Burt Herman

First ever global Hacks/Hackers conference call on Sept. 1

Greetings from Buenos Aires! I’ve spent the last few days at the Media Party that Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires has put on for the fourth year in a row, bringing hundreds of people to be inspired, collaborate and hack together. It’s an amazing event that shows the potential of what we can do if we work together on a broader level. With Hacks/Hackers organizers from around the world present, we held a workshop to talk about how we as the global Hacks/Hackers movement can collaborate more across geographic boundaries.

Aug 31, 2015

Hacks/Hackers launches Connect series in Berlin

[View the story “Hacks/Hackers launches Connect series in Berlin” on Storify] Hacks/Hackers launches Connect series in Berlin Around 100 journalists and technologists passionate about the future of media joined the weekend event in the German capital Storified by Burt Herman· Sun, Jun 28 2015 22:04:05 We kicked off Hacks/Hackers' first-ever global event series with a packed room of more than 100 participants at the Berlin Factory, bringing together members of the grassroots movement along with entrepreneurs, journalists and developers passionate about the intersection of media and technology.

Jun 28, 2015

About the Hacks/Hackers site

A few weeks ago, we launched an exciting initiative (in partnership with Google) to support media entrepreneurship, an event series we call Connect. As part of the launch, we decided to replace the main Hacks/Hackers site with an information and signup page for Connect. At the time, that seemed to make sense. The old site was years out of date, filled with months-old content and daily traffic had fallen to the single-digits.

Jun 9, 2015

How Twitter does data journalism: San Francisco Hacks/Hackers goes inside the nest

More than 150 hacks and hackers gathered Wednesday at Twitter’s main headquarters in San Francisco to hear the company’s Data Editor Simon Rogers talk about data’s increasingly important role in journalism and how Twitter makes sense of the hundreds of millions of tweets passing through its platform every day. From mapping the patterns of disadvantage that contributed to the UK riots, to data visualizations of Oscars tweets, Rogers helped demystify the collection strategies and tools required for top-class data analysis and visualization.

Oct 9, 2014

We’re taking Hacks/Hackers to the next level: Applying for the Knight News Challenge

Hacks/Hackers has grown in ways we never predicted. It was just over two years ago that the first event was held at a San Francisco bar. Since then, we’ve expanded across the U.S. and the world, and now have more than 9,500 members in Meetups across four continents. We’ve long sought to bring everyone together and enable journalists and technologists to connect regardless of their geographic location. We also want to make sure Hacks/Hackers survives as a sustainable movement long into the future.

Mar 22, 2012

Reporting Recipe: Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for Data Projects

This is a guest post that also appeared on Oct. 15 on ProPublica’s blog at http://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-use-mechanical-turk-to-do-data-driven-reporting-and-how-you-can-too by Amanda Michel ProPublica Of all of journalism’s recent evolutions, data-driven reporting is one of the most celebrated. But as much as we should toast data’s powers, we must acknowledge its cost: Assembling even a small dataset can require hours of tedious work, deterring even the most disciplined of journalists and their editors. Fortunately, there’s an affordable — and amazing — tool that can make the impossible easy: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk).

Oct 15, 2010