NPR Visuals Blog

Look for information you would want to see in your available media -- find a dataset and build it into a useful app to be filtered and queried in different ways. Map data points to physical locations. Correlate those things. At some point it all starts to look like a population density heat map, but sometimes you find good stuff in there. And people want to see it. They need more tangible access to all the real world data we have been collecting. Otherwise, what's the point?

I worked for a year at a newspaper and built apps and stuff like that -- it was the most fulfilling work I've ever done and I wish the situation had been able to work out. If I ever get a chance to do real news apps again, I would jump on it. Enjoy your opportunity, Anders, and be prepared to show your work.

Sometimes, the phrase "if you build it, they will come" is applicable. If you build something that shows you CAN build something, show it to the right people and you will attract attention.

Some inspiration:
http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/
http://blog.apps.npr.org/
https://source.opennews.org/en-US/
http://flowingdata.com/

That thread has hundreds of legit replies with bugs (that are impossible to read on desktop Twitter from what I can tell). I saw a few cases of "I published an article about our challenges supporting Safari, the team reached out and then ghosted us", like http://blog.apps.npr.org/2021/08/31/joy-generator.html. Search for Safari on that page... oof.

Dear Safari team, the first step in fixing any problem is to admit that you have one. Please internally acknowledge that Safari has _lots_ of issues like these and has a reputation problem among web developers. It's not just people hating on Safari and being ignorant, I would love to support Safari better, but it's just so frustrating in practice and when filing bugs they seem to go into a black hole. I think a big problem is that bugs seemingly get duplicated into some internal system where there might be some discussion going on, but none of that is visible to the rest of the world and it creates that black hole perception and lack of back and forth discussion with the people who are reporting these issues.

I saw the guide linked to a recent indepth writeup on how the NPR Visuals Team developed the project page for their White Lies investigative podcast:

http://blog.apps.npr.org/2019/05/17/white-lies.html

An excerpt:

> In keeping with our hypothesis-driven design process, we started the project by identifying likely audiences for our digital experience, the contexts by which they’d come to the site (via a promo on social, etc.) and their expectations. With that audience exercise in mind, we decided on a few primary editorial goals for the project:

> - Provide a standalone narrative for people who only encounter the story on the web (and may or may not go on to subscribe to the podcast)

> - Intrigue readers and entice them to listen to the full podcast

> - Provide multimedia material that couldn’t fit into an audio-only experience

> - Introduce newcomers to the history surrounding the murder, including Bloody Sunday and the civil rights struggle

The social safety net and creative destruction discussion is interesting.

However, I'm interested from a design perspective. Does anyone know if this was built by the "apps team" at NPR? IMO, it's very well done.

More from the NPR "apps team."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279440

http://blog.apps.npr.org/2013/02/14/app-template-redux.html