In the time #wjchat has been around, we’ve made friends, colleagues, propped each other other during hard times and celebrated each other’s success.

This was a community of misfits, data geeks, reporters who loved to tweet, students who were intrigued by the idea of the web and veterans who knew there was a opportunity ahead of us. We came together for more than seven years once a week. It’s been less often in the past year.

Our editors told us to never bury the lede, so here it is: #wjchat is ending.

We’ve decided it’s time to hang up our…

The #wjchat crew has spent the past few months tackling a few issues:

1. How do we reduce the amount of time the all-volunteer crew spends on prepping and running the chats? (It’s way more time than you think)
2. What’s a possible solution that keeps our little community together, happy and represented? (We hear you, we aren’t going away)
3. Is there any form of partnership that makes sense for us? (A few people reached out, hoping to partner or work with us in some way)

Most of these were laid out in an earlier post by crew member Andre Natta.

#wjchat…

Since the end of 2016, thoughts on leadership have been rolling around my head. I was lucky enough to be part of the inaugural class of Poynter-NABJ’s Leadership Academy for Diversity in Digital Media, alongside some amazing people, in December, around the time I was really starting to feel the crunch from freelancing while considering my options. Several of us were “in transition” as we kindly called ourselves (read: laid off or forced to leave a job).

As part of that, and other discussions, I got feedback on who people saw me as, what my strengths were, etc. …

When reported.ly folded, countless people asked me what I was doing next. The first answer was, “going on a hippie-dippie retreat because I don’t remember how to just be.” That’s still true. I have a few plans now (freelancing, training journalists in Vegas, working with UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Investigations Lab, any idea you might propose to me). It’s still a time of waiting for me. Waiting for my mind to get to the right place, waiting for answers, waiting.

I just got to the retreat. I got lost, I took my time getting there, but here I am and I’ve eaten dinner and unpacked.

It is so quiet that all I can hear is the tinnitus in my ears. The ringing is at once comforting and discomforting. I don’t often hear it. There are always sounds around me — breathing, the water filter, laundry, the dishwasher.

But here, nothing.

I go through each and every cabinet, just to see what is there. I mentally catalogue the tea. At home, I call this “taking stock,” the act of me opening…

As Reported.ly looks set to shut its doors, at least for now, deputy managing editor Kim Bui looks back on what the team learned

For 20 months, a small team worked through the question of how to take social newsgathering to scale. There is more “noise” than ever, every day seems to add a new form of storytelling to the ranks (Facebook Live in shootings, for example). That was our job, to filter the noise, distill it, and explain it.

In the process, we learned a lot about ourselves, this form of reporting and our audience.

Here’s a few of…

I know many of you are thinking I should be writing about what is next, or what reported.ly gave me, since it’s the first day without it. That will happen, but for now, an essay I wrote a while ago about refugees, the words we choose and my family. This is how reported.ly’s refugee coverage changed the conversation I had with my parents.

I didn’t even know we were immigrants until I was 7. True to being a child, I knew that my parents had come from Vietnam, as had my older brother and sister, but it did not really click that we were “immigrants.”

It started with a family history project. My father tried to help me fill in all the limbs and branches, but we didn’t get past my grandparents. …

It is death by a thousand cuts — the small injustices that add up, one after another. It’s the cruel nurse, the rude admitting staff, the names called out of a passing car.

For the thousands of African refugees living in South Africa, it’s a fact of life.

It’s hard to describe South Africa’s relationship with xenophobia. The country in its current political form is two decades old, having somehow emerged from living under the yoke of apartheid. Unemployment is at a staggering 28%, mostly affecting young South Africans. At the same time, South Africa accepts more refugees than any other country in southern Africa, and has one of the more liberal refugee laws.

Uber drivers are often from Zimbabwe, and they’ll tell you that they came to South Africa because of the chaos back home. There are more jobs here; the standard of living is higher. Politics…

This article first appeared on FirstDraftNews.com. Follow First Draft on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest reads and resources on social newsgathering, verification and fake news.

During the Nice attack, French police asked people not to share photos and videos. Why? Facebook Live usage has gone beyond melting popsicles and exploding cans of biscuits. It’s now being used by the public during police shootings like Dallas, and in terrorist attacks.

As the digital front line, journalists often tell each other, “please don’t watch that video”. Just last week, a colleague and I discussed part of a video…