Nearly 100 people joined us last Saturday for ONA dCamp at the Washington Post, which focused on using human-centered design to improve workflows and projects.
We’ve pulled together a ton of photos, gifs and Vines from ONA dCamp to show you what design thinking means and how folks applied it to the problems they wanted to solve in their newsrooms.
The New Yorker has introduced Strongbox, a tool for users to submit documents and correspondence without fear of being traced. Amy Davidson notes in her description of the tool that readers and sources have sent materials to the New Yorker for decades, but now, more than ever, it’s easier to trace where they came from. She writes, “[A]s it’s set up, even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.”
The tool was created by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen. The image above, created by the New Yorker, demonstrates how it works.
Read more: Introducing Strongbox, a Tool for Anonymous Document-Sharing : The New Yorker
At Bloomberg, reporters could sit at their desks and use a keyboard function to see the last time an official of the Federal Reserve logged on. And the Justice Department obtained the records of The Associated Press from phone companies with no advance notice, giving it no chance to challenge the action. The absence of friction has led to a culture of transgression. Clearly, if it can be known, it will be known.
In mid-April, we went live with a half dozen articles which we call “stubs.” The idea here is to plant a flag in a story right away with a short post—a “stub”—and then build the article as the story develops over time, rather than just cranking out short, discrete posts every time something new breaks. One of our writers refers to this aptly as a “slow live blog.
This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code community
The results of Fast Company’s experiment with “stubs” — which allowed them to gradually create long-form journalism — pleasantly surprised the team when it brought a lot of traffic. Learn more about their strategy and check out snapshots of their site analytics from Chris Dannen.
The DOJ’s actions — gathering two months of records for more than 20 telephone lines, both from major AP bureaus and the home and cell phones of individual AP journalists — is a startling and potentially dangerous overreach of its powers, powers that are strictly limited under the DOJ’s own guidelines for issuing subpoenas to the news media for testimony and evidence.
ONA President Jim Brady, Editor-in-Chief, Digital First Media
ONA has joined with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 50 other media organizations in issuing a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding its subpoenaing of telephone records belonging to The Associated Press.
Read more: Letter from ONA President: DOJ overstepped bounds in AP subpoena - Online News Association
Useful tips on how to make sure you have fresh content on your student news site over the summer, written by Kelly Fincham, a member of the ONA Educators group.
We’re thrilled that Nate Silver will keynote at 2013 Online News Association Conference this year. The data forecaster at FiveThirtyEight.com will join us at ONA13 for a conversation on data journalism. Read more on journalists.org.
Registration for ONA13 is open, and you should register now so you get the early-bird discount.
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news. The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP…. In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
Gov’t obtains wide AP phone records in probe
In a statement from the Radio Television Digital News Association, Chairman Vincent Duffy said, “This unprecedented invasion of privacy involving confidential information is a blatant violation of basic rights afforded by the First Amendment.”
Syria Goes Dark
Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
According to Dan Hubbard of Umbrella Security Labs: “At around 18:45 UTC OpenDNS resolvers saw a significant drop in traffic from Syria. On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet.” Hubbart notes that the two top-level domain servers for Syria (ns1.tld.sy and ns2.tld.s) were unreachable earlier today. Matthew Prince at Cloudflare published a video demonstrating just how the routes into and out of Syria’s Internet were withdrawn.
This is not the first time Syria has suffered an Internet shut down. In November 2012, Syria suffered a severe Internet black out. And as the violence in the region has escalated, we’ve documented campaigns of targeted malware attacks against Syrian activists…
…Yet during this time the Internet has largely remained available. While heavily censored, monitored, and compromised, the Internet has served as an important window connecting the world at large to Syria, and one way that international observers could connect with individuals on the ground in that country. A number of activists on the ground in Syria have access to Internet via satellite links, which can connect them to the Internet but carries a high risk for detection, which can be life threatening.
The Syrian government blames the blackout on “terrorists”, according to the BBC, but security experts and activists believe the regime shut down the Web to interfere with rebel communications, possibly in advance of an a major offensive.
Image: Google Transparency Report shows Syrian Internet blackout May 7, 2013, via the EFF.
A shudder went through Wall Street on Friday after the revelation that Bloomberg News reporters had extracted subscribers’ private information through the company’s ubiquitous data terminals to break news.
![The New Yorker has introduced Strongbox, a tool for users to submit documents and correspondence without fear of being traced. Amy Davidson notes in her description of the tool that readers and sources have sent materials to the New Yorker for decades, but now, more than ever, it’s easier to trace where they came from. She writes, “[A]s it’s set up, even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.”
The tool was created by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen. The image above, created by the New Yorker, demonstrates how it works.
Read more: Introducing Strongbox, a Tool for Anonymous Document-Sharing : The New Yorker](http://24.media.tumblr.com/033a45447c5dc3dcdf3653e884b10517/tumblr_mmuovrOwv81qiw6fso1_500.jpg)
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