How can a developer help The New York Times newsroom?

Who We Are

We are a software development team embedded within The New York Times newsroom. We work on behind-the-scenes technology, collaborating with teams that handle data, graphics and unique design presentations. We build tools for reporters, editors and designers as well as special projects for our readers. We run experiments as well as guide, train and support the use of these tools.

Our goal is to apply software engineering as a newsroom craft towards:

• Bringing our readers stories they can’t get anywhere else
• Helping the wider newsroom see and pursue stories we wouldn’t otherwise be able to
• Making the seemingly impossible story possible

The Team (alphabetical order)

• Aaron Krolik
• Alastair Coote (github)
• Amy Hughes
• Andrew Chavez (github)
• Andrew Fischer (github)
• Annie Daniel
• Ben Koski
• Isaac White
• James Thomas
• Jaymin Patel
• Mike Andre
• Neil Berg
• Rachel Shorey (github)
• Tiff Fehr
• Urvashi Uberoy (github)
• Will Houp (github)

Current Projects

Self-service newsroom tools that allow our reporters and editors to publish highly interactive work on their own:

• Tap Stories, for creating visual, mobile-first stories
• Adventure, for building quizzes and interactive stories
• DocTools, for deep source-document collaborations, analysis and publishing
• Attribute, a pipeline for reader submissions to drive stories dependent on reader voices.

Reporting tools to help our newsroom drill deeper into beats and make unexpected connections:

• An internal campaign finance database feeding stories and graphics.
• The secure, encrypted and anonymous tip-collection system at nytimes.com/tips.
• A “zoo of bots” 🦓🐯💻🤖 to alert reporters to newly posted data or changed data on the web.
• Continued support since 2011 for the The Guantánamo Docket, one of the longest-lived public news applications.

Tools to create more direct and meaningful newsroom/reader interactions including:

• A system for storing and retrieving reader-input data
• An interactive messaging experience for readers to follow our reporters in the field.

Scalable data pipelines to support major event coverage including:

• The loaders and APIs that drives The New York Times election results.
• The API that powers our Olympic results and graphics.

Experiments with new technologies

• Calendaring
• Push notifications
• AMP

Collaborations with Graphics and The Upshot

• Live Polling

Infrastructure to support operations for newsroom developers across Interactive News, NYT Graphics and NYT News Design.

Our Partners

We collaborate closely with NYT Graphics, our Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR) desk, NYT News Design, The Upshot and the NYT technology department.

Stay In Touch

The Interactive News team at The New York Times is always looking to connect with creative, interdisciplinary thinkers with strong technical backgrounds.

If you're interested, please fill out our contact form. You may receive a note from us occasionally.

Open Source Invented Here

• ArchieML
• library

Press

• 2021: Presentation at Tufts University's DISC program about our Coronavirus Trackers, from data acquistion (INT & more) to visuals (Graphics)
• 2021: Public Service award from the Pulitzer board (Poynter's write-up)
• 2020-2021: Tracking Covid-19 From Hundreds of Sources, One Extracted Record at a Time which details INT's role in our Coronavirus Trackers during the pandemic
• 2020: 2020 Philip Meyer (data) journalism award from by I.R.E. and the broader "news nerd" community
• 2019: Hacking our Hiring article series in OpenNews's Source, about how Interactive News conducts and evolves our hiring process
• 2019: How We Sped Through 900 Pages of Cohen Documents in Under 10 Minutes
• NiemanLab, 2019: The New York Times has released an open-source tool to let you manage all your internal knowledge more easily
• NiemanLab, 2018: With its new Olympics texting experiment, the Times is saying goodbye to SMS, hello to personalization
• 2017: Developing New Live Coverage Story Formats
• 2016: I Tracked and Tried to Outsmart ‘Hamilton’ Scalpers — With 341 Lines of Code
• NiemanLab, 2015: The New York Times liveblogged last night’s GOP debate directly from Slack
• Poynter, 2012: New York Times news apps team ventures into product development with Olympics syndication
• Mizzou, 2011: The Times techie
• ISOJ, 2010: The Journalist as Programmer: A Case Study of The New York Times Interactive News Technology Department
• 2009: Talk to the Newsroom: Interactive News Collaborative
• NYMag, 2009: The New Journalism: Goosing the Gray Lady