"Show your work" makes a triumphant return

"The day we had lunch was the day that Hillary Clinton, then running to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, had released her travel records as first lady in the 1990s. Most newsrooms wrote stories and let readers download a PDF of the release. But the team at the Times, which was a new hybrid of journalists and software engineers, published a beautiful interactive web interface that let readers read the documents right in their browsers."

"Knowing documentary evidence would be central to our work at ProPublica, and feeling pretty bold, we asked Aron if the Times would give us the code behind it. To our surprise, Aron not only gave us the code, but he and his team gave us a copy of the Amazon cloud server blueprint required to publish it. It was the opening chapter in the story of Aron and I founding DocumentCloud with some of our colleagues."

In spring 2008, a New York Times interactive team published an interface allowing readers to view Hillary Clinton's released travel records directly in browsers. The Times team shared the interface code and the Amazon cloud server blueprint with ProPublica colleagues, enabling the founding of DocumentCloud. Throughout the 2010s, newsroom technical teams commonly shared code, taught at conferences, and answered questions on NICAR-L, fostering open-source learning among data journalists. An analysis of 300 newsrooms with GitHub repositories found an 85 percent drop in new repository creation, from 2,097 in 2016 to 320 last year. Open source culture in newsrooms is expected to return next year.

Read at Nieman Lab