Source (Mozilla OpenNews)

The main reference I found to the amount of time it took came from a Q&A[1] that appeared after it was published: > [...]I spent much of the summer getting to know the people involved (sometimes with the photographer Ruth Fremson and the video journalist Catherine Spangler in tow) and the loved ones left behind, and attended the 2012 International Snow Science Workshop in September to help understand the world of avalanches and snow. And I started writing, which took a few weeks. By then, The New York Times had committed to telling this story through multimedia. And, as I hope people see in the credits at the bottom of the article, it was quite a team of graphic artists and designers and editors. Unlike me, they all had plenty of other duties this fall — the presidential election, Hurricane Sandy — but really devoted much of the past month to the publication. Based on that, it seems the NYT is claiming it took a team working part time—in an unusually busy news time—about a month to complete. The credits for Snow Fall list 11 people on the design team: to get to 200 hours, the minimum needed to qualify as "hundreds", it'd be 18 hours per person. Plausible, but it would be better if he could cite that claim. I couldn't find any claim to the part about "hand-coding" (whatever that means). In fact, in a different Q&A[2], they mention using a mixture of prior custom work and off-the-shelf components: > We used a number of custom components that we’ve used in other projects in…

The comments in that article link to another interesting perspective from a developer who built a mugshot gallary for the Tampa Bay Times: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/learning/public-info-doesnt-al…

About the making of Snow Fall: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made-snow-fall… See also: http://www.interactivenarratives.org

> No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not backed by public data is slander. whether slander or libel or whatever, this article states how much time NYT spent on it: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made-snow-fall… so much for backing it up. the author stating he did it in an hour, might be true or a boast, that's a claim about himself not the NYT, doesn't matter if it's true or not. i can see how they can ask him to remove the video (and the author complied), but I really don't get on what grounds they can ask him to remove all mentions of NYT from his site.

I submitted this, but I'm not the author of the library. I agree with many of the concerns and limitations brought up here, most notably the fluid, non-binary nature of gender. That said, thoughtful application of probabilistic guesses about gender can add value in certain situations. For instance: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/learning/freeing-plum-book/

http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/introducing-tabula/ Wasn't this on here a few days ago?

A new tool for pulling tables out of PDFs was released recently by Mozilla Open News http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/introducing-tabula/

ProPublica recently published an article (with an unseemly title) about the nightmare of scraping data from pdfs and putting it into tables. [1] They wrote some custom software to do the scraping. At the end of the article they mention some software released recently by a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow, Manuel Aristarán, called Tabula, which is a PDF data table scaper.[2] I haven't tested it yet. [1] http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/heart-of-nerd-darkness-why-dollar… [2] http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/introducing-tabula/

> I have a suspicion that what newspaper companies want is not what is taught in journalism school. You are correct, but not in the way that you intend. Journalism schools are even slower moving than the news industry. There are pockets of the news world who realize they need data analysis skills and programming talent (at prices they can afford). Journalism schools, by and large, have no idea what to do about this, even if they recognize the need, and few plans on how to bridge this gap. The Knight Foundation & Mozilla are making an effort to recruit programmers to the news world through efforts like Source (http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/ ) and the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellowships (http://www.mozillaopennews.org/fellowships/ ). (In fact I'm one of the earlier programmers insnared by their machinations, and i now work on DocumentCloud at the journalism non-profit Investigative Reporters & Editors)