The University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism and the Austin American Statesman both sponsored the first Journalism Hackathon, which was a success, especially for a first year event.

This was my first time organizing a hackathon - as part of a team including Robert Quigley and R.B. Brenner from the School of Journalism, and Christian McDonald and Andrew Chavez from the Statesman (they both also teach at the University of Texas in the School of Journalism as well). I’d like to thank Mashery, Microsoft, and Clarify for coming to the hackathon to show everyone what their technology does, and how it could apply to the changing world of journalism.

Many of the participants had never been to a hackathon before, and in fact were kind of intimidated - maybe the combination of “hacking” and “marathon” really doesn’t sound that friendly! From the beginning, we wanted to organize a friendly hackathon, where the focus was on learning something new, getting to know the other participants, and accomplishing something!

The highlight of the hackathon was the tour of the Statesman’s newspaper printing presses, led by Christian McDonald - the presses were busy churning out the next day’s paper. One of the most interesting facts we learned is that the Statesman prints many other newspapers as well - it’s just cheaper for these other papers to get rid of their printing presses, and run their paper copies off on the Statesman’s presses.