Chris Amico

Climate change is altering rainfall patterns in the United States. I conceived of this presentation using sound to tell the story. Three composers from Full Sail University created original pieces of music using rainfall data from the investigation. I worked with the musicians on the concept and built the audio-playing charts in the story. The charts use Svelte and D3.

I built a series of narrative maps in this investigation to help explain how mismanagement of water rights contributes to worsening drought. I worked with editors to design each step in the narrative and built a workflow allowing continuous updates as the story came together. The maps use Mapbox and my own Ulysses-JS framework.

This is the story of three children growing up in the Marshall Islands, knowing they might be among the last to do so. I developed the overall technical architecture for the project using Svelte, ArchieML and Tarbell. I built an editing workflow (using ArchieML in a GoogleDoc) to manage assets throughout the project and taught reporters to use it. I built about half the interactive slides.

In designing this experience around a sprawling investigation of pollution on the US-Mexico border, we broke the story into fragments and let readers choose where to start based on how much time they had. I built the overall site architecture in Svelte and designed a mini-CMS using ArchieML.

This was a demonstration of a workflow I’ve adopted for analyzing GIS data using Datasette and SpatiaLite, using a suite of open source tools. Source code and additional links are available on Github.

In this NICAR lightning talk, I explain how there are only three kinds of code we write in newsrooms: Reporting, storytelling and product. We screw ourselves up when we mix up the kind of code we’re writing.

Kim Bui and I argue that newsrooms can and should prepare for most news events, and we give practical examples of how to do so.