News Hack Day SF

What is NewsHack Day?

NewsHack Day brings together journalists, developers and designers for several days of creative news coding and data reporting. The June 22-24 event begins with a code bootcamp in Python/Ruby led by ScraperWiki (“Liberate the Data”) on Friday, followed by a two-day news hackathon at The Hub SOMA on Saturday and Sunday. We’re  inviting participants from a broad range of news, technology, design and academic communities in the Bay Area. 

We have three simple goals:

• expand the community of journalists, coders and designers
• rapidly conceiving, prototyping and building digital news tools and stories  
• make NewsHack Day an open resource for anyone to replicate or (better yet) improve the concept

So exactly what is a hack?

Hack         hack/hak/     noun  

  1.    writer or journalist producing dull, unoriginal work: “a hack scriptwriter”.

  2.    code that is written to provide extra functionality to existing software.

  3.    a solution to a problem.

At NewsHack Day, you’ll form teams to build your own functional software and code solving a problem facing journalists or tell a better story. Story hacks create article concepts around datasets and/or data visualizations, while tool hacks help reporters and editors preform their job better. Topics? That’s for you to decide, but we’re lining up lots of data and prizes in the science and politics reporting categories.

Here’s a good video explaining the London Hack Day. 

Who is it for?

If you’re interested and engaged in media, programming and design, then this event was designed for you. Not everyone needs to be an ace reporter or crack coder. Come prepared to pitch in on tough problems, help your team and learn a lot before the weekend is through. We hope the connections you create here will carry over to the rest of your work.

How does it all work?

The NewsHack Day event format is taking a “hackathon as newsroom” approach. We’ll have a digital ticker tape of ongoing projects and ideas streaming during the event allowing any team to scan the project landscape and work together. Editors will help teams work out any problems. The weekend is intended to quickly generate, mock up, test and share ideas, while ensuring the maximum collaboration and exchange of ideas. Any designer, journalist or programmer can sign up (space permitting). Your ideas will be presented at the end of the event. The final products are intended to solve problems facing journalists while reporting, producing, curating or communicating information, or telling a story that has not been told. These proof-of-concept examples will be turned into more refined tools/stories for journalists and others to improve after the event. Prizes and merriment are to be had. 

Prizes:

• Mother Jones’ “Smart Fearless Reporting” prize: Editorial consideration to work with a team’s story or news tool idea receiving a byline (for stories) or development credit (for tools).
• The FooPrize:  People’s Choice Award: voted on by the group online during judging
• The Design Award 
• SoundCloud’s Spectacular Audio Award 
• Most Audacious Failure: This will go to the most audacious project that didn’t quite realize its ambition but dreamed bigger and better than anyone else 
• ScraperWiki’s Deep Data Dive award: Best use of data in the public interest
• New Media Ventures Prize in Political Innovation: Awarded to the project that successfully uses media to drive progressive political change.

Winning teams in categories get featured on the Visual.ly blog (blog.vsual.ly) and prizes will be distributed.

Who’s organizing this?

Michael Coren         MajorPlanet Studios, FastCompany

Aine McGuire           ScraperWiki 

David Harris            Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences

Gopika Prabhu         Elefint Designs

Matt Scharpnick       Elefint Designs 

Burt Herman            Storify, Hacks/Hackers

Bo Kim                     Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

John Osborn            Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Anna Guardiola       The Hub SOMA

Sydney Calander     The Hub SOMA

For more information, please contact Michael Coren at michael@majorplanetstudios.org