What We’re Looking for Help on:

Our team does two types of projects:

• News applications, which are interactive databases that help the public make important decisions in their lives. They’re also always investigative in nature. Some of our largest news apps take a long time to make, but the ones we may need help making in the next couple of months should be able to be done in a month or two. Here are a few examples of the scope and type of work I’m expecting we’d need help with:
  
  
  
  
  • Bombs in Your Backyard
  
  
  • HUD Inspect
  
  
  • Facebook Political Ad Collector
  
  
  
  

Some of these projects involved extensive back-end database work, or data analysis, before we created the public-facing news app. If you have those skills, great! If you don’t, don’t worry. We can also pair you with a developer or editor we have in-house. We’re looking for folks who can do either the front end or back end, or both, on these projects.

• Graphics, which you can think of as storytelling done visually instead of only through text. The work can range from interactive quizzes, to data visualization, to other creative ways to use multimedia and interaction design to tell a story. Here are a few examples of the scope and type of work I’m expecting we’d need help with:
  
  
  
  
  • How (Not) to Cross the Street in Jacksonville
  
  
  • Political Operatives Got Donors to Give Millions. The Money Wasn’t Used As Promised. Here’s How They Did It.
  
  
  • Could Your Police Department Be Inflating Rape Clearance Rates?
  
  
  
  

Additionally, we may need some overall help with:

• Scraping data from websites


• Converting a bunch of different CSVs and putting them into a common schema


• Taking a large data source and turning it into a database

Relevant Skills:

The general skills we’re looking for include any of the following:

• Front-end web design skills (HTML/CSS + Javascript)


• Front-end data visualization skills (D3.js or other libraries)


• Web scraping skills using Python or Ruby, even Selenium


• Data manipulation skills that would allow you to convert one data type to another


• Back-end Rails or Django skills that would allow you to build and deploy an interactive database