Digital Platforms — how, why and when should journalists and media get on board?
For the May meetup at Hacks/Hackers Brisbane we'll explore the sometimes thorny topic of journalist and media on social media and digital platforms.
Some of the questions we might explore:
What are the benefits and challenges of journalists and media outlets using digital platforms?
What's the reason for getting involved — building or reaching an audience, finding interesting stories, simple community engagement?
How and should you separate your professional and personal personas?
Which platforms be more critically approached as objects of journalistic study and why?
What makes a platform somewhere a media organisation wants to have a presence? And what might change that?
We hope you'll join us and look forward to the thought provoking and challenging questions you always bring to the discussion.
Event details
When: 5:30pm, Thursday 25 May
Where: Foyer of the ABC building, South Bank
Please RSVP on humanitix
Last meeting
For last month's event we experimented with a bit of a different format — instead of a single speaker or a panel, we asked everyone who came along to spend a couple of minutes telling us about one or two of the tools in their kit.
A big thanks to everyone who turned out hand was generous enough to share. There were a wide range of tools and techniques to talk about.
Jules gave us an insight into how ABC News' Story Lab team builds their own tools to help with production of complex interactive data-visualisation stories. He showed off a chart builder the team used for creating a story about the 2022 federal election.
Dennis showed off how he used D3 and Observable Notebooks to visualise and explore the Twitter algorithm. He also showed us some tricky techniques to get the most out of Google Colab , including how you can run nodejs inside Python and use ngrok to expose a web server running in a notebook.
Colin showed off his favourite new note taking tool, the Supernote.
Josh showed off his experiments with different ways to visualise time using Observable.
Matthew told us about how he uses Google Pinpoint to interrogate and explore large text documents and PDFs such as government reports and council minutes to make reporting easier and more robust.
Simon gave us a demo of how to use GitHub for scraping data from the web, including a template to help people get started.
Finally, James showed us his incredible Alfred workflows for managing his websites and streamlining repetitive email reports as well as how he uses Whisper for transcribing audio safely on his own computer without sending it to a third party service.
Have you seen this?
That’s a new Story Lab piece out this week, using data from Have I Been Pwned to explore data privacy.
Daniel Cohen in the LRB looks at Spotify’s project To Monopolise Our Ears, including the effect of its recommendation engine on what we listen to.
In NYMag’s Grub Street, the rise of TikTok and short-form video is responsible for a new era in restaurant aesthetics, from Ezra Marcus.
See you on Thursday!