Tag Archives: Code

Tool of the week for journalists – Codeacademy, for those who want to start to code

Tool of the week: Codeacademy

What is it? Free tutorials in basic JavaScript

How is it of use to journalists?  The rise in data journalism, an interest in Hacks/Hackers meetups and collaboration between journalists and developers has led to many journalists to express a wish to start coding. But where to start?

Codeacademy is a learning tool that offers tutorials to get you started. So far there are only a couple of courses on the site but they are free and superbly designed.

The homepage gets you to begin entering a bit of JavaScript and you soon find yourself progressing though the tutorial. There is a progress bar to show you how much of the course you have completed and reward badges to give you the equivalent of the teacher’s gold star.

You might well find you quickly learn simple JavaScript that has a useful application for you as a journalist. For example, within the first five minutes you learn that writing “.length” at the end of a word or phrase gives you the character count. You can then open an editor (using Chrome from a Mac the command is ALT+CMD+J), paste the headline of a news story, add “.length” and you will have the character count of the headline.

 

KDMC: Everyblock’s public code useful for news organisations

Over at the Knight Digital Media Center, journalist Michele McLellan takes a look at Everyblock’s decision to publish the open source code for the application that powers its ‘micro news’ engines in 11 U.S. cities. She recommends that news organisations and entrepreneurs take note.

Full story at this link…

Charles Arthur: New to journalism? Learn to code

“All sorts of fields of journalism – basically, any where you’re going to have to keep on top of a lot of data that will be updated, regularly or not – will benefit from being able to analyse and dig into that data, and present it in interesting ways,” says the Guardian’s technology editor.

Full story at this link…

How do: Newscientist.com to be revamped

The website of the New Scientist magazine will undergo a revamp after cutting a deal with development company Code to complete the makeover.

Code, which will work with in-house development team on the new site, will focus on improving usability, navigation and enhancing the site’s social media features.

The online edition of the title had its previous redesign in 2004.