OpenNews

Hello Again. New Source for You.

an alarm clock, time to wake up

Cross-posted from our community site, Source.

Source is changing shape. We’ll write more about our new design, and about the tech changes underneath it, next week—Ryan and Lindsay and I had the good fortune to collaborate with Ethan Marcotte, which is why it’s so damn pretty and well behaved—and this morning I want to call out a couple of underlying organizational and editorial changes.

Source is published by OpenNews, a project incubated at Mozilla and funded by the Knight Foundation to support and strengthen the community working on open technologies and processes in journalism. As of today, OpenNews is independent, working as a project of Community Partners, a nonprofit fiscal sponsor. You can read about our new setup and the programs and events we’ll be offering—and get the just-released dates and location for SRCCON 2017—at our blog.

Our director, Dan Sinker, writes this about the community we build with:

At OpenNews, we build our programs with the community of coders and journalist, data geeks and designers that are helping journalism stay vital and relevant. These are people that wake up every day driven to ask hard questions, to write tough code, and to help the world better understand itself. It’s not an easy job. It’s not one that pays all that well. The demands of deadline and the culture of newsrooms can be taxing. But it is rewarding work. It is work that helps people. It is work that speaks truth to power.

If you recognize yourself in that description, whether or not you currently work in a newsroom, Source is meant for you. Our features and walkthroughs are written by and for the people doing the work. This field has grown, and grown up, even since I started Source with Dan four years ago, and we’re changing to keep up. The rework of our site was guided by our consultation with people throughout the field, and our editorial focus will continue to evolve. Right now, that means you’ll see plenty of project teardowns and process documentation—the DVD-commentary work at the core of Source—and also an increased emphasis on security and anonymity, transparency and goverment data, accessible and inclusive design, collaborative investigations, and self-care for people doing this work. We’ll be publishing more pieces than ever in the coming year, and if these are areas you’d like to be writing about, please let us know.

We’ve also begun rolling out our first slate of columns with pieces from Dana Amihere of the Dallas Morning News, and Quartz’s David Yanofsky, and this morning we’re publishing the first one from our new security columnist, Martin Shelton. You’ll see lots more from and about our columnists soon.

Source Guides are also now open for pitches—if you’d like to put together a guide on a topic you think we should be featuring, tell us about it. (We pay.) Source Jobs remains free and open for your listings in the field.

Our new site and CMS are still stretching and cracking their joints, so please raise a flag if you run into trouble.

posted February 09, 2017 | posted in Source