The Power of Hack Days: Unleashing Innovation in Journalism

In an era where technology is rapidly changing the media landscape, hack days have become an essential tool for news organizations to stay ahead of the curve. These events bring together talented individuals from various departments to collaborate, experiment, and innovate, resulting in cutting-edge solutions that can transform the way we consume news.

The intersection of sports and technology

Recently, a group of colleagues from the product and engineering department, as well as other parts of the organization, came together for a hack day with a grand theme centered around major world events, including sports and upcoming elections. The hackers played around with the idea of using Python programming language and real-time mobile telemetry data to influence the outcome of UK elections, proposing a bold new journalistic geometry, adding fun polls, quizzes, and newsletter sign-ups to the live blog, and posing the question: “Can bedrock do what CAPI can do?”

A snapshot of the hack day event

The event saw 19 amazing hacks produced and presented over two days, showcasing the creativity and ingenuity of the participants. Here are some of the winning concepts and designs from the day:

Best Conceptual Hack: Guest

A new “dinner party” puzzle from Freddie, Abo, Chloe, Ara, Ilhan, and Andrew, where readers need to find the right seating plan for a list of guests from the week’s news. Expect to meet politicians, athletes, actors, musicians, and more - dead and alive!

Best Technical Hack: favicon-rendering

Rhys created a hack involving favicons, the small icons in the top of a browser that indicate the current website. The Guardian’s favicon currently displays their logo, but some websites use favicons to communicate information, like Gmail’s unread email count. Rhys wondered about further possibilities for The Guardian’s favicon and developed a hack with two parts: a counter in the favicon for unread live blog entries, which would appear on live blogs, and a more experimental demo that displayed a tiny version of the Guardian article being read entirely within the favicon. This included a Guardian header, real-time scrolling, all the article text, and images.

Most Entertaining Hack: Guardian Priority

The Guardian only publishes a small handful of puzzles every day, but hundreds of articles containing thousands of paragraphs of text. “Priority Puzzles” is a browser extension from Simon that converts paragraphs into playable crosswords. Simply click on any paragraph, and its letters are arranged into a square grid, words are found, and clues are generated using AI.

Best Past the Post (Most on Theme): Big Event in July

Jamie worked on a way to include tennis scores in our live blogs. Journalists often write live updates of games in tennis matches that include scores written in a consistent text format. We can parse this format into structured data and display the scores using a tabular representation at the top of the blog.

Tennis scores in live blogs

As always, we would like to extend a well-deserved congratulations to all the winners, as well as a huge thank you to everyone who participated and the many people behind the scenes who help make our hack days happen.

Finally, a few thoughts from our Director of Engineering, Mariot Chauvin:

“Hack day is an excellent way for organizations to experiment quickly with innovative ideas and for participants to develop technical skills and improve cross-discipline collaboration. We have been organizing hack days regularly at the Guardian for the last 15 years, and they are always a special moment. A moment suspended in time, in a technological digital world evolving at an accelerating, frantic pace, and within news organizations disrupted in their business models. What I found remarkable with this edition is the fact that the four winners are representative of the necessary evolutions of a news organization to adapt to the transformation of the media industry value chain: structuring content, building a distinctive gaming experience, and using technology as an edge.”