Bolster your digital safety: An anti-hacking, anti-doxxing workshop

Journalists in all newsrooms, especially women, LGTBQ+ and BIPOC, are dealing with unprecedented levels of online abuse that can take form in publishing of private information, impersonations, hacking and more.  In the ONA session, “Bolster Your Digital Safety: An Anti-Hacking, Anti-Doxxing Workshop,” Viktorya Vilk, program director for Digital Safety and Free Expression, PEN America and … Continued

Managing metrics that matter for subscriptions

Managing metrics that matter  Mike Denison, audience engagement editor at Science News, sees analytics and metrics as a tool to “cut through the noise and look beyond page views.” This year at ONA20, learning about the importance of analytics and metrics has shown to be of growing interest for the industry at a time when … Continued

Readers can help you plan your next move

The beginning of the coronavirus pandemic brought with it a surge in engagement and traffic to the Spanish materials we publish on our site, Documented Semanal.  Within weeks, we had built an ecosystem where our readers, using our WhatsApp app, had guided us to create certain stories which would then draw in more subscribers who … Continued

Building a culture of great visuals

Boyzell Hosey, Deputy Editor of Photography, faces new challenges at the Tampa Bay Times in planning the daily visual report.  He directs a significantly smaller photo staff than a decade ago in addition to the added burden of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the plan boils down to the same principle as always, … Continued

Discovering how readers perceive photos and video

The main questions bouncing around my educator’s noggin for the last couple of decades have been about how visuals resonate with audiences — what draws a person’s attention, helps them to parse information, to understand and remember? My goal with this RJI project is to create practical materials to help small newsrooms and non-profit organizations … Continued

Mapping COVID-19 cases in Observable with Vega-Lite

Choropleth maps show how data varies across a geographic region, a visualization technique used often to present a wide variety of data, including economic data, election results and, more recently, the prevalence of COVID-19 cases and deaths. I recently created a choropleth map that pulls live county-level COVID-19 case data from the Missouri Department of … Continued

Unpublishing project advisory board gets rolling

The unpublishing project has gained significant momentum in the last few weeks, including an unpublishing webinar with editors RJI hosted in August. Much of the work has been behind the scenes, cementing the foundation I need to ensure the final result is valuable to newsrooms across the country. There is much work to be done in … Continued