and in simple terms, but it also had all kinds of added features that made it a fun read online.
Linda Sandvik, OpenNews Fellow, The Guardian
This isn’t new as of 2015, but I love Melody Kramer’s ongoing interview series on people not in the news, commenting on the news. An example: Meet Liz. All of them can be found on her GitHub.
Jue Yang, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
Here’s something great I found in 2015: Partially Derivative.
I stumbled upon this podcast about everything data when I was trying to contextualizing what data journalism is in real newsrooms (episode 35). They reveal data’s ubiquitous existence with diverse topical choices. Looking forward to listening to more of them.
Lovable Tools
Sisi Wei, ProPublica
ArchieML has made translating our apps this year a much easier experience—both for the developers and the translators.
Matt Waite, Drone Journalism Lab/University of Nebraska
I’m really interested in GitBook which uses markdown and Github to publish books. GitBook allows for authors to create ebook versions and even charge for them, or give them away for free. The Tow Center at Columbia is already using it to really great effect, but I’m curious to see if more people inclined to share knowledge and how-to type stuff take it up.
Booster Rockets for Newsroom Culture
Ryan Pitts, OpenNews
Many news organizations worked on diversity as more than an abstract problem. If we want to cover meaningful stories for our communities, and do it well, our newsrooms need to reflect those communities. A few concrete steps from 2015: ProPublica published a “state of the newsroom” report on diversity; Vox Product formalized its inclusivity efforts and published a code of conduct; and the NPR Visuals team changed the way it handles cover letters and interviews to help candidates regardless of background.
Read Full Story from Source https://source.opennews.org/articles/just-one-thing-year-review-part-3/
This article by Dana Amihere,Brian Boyer,Daniel Drepper,Maite Fernandez,Sydette Harry,Erika Owens,Ryan Pitts,Linda Sandvik,Elisabeth Soep,Matt Waite,Sisi Wei,Jue Yang originally appeared on source.opennews.org on December 23, 2015 at 11:00PM
