The Times & Sunday Times Digital Development @timesdigitaldevelopment - Tumblr Blog

What we're reading

Each week, we send two interesting articles about journalism to editors at The Times and The Sunday Times who might have missed them. Here’s this week’s reads..

New York Fashion Week might be kicking off next week but this year’s must-have item is already out - the edition.

According to Ken Doctor, a prominent media US critic writing on Nieman Lab, the increasing popularity of email newsletters points to the need for readers to make sense of the day’s news at certain points of the day (a la the top-of-the-hour radio news report, and the evening TV news).

As Ken notes, ‘it’s kind of funny that editors are rediscovering the value of editions, of predictability, of habit, here in 2015.’ And he suggests the other ‘issues’ that the industry face are ones that have already played out in print over the last 50 years.

Lots of our recent thinking has based on the idea of generating habit and what Ken calls ‘the reconnection of circadian rhythm’ so it bodes well. Our own Pat Long wrote about it for journalism.co.uk last year.

If you have time (and I really recommend this one), read the full piece here.

Guardian readers editor Chris Elliot posted a piece this week about the fallout from the site’s redesign and the response to Wolfgang Blau’s post about the site (which garnered 4400 comments).

Some readers disliked the design, saying it marked a ‘further dumbing down’ of the site, but countered by saying they had collected 130,000 pieces of reader feedback during testing. The redesign hadn’t impacted the number of viewers to the site, Elliot said (although he did get another 1100 comments on his piece).

I think it goes to show that a) readers will always be angry about changes we make and b) it’s important to be transparent to minimise the frustration as far as possible. Despite the Guardian’s open approach, only three comments on Blau’s piece were from journalists.

Separately, over on the Media Briefing, it was interesting to note that a third of readers to the Guardian still went to the homepage during their visit. This is despite many publishers (none paywalled) declaring the homepage as dead last year.

Read the full piece here.

#journalism #redesign #guardian #media #nieman #ken doctor

What we're reading

Each week, we send two interesting articles about journalism to editors at The Times and The Sunday Times who might have missed them. Here’s this week’s reads..

Emily Bell used the annual Cudlipp lecture this week to suggest that big tech companies and news outlets needed to think a bit more like each other.

Talking at the London College of Communication, she outlined the need for the values of journalism to be present in software and called for engineers to seek to understand and work in news (something we’ve found isn’t always the case when trying to hire developers ourselves).

Jonah Peretti got an obligatory mention and was likened to ‘Lord Northcliffe on steroids’ by the former Guardian editor and now Columbia Journalism’s Tow centre chief. The founder of Buzzfeed had done the most to take advantage of the rise of social media, Bell said.

Interestingly, the launch of Snapchat’s new publishing feature this week, which allows launch partners including MailOnline and Vice to publish mini-editions, perhaps heralds the kind of mutual relationship between publishers and tech companies that Bell is referring to.

If you have time, read the full transcript here and Roy Greenslade’s analysis here.

The BBC this week published their Future of News report with James Harding outlining the trends taking place not just at the Beeb but across the news industry as a whole.

With quotes from Seinfeld, Thomas Jefferson and our own Caitlin Moran, Harding reiterated the BBC’s commitment to quality over quantity and explained that ‘the future of news is the news’, suggesting that he believed the ability to break and cover the big stories will be what prevails.

Coming after last year’s NYT innovation report, it shows this kind of report is the media strategy du jour and, in the case of the Beeb, a useful tool ahead of the Royal Charter negotiations next year.

Read the full piece here.

#journalism #news #news design #newspaper #digital #Digital Talks #Digital Team #cudlipp #guardian #emily bell

axisJS v1.0.0 released!

I’ve been working on an open source, AngularJS-based webapp for building charts called axisJS.

After a significant amount of development over the past few months, I’m pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.0, which is pretty stable and functional at this point. Although we’re already using axisJS in production with a fair degree of regularity, version 1.0.0 is the most stable and feature rich yet, and is built to make it really easy for developers to extend and customise.

What kind of charts can you make with axisJS? You can make line charts…

Bar charts...

Combination charts...

Donut and pie charts...

Gauge charts and more!

(All of the above took me about a minute in total to generate.)

You can add titles, change around the axes, specify colours and more — all without writing a single line of code. axisJS charts can currently be saved as PNG, SVG or PDF, and exported to WordPress (See our Axis WordPress plugin) or any CMS via embed code. Plugins for other CMSes are on the way, and everything is incredibly modular and extensible — writing a plugin for a new CMS or output type is really straight-forward and easy (I’m currently working on developer documentation — see the wiki).

We’ve also architected this so it’s really straight-forward for newsrooms to style axisJS charts to reflect their stylesheets. Everything is configured via a YAML config file, with additional styling in title-specific stylesheets. Because static graphics have been given quite a lot of attention, axisJS charts can even be used in print production — indeed, we’re planning on replacing the daily hand-generated Adobe Illustrator graphs seen in The Times _Business section with _axisJS charts, in turn saving the graphics team an enormous amount of time.

What’s next, then? In addition to improving the UI and documentation, we’re working on AxisMaker, an interface that will allow anyone to easily create and host interactive axisJS charts on GitHub for free, using GitHub Pages. We’re also making support for print output even better and contributing back to C3.js, the underlying D3-based library that renders the charts.

Watch this space for more information about AxisMaker. In the meantime, try out axisJS online here!

-- Ændrew Rininsland is the lead developer on axisJS and Doctop. Follow @aendrew on Twitter and GitHub. He also blogs at aendrew.tumblr.com.

#charts #c3 #axisjs #floss #opensource

My year in open source — Ændrew Rininsland (@aendrew)

While I worked on a good number of specific content pieces this year, a large part of my focus was dedicated towards building reusable, modular, open source projects for the newsroom. I'll talk about two of them in this post, and why we hope they'll help journalists at The Times and Sunday Times moving into 2015.

Axis

Axis began life as an attempt to create a fast, user-friendly interface so that Times Red Box could easily create interactive charts for their morning emails. Originally named LlamaCharts and based heavily off Quartz's ChartBuilder code, Axis grew at a momentous pace as the scope expanded to accommodate progressively more goals, eventually shedding its original code and becoming a ground-up rewrite in AngularJS.

"Axis" is the umbrella term we're using to describe a collection of different codebases. At its heart is the AngularJS app, axisJS, which provides an interface to C3.js, an abstraction of the widely-used D3.

axisJS can build charts that can then be saved as PNG or SVG, or exported to some sort of web-based CMS, or copied as an embed code. In order to accommodate the needs of both The Times and the Sunday Times, axisJS is configured via a flexible and easy-to-read YAML file. The long-term hope is that we'll soon be able to use axisJS to create charts not just for the web, but for print use as well (in the process, saving the graphics teams countless hours of routine work).

We've created a WordPress plugin that allows anyone to insert rich, easily-created graphs into WordPress, and because it's everything's open source, projects to use axisJS with Drupal and other content managements systems are also underway.

Lastly, we're working on a public platform that makes it really easy to build and deploy Axis charts, saved into your own version-controlled repo on GitHub and designed to be an alternative to DataWrapper, which has recently changed its terms of service and is now paid-for. Watch this space...

Overall I've learned an enormous amount over the 4-5 months I've been developing Axis, particular with regards to AngularJS. Angular really is a great framework to develop with, allowing incredibly complex projects that are fast and testable. Automated testing is another thing I've really learned with axisJS and AxisWP — previously, I just saw it as an extra step used to ensure code quality, but now am realising how useful it is to use tests as a way to develop functionality (That is, to use Test-Driven Development and Behaviour-Driven Development). While learning testing frameworks takes a bit of effort, the effort is really worthwhile given how much repetitive trial and error it eliminates, and how many regressive bugs it helps you avoid.

Doctop.js

Doctop emerged while working on a project for Red Box, in which the code was ready quite a length of time before the copy was. In news development, it's very common to experience what I call the "developer waiting on copy" problem — no matter how well-planned a project is, it's pretty likely the journalist won't have copy ready until the very last minute, and even then, sub-editors will want to go over it and senior editors will then want to tweak it. This results in late nights and busy weekends for newsroom developers.

Doctop, an open source jQuery plugin we released in November, seeks to solve this problem. Instead of spinning up a new Django or Laravel instance every time a simple WYSWIYG interface is needed to manage a small amount of content, all the content can be placed in a single Google Docs text document. The built-in headings are used to denote sections, which are then pulled into a single JavaScript object, which in turn can be templated using a library like Handlebars.js.

The Google Doc retains all of its functionality (rich formatting, version control, and, most importantly, collaborative editing), and everything technical is completely transparent to the user. Doctop combines with Tabletop.js (which pulls data from Google Sheets in a similar fashion), in effect making Google Drive a super-powered RESTful CMS.

We've already used it in production a few times and I'm really excited for Doctop's future. It totally eliminates the need to have a complex backend for simple copy management, enabling scalable interactives that live solely on Amazon S3 or any CDN. Instead of worrying about things like high volumes of traffic making a server grind to a halt, or ensuring said-server is at the level of security necessary for newsmedia, developers can spend time doing things like testing the interactive itself, or adding new features, or whathaveyou, and the "words and pictures" people can focus on exactly those.

Open source at The Times and Sunday Times

I've frequently gotten some weird looks when I tell people I build open source code at The Times and Sunday Times — although we're proud to be one of the first newspapers to put all of our journalism behind a paywall given our unwavering belief that good journalism must be paid for, that philosophy seems at odds with wanting to give away code for free.

It's not, however, high-minded hippie-flavoured idealism that drives our open source contributions. Open source is good for journalism, and makes good business sense. We're a small team, but despite that, we have a huge output. That output is diminished every time we have to add a new feature or fix a bug in an existent codebase.

By making select projects open source — particularly where it will benefit the broader industry and foster collaboration — we try to solve general problems other newspapers have, in the hopes such solutions become so useful that other newsrooms feel compelled to contribute back documentation, bug reports, bug fixes and even new features. This is what makes open source so powerful — instead of trying to create products, open source seeks to collaboratively solve technology problems so people can get on with the work that matters to them.

For me, this is teaching journalists how to use various tools and helping out with stories requiring extra interactivity. Last year, our team created a million different useful tools for journalists; I feel our task for 2015 is teaching the newsroom how to use them all. Open source is helpful here too — for a project to be valuable from an open source perspective, it needs good documentation, and releasing our products as such forces us to think about that aspect in a far greater capacity.

If interested in any of our projects, please visit our GitHub Page, where we release all of our open source projects. We welcome pull requests — ship it!

#open source #charts #google drive

6 months as a newsroom developer at The Times and Sunday Times

(photo: Mattie TK)

It’s been six months since I first walked into the offices of The Times and The Sunday Times, and a lot has happened. I’ve filled a Trello board, emptied it again, and refilled it in the process. I’ve worked on two major newsroom tools, Deck (more about this later) and Magflow, a plethora of interactive stories, and a number of open source tools, ranging from AngularJS directives to WordPress plugins.

Even in the short time I have been with the team (who, by the way, are one of the greatest groups of people I could have asked to work with), it seems like such a large amount has changed; the way we work, the challenges we face every day, and the range of incredible stories we help produce. There is a long way to go in terms of digital innovation in the newsroom, but we’re doing a lot of great work, and are succeeding in our task to prepare the newsroom for the future.

Given the small size of our development team, we’re often faced with a workload challenge, having to prioritise one project over another, only for that to be thrown out the window as a major story breaks.

One of our answers to this constant tug-of-war was to build a smarter, more efficient way to help with day-to-day tasks. Originally born out of the needs of the Red Box project, we created Deck, a flexible templating engine, which leverages the power of Laravel for it’s newsroom-friendly management interface. Thanks to the work we have done, editors and journalists can now build anything ranging from quick longform pieces, quizzes, hotspots, galleries, lists, and a host of other in-demand interactives. Deck disconnects the templates from the content management system, meaning we have extensive flexibility to add and customise bespoke elements with ease, and simplify the creation process.

Each of these contain Times or Sunday Times approved styles, making them feel part of our wider published work. It’s difficult to explain exactly what Deck is capable of in so few characters, and once we’ve finished another sprint in the new year, I hope to write in some more detail about it, so look out for that.

There is a lot more I could write about the past 6 months, but I’ll save that for another day (as I’m actually writing this on Christmas Eve, and seriously, there are much better things to do)!

Looking at the list of projects we’re working on over the next few months, there are so many great projects coming from our team in 2015, it’s hard not to be excited about it.

What The Times and Sunday Times digital team achieved in 2014

It’s been a year of rebuilding and rethinking at The Times and Sunday Times digital team.

We’ll have a recap of projects in more detail from different members of the team this week, but to start with I’ve put together a brief roundup of what we got up to.

We’ve launched a new daily political briefing (Red Box), which was the impetus to build Deck (more about this soon) and AxisJS.

We ran two Build The News coding events, hired a new newsroom developer (and we’re still hiring - feel free to get in touch @petren)

We’ve begun the process of re-architecting our servers and deployment processes.

We built and deployed, Deck, Magflow, AxisJS, Axis for Wordpress, The World cup predictor, Front Row, CardKit, Sports Widgets, custom styles for Timeline.js and Storymap.js, an election map generator, a quiz builder and a drag and drop bulletin editor. (We’ll add links as we write about them)

Most importantly, most of these are usable by any journalist or editor in the newsroom without developer input.

We’ve opened sourced over 20 pieces of code which you can check out here, including all our winning hack day code...

...we won the BBC Dublin #NewsHack and then went on to win the Global Editors Network final in Barcelona with our idea ‘Moments’

We started experimenting with Google Hangouts, launched our WW1 retrospective email and visited the archives

To start us off, Chris has written about his first 6 months as a newsroom developer...

The Times team triumph at Build The News

Who would have thought meetings at 6pm on a Friday were the height of productiveness?

Certainly not the team representing the Times at Build The News, as we attempted to rouse ourselves during a discussion of ideas for the following day’s hackathon.

As I wearily plonked myself down, I must admit giving up my weekend to develop digital tools for the newsroom sounded like the opposite of 48 hours of fun. But the Friday night creation of Duel – as our idea would go on to be known – did at least put the wind in my sails.

It felt like the beginnings of an exciting project, and having never before taken part in a hackathon I resolved to bin my cynicism, park my desire to watch Arsenal and approach the event with Steve Ballmer-esque enthusiasm.

I was delighted I did. The Times team, compromising three journalists, a designer and a developer, were a joy to work with and the weekend was a roaring success.

As a member of the winning team (Friday night ideas sessions are now firmly on the menu) it would be easy to view the weekend through rose-tinted glasses, but everyone I spoke to was glowing in their praise of the event.

Build The News was challenging and amusing in equal measure, with student and staff teams pushing themselves to refine, design and develop their ideas while maintaining a sense of fun that characterised the whole weekend.

Teams tackled one topic from a list of three – long form, comments and campaigns – with two days work (and one night of drinking) compressed into three minutes of presentation.

Our project, Duel, a new form of commenting whereby readers can challenge others’ opinions in a head-to-head discussion, with the winner decided by up votes from other readers, beat of stiff competition from the Sunday Times and the Sun to come up trumps in the staff category.

The victorious student team came up with Crowd Tip, a commenting tool designed to allow readers to vote for issues within an article they would like to see discussed or developed further. For the judges, it was a great way to incorporate reader opinion into future coverage of a topic.

Overall, I was impressed by the quality of ideas, but also the aptitude of each team; no one attempted to recreate the Internet, and the vast majority of concepts were eminently usable.

A hackathon convert, I am now eagerly awaiting the chance to defend the Times’ crown at the next Build The News. Friday night brainstorming included.

aendrew

In preparation for the Scottish independence referendum, Josh Boswell and I were tasked with preparing the usual visualisations: a “balance of power” graphic for the front page, and the customary results map. We had worked together on a similar project during the local elections earlier...

aendrew

The last while I’ve been working on two things for The Times’ Red Box project — an AngularJS-based chart builder interface, and a WordPress plugin that surfaces it.

I’m please to announce that both are now available for testing on GitHub and are at a decent level of stability.

axisJS

…

The News Building

Today is the Digital Team's first day in the new building.

The move was a great opportunity to change the way we work in The Times and Sunday Times newsrooms.

The floor plates of the new building mean we can fit entire titles on a single floor instead of splitting them across two. In Wapping the digital team was off the main newsroom floor.

Serving two titles means we have a unique challenge - to be present and a part of conversations and decision making in two places at once.

In the new building we have desk space near the backbench on both The Times and The Sunday Times. Everyone that didn't have a laptop has been issued one - we can work anywhere in the building, with any team that suits what we are up to at that moment.

It's also an important statement about our digital future - no longer are we tucked away - just as we have become deeply embedded within the newsroom we expect digital thinking, commissioning and decision making to as well.

With a distributed team and a growing number of projects, tools that we use for communicating and planning like Slack and Trello will become indispensable.

As The Times gets up to full speed over the next ten days and The Sunday Times follows a few weeks later we'll try and let you know how it's going.

#The News Building #Digital team

Build The News is back

Yup, the rumours are true. We're running a second Build The News event this coming October.

We have loads of information on the Build The News website and you can see all the projects from the last event here:

build.hackdash.org

What happened after the last event?

The Winners, Ferret (previously named Low Pass) have been in to the office twice to work on their idea with support from the Digital Team.

We hired Chris Hutchinson, a developer from one of the teams that competed.

We also made sure projects were taken on in the newsroom - our Syria piece came off the back of work started that weekend.

Best use of video: a hackathon roundup

“Hackathons aren’t all about winning”, I said, clutching our giant trophy in one hand and a jubilant glass of cava in the other.

On Friday night, Aendrew Rininsland, Eoin Tunstead and I were at the closing cocktail party of the Global Editors Network Summit 2014, after scooping first prize in the Global Editors Network international hackathon. I was trying hard not to be unbearably smug.

Alas, I did not succeed, and I soon dispensed with the glass and used the silver cup instead.

Debauchery aside, It was a truly world class competition. Listening to and discussing ideas with top teams from around the globe was privilege enough, and without exception their hackathon projects were fantastic.

Although it was a competition, there was a real open-source ethos and several teams are now joining together to realise some of their ideas.

One of the best came from La Nación’s team - an idea to flag and tag parts of videos using .srt files, creating a crowd-sourced, fully searchable and machine-readable video database. We’re excited to be working with them to get this off the ground.

The key, for our project, was to solve a specific and limited problem. Mission creep is a real danger in a hackathon when you have less than two days to create something that actually works.

Our idea is called Moments. Essentially, it chops into short clips the hulking videos that squat at the top of articles and places these clips at relevant points inline in the copy.

In the CMS interface we built, a journalist highlights the point in the article where they want to insert a video moment. They set the start point and the end point of the video. They add a description, and they publish.

There’s still a long video at the top of the page. But now, small play buttons are inserted inline in the article copy. Clicking them opens a video player at that point on the page, which shows a relevant 6-10 second snippet from the video at the top - a moment. When it’s done, it neatly packs away and you can carry on reading.

This way, a journalist can create a tailored but seamless multimedia experience in a couple of minutes.

A couple of teams came up with awesome ideas that use copy, images and data visualisations to augment video. But news organisations like our own mainly deal in the written word. We don’t have the resources to make a lot of videos every day. So really, video’s role for us is to augment copy.

Using this business-headed approach gave us a creative constraint. We gave ourselves direction by using another immutable hackathon rule: build from the front backwards.

The two days of hacking led up to four minutes of presentation, so it was important to make it at least look like it worked for those four minutes.

Building from the front backwards makes you think about the user journey first, and so narrows down what features you actually need to build, and what ones you can throw out.

In the end, we didn’t really have a back end to our project, because it didn’t need it. That meant we could spend more time sharpening up the front end. We still aimed to be innovative, creating our own custom HTML element (moment-video), and making it responsively snazzy with famo.us. But we kept it light, because we had to build the damned thing in considerably less than 48 hours.

One of our key aims was to build something we would use. It’s all too easy to come up with a fabulous pie-in-the-sky idea that never leaves the hackathon. But with Moments, we decided to focus on a particular problem that we have at The Times (although it is common to many other newsrooms).

So Aendrew took some time to make the project compatible with pretty much any CMS, and to build it modularly to make it extensible and flexible. And now we’re back, we’re actually going to use it.

@joshtboswell

#hackathon #video journalism

Times Sport Instagram on a tour of Wimbledon

Last week, to mark the launch of the Times Sport Instagram account, we were invited to Wimbledon for a behind-the-scenes tour of facilities in SW19.

The meet-up, titled Instameet, brought together some of the UK’s most popular and creative 'Instagrammers' for a tour of Aorangi practice courts, Henman Hill, Court 18, the southern courts, No.1 Court, Centre Court, the northern court and press areas.

Times Sport was the only sports news outlet invited, along with a representative of Elle.

It was a glorious day in SW19 and great to take see how Wimbledon prepares for the annual championships. There was a some pre-promotion on the @TimesSport Twitter account beforehand.

Then, during the two-hour tour, we posted 15 images from the new Times Sport instagram account. We spotted world number two Li Na on the practice courts, found the space allocated to The Times in the press room and spoke to cleaners on Centre Court.

Tagging some of the top 'Instagrammers' and @wimbledon was a useful tip from Hannah Waldram, community manager at Instagram. By the end of the day, we successfully passed the 100 followers mark - a great way to start for TimesSport on Instagram.

The aim of this new Instagram account is to bring readers closer to the action. Our sports reporters out on the road are encouraged to Instagram pictures from the account, so readers get an insight into what they can look forward to in our editions. At the moment, the focus is on Wimbledon and the World Cup in Brazil.

If you're on Instagram, give us a follow: http://www.instagram.com/timessport

#wimbledon #instagram #tennis #sport #times

The Times Digital Development team is hiring

Come and join people like this as they pick up silver things

Since The Times and The Sunday Times Digital Development team was formed at the start of last year we've steadily grown in number, taking on new team members all of the time.

Now we're hiring again.

We're looking for a talented and dedicated senior Front End Developer to come and work with us on the editorial floors of two of the world's greatest news organisations.

You:

You'll be passionate about user interaction and storytelling and keen to help shape the future of The Times and The Sunday Times' digital content strategy.

Us:

We're an award-winning multidisciplinary team of journalists, developers, designers and data people. We get excited about building things: you can find out more about our work on this blog. We're also nice.

You can read more details about the job and apply on the News UK Careers site here now.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me directly on Twitter.

Pat Long

Head of News Development, The Times and The Sunday Times

#jobs #journalism

Making the most of video

We’re approaching the end of the first day at the GEN Hackathon in sunny Barcelona, and things are looking good.

Our brief for this international two-day competition is Making the Most of Video, and we’re told that:

“From live streaming to video aggregation, short news clips to documentary storytelling... the options for digital news videos are rapidly growing as are the opportunities.”

Initially we were unimpressed. Making the most of Video? That’s so two thousand and late. But hackathons are all about solving a specific problem, and with this topic, there is a clear problem to solve.

Video is very time and resource intensive. Newsrooms across the world are cash-strapped and time poor. So you have to make the most of every video you make.

On a mainly text-based news website, a common layout for video is to plonk it at the top of an article, with the text flowing underneath it.

This creates an awkward user experience, where your attention is split - you end up watching some of the video and scanning the article, scrolling up and down the page and getting the most out of neither medium. That’s a problem.

Our project, moments, solves this problem. Small play buttons are inserted inline in the article copy. Clicking them opens a video player at that point on the page, which shows a relevant 6-10 second clip from the video - a moment. When it’s done, it neatly packs away and you can carry on reading.

The reader gets a seamless and truly multimedia experience. You only have to watch the bits that interest you, but you’ll end up spending more time on the page, because the video snippets draw you through the article.

Moments literally puts video in its place. Video must work to supplement and enhance written content, because most news organisations don’t have the resources for video to be their primary content type. Placing relevant inline moments achieves this simply and elegantly.

And if you’re one of the few who like things just the way they are, don’t worry: the full video still appears at the top of the article.

So how do we generate these clips? A simple tagging system in the CMS. The video is set alongside the article. The journalist highlights a section of text, and then a short snippet from the video. They click ‘add moment’, and they’re done.

The journalist can also provide a quick description of the snippet - all of twenty seconds’ work, that provides an accessible alternative for visually disabled readers. It also creates opportunities for future use of these moments, by machine-reading the video descriptions.

Stay tuned - we’ll continue fleshing it out tomorrow.

@joshtboswell

#video journalism #hackathon #gen #barcelona

Top 10 #meandmyST moments

In January, we started asking our social media followers to show us how they enjoyed reading The Sunday Times. What began as a fun little experiment soon has become a wonderful weekly celebration of our readers with snaps being sent in from around the globe. With pet pics, beach shots and general merriment set alongside the app, tablet or paper editions, here are a few of our favourites so far.

As if The Sunday Times wasn’t value for money enough, one mum decided to get creative with her paper and fashion it into a sun hat for her wee babby. Adorable!

We liked this Seattle snow-scape sent in from tablet-toting Alex.

#meandmyST reading The Sunday Times in snowy Seattle on a Saturday night pic.twitter.com/ChQGGq27be

— Alex (@Alex_syntax)

February 9, 2014

Like much of the internet, we have a soft spot for dogs. Especially dogs reading The Sunday Times. I think you can guess what comes next…

@thesundaytimes Someone's very interested in their personal finance #meandmyST #dogandmyST pic.twitter.com/dpxDamsUx2

— Luke Jones (@Lukejones03)

March 16, 2014

What could be a more relaxing way to enjoy your Sunday paper than to have a leisurely nestle in the heart of your very own lemon grove? This guy looks like he’s got a zest for life, right!

@thesundaytimes #meandmyST pic.twitter.com/XNLSfKAXWu

— Driving Over Lemons (@WhenInSpain)

March 9, 2014

See what we did there? Please don’t cancel your subscription as a result of this caption.

ST reader Kate interspersed her afternoon at Melbourne’s One Day International with a spot of browsing on her phone during the recent Ashes series.

@thetimes at Aus v Eng ODI at the MCG! #melbourne #meandmyST pic.twitter.com/PEK9fduzS9

— Kate (@katescarrott)

January 12, 2014

Much as we enjoy tweeting about #meandmyST from the office in London, it doesn’t have quite the appeal of this glorious looking beach, where one reader was perusing the iPad edition. The sun! In February! Just imagine! Oh wait, we can’t.

Sunday. Sun, beach and #meandmyST. #bliss @thesundaytimes pic.twitter.com/oeEbeY97Fp

— Eva Grosman (@evagrosman)

February 23, 2014

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this snap is so brilliant. Perhaps it’s the peering eyes. Or the carefully balanced tablet. Either way, we love it.

@thesundaytimes @thetimes pre-breakfast reading! #meandmyST pic.twitter.com/XgG46wmnHQ

— CJ (@csjohal)

February 2, 2014

This one, sent in by reader Antonia, was the cause of must jealousy, we must admit…

@thesundaytimes my Sunday Times on Blackberry with Indian ocean in background pic.twitter.com/uf8K6sOz0r

— antonia filmer (@tweetingtonia)

February 2, 2014

If there’s one way to celebrate David Hockney making the cover of Culture, it’s by creating the artiest shot imaginable for #meandmyST. The man who can make baked beans look like something worthy of the Tate is a clever man indeed.

No better way to spend a Sunday. w/ @ST_Culture & @TheSTMagazine: pic.twitter.com/OllEwWWTsN

— Matthew Oxley (@matthewoxley)

February 2, 2014

The mug never lies.

@thesundaytimes Morning cuppa and my paper.....perfect! Pure dead brilliant in fact. #meandmyST pic.twitter.com/gbm1ugGD4w

— Hazel Farrell (@hazellfarrell)

January 26, 2014

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- @charlottelytton

Our week working on Low Pass with The Times and Sunday Times

Back in February, The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun co-hosted Build The News - a hackathon for journalists and developers within the student community. The weekend was a great success with 10 teams taking part, and some really interesting ideas emerging.

The overall winning team came up with ‘Low Pass’ - a tool intended to allow journalists covering a breaking news story to find the signal among the noise on Twitter. We invited the team in for the week to continue developing the tool - and this is their account of the week.

Building the News

At the end of the hackathon we had a tool that worked - just. (Details of our experience at the original Build The News event can be found in this blogpost from team member Jeshua.)

Low Pass returned a graphical representation of the number of results for a given search term, and allowed user to grab tweets from a selected time period.

A serious amount of work was needed to turn it into a reliable tool, though - and we also needed time together to think more about how the tool would work in practice, and what it would offer users.

[Caption:] It wasn’t supposed to look like this

To this end, we got facetime with a huge range of people across the News UK titles: The Times’s community team; The Sun’s social media team; Nick Petrie and the rest of The Times/Sunday Times digital news team; several reporters from The Times and The Sunday Times; Joel Wade, a designer on The Times; various executives including Craig Tregurtha, group managing editor, The Times and The Sunday Times.

(We’d love to list everyone by name, but, space :) ).

What did we get out of this? Our main take-aways were:

that being able to find good pictures of a breaking news event is crucial. This is something that came back from both social/community teams - but also from some of the reporters we spoke to. Increasingly, in an age of social media, reporters themselves will be assisting picture desks in finding photos of breaking news events

that the tool will work best for things that happens in the public realm, where there are witnesses. So, the killing of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, as opposed to Peaches Geldof’s death. We were assuming this was the case, and our time in the building only served to firm this up

there might be uses for the tool that we hadn’t initially realised. Charities monitoring the takeoff of a campaign, marketers wanting to see who early adopters of a hashtag are - there are lots of people who might be interested in a tool that allowed them to easily track early engagement on Twitter

One example that really caught our imagination was mentioned by Robin Henry. In November 2012 The Sunday Times scored an exclusive with the news that comedian Alan Davies could face prosecution for a potentially libellous tweet relating to the Lord McAlpine - when reporting that week had focussed almost exclusively on the Sally Bercow’s own misguided tweeting.

According to Henry, the ST got the story simply by trawling - lots of trawling - through tweets that had been sent about the case, most of which referred to Sally Bercow’s case.

To us, this seemed like the perfect example of where Low Pass can have value - cutting through the noise, and the mass of retweets, to find messages that contained original material. We hope it will allow a reporting team to find a similar story more quickly and with less work in future.

We got good ideas on other use cases, thoughts on design and UX, and - because we’re not operating in a vacuum - thoughts on the limitations of other existing Twitter search services (e.g. Topsy).

We also demoed the tool to a number of executives and got (really encouraging) feedback from them.

A lot of time was obviously also spent on developing the tool from where it was previously. This involved:

improving and testing the core function;

working on a neater user interface;

adding *some* additional functionality

What doesn’t the tool do?

The tool certainly doesn’t do everything a user might want it to - and it might never.

There are two main things which it doesn’t even try to get involved with: knowing what search term a user should try in the first place, and trying to do anything on the reliability of tweeted information.

We have a few ideas in these areas - but ultimately, there are probably limits in terms of what an application can do here. There are some things which humans - reporters, community teams, picture desk editors - will always be better at.

Name

We also decided that were definitely going to change the name of the tool, from ‘Low Pass’ to something a bit more positive.

So we bounced several ideas around.

And went with some for a while.

Then couldn’t decide what we liked best, so went back to Low Pass (for now).

Code

Code for the tool - written predominantly in JavaScript and Python - is open source, released under the MIT licence, and is available on GitHub.

Taking it further

What happens next is something of an open question for now. All members of the development team have other commitments (*ahem* Finals *ahem*) that will be taking up a certain amount of our time. And there are also important decisions to be made on, for example, whether any further development stays on an open source basis.

There are a number of additional features we’d like to add, ranging from things we see as being core functionality (more filtering options; options to zoom and scroll on the search results graph; basic flagging of tweets that look unreliable) to more advanced features that might be a little further off.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear thoughts on the tool - can you see the value of the tool? How do you think you’d use it? And what additional features would be useful?

If you’ve got any thoughts, or just want to say hey, then feel free to get in touch with any of us via Twitter.

Philip Nye (@philipnye)

Hackers:

Giovanni Charles (@gdcharles)

Jeshua Maxey (@jeshuamaxey)

Hacks:

Philip Nye (@philipnye)

Ashley Pace (@ashmpace)

Kadhim Shubber (@kadhimshubber)

With thanks to all those at The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun who contributed their time and ideas this week.

#build the news

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