My favorite metaphor for explaining programming to non-coders is that it’s like carpentry. You can put together a chest of drawers with nails and glue, and it’ll fall apart in a year, or you can build something lasting and use dovetail joints. We’re not plumbers providing a utility, but neither are we artists. It’s nice if our work is beautiful, but it also must be durable. We’re craftsmen. We make things that people use.

PANDA is your newsroom data appliance. It provides a place for you to store data, search it and share it with the rest of your newsroom.

How do we balance the empowering possibilities of the networked public sphere with the dark, unsettling, and even dangerous energies of cyberspace? Matthew Battles blends a deep-historical perspective on the internet with storytelling that reaches into its weird, uncanny depths. It’s a hybrid approach, reflecting the web’s way of landing us in a feral state—the predicament of a domestic creature forced to live by its imperfectly-rekindled instincts in a world where it is never entirely at home. The feral is a metaphor—and maybe more than just a metaphor—for thriving in cyberspace, a habitat that changes too rapidly for anyone truly to be native. This talk will weave critical and reflective discussion of online experience with a short story from Battles’ new collection, The Sovereignties of Invention.

What does a public right to hear mean in networked environments and why does it matter? In this talk I’ll describe how a public right to hear has historically and implicitly underpinned the U.S. press’s claims to freedom and, more fundamentally, what we want democracy to be. I’ll trace how this right appears in contemporary news production, show how three networked press organizations have used Application Programming Interfaces to both depend upon and distance themselves from readers, and describe how my research program joins questions of free speech with media infrastructure design. I will argue that a contemporary public right to hear partly depends upon how the press’s technologies and practices mediate among networked actors who construct and contest what Bowker and Star (1999) call “boundary infrastructures.” It is by studying these technosocial, journalistic systems—powerful yet often invisible systems that I call “newsware”—that we might understand how a public right to hear emerges from networked, institutionally situated communication cultures like the online press.

Narula proposed the use of microformats and the little-known rev attribute to attach semantic meaning to links, allowing browsers to handle different kinds of links differently. (rev is supposed to represent a reverse link. All major browsers, when faced with a rev attribute now, just ignore it. It’s like a cousin to rel.)

Eugene Wu, a graduate student of computer science at MIT, demonstrated a suite of tools called DBTruck that makes data comparison a snap. Enter the URL of a CSV file, JSON data, or an HTML table and DBTruck will clean up the data and import it to a local database. Normally you might go to a web page like this, select and copy the table, paste it into an Excel spreadsheet, then spend 15 minutes trying to fix the misplaced cells and formatting issues. DBTruck is automated and fast.

Too often we just get a giant number — the U.S. debt is $15 trillion, Chinese greenhouse gases are the highest in the world at 7 billion tonnes a year, Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics, etc. Is there some way of helping to put these statistics — huge to the point of meaningless — into an understandable, human framework?

Four years ago, its traditional-to-digital-audience metrics were at a one-to-one basis, meaning for every traditional reader there was a digital one, according to Justin Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company. Now, he says, on average, its digital audience is 25 times higher than the print audience. According to ComScore, The Atlantic got 3.6 million uniques in April 2012. On the advertising side, more than 50 percent of its revenue will come from digital.

Quartz is its boldest move yet. Helmed by ex-Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Delaney and slated to officially launch later this year, Quartz is looking to succeed where Portfolio most recently failed. It plans to take a global perspective — sprinkling correspondents around the globe — and offer a mix of magazine-like analytical content and the short bursts and infographic fare that’s more au courrant on the Web but aimed at global business leaders.

Quartz is also taking an interesting distribution by focusing more on mobile and tablets. Its content won’t be created for Web reading, then ported over to tablet and mobile, Delaney said. Instead, features will be native to those environments. One trend Quartz is not joining: paywalls. All its content will be free on desktop, mobile and tablet.

Christened with the new name last month, the four year-old platform is now much more than a CMS. It comes with nearly every tool that’s needed for publishing, all tightly connected. And it’s already powering hundreds of SB Nation sports fan sites around the country, plus our gadget-oriented pseudo-competitors over at The Verge, forthcoming gaming site Polygon, and whatever else Vox decides to launch (I’ve heard there’s one coming about cars, for example).

The solution, one that I believe we’ll see more often at top online publications, was to create a tight development loop between developers and writers.

One of the most maddening parts of publishing online today is all the data entry related to a story — adding links to previous articles, tags, categories, images, and any other non-writing elements within the text editor. This process often takes up more time than writing the story itself, and the only solutions I’ve seen have been half-functional plugins.

On the topic of photos and videos, Chorus also has some careful solutions in place. The text editor includes a section that shows writers relevant licensed photos to use, whether from the AP, Getty or other services. It also comes with a streamlined photo editor to help writers crop images to their needs, and a tool for quickly uploading videos and photos that they’ve taken at events.

I'm a journalist because I'm really, really into demystifying the "others" in our world: Other people. Other experiences. Other truths.

The "non-article" isn't about re-inventing the article and it sure as hell isn't about replacing it.

We have an opportunity to invent new ways of telling stories and new ways of connecting people through those stories.

If you are old school and hearing "journalism" and "storytelling" together makes your blood boil, that's a problem for your cardiologist.

At last a suitable name has been proposed for the some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists that have received occasional discussion on Language Log (here, in the first instance). I mean formulae like these (where the N, X, Y, Z are filled in to taste): If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z. In space, no one can hear you X. X is the new Y.

Glen Whitman, who discussed this topic on Agoraphilia, taking his cue from the first example, proposes calling these non-sexually reproduced journalistic textual templates by an appealingly simple name: we can call them snowclones.

Hearing no other nominations, I now hereby propose that they be so dubbed. The clerk shall enter the new definition into the records.

But publishers are complicators, and for the most part have never understood the Net or the Web. Nor have they fully embraced its inherent simplicities, with the remarkable exception of RSS (which Dave made into Really Simple Syndication — a purpose that could not possibly be misunderstood by publishers, and which now brings up 4,270,000,000 results on Google).

How does the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart production team search for the archived TV clips they use so effectively to expose hypocrisy, prejudice and just darn funny moments of unguarded honesty?

To what extent do they record and tag programming; use commercial archives; and search program closed captioning?

Simple investigative search combinations using TiVo or a similar tool (now we know it's Snapstream).
He also mentioned that they use LexisNexis and plain ol' Google extensively.

Why is it that ideas for creating new narrative forms around print media inevitably involve adding sound and video to it? It’s like print is some kind of backward child who needs remedial education, or a bicyclist who should instead be driving a race car.

The Data Journalism Handbook is a free, open source reference book for anyone interested in the emerging field of data journalism.

This demo is an experiment in augmenting video with additional information [in the sidebar].

Nine years and one Pulitzer Prize later, what is the phenomenon that lunch set in motion? How is it that The Huffington Post, at turns celebrated as the savior of its parent company and decried as a glitzy thief of journalism produced by others, has come to matter?

Still, networks were eternally undermined by the inevitable force of randomness. It was one thing, say, to go to a baseball game and hear the stirrings of rhythmic clapping that then cascade around the ballpark so that quickly everyone is clapping in unison. A powerful thing to behold—so much so that an inning later, you yourself might want to start the whole stadium clapping. Maybe the person to your left joins in, and maybe five or six others do, too. Until the clapping dies. In Watts’s view, networks were a wonderful phenomenon to observe, but all but impossible to replicate. Why did everyone in the ballpark feel the desire to join in the clapping in the sixth inning but not in the seventh? What was different? Could you somehow recreate the precise conditions that made that ephemeral but resoundingly successful sixth-inning network happen?

We asked them “If this project goes wrong, what’s the most likely thing we would have done to make it go that way?” They gave us some really interesting answers. We learned that they’d tried to make this app once before, but it didn’t feel enough like the print magazine, so they axed it before launch. We were being brought in to do it right.

So on the one hand you’ve got this lightweight, easy to complete paper magazine with minimal navigation. On the other hand you’ve got this heavy iPad with a tiny viewport, requiring loads of navigation. It was worrying.

Now, we were determined not to have the app ruined by invasive ads. We didn’t want ads appearing on article pages. We didn’t even want them appearing between the pages of an article. So we pitched this idea that we’d have only full screen ads that would appear in between the section pages.

Looking back on it, we made the classic architect’s mistake of designing for a fictitious user behaviour that only existed in our heads. When architects design public spaces, they have to design the paths. They have to define how people will move through their space.

Desire lines. If you look on the right, there, you’ll see the council has even added a fence to stop people from doing this.

What you get is this: “Pfffft!” It’s an anticlimax. It’s just dull. You know why we did it like this? To avoid the additional costs of image licensing for bigger images. We thought we were saving our client money.

The way you move through articles in this section is by tapping the arrow buttons above the photo, or the pins on the map. That seems OK in isolation- but if you look at in the context of the rest of the app experience, it feels wrong. In the rest of the magazine, you swipe through pages using a sideways swiping gesture. It’s a nice, laid back, soothing reading experience- but when you get into this section, you are forced to change the way you hold the device. Suddenly you have to take one of your hands, hold your finger like this and prod. It’s like switching from an iPad to an old stylus based interface from the 90s.

If you think about the tone of my story, some of the main themes were time pressure, worry, risk-taking, embarrassment, and recovery from embarrassment. For me at least, this is what real life user experience design is like. It’s nothing like the vision we normally portray outwardly to graduates and newcomers to the field.

We’ve basically weaponized our understanding of Psychology and turned it into tools of manipulation and persuasion. For us to move forward, we need to turn that lens of analysis on ourselves. Designers are human too – and we’re all prone to making the same kinds of mistakes.

So the first person to leave a comment on a Gawker network post will now be in charge of policing the thread of commenters who reply, maintaining a high level of discussion and recruiting other voices to participate and bring more page views. And there will be multiple comment moderators and threads per post. Free labor!

But Denton says now that this system actually turned out to be a massive mistake, and that all it did was encourage social-media gurus and professional commenters to game the system in order to get rewards:

It was a terrible mistake. It doesn’t work because people game it — and the people who game it are the people with time and social-media expertise, and those are not the people with information or insight. What person who actually has a job and a reputation… would give a f*** about getting some little badge like they’re in high school? It’s patronizing.

In a similar way, the commenting changes are designed to make discussion among writers (who he said will be encouraged to spend far more time in the comments section) and readers and sources far more prominent, in some cases to the point where they become the story.

The New York Times now has 454,000 digital subscribers, and the company’s Boston Globe another 18,000. These subscriber deals were structured — essentially providing free digital access to Sunday subscribers — so that there was minimal cannibalization of print.

The worse news is that digital advertising — ideally an eventual replacement for some share of print advertising losses — was down in the first quarter too, actually by a higher percentage (10.4 percent) than print.

nother bit of context for today’s good news is that the Times Co. remains not very profitable with an operating margin for the quarter of about 4 percent.

They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing. Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said. And they believe that, even if they do a good job, there is no path forward. Will they one day graduate to a beat, covering a crime scene, a city council or a school board? They didn’t know. So some left; others are thinking of quitting.