Creation and curation: Building newsroom tools at Dow Jones

Erin Sparling, head of newsroom development at Dow Jones, discussed his team's recent experiences with building tools for the "creation, curation and syndication" of stories on mobile devices, speaking at yesterday's Hacks/Hackers event in London.

He explained how the editorial and design workflows influence the tools they have built for different outlets, including The Wall Street Journal.

Sparling also discussed the design process of content curation for digital products, covering subjects such as how to manipulate the visual aspect of stories on the web and how to create collections of content for multiple apps.



"When we launched the iPad app in 2010, we built a custom layout framework. It was specifically designed to let us express meaningful layout changes on a daily or hourly basis," he said.

"The framework borrowed HTML elements and let us build applications that are totally distinct from one another. We then built tools on top of that to allow editors to be able to make changes to these templates."

• Elliot Bentley, graphics editor at The Wall Street Journal, will be speaking on a panel about building in-house tools for the newsroom at our upcoming news:rewired conference on December 1, looking at the resources needed, the collaborative approach between developers and journalists and the open-source movement. Find out more here.

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