New media and legacy media came together at the second weekend-long “hackathon” hosted by the Society for News Design.

Source: www.niemanlab.org

Nieman Lab reports this as more of a “designathon” rather than a hackathon, where about 40 attendees from stalwarts of traditional media (Boston Globe, ESPN, Washington Post, New York Times) and new media groups (Vox Media and Slate) came to the Society for News Design’s #SNDMakes Boston to prototype a news product over the weekend.

 

SND’s intent is “providing a vehicle to facilitate discussions about real problems all news organizations face,” according to SND digital director Kyle Ellis.

 

Six teams were formed, and came up with interesting concepts, all strongly journalist/publisher focused. By this I mean that users (consumers of news) aren’t forgotten, but for example, one of the teams created a search tool for journalists called Anglr that helps to identify a unique perspective on a story by searching keywords in Google News, Twitter and Facebook social rankings for the results and related keywords.

 

Other concepts coming from other teams included creating more flexible homepage design (Hmpgr), making fact-checking processes more integrated into a journalist’s workflow (Legit), and a tool called Pre-Post that could become a standalone tool that would allow content creators and editors to check how their content would look or be seen on a wide variety of platforms, from CMS to Twitter to Facebook.

 

All of the projects take into account the mutiple platforms, services and devices that are used for finding, sourcing, creating, publishing and distributing news. There was even one team thinking about audio first, as in podcasts or audio stories, and how they could be made more visually stimulating.

 

While the goal wasn’t to build prototypes meant to go into production, some of these may have life after the weekend, or become incorporated into a news site you might read… or listen to.

 

How you look at news, and how news looks to you, is being thought about by the new generation of journalists who directly use the technology that previous generations of journalists would never touch. Hackathons for news design should become a regular event, all over the world.

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