Projects, Products, & Research

This track is here to connect you with tools and ideas you can use in your newsroom right now. We’ve invited the folks behind some amazing journalism projects to share intro videos and demos in advance, and they’ll be available throughout SRCCON 2020 to meet up for 1-on-1 and group conversations.

Projects cover everything from technical tools for journalism to frameworks for reimagining newsroom workflows. There are channels for each one in the SRCCON Slack, so meet them below, then connect with them there!

The Accountability Project

The Accountability Project curates, standardizes and indexes public data to give journalists, researchers and others a simple way to search across otherwise siloed records—676.8 million of them so far.

Big Local News

Big Local News cleans and shares data so that journalists and researchers can discover and write stories about policies that affect their communities. The Big Local platform helps journalists collaborate on projects and use data in local stories. Tools like the COVID-19 Case Mapper make it easier for local newsrooms to investigate data and share it with their readers.

Datasette

Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape or size and publish that as an interactive, explorable website and accompanying API. Datasette is aimed at data journalists, museum curators, archivists, local governments, and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world.

Demos from the video:

Election SOS

Election SOS offers free training for journalists, connecting them to best practices, resources, and support around election coverage.

Memberkit

Product Kit from News Catalyst

Product Kit is designed to support product strategy, research, and development in news organizations that are new to product development and management. With an emphasis on transparency, accountability, and progress, Product Kit can also be a useful reset for existing product teams.

The Quilt: Policy, Art, and Healing

“The Quilt: Policy, Art, and Healing” is a joint effort by Voices for Racial Justice and The UpTake that aims to transform the ways in which Minnesota’s BIPOC communities approach both legislative policy work and legislative reporting. The magazine used the Journalism of Color methodology to create the reporting and applied a racial equity impact analysis to legislative storytelling.

Systems Thinking for Journalists

Journalism has the power to shape how we see the world. What if we could better explain our most entrenched problems? What if we could illuminate effective opportunities for change? A practice called systems thinking can help, and this toolkit can help journalists use it to be a force for systemic change.