Introductions

[Tyler Dukes]

As this forum begins to grow, I thought it might be useful to start a thread that will allow everybody to introduce themselves as they join. Please tell us your name, affiliation, a little bit about yourself and why you joined the forum!

I'm Tyler Dukes, managing editor of the Reporters' Lab project at Duke University's DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. My background is in reporting and editing in print and online, particularly in the areas of science and technology. I spent almost three years studying electrical and computer engineering before I found journalism, and I joined this forum because I like talking to people about how they develop and hack more than I like developing and hacking on my own.

[Duncan]

Good idea, Tyler.

I'm Charles C. Duncan Pardo, founding editor of the Raleigh Public Record. We are a nonprofit, online-only newspaper with a mission to cover the stories that don't get covered in Raleigh. To fulfill our mission we cover a lot of city and county politics, sit through really exciting planning commission meetings and that sort of thing where we almost always have the only reporter in the room. We also work hard on enterprise stories and give our freelancers to room to pursue reporting on the issues that face Raleigh. We've been around for more than three years now and have grown from all-volunteer to having a budget this year of $40,000, most of which goes to paying freelance reporters.

Our goal is to figure out how to create a model for sustainable metro journalism. I joined this forum because we are always looking for new ways to help report stories. Along with being the editor at the Record, I'm also the chief Wordpress hacker, MySQL novice and student of data viz. I also do the dishes and take out the recycling. True to our name, we submit lots of public records requests. We're proud to report that over the summer we submitted the single largest records request in the City of Raleigh's history. Figuring out how to use that data in our reporting is core to our mission.

charles

raleighpublicrecord.org

[Greg Linch]

Hi, everyone. My name is Greg Linch and I'm the web producer for world and national security coverage at The Washington Post. I code a little on the side and am very interested in the Lab's work. I joined to hear about what's going on and participate in the discussion.

Best,

Greg

[Sarah Cohen]

I'm Sarah Cohen, the founder of Reporters' Lab and the Knight chair at Duke. I'm really looking forward to sharing ideas, projects and interesting work. My background is in investigative reporting, particularly computer-assisted reporting, mainly at the Washington Post. 

[knowtheory]

Hey folks,

I'm Ted Han, lead developer for Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) on DocumentCloud.

I'm a linguist by degree, a software developer by trade and a scifi nerd (well, nerd in general really) by leisure.  As someone who came to software development through the side door, I've got strong feelings about the manner in which computer science and software development interact with other trades and fields of study.  Part of what grabbed my attention about the world of journalism are the efforts (Knight News Challenge, the Knight/Mozilla Partnership, the ProPublica Nerd Blog, IRE and Sarah Cohen's efforts with Reporters' Lab) that have been made to build tools appropriate to reporter's workflows, and to nudge those workflows towards more convenient/efficient practices.

In short, I'd like to see the best parts of software development – helping users automate boring/tedious tasks – melded further into fields such as journalism.

From the technical side, I largely work on Ruby (including, but not limited to Ruby on Rails) and Javascript projects using Linux distributions like ubuntu.  I have a fondness for data modeling and data modeling toolkits.

[Neville Crabbe]

Hi, my name is Neville Crabbe. I'm a journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I shoot, write and edit for radio and television and have a particular interest in doing stories that people remember, but admit, in daily news, that's not always possible. I spent the last five years reporting from Canada's Arctic territories and am now located in close to the U.S. border in New Brunswick. I want to learn ways to dig deeper.