GitHub for journalists

SDS 236

Ben Baumer

2/6/23

Why?

Journalists use GitHub

• Getting GitHub: Why journalists should know and use the social coding site

“In a lot of cases, journalists and programmers need to figure out how to hang out in each other’s worlds better,” Eads said. As more journalists embrace GitHub as a way to improve stories, they’ll develop a new kind of news community, centered around collaboration and code – truly a news nerd’s nirvana.

–David Eads (Chicago Tribune)

Examples

• Open Journalism Collection

Do no harm: There’s an infection hospitals can nearly always prevent. Why don’t they?

• GitHub repository
• Interactive map
• Feature article

Learn more

• R for Journalists

A site from Andrew Ba Tran of the Washington Post.

For reproducing good work and experimenting with new techniques.

Journalists use GitHub for blogs

• Ex: Lisa Williams blog

The blog uses Jekyll, a blogging system that creates a static site (look, Ma, no database!) and hosted on Github Pages.

I use an issue-driven development queue to make changes to the blog infrastructure, and create a new Markdown file for each post. I publish new posts using Git, committing the changes and pushing them to Github. The site mirrors the gh-pages branch of this repository.

We will use GitHub for a blog

• Fork and clone quarto-blog repo
• Open new branch for your new story
• Write the story, commit changes
• Open new pull request
• Receive feedback and update story
• Merge pull request and publish story
• See example post: “How to write for this blog”

Let’s get started!