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
- Big Local News
- Datasette
- Election SOS
- Memberkit
- Product Kit from News Catalyst
- The Quilt: Policy, Art, and Healing
- Systems Thinking for Journalists from Journalism + Design
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.
- The Accountability Project
- We’re Building a New Central Resource for Public Data
- Example story with Accountability Project data: Dark money dominated Ohio’s nuclear subsidy saga
- Example story with Accountability Project data: Long before coronavirus, local nursing homes were struggling with infection control rules
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.
- Big Local platform
- COVID-19 Case Mapper
- A comparison of four major COVID-19 data sources
- COVID-19 story recipe: Using AHA data to analyze hospital bed capacity
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:
- SBA loans & how it was built
- COVID-19 cases and deaths, with the datasette-vega charting plugin & how that works
- More demos here
Election SOS
Election SOS offers free training for journalists, connecting them to best practices, resources, and support around election coverage.
Memberkit
- Memberkit 1.0: Upgrade your analytics and build a data-powered membership program
- All the Memberkit docs
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.