Articles by

Mariano Blejman

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    Interactive news teams, data journalists and digital innovation thought leaders from all over the world gathered in Buenos Aires from Aug. 30 - Sept. 1 to reinvent journalism. The event was sponsored in part by Knight Foundation. Below, one of its organizers, Mariano Blejman, blogs the highlights.  Around 700 people attended the three-day Hacks/Hackers BA Media Party, at Ciudad Cultural Konex, averaging around 400 participants per day. The largest gathering of journalists, editors, designers and software developers in Latin America brought together people from the interactive teams of The New York Times, The Guardian, and ProPublica, plus 20 international speakers from three continents and various countries in the region, including Colombia, Chile, Perú, Uruguay, Brasil and Guatemala, and digital editors from all of the largest Argentine media organizations.  The first two days involved 23 parallel workshops and the third day was a huge hackathon, where 250 people worked on eight projects. The Media Party was the largest event in the history of Hacks/Hackers at the global level, and captured the attention of the local and international press. Also at the event, Daniel Sinker officially announced a new round of Knight-Mozilla Open News Code Sprint Grants that will offer up to $10,000 for projects related to innovation in journalism. The event’s website: http://mediaparty.hhba.info Among participants were members of the interactive news team at The Guardian (Alastair Dant, Mariana Santos, Alex Graul and Nicola Hughs), who gave a keynote and a workshop on interactive news; Tyson Evans of The New York Times; Justin Arenstein, media strategist and consultant for Google and ICFJ; and Dan Sinker, director of the program Knight Mozilla Open News. Workshops were also given by Al Shaw (ProPublica), Thomas Levine (ScraperWiki), Jonathan Stray (Overview), Karen Reilly (Tor), James C Burns (Zeega), Rob Baker (Ushahidi) and Douglas Arellanes (Sourcefabric), who also gave support to the HHBA Media Party website, together with local projects. Furthermore, we kicked off the Data Journalism Handbook for Latin America, proposed by Poderopedia, and presented a preview of CryptoPeriodismo, Pablo Mancini's book. Additional attendees included Knight Fellows Gustavo Faleiros from Brasil, Sandra Crucianelli from Argentina, Ronnie Lovler from Colombia and Miguel Paz from Poderopedia, plus dozens of regional groups. Editors, journalists, entrepreneurs, programmers and designers came from Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Perú, Uruguay and more. Among local projects presented in the Media Fair were Atlas Electoral, Chequeado, Mapa76, Comenta.TV, DocuMedia, Educabilia, FOPEA, La Nación Data, Poderopedia, Tuiter, The Real Time, Viflux, ShowTimeLine! and Zauber.