News developers are becoming key players in newsrooms these days, producing some of the most innovative work in journalism.
Source, a website launched in October last year as part of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, aims to bring the growing community of news developers together to learn from one another.
The site includes an index of open source code, listings of people and organizations who are producing the best work in the field, a list of coding events around the world, as well as project walk-throughs and interviews. A recent example: “How we made ‘Snow Fall,' ” in which the New York Times team explains how they made this awesome example of multimedia journalism.
Starting next week, Source will also include a learning section centered around case studies, announced Dan Sinker, head of Mozilla's OpenNews project.
This series, which will run through the end of June, will revolve around three categories: data, mapping and data visualization. With the objective of showcasing the kind of problems developers encounter when working in newsrooms, each case study will include a description of the project, the initial challenges faced and how they were solved, as well as the limitations of the solutions implemented and the compromises made, explained Kio Stark, who is in charge of the new learning section, on a recent Mozilla OpenNews community call.
If you want to nerd out on how some of the great journalism projects were made, you can check out Source here. You can hear Dan Sinker and Source's editor Erin Kissane talk about the website on this Nieman Lab podcast.