The Linchpen

Curiosity about how systems work, plus the notion of “journalism as hacking”

A random late-night thought and a few of the responses:

Journos & programmers are both curious about how systems work. The relationships & how they interact w those systems is different. Or not?

— Greg Linch (@greglinch) February 12, 2013

Space permitting, I would’ve cc’ed @jonathanstray @jayrosen_nyu on bit.ly/12pRIjh P.S. Has anyone explored “journalism as hacking?”

— Greg Linch (@greglinch) February 12, 2013

@greglinch @jayrosen_nyu they share some logic, but “hacking society’s systems” is way, way harder than programming jonathanstray.com/papers/Rittel_…

— jonathanstray (@jonathanstray) February 12, 2013

@jonathanstray @jayrosen_nyu True. But even at a basic level, exposing “vulnerabilities” in system & reporting them, there’s some similarity

— Greg Linch (@greglinch) February 12, 2013

@jonathanstray @jayrosen_nyu Ah, yes. I recall that paper and others from your solutions journalism post bit.ly/VQkBYD Good stuff!

— Greg Linch (@greglinch) February 12, 2013

@greglinch The Wealth of Networks, maybe not quite what you had in mind, is nonetheless fascinating.

— Sam Petulla (@spetulla) February 12, 2013

@jonathanstray @greglinch @jayrosen_nyu My pet theory is that economics is journalism hacking at the extreme.

— Sam Petulla (@spetulla) February 12, 2013

Ripe for discussion

Have you heard talk of “journalism as hacking?” (Not to be confused with journalists involved in hacking.) If so, please share links — or any thoughts — below!

New role at The Washington Post: I’m now an editor working on local projects!

It’s time for a job update! My six-month stint with our newsroom developer team (an internal apprenticeship, if you will) ended in December and a great opportunity quickly presented itself…

I’m very excited to announce that I’m now working with the local team on medium- and long-term journalism and technology projects. I’ll also be diving into big breaking stories when those arise.

This new role blends project management and hands-on work (e.g. continuing to put those improved code skills to use!). I’ll be collaborating with editors, reporters and others across the newsroom, including the developer team. Karaoke is not an official responsibility, but we’ll see how that plays out.

Here’s the announcement:

We’re pleased to announce that Greg Linch is Local’s new innovations editor. He joins the staff after working for six months with newsroom developers building web tools for reporters, editors and producers. Greg was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper at the University of Miami with a focus on traditional writing and reporting until he began dabbling with coding during his junior year. By the time he graduated, he’d become an entrepreneur, co-founding a college media start-up, and gravitated to another start-up in Loudoun County called Publish2. He joined the Post in 2010 as a producer for Health & Science before moving on to Politics, briefly, and then the Foreign Desk.

We’re confident that Greg’s training in journalism and his burgeoning technical skills will enable him to help reporters and editors find new and expansive ways to tell stories, present data, hold public agencies accountable and find new audiences on the web and on mobile devices. He can speak multiple newsroom languages, he understands what’s possible across digital media, and he’s passionate about working closely with reporters and editors. He previously worked on the Zero Day series with Bob O’Harrow, who says Greg is “totally smart, really collegial and makes stuff happen.” In his copious spare time, Greg has also served as an adjunct instructor for Northwestern’s Medill National Security Journalism Initiative for the past two fall quarters. This year, he begins a two-year term on the Online News Association’s board of directors. Please join us in congratulating him on his important new assignment.

Send me your ideas, especially D.C.-area folks!

Highlights from #ONADC meetup about awesome Washington Post projects

The Washington Post (disclosure: my employer) hosted and presented a series of lightning talks for the January 2013 gathering of the Online News Association D.C. meetup group (disclosure: I’m a board member). Below are some highlights I pulled into Storify:

#newsfoo 2012 highlights captured from afar

NewsFoo just wrapped up its third event. I haven’t been since 2010, but I followed along on Twitter again this year. Below are some good bits from the unconference (in chronological order).
Continue reading #newsfoo 2012 highlights captured from afar

Advancing math and science: Benoit Mandelbroit, fractals and identifying new patterns

An absolutely fascinating episode of NOVA on fractals! Along with my general interest in science and — more recently — math, material like this always makes me think of how we can apply lessons from others fields to journalism. For example, Nate Silver and his statistical models becoming more prominent this election cycle.

Below are some quoted highlights from the show — re-ordered for better flow in this context.

Narrator:

For generations, scientists believed that the wildness of nature could not be defined by mathematics. But fractal geometry is leading to a whole new understanding, revealing an underlying order governed by simple mathematical rules.

Keith Devlin, whom you might recognize as NPR’s “math guy:”

The key to fractal geometry, and the thing that evaded anyone until, really, Mandelbrot sort of said, “This is the way to look at things, is that if you look on the surface, you see complexity, and it looks very non-mathematical.” What Mandelbrot said was that… “think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.”

Devlin:

So this domain of growing, living systems, which I, along with most other mathematicians, had always regarded as pretty well off-limits for mathematics, and certainly off-limits for geometry, suddenly was center stage. It was Mandelbrot’s book that convinced us that this wasn’t just artwork; this was new science in the making. This was a completely new way of looking at the world in which we live that allowed us, not just to look at it, not just to measure it, but to do mathematics and, thereby, understand it in a deeper way than we had before.

On design

Narrator:

If we could understand more about how the eye takes in information, we could do a better job of designing the things that we really need to see.

Bonus:

Look out for one my favorite scientists — Geoffrey West! (Why? In short, read A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation. I’m slightly obsessed with new ways of quantifying things, such as impact.)

If you can’t see the embed above, watch on You Tube.