Here at ProPublica, we love to find new ways to tell
stories. We’ve built data-driven
news apps, commissioned our
own news songs and crafted narratives with a
novelist’s touch, all to enrich our investigative reporting.
“Your
Hospital May Be Hazardous To Your Health,” co-published today
with PBS Frontline, is our newest try at innovation. And it had an unusual
gestation – as part of a five-day hackathon
that brought together teams of journalists, filmmakers, developers and
designers to produce interactive stories for the Web.
The piece draws from ongoing reporting about
patient safety by ProPublica reporters Marshall Allen and Olga Pierce. Our
collaborators were documentary filmmakers Tom Jennings and Sabrina Shankman and Director of Development
Sam Bailey, all
with Frontline, and a team from Ocupop, a web design
and development group based in Milwaukee, Wisc.
The hackathon – “Tribeca
Hacks: Storytelling Innovation Lab” – is a project of the Tribeca Film Institute and
Mozilla that is supported by the Ford Foundation.
