ProPublica
ProPublica news application developer Al Shaw discovered an Instagram API that lets you search by both time and geographic coordinates -- "a perfect way to see who's at a certain place at a certain time," Shaw writes.

He built a simple tool called QIS, or Quick Instagram Search, that journalists could use to find Instagram photos at newsworthy events. "Just having fun with it, we found a lot of interesting stuff," he said in a phone call with Poynter. "Anything you could type into Google Maps would work."

One example from Shaw's post: a photo of the Boston Marathon finish line on April 15 minutes before it was bombed. QIS could conceivably help newsrooms verify photos from breaking news events. (more...)

News applications editor Scott Klein has written a "ProPublica News Apps Style Guide" that codifies "the typographic and technical best practices" its developers follow.

Much like the AP Stylebook, the News Apps Style Guide helps journalists resolve uncertainty and avoid common mistakes by providing guidance on the most important or often misunderstood points.

Also like the AP Stylebook, the News Apps Style Guide contains an alphabetical list of subjects -- from Accuracy to Updates (no "z-" words yet) -- with a brief discussion and guidance for each.

Which browsers should your news app be sure to work in? "The current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis" as well as "the built-in browsers in the latest revision of the iOS and Android [SDK]," and "if earlier releases represent more than 2.5% of our audience, continue to support them." (more...)

Chicago Reader
How to reconcile serious journalism with the voracious appetite of a website is "the topic chewing away at my brain the last nine months," says Voice of San Diego editor Andrew Donohue.

We believe in order to have an engaged internet audience we have to be in front of them every day; the conversation has to come to the site But our mission is to do impactful, meaningful reporting that can take months at a time. It's a constant balancing act to find a way to do both. There's no formula whatsoever.

VoSD was having success with quick-hit rolling investigations -- the stock-in-trade of TV muckrakers -- "but all of a sudden we realized we're not really having the impact we wanted to be having," Donohue tells Michael Miner. "So we've really taken the foot off the gas over the last month or so and put out a couple of big-project pieces."

It's a dilemma for ProPublica, too: "If websites have to be updated all the time to drive traffic, how do you get the time to think about in-depth things?" asks managing editor Stephen Engelberg. "There's clearly a conflict between new forms of communication." He feels pressure to do a one-month story in three weeks, "maybe two." "It's less the pressure of bean counters demanding results than it is a kind of social pressure, the result of hanging around with a website and its predilection for immediate satisfactions," writes Miner.

Romenesko Misc.
#MuckReads lets users read and share investigative stories online. "People can simply tweet their favorite investigations with the namesake hashtag to share some of the top accountability stories, interactive graphics, podcasts and video of the day," says ProPublica's release.

#MuckReads was inspired by Mark Armstrong’s @LongReads, a community-driven effort to aggregate the best longform journalism on the web. ProPublica has worked closely with @LongReads since its launch, which led to rethinking Investigations Elsewhere, the previous mechanism ProPublica used to highlight accountability journalism from around the Web.

Megan Garber has more on the new feature.

(more...)

ProPublica
Asked during a weekly podcast whether the nonprofit news service would ever place its content behind a paywall, Richard Tofel, general manager of ProPublica, responded: "If the general expectation is that people will pay for content online, then it becomes like cable television, then frankly, sure. Absolutely. It would make a very big difference in our ability to sustain the operation. ... We're not going to be the second or third news organization to do that. ... But the second or third hundredth news organization? For sure. And maybe quite a bit before that." Tofel's comments on the decline of newspapers and the viability of long-form journalism  after the jump. (more...)