Here’s our weekly look at stories about the media that you may have missed on Medium. As always, if you see something worth sharing, please send it my way.
Finding Dylann Roof
July 10, Storyful
This is actually from last week, but a great read. Storyful details how it reported out more on the identity of Dylann Roof shortly after Roof killed nine people in Charleston, South Carolina.
Through collating lists of authentic and accurate sources, and by knowing which open-source tools to use, Storyful was able to quickly build a picture of Roof after his name was first connected with the shooting. We then were able to establish to a high degree of certainty the veracity of his website and attached manifesto. By analyzing the Exif data of the images from the website, Storyful was able to confirm that the images were authentic, original versions of photographs belonging to Roof.
A blueprint for designing hackathons
July 13, by Jeanne Brooks and Lam Thuy Vo
This is a detailed account for creating your own hackathon with monthly and weekly to-dos, a list of roles and how to get people to come.
Make sure you reach out to a wide variety of groups. There are various strategies for inviting diverse communities to your event. For more information on outreach, feel free to consult this post on building a diverse newsroom, which in addition to being a great playbook for diversity recruiting, also includes a list of journalism associations lead by members of ethnic, LGBTQI and other potentially underrepresented communities.
The Biggest Twitter Publishers Of June 2015
July 13, by Liam Corcoran
NewsWhip reports BBC, The New York Times, Mashable, The Guardian and NBC were in the top 5 spots of most tweeted sites for June.
After an absence in May (13th), BuzzFeed return to the top 10, with a total of 1,053,000 for the month. Interestingly, their two best-performing pieces of June were very much in the news spectrum. ‘These Are The Victims Of The Charleston Church Shooting‘ was tweeted over 20,000 times, while ‘Texas Police Officer Suspended After Pulling Weapon On Teams During Pool Party‘ had over 16,000 tweets.
The opportunity for African newsrooms: mobile but not online
July 13, by Stephen Abbott Pugh
Mobile is both a challenge and an opportunity in many countries in Africa, Pugh reports.
My fellowship focuses on building engagement around health and development news as part of the Code for Africa team. Code for Africa has had great success with projects that focus on creating “actionable data” for citizens. Key examples include the GotToVote project, which helps people exercise their right to vote by simplifying the process of finding registration centers and checking electoral records; and the creation of a suite of health tools designed to help check up on doctors in Kenya. In these cases, Code for Africa took complicated data and made it personally relevant to individuals through simple user inputs. This is where we see the future of news and information services across Africa.
Movies and shows about journalists that every journalist should watch
July 14, by Malachi Petersen
From “Anchorman” to “Broadcast News”…
How we created a data visualization on cancer risks to American workers and how you can help us
July 15, by Yue Qiu
This piece gets behind the scenes with a data viz for Center for Public Integrity.
We know that the most important thing for a data visualization is to get it right. During the process of producing the interactive, we were constantly in touch with experts, officials and scholars in the field to try to ensure accurate representation of the data. Beyond its accuracy, we were most concerned with helping the data be as effective as possible by making it clear and navigable.
The Pink Ghetto of Social Media
July 16, by Alana Hope Levinson
While women may not be leading newsrooms in large numbers, they are leading social media teams, Levinson reports.
Young women today are looking to break into a news industry that’s concurrently trying to diversify and beefing up social media jobs; it’s no wonder that a lot of them end up in these roles. But Amy King, chair of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, says women have long been cast as supporting players in the office. “Think of the classic trope of the secretary who does the work that her boss is actually getting all the credit for,” she says. The volunteer organization has done groundbreaking work in tracking the abysmal byline gender gap by combing through select national magazines annually for the past six years. The studies have revealed a persistent woman problem: “Women tend to do the behind-the-scenes work that is unrecognized or unappreciated,” King adds, partly because they are willing to.
Four Ideas You Should Imitate, Copy and Steal
July 17, by Josh Stearns
Stearns boils down four great ideas that you can also find in his weekly newsletter.
