Silk for Publishers: A “Swiss Army” Knife for Data Journalism is Free for Newsies

TLDR: Hello there! We’re launching Silk for Publishers, a dedicated program to help news and media organizations use Silk for data publishing and visualizations.

Longer Story: Over the past few months, we have been helping journalists that wanted to use Silk for data visualizations and data publishing. The response has been strong. Silk visualizations have been published in Mashable, The Atlantic,GigaOm and The National Journal, to name a few.

And we have had ongoing conversations with numerous other publications. So it seemed only logical to hang out a shingle. This week we put up our “Silk for Publishers” page. The page summarizes the benefits of our product and shows why the Silk data publishing platform is truly an all-purpose tool for data journalism.

Silk’s power for data journalism starts with the ability to embed Silk visualizations in other sites with a simple snippet of HTML (called an iFrame). That feature opened up the doors.

In the last few months, we’ve also added in-line filters, upgraded the visualization palette, added new types of charts and refreshed the overall look and feel of our visualizations. The map improvements are the latest part of this quest to make Silk visualizations truly publish-ready for any media property.

The journalists we have worked with love that they can take a spreadsheet and turn it into something visually useful in a matter of minutes. In particular, the ability to convert simple location data into a map has been helpful.

Here’s a quick FAQ for Silk for Publishers:

Q: I’m a publisher. Why would I use Silk?

A: Because it is the fastest, easiest way to publish data and create visualizations, charts, maps and galleries. And it’s free. Did we mention Silk is free for news orgs?

Q: Free scares me. What’s your business model?

A: A large percentage of Silk’s customers are businesses that like keeping their data private. We will charge them a reasonable fee for private Silks.

Q: So how would Silk fit into my site?

A: Every visualization created on Silk — every table, chart, map, image gallery, or grouped view of data — has an iFrame code that allows you to easily embed it on most publishing platforms and CMS tools. The iFrame is a well-known technology. And its easy to use. Copy, paste and you have a live visualization.

Q: Live? You mean the data is interactive in the visualization?

A: Totally. You can filter the data, click on the data points, scroll up and down in gallery windows, all within a nice framework that sits cleanly on the story page or blog post.

Q: Where can I see some Silk visualizations live on other sites?

A: You can see them on Mashable, The Atlantic, GigaOm, The National Journal, and many others.

Q: Cool. So how would my journalism team learn Silk?

A: Easy. Get a spreadsheet. Upload it. Then start building visualizations and querying the data. Feel free to ask us for help, too.

Note: You can follow our Publishers Program and tools we build for journalists@silkjournalism or if you want to chat or a demo, email us. We can build you something or schedule a training session.