{"id":2256,"date":"2016-09-17T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2016-09-17T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/newsroom16\/?p=748"},"modified":"2021-06-22T18:35:49","modified_gmt":"2021-06-22T22:35:49","slug":"circuit-boards-and-wires-creating-tools-to-expand-storytelling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/2016\/09\/17\/circuit-boards-and-wires-creating-tools-to-expand-storytelling\/","title":{"rendered":"Circuit boards and wires: Creating tools to expand storytelling"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sam
Sam Ward from the Center for Investigative Reporting,
Amy Schmitz Weiss from San Diego State University and Jerry Staas Haught from USA TODAY Network work to build a conductivity sensor during an ONA session. (Photo by Dana Branham\/ONA Newsroom)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wires, batteries, circuit boards \u2014\u00a0one Friday afternoon session made ONA\u00a0look more like a science fair than a journalism conference.<\/p>\n

During their hands-on \u201cBreak-It-And-Make-It\u201d workshop, WNYC\u2019s John Keefe and BuzzFeed\u2019s Christine Sunu taught attendees how\u00a0to build sensors that could measure differences in the conductivity of liquids \u2014\u00a0and more importantly, how to use sensors like those to do journalism.<\/p>\n

\n

Whoa. It’s working. Can y’all hear the difference in tone? #ONA16breakit<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/Z8evF1SJtP<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Dana Branham (@danabranham) September 16, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In July, WNYC launched a project to track how hot apartments in Harlem get. With high numbers of people visiting the emergency room for heat stress and a city made of materials that trap heat, Keefe and his team wanted to see just how hot Harlem was. <\/span><\/p>\n

They built homemade temperature sensors (for super cheap, too), installed them in people\u2019s apartments and found measurable, concrete evidence that Harlem apartments without air conditioning weren\u2019t cooling down at night.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[Using sensors] made us think in new ways that we wouldn\u2019t have thought of otherwise,\u201d Keefe said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t rocket science or a breakthrough in journalism, but what it is is interesting to see those moments when they make sense.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But Keefe and Sunu began their session talking about picking apart websites to find invisible data. So what\u2019s the connection?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn both cases, what you\u2019re doing is peeling away the facade or the presentation, whether it\u2019s a website or a temperature sensor in a box, and you\u2019re peeling it away to its component parts,\u201d Keefe said. \u201cThe idea here is really: Let\u2019s take things apart to their component parts, understand what\u2019s possible, what\u2019s in our devices, demystify things a little bit, and along the way, also come up with ways to do things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, attendees didn\u2019t anticipate that they would\u00a0be building hardware during the session.<\/p>\n

\u201cI expected it to be more like,\u00a0\u2018L<\/span>et\u2019s put together a quick little gizmo!\u2019\u201d said Dani Friedland, a technology products coordinator for Marketing & Technology Group. \u201cI expected a gizmo on my screen.\u00a0This is a totally new realm for reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Students and working professionals alike said they walked away with new ideas for reporting. Taylor Blatchford, a<\/span> reporter for the Columbia Missourian and a University of Missouri student, said she picked the session to do something more hands-on but didn\u2019t realize what it would entail.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI report on health and public safety in Missouri, so there were so many things that I\u2019d never even thought of,\u201d Blatchford said. \u201cI almost didn’t come to this one because I didn\u2019t have my computer today, and that didn\u2019t matter at all. I\u2019m so glad that I did.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Keefe said the talk was meant to spark new ways of thinking about how to do reporting but added that\u00a0he understands building sensors isn\u2019t for everyone. It\u2019s just another way to find stories, he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf this is fun for you, then there\u2019s something to pursue, and if it\u2019s not, there\u2019s other ways to do journalism,\u201d Keefe said. \u201cJournalists are always coming up with interesting ways to do and tell stories that haven\u2019t been done before, so what could you come up with that hasn\u2019t been done before?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wires, batteries, circuit boards \u2014\u00a0one Friday afternoon session made ONA\u00a0look more like a science fair than a journalism conference. During their hands-on \u201cBreak-It-And-Make-It\u201d workshop, WNYC\u2019s John Keefe and BuzzFeed\u2019s Christine…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10501,"featured_media":2407,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[480,185],"tags":[1267],"powerkit_post_featured":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2256","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-conference","8":"category-industry","9":"tag-ona16"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2016\/09\/IMG_7565-1-scaled.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd5Q1c-Ao","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10501"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4317,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2256\/revisions\/4317"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2256"},{"taxonomy":"powerkit_post_featured","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/powerkit_post_featured?post=2256"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}