Journalists, find your team at a hackathon
I wouldn’t blame you if you thought about closing the tab at the word hackathon. The wikipedia entry makes hackathon seem irrelevant to journalists —
An event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development and hardware development, including graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate intensively on software projects.
Right.
Stay with me for a second. Hackathons are no longer only geared towards these titles above inherited from the software industry, just like the press is no longer only for journalists.
The virtue of attending one of the well-designed, inclusive hackathons is that you get a taste of what it is like to make a product and, as a result, gain a broader understanding of the ways media organizations can innovate (like some of the newer and richer ones already do). You collaborate in a multi-disciplinary team and share the same goal of making something useful, if not inspiring, all in the span of a day or two.
Hackathons are an intentional local incursion of the future. —@kookster
I was recently at Audio Hackathon (#audiohack), sponsored by This American Life , a popular radio show that has everything to do with journalism. It was my fifth or sixth hackathon this year (previous voyages include two Hacking Journalism weekends and Comedy Hack Day NYC.) I would like to share a few inspiring prototypes from the event, the processes that led to them, as well as things I have learned by working with my team.
What can you make?
I don’t know if I should be the person to be answering the question [of what we can make]. I will leave it to you inventors. — @iraglass
Ira Glass said this at the beginning of #audiohack. With a crowd of engineers and designers, anything seemed possible. So — what angle should one take?
As an example, Ira voiced a practical problem he’d like to solve: managing the feedback from the listeners. How long they listened to an episode, when they paused, at what point they dropped off, et cetera. In short, some kind of analytics that would inform the producer what worked with the audience and what did not.
Alex Blumberg, the host of Startup and the founder of its parent media company, followed up with his startup-y proposal: a podcast player that would make it easy (such as clicking a button, or swiping the screen) for listeners to buy tickets for live shows and to sign up for email updates while they are listening.
In sum, the producers were interested in:
- ways to surface lesser known shows/podcasts
- easier, meaningful sharing of the shows/podcasts in a culture of short attention spans
- more engagement with, and feedback from, the listeners
- possible ways to expand audio story-telling into the realm of text and visuals
Got (meta)data?
Now that we got some topics of interest, it’s time to take inventory of the existing landscape of shows and podcasts. If I barely knew how radio shows were produced before chatting with a radio host, I knew even less about how on earth I could find them — especially if they hadn’t been on iTunes, weren’t mangled into the algorithm of NPR One, or didn’t get a chance to crawl into my ears this morning over my alarm clock radio.
What database(s) are radio shows using to store their episodes? Is there any mechanism that makes podcasts more searchable?
Fortunately at #audiohack, engineers and directors from Audiosearch, Public Radio Exchange (PRX), and Public Media Platform (PMP), were invited to speak about their endeavors in the archival, distribution and redistribution of audio content. It’s still a maze to me, if you ask, but I’ve garnered a thing or two about using their APIs to present and analyze shows. (For those of you who are not familiar with APIs, don’t fret — you will get more familiar with it as you dig deeper into data. For now, read the excellent article, What APIs Mean for Data Journalists, by Derek Willis.)
Teams. Well-organized teams.
Focus topics, check. Existing databases/API, check. We now need a way of working that can prototype a solution, and prototype it fast.
Collaboration is the only way [in the future of newsroom]. — @ShreeyaSinha
That way of working is — not surprisingly — team collaboration. In a recent talk at CUNY-J, Shreeya Sinha, assistant editor for NYT Investigations & Obituaries (who has pushed innovative visualizations and interactivity into its investigative pieces and runs the digital coverage of the Obituary desk) affirmed yet again the value of product teams in newsrooms at different scales.
Hackathons are a quick way to become part of a team workflow. It helps you get outside of your comfort zone. Since each individual possesses unique skills and expertise, you learn to defend your own ideas with reason, while questioning (constructively) those of others. (People have given this process names, such as ideation and design thinking.)
However, a well-functioning team does not appear magically on its own. At #audiohack, the organizers spend lots of effort to pre-group the participants into what resemble real product teams. Each team consists of subject experts, designers (interaction, visual), developers (front- and back-end), and someone with management knowledge.
This was the composition of my team:
- a reporter/host from Marketplace
- an engineer from Spotify
- another engineer from PMP (Public Media Platform)
- a designer from Penguin Publishing
- a technologist from CUNY-J (who functioned as a designer)
The future(s)
The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. — @kooster
The shape of the future is not determined by a linear process of ask-and-fulfill. While the producers have some ideas rooted in their practice, viable products are always an iteration, if not an entire rethink, of the “original” idea.
In two days, teams at #audiohack developed prototypes that were not just simply a reaction to the requests. They brought new ways of using, distributing, and sharing audio. I found these particularly interesting:
- Earmoji: add audible reactions (emoji-style) to shows/youtube clips
- Hearsay: share a snippet of podcast with its exact transcript visualized (great for sharing on twitter and facebook)
- Listening Party: insert audio notes to podcasts so that when a friend plays the shared podcast, s/he will hear the notes that almost become part of the story
Find a full list of products in a detailed recap by folks at Audiosearch and a summary of the event by Lam.
Tips on going to a hackathon
Ready for a hackathon now? Here’re some tips that help you pick one:
- Check http://nyhackathons.com/ for hackathons in/around NYC
- Apply for a hackathon where you will be grouped into a collaborative team. The organizers will ask you to list your skills — be confident and pitch your expertise.
- Avoid most conventional hackathons where you are asked to find your own teammates (with the exception of Comedy Hack Day.) Those occasions rarely foster a product mindset — they either have too many people who do not code or too many people who only code. In the former case, you end up with ideas without implementations; in the latter, you might find a hard time to belong.
- Think twice about that grand prize some hackathons offer in the end: you want to learn in a collaborative, not competitive, environment, especially if it’s a weekend.
Tune in for potential hackathon happenings at CUNY-J in the next few months. (If you have an idea that you’d like to turn into a product-minded gathering, I’m all ears. Get in touch.)
The new newsroom is more collaborative than ever. Be part of it.
