SRCCON 2024

👋 Psst, this is a draft!

Just a quick note: this is a draft entry. That is, an entry literally tagged draft which I’ve published. The quality may be lower than typical a benchmark post, although that is personal distinction. You can read more in my announcement. Cheers.

Published

I attended SRCCON 2024 last week.

SRC as in “source” thusly “source con.” Also supportive of “ess-are-see-kahn” and “sir-kahn.”

I found out about this1 via Mitch via Carlana’s toot.

I’m certainly not in journalism, but I do appreciate it. And I definitely like writing, especially technical writing.

Aside: been a fan of Carlana’s blog for a few years so it’s always a treat to meet your idols IRL.

Day 1

Copped an early 6:40am ride with my SO. Hung out at Starbucks for ~90 minutes responding to emails and Slack messages.

Walked to the venue at 8:30, filled up my thermos2 with coffee, and grabbed a seat at a table.

Making open source more open

Spent most of this session on my computer and talking with the people at my table. I’ve played around Tesseract before, but Semantra was new to me. Handy to have in the toolbox.

How a newsroom and product team built a killer planning tool, and you can too

tl;dr Airtable is popular with journalists. They built a custom bit of software to act as the top-of-funnel / entrypoint for stories in the newsroom. It integrated with their CMS. Cutely called Squid.

Building a practice of UX and accessibility in your organization

Had some good conversations around strategies to keep a11y & UX top-of-mind and not an afterthought. My stomach was upset so I missed the last half of this.

Five years of running a news org on the JAMStack

Hell yes. This is what brought me to SRCCON.

Carlana did a great presentation and structured it nicely with some breakout sessions talking with the humans at your table. I’m surprised by how many different CMSes there are across the journalism industry. It seems like nearly every newsroom has their own fully custom or tweaked off-the-shelf solution.

I was mildly surprised that headless CMSes weren’t discussed more, but I guess it’s still not a usable experience for journalism stories. Hence the many workarounds.

After dark

Dinner was good. Talked with a fellow attendee for an hour on topics including RSS podcast feeds, favorite fonts, license plate designs, and state flags.

Wrapped up the evening by going to a hobby show-and-tell session which was, in order:

  1. a history of Eurovision (had no idea it’s been around since post-WWII),
  2. a non-runners journey into running,
  3. and lessons learned when submitting a redesign for the MN state flag.

I took a Lyft home. Long 14+ hour day.

Day 2

Took the bus, nice direct route. Good AM coffee vibes.

How to use quick and scrappy user research in your newsroom

Reminded me of Paul Boag’s Frontend Masters workshop earlier this year. You can view my notes from that.

Was nice to do some breakout session time with my table and do some quick and dirty user testing + feedback on personal/professional projects.

When AI Goes Wrong: How to handle it and what to do

Breakout group driven session on examples of AI failure within the newsroom industry.

We are all designers if we listen to ourselves

Interesting session on “language pattern” which stems from “A City Is Not A Tree.”

Learned two new terms from this:

What did we do with all that OpenAI money and who is it helping

Some interesting tools that were mentioned:

In conclusion

Super pumped I was able to attend. Got to learn way more about journalism and make some new industry connections, both local and across the world. Looking forward to attending again, hopefully next year.

  1. Literally the day before and I was still graciously given a free ticket by the organizers.↩︎

  2. Just like Devopsdays MSP 2024 I remembered to bring a coffee thermos.↩︎

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