I was hoping someone else had a "magic bullet" response, but honestly, personal recommendations are still tops. Now that doesn't mean you actually have to know the person doing the recommending, but I've recently received some great design recommendations just by reaching out and saying, "Hey, I love this news site, was wondering who the design team was?" The same with a lot of news app developers, who are often quite happy to make quality referrals if they're too busy to do the work themselves.

That, and trolling the high-score users on H/H ;)

Michael Morisy

241

One other thought (after finding your earlier tweet):

Call colleges and specific professors to ask for recommendations. Sounds like you're looking for data visualization kinds of people, which don't generally come from established journalism schools (yet).

And most of these folks with the skills you seek probably are fully employed at the moment. You might need to sacrifice news experience or app experience, especially for a one off. But you might find fertile ground among those with lots of news experience and database experience who are looking to diversify. :)

For references, try @macloo at University of Florida, try the folks at UNC like Laura Ruel, try even the computer science department even at UNC Charlotte. Some dataviz folks are coming out of computer science master's programs, not j schools, but if you want folks with news experience, that's harder.

For more references, try NICAR and its listservs. Ted Mellnik of The Charlotte Observer would know the right people, and he's on fellowship at the University of Michigan now. Try Anthony DeBarros at USA Today (last I knew).

Listservs are the most effective tool I've seen for some specialized skills.

andriak

80

I haven't tried it myself yet, but I see a lot of people have success finding people by putting the word out through their twitter streams and asking that it be re-tweeted. That way, you're using a network of people who are likely already aligned with your interests.

amyjobrown

113