We started the first hack day of 2024 with a grand theme that covers all the important events in the world, including sports and upcoming elections around the world. Hackers have toyed with the idea of using the python programming language and real-time mobile telemetry data to influence the outcome of the UK election, proposing a bold new journalistic geometry, as well as adding fun polls, quizzes and newsletter recordings to the live blog. asked the question: “Can bedrock do what CAPI can?”
And that’s just 4 of the 19 amazing tips produced and presented at the two-day event!
Here is a selection of the winning concepts and designs of the day:
Best conceptual tip: Guest
A new ‘dinner party’ puzzle from Freddie, Abo, Chloe, Ara, Ilhan and Andrew where readers must find the correct seating plan for the guest list from the week’s news. Expect to meet dead and alive politicians, athletes, actors, musicians and more!
Best tech hack: creating a favicon
Rhys created a hack involving favicons, which are small icons at the top of the browser that indicate the current website. The Guardian’s favorite icon currently displays their logo, but some websites use favorite icons to convey information such as Gmail’s unread email count. Rhys wondered if there were other possibilities for The Guardian’s favicon and developed a two-part hack:
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A counter in the favicon for unread live blog entries that will appear on live blogs.
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A more experimental demo showing a small version of the Guardian article being read entirely within the favicon. These included the Guardian headline, real-time scrolling, full article text and images.
Most fun tip: Guardian Priority
The Guardian publishes only a handful of puzzles each day, but hundreds of articles containing thousands of paragraphs of text. “Priority Puzzles” is a browser extension from Simon that turns paragraphs into playable puzzles. When you click on any paragraph, letters are arranged in a square grid, words are found and clues are created using artificial intelligence.
Best after post (Most on topic): Big event in July
Jamie worked on a way to include tennis scores in our live blogs. Journalists often write live updates of tennis matches with scores written in a consistent text format. We can parse this format into structured data and display the scores using a tabular representation at the top of the blog.
As always, as well as offering well-deserved congratulations to all the winners, we’d also like to say a big thank you to everyone who took part and the many people behind the scenes who helped make our hack days happen.
Finally, a few thoughts from our Director of Engineering, Mariot Chauvin:
Hack day is an excellent way for organizations to quickly test innovative ideas and for participants to hone their technical skills and foster interdisciplinary collaboration.
We’ve been running regular hack days at the Guardian for the last 15 years and they are always special moments. It’s a moment suspended in time, in a rapidly evolving technological digital world that evolves at a frenetic pace and within news organizations whose business models are being disrupted.
What I find remarkable about this edition is that the four winners represent the evolution required for a news organization to adapt to the transformation of the media industry value chain: structuring content, creating a different gaming experience, and using technology as a tool. edge.
In a context where producing high-quality content (article, podcast, or video) has become a commodity, a news organization’s value lies in publishing content. coding knowledge. This involves selecting, validating and structuring content to provide a customized user experience. Guardian recently launched a new recipe app that leverages a suitably modeled recipe data store extracted from our archive. Jamie’s hack is another example of how useful structured data can be in improving user experience.
Guest And Guard Priority hacks are examples of different games at the heart of the New York Times’ digital revenue strategy. The leading American organization was already generating $20 million in annual revenue from its strategic investments in this market in 2021, which has been growing ever since. This highly successful strategy explains why they spent $3 million to acquire Wordle. Today, Wordle is one of the main drivers of subscription acquisition. As games are expected to continue growing in the coming years and platforms launch their own offerings for mainstream games (puzzles, sudoku, etc.), successful news organizations will emulate The New York Times’ strategy and offering different gaming experiences attracting new audiences and converting them into supporting their journalism.
Finally, to better serve the audience needs of news organizations Technology as a competitive advantage. New technologies can be used to address specific target audience concerns and improve their experience. The recently launched private cloud is a perfect example of how Apple has an advantage in data privacy and protection of user data. Rhys is creating favicon The hack is not aimed at readers, it shows smart use of technology. The launch of Tor Onion, a service that gives readers secure access to our journalism, also required significant creativity. More generally, investigative journalism is an area at the Guardian where we will continue to increase our use of technology to ensure important stories are published.