Use Templates to Make News Apps Quickly

Coding is expensive and slow, journalism should be cheap and fast. This is the main problem I face as a data journalism producer. My responsibility is to produce news apps for Helsingin Sanomat, a main daily newspaper in Finland. When there is a breaking news event, we have about five hours to come up with […]

Hackday for News Apps at OK Fest

GOAL: You have six hours to make a working news app. There are three of you, a coder, a graphic designer and a journalist. Is it possible? Yes. Five times in the last two years the biggest Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, has invited people to do just this, at HS Open hack days, which I […]

Finnish data journalism app contest

Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s leading national paper, is organizing an article app contest to find data visualizations. For many journalists today, it’s not a lack of open data that’s the problem, but a lack of the skills and off-the-shelf visualizations needed to make that open data useful to them. A year ago, the Finnish government decided […]